X4 Foundations

I have a bunch of the X games I probably got in a cheap bundle somewhere. I tried going in order from X but found it unwieldy/boring/slow/aimless. Does it get better later? Should I play the last one I have (X3: reunion, terran conflic, alien prelude) and ignore the older ones?

I would say start with X3: Terran Conflict. Until Rebirth, Egosoft basically just kept building more and more on the same game idea.

The Argon Patriot start might be best for you. You'll be close to the Terran Conflict and Goner starts without being right in them immediately. Be sure to figure out how SETA works (the J key, I think) as that speeds the game up a lot - especially when following the docking path on those HUGE Terran stations. Getting a docking computer helps even more. Just get close to the dock, press the hot key, and teleport right in to the bay!

The game shouldn't be unwieldy or boring. There are a lot of commands you can do so there's a pretty good sized menu but just concentrate on the stuff you need to know and learn as you get more power and you should be good. (Of course, you can always read my guide in the guides section, too.)

It's somewhat aimless at times. I wouldn't call this a sandbox game but it could be called a hybrid between normal and sandbox. There are plots that guide you through major stories and give you goals to accomplish but you spend most of your time on your own, doing random missions, fighting pirates, exploring the many sectors of the universe, and just generally getting more/bigger/better ships and space stations.

It can be slow sometimes but, with SETA able to crank the speed up x10, it shouldn't stay slow for long.

X3:TC seems somewhat more oriented toward trade with its massive HUB mission. There's certainly a lot of battles but nothing like the Albion Prelude expansion. If you get 100 hours into X3:TC and are wishing for more battles, rev up X3: Albion Prelude and you'll have lots of fighting between lots of capital ships. You do want to figure out how to play the game in X3:TC before you try Albion Prelude.

Release date is Nov. 30.

Quick trailer


Not so quick trailer that explains what's in the game

Excellent news.

This is one of my favorite series, and, even though I was disappointed with Rebirth, I hope X4 means a return to form, as X3 was, to me and most fans, much more engaging and rewarding. I also hope the borons come back this time around!

You can walk around in all the ships and stations. The Borons are aquatic so their ships are full of water. They may have never bothered with artificial gravity, either. All in all, you would not like it in their ships. A lot of folks are hoping they show up in a DLC but I'm really not expecting them to show up again until X5.

Regardless of these technical issues, I would like to see them come back. Borons, Paranids and Splits are my favorite races. I miss my plankton farms near Kingdom's edge!

Do you think this will be super buggy right after release as was the case time and again before? I'm super excited and I'm not sure I'll be able to wait too long after release.

This looks pretty great. It's like someone stripped all the MMO rubbish out of Star Citizen, and then actually completed it.

I'm fairly confident we will have Boron within 1-2 years as a DLC. I'm probably going to buy this on release just to reward them going back to what people actually wanted.

Originally Posted by arthureloi
I miss my plankton farms near Kingdom's edge!

Plankton is actually in Rebirth even though there are no Boron. Seems the Argon Federation (well, at least the part we see that was trapped in Omicron Lyrea) has developed a taste for it. They mix it with beans and some spice to make BoFu. A now-big company called CHOW staved off a famine by making the stuff.

Originally Posted by Zloth
Plankton is actually in Rebirth even though there are no Boron. Seems the Argon Federation (well, at least the part we see that was trapped in Omicron Lyrea) has developed a taste for it. They mix it with beans and some spice to make BoFu. A now-big company called CHOW staved off a famine by making the stuff.

Cool! I am not big as far as Rebirth's lore is concerned, as I hated it.

Did you like the stock market in Albion Prelude? Would you like to see it back?

Originally Posted by arthureloi
Cool! I am not big as far as Rebirth's lore is concerned, as I hated it.

Why? Once they cleaned up most of the mess (and modders made the smalltalk mini-game much less important) it was quite fun. At least the trading and building part was - I tend to avoid the large scale fights. Production lines were a lot more interesting, ship captures got improved a lot, the trade system was much better…. The big thing people seem to go on about is the stuck-in-one-ship thing but in X3 I spent practically all my time either in my Terran Vidar (for fights) or my Boron Angel (for everything else).

Did you like the stock market in Albion Prelude? Would you like to see it back?

Nah, it was terribly easy to exploit when I played AP so I mostly avoided it. I "only" played that game for about 80 hours to see the story - the vast majority of my time in X3 was in Terran Conflict.

Originally Posted by Zloth
Why? Once they cleaned up most of the mess (and modders made the smalltalk mini-game much less important) it was quite fun. At least the trading and building part was - I tend to avoid the large scale fights. Production lines were a lot more interesting, ship captures got improved a lot, the trade system was much better…. The big thing people seem to go on about is the stuck-in-one-ship thing but in X3 I spent practically all my time either in my Terran Vidar (for fights) or my Boron Angel (for everything else).


Nah, it was terribly easy to exploit when I played AP so I mostly avoided it. I "only" played that game for about 80 hours to see the story - the vast majority of my time in X3 was in Terran Conflict.

Well, first, it left a really sour taste after my first impression, which was right after release.
Then, when I came back after all the patches, I thought the world did not feel as alive as before, and that severely lowered immersion, which, in the case of an X game, is extremely important to me.

I hated features such as drones, having to scan stations piece by piece, hacking, small talk, hiring trade representatives, the way your fleet worked and organizing your forces.

One thing I really liked was purchasing and deploying satellites. That was gone in rebirth.

The way travelling worked (hyper lanes etc) was really obnoxious to me. I much preferred the gates we had before.

