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The X universe is a single-player space sim and a sandbox with a heavy emphasis on giving a player the freedom to take lots of different paths with a rather loose story line that you can play or ignore. The series started in 1999 and the newest entry in the X4: Foundations just launched yesterday.

I haven't played al of the games in the series, but I played X3: Albion Prelude pretty heavily and eventually built a pretty big commercial empire with my own space stations and a fleet of ships. Incidentally, I played it under Linux and the new X4 game uses Vulkan and will have a Linux launch coming soon (Windows only right now). This is the type of game that doesn't give you an elaborate central plot, but gives you the opportunity to trade and engage in combat mostly on your own terms, which is more to my personal liking since I don't need to feel like I'm in a scripted movie to enjoy a game.

I gave the most recent installment (X Rebirth) a miss since it took away many of the fun features like being able to pilot any ship from a fighter all the way up to a capital ship. However, it looks like Egosoft heard the complaints from users and X4 appears to share most of the positive features from the earlier games in the series while further improving graphics and making the gameplay more dynamic. Also, while there's certainly some post-launch polishing to do, the reviews I've seen on Youtube with live footage from yesterday's launch seem to show a game that's working pretty well with acceptable performance (Rebirth was notorious for not meeting those goals).

Something about these games: Playing for 5 to 10 hours is generally referred to as "just scratching the surface" since most games tend to mean you play for a long time!

Who needs Star Citizen!

Here are links to a couple of post-launch online review and play videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onW160fisG8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4GQXz3zhsc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2KrmYmRRBU

chuckula wrote:

Who needs Star Citizen!

Given my experience with all the X3 games, X:Rebirth, and Elite: Dangerous...me.

I hope X4 is good, but I'm waiting for my friend to let me know. He was an X3 fan but he knows me well enough to say if I'd dig it.

If you can get it to work

KeillRandor wrote:

If you can get it to work

The recent "free fly" or whatever it was called of SC was a commmmmmmmmmmmplete joke. Like, worse than a joke.

Word on the street is that X4 is actually playable at launch. I have to admit, I'm impressed and was not expecting that.

Re: difficulty and Star Citizen, be aware that SC wants to be the IL-2 Sturmovik of space games so expecting it to offer an easier experience than X universe is probably not a realistic expectation.

NovusBogus wrote:

Word on the street is that X4 is actually playable at launch. I have to admit, I'm impressed and was not expecting that.

Friend says the tutorial was a little wack.

I'll probably pick this one up after a bit, but with Black Armory and Just Cause 4 around the corner I can wait a bit.

I will without a doubt get the game, it's just a matter of when. While rebirth wasn't my favorite I enjoyed it, but boy was it broke on release.

As for star citizens, maybe it will be ready in a couple years for me to buy.

NovusBogus wrote:

Re: difficulty and Star Citizen, be aware that SC wants to be the IL-2 Sturmovik of space games so expecting it to offer an easier experience than X universe is probably not a realistic expectation.

It's not just difficulty though. The game is unplayable. It's a dumpster fire.

thecoldanddarkone wrote:

As for star citizens, maybe it will be ready in a couple years for me to buy.

lol don't hold your breath.

DancinJack wrote:

It's not just difficulty though. The game is unplayable. It's a dumpster fire.

As alphas go it was quite playable last time I loaded it up. Just clearly not finished.

Yup, it's mostly playable but still very tech demo-y and they've not got the netcode issues entirely sorted out yet (but it's way better than it was a year ago--I get randomly killed by the furniture but don't lock up for 20 seconds on a regular basis). They're making good progress on getting features into the test universe but the risk of the project getting lost in the weeds is still very high, and the single player version is still an unknown quantity until they supplant the marketing spiel with a legit roadmap like they did with the multiplayer portion.

Personally, I wish they had stuck with making the lesser-scope Freelancer 2.0 they promised me back when I gave them money in 2012. I just want to fly spaceships, and maybe wander around a station from time to time, not fool around with all that Battlefield-meets-Second-Life-in-space nonsense they're always on about these days.

NovusBogus wrote:

Personally, I wish they had stuck with making the lesser-scope Freelancer 2.0 they promised me back when I gave them money in 2012. I just want to fly spaceships, and maybe wander around a station from time to time, not fool around with all that Battlefield-meets-Second-Life-in-space nonsense they're always on about these days.

Agreed 1000%. I wanted Freelancer 2.0 and we're getting something where 80% of the dev time seems to focus on everything except space flight...

Interesting, I will have to watch the full Youtube clips at a later time.

Waco wrote:

NovusBogus wrote:

Personally, I wish they had stuck with making the lesser-scope Freelancer 2.0 they promised me back when I gave them money in 2012. I just want to fly spaceships, and maybe wander around a station from time to time, not fool around with all that Battlefield-meets-Second-Life-in-space nonsense they're always on about these days.

Agreed 1000%. I wanted Freelancer 2.0 and we're getting something where 80% of the dev time seems to focus on everything except space flight...

No kidding, Star Citizen has become the very definition of feature creep. I gave up tracking the number of times they had to rebuild the engines because they grew outdated, or didn't support the features they wanted to add.

The big Stellaris 2.2 rework + Megacorp update will be out on the 6th though! Going to have a blast with that.

Is it multiplayer, or is multiplayer planned for the future? I could see myself enjoying X4 but the solitary nature of it puts me off for something that demands such a large time investment. I've definitely enjoyed this single-player genre before, but they're the kind of thing you can put down for the last time after 50 hours or so.

Incidentally I own a promotional copy of SC and I'm fully expecting that it will never be playable or officially launched. I'm also watching Elite Dangerous slowly flesh out into a half-decent experience but my worry is that it'll die off before it ever achieves greatness. That hasn't stopped me playing it though, because it's currently the best of the sorry bunch when it comes to MMORPG space pilot simulators.

I have to admit that this one snuck up on me. Like many, I put an ungodly number of hours into X3, but barely touched Rebirth. The few streams I watched of X4 looked encouraging. I'll most likely pick it up after recovering from the holiday spending spree. It should at least give Egosoft a chance to polish the game a bit further.

Well, for their first game I've played that actually feels playable it's alright. Eventually, I might get to the point where I actually try to play it.