trusteft: Just in case I gave the wrong impression.
I couldn't care less about story.
I want my games single player, with a huge dynamic open world. I am not against stories, but that's not why I get this type of games. I want the freedom. I want no one to tell me what I have to do.
But there is a need for great dynamic (randomly generated or not) "sandbox" for the player to play in. That includes, missions, exploration and believability that the NPCs you meet are there and are real.

trusteft: Just in case I gave the wrong impression.
I couldn't care less about story.
I want my games single player, with a huge dynamic open world. I am not against stories, but that's not why I get this type of games. I want the freedom. I want no one to tell me what I have to do.
But there is a need for great dynamic (randomly generated or not) "sandbox" for the player to play in. That includes, missions, exploration and believability that the NPCs you meet are there and are real.

AlienMind: ObsidianAnt was streaming it on youtube just now. It's good.

trusteft: Anyone knows if planets or planetoids are landable?

trusteft: Anyone knows if planets or planetoids are landable?

Bigs: Can't land on planets / asteroids etc apparently... not that you could any any of the previous X games

kohlrak: Highly doubt it, since it's been talked about from day 1 in other games that you can't outside of special circumstances, but nothing has been said in the previews for this game. I imagine it would've been mentioned by now. I guess that'll be X5: Building Blocks.

trusteft: Thank you.
trusteft: Thank you. It's a shame. You could land on planets in similar games from the 80s up to late 90s. I don't know why they removed this feature from similar modern games.

kohlrak: Planets are a bit messier to deal with. This one has water, that one has methane, that one is a moon, etc. Given their dedication to graphics, too, i can see where a problem would arise. Given how landing works for space stations, it could be problematic even if you wanted to restrict them to only a base of the planet. Plus, all the ships would have to be redesigned to work within an atmosphere. I actually appreciate that you can't land on planets, 'cause it makes it far more believable and allows for far cooler ship designs. Look at the Boron ships of previous games, for example (since the Boron are absent in this one).

trusteft: Look at Elite Frontier 2 or Elite First Encounters. If they could do it at the time there is no excuse why it "can't" be done today due to tech limitations. Yes graphics have improved since the 80s and 90s but so has computational power. If a 16bit computer with 1MB of RAM and no dedicated graphics unit could do it, a computer of today with millions of time better performance, can do it.
Now, if it is a design decision, as it appears to be with the X series, fine. I don't blame them for that.
I am not sure how being able to land on planets would take away from the game, even if it is just on bases.

kohlrak: Have you played them? They pride themselves even on letting you park your ship manually, which would fall apart if you had to simulate the whole planet. And that's totally ignoring actually trying to design and render a whole planet.

Socratatus: The only reason I believe there is no planet landing is down to their priorities. It`s clearly possibly to make it happen, They just haven`t made it the main thing. Yet.

It took Elite a good while to get around to many of the stuff they have now, but guess what, you can`t walk around stations (space legs) which people have been asking for, for ages. In X4 you can.

I`ve watched the stream and you can land on a station, step out and walk around, something I really like. there`s also a good amount of npcs wandering about. I also really like that you can put CUSTOM pics on your ships- I already have some very nice pics all of my own ready to go up!

Now it looks like they are planning on two more expansions, one in 2019 and later... Who knows what will be in those...? Maybe if enough people petition for planet landings we will see it in X4 too.

Most of all I just like not being forced online all the time just to fly Solo without their servers overloading and being kicked out of my session. Then being ignored when trying to complain about it on their forum.

I don`t like paying for stuff without knowing exactly what I`ll be getting. I did it ONCE with Xcom 2 and luckily they pulled through. I have to think hard about taking such a risk with X4... I might just go for the basic.

But from what I`ve seen, X4 is a buy for me. I just hope they`ll incorporate Track Ir in patches soon.