Even the co pilot and item descriptions irritated me and I kept comparing it to Terran Conflict.

All in all, it just did not feel alive and engaging, a skeleton, if you will, of what I loved before.

You don't have to scan stations piece by piece in Rebirth. Doing so gets you a temporary bonus but, if you don't already have some trade ships ready to take advantage of it, the bonus will run out before you can get anything out of it. (Though it is kinda fun if you put the thrusters on max and try to scan the whole thing without slowing.)

Drones are just little ships. I really don't use them much, personally. Hacking drones help to capture ships but that's really it. Hacking a station costs too much reputation for my style of play.

Trade reps essentially are trade satellites only they are on a per station basis. It does take WAY too long to get one, though, because of the small talk game you have to play to get one. Enter the TAF mod. 80,000 credits (which isn't much by the time you start really needing lots of trade agents) and you've got your agent.

Hiring was also a massive pain as you had to go through the small talk just to find an NPCs stats - and the stats you got weren't even for the NPC you were speaking with! That's got a good mod, too: Show Skills. Now everybody tells you their skills whenever you ask. You can still use the small talk to find the best at a given job if you want to save yourself sitting in a sector and phoning everyone up.

I really don't organize any fleets in Rebirth. I just send my trade ships all over known space doing deals and maybe assign some ships to stations to do trading. So I've got no clue how the fleet organization really works.

Gates don't give a good sense of scale. You go through one and end up somewhere else. When you go through a gate from sector A to B you have no idea if they are actually close in space or in a galaxy far, far away. With the highway system, you know how you got from A to B. (Though they were kinda long at first. Egosoft shortened them so they only take a few seconds now. Personally, I think they are a bit too short.)

Originally Posted by Zloth
You don't have to scan stations piece by piece in Rebirth. Doing so gets you a temporary bonus but, if you don't already have some trade ships ready to take advantage of it, the bonus will run out before you can get anything out of it. (Though it is kinda fun if you put the thrusters on max and try to scan the whole thing without slowing.)

Drones are just little ships. I really don't use them much, personally. Hacking drones help to capture ships but that's really it. Hacking a station costs too much reputation for my style of play.

Trade reps essentially are trade satellites only they are on a per station basis. It does take WAY too long to get one, though, because of the small talk game you have to play to get one. Enter the TAF mod. 80,000 credits (which isn't much by the time you start really needing lots of trade agents) and you've got your agent.

Hiring was also a massive pain as you had to go through the small talk just to find an NPCs stats - and the stats you got weren't even for the NPC you were speaking with! That's got a good mod, too: Show Skills. Now everybody tells you their skills whenever you ask. You can still use the small talk to find the best at a given job if you want to save yourself sitting in a sector and phoning everyone up.

I really don't organize any fleets in Rebirth. I just send my trade ships all over known space doing deals and maybe assign some ships to stations to do trading. So I've got no clue how the fleet organization really works.

Gates don't give a good sense of scale. You go through one and end up somewhere else. When you go through a gate from sector A to B you have no idea if they are actually close in space or in a galaxy far, far away. With the highway system, you know how you got from A to B. (Though they were kinda long at first. Egosoft shortened them so they only take a few seconds now. Personally, I think they are a bit too short.)

I would say some of these things are a matter of personal taste.

For instance, the travelling methods. I found Rebirth's highway system ridiculous. Bumping at other ships and having a hard time exiting every time certainly wasn't fun. I also found them counterintuitive and hard to understand. I would much rather have the good old system or something more akin to Elite Dangerous's mechanics.

Some other aspects are objectively bad and go against the player's best interests, such as organizing a fleet, which is just broken.

As for the mods, I don't use any and I don't feel comfortable with them, but if a game needs them for such basic features, I would say something definitely went wrong.

All in all, Rebirth is, to me, and, as it seems, to the majority of the fans, a very poor offering, and I'm glad Egosoft heard us and seems to be heading towards the right direction. I do think they learned and salvaged what few cool features remained from Rebirth.

GUYS. This thing is going to be released in 2 days. !?!
WTF - there was no marketing, no buzz, no nothing after their preview some months ago. NOTHING. THIS IS SUSPICIOUS. I am expecting no less than a turd. Very very frightening. I'm expecting braindead NPCs (a can of worms which should not have been opened), boob windows and a stupid console interface.
I decided to keep my expectations at absolute zero, no hype, buy only after proper letsplay research. If it is a turd, will play X3 Litcube at some point.

Well I learned in the past twenty years that every game at launch in the X-series is a mess. They improve with the patching and content updates with the expansions.

I've tried to get into the X games several times. I just can't. I need more interactions, characters and such. It's a shame, as I could really use a good space sim.

I have spent hundreds of hours in those games, but that was before the last 2 entries. I really hope they nail it this time..
Obviously it will be a whack-a-bug marathon at launch. Egosoft has been a misunderstood pioneer in what is today a trendy fashion of making sure than no Quality Insurance guy has been bothered during the whole process of the development.

So if it goes out in December I expect it to be playable for Christmas 2019?

I've been watching the hype and really can't understand it. These games always need a few months to get on their feet and the last one needed (over?) a year.

Somebody is streaming already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igmDNW1AyWQ

I've been a long time, half arsed follower of the X's but am still only on again/off again with an X3TC play through.

Will definitely be keeping an eye on this one but as every says they usually take a bit of user testing to get up to nice playable state. Maybe that's their tactic this time… Have a quiet soft launch, avoid all the new players howling at once about all the bugs