A comparison of ED vs X3

[Foreverowned]

and leave the rest of us to enjoy ED for what it is, a hard sci-fi, vast, open sandbox simulation.

I like ED, at least what i see of it, it's certainly vast and open, and a simulation, although in my opinion a fairly limited one, the content is sparse as far as i'm concerned.

De gustibus non est disputandum friend, but you're trying to spit in my soup to "improve the flavor". Go get your own.

If he's paid for the game it's as much his soup as it is yours.

 

[Meritz]

And again "There is no reason to have to sacrifice the 1:1 scale to achieve greater variety in each sector.

Ok. I'm very interested in your ideas on how you would make each of the 400 000 000 000 systems in the galaxy "unique". See, to me, they already are, because I do not require a differently colored nebula in each one. Each has a unique combination of stars, planets and other stellar phenomena and is literally one of a kind.

What would you do?

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If he's paid for the game it's as much his soup as it is yours.

Yeah, we both bought chicken soup and he wants fish broth. Star Citizen -> that way.

 

[Zenicetus]

Ultimately if you show space sim fans the above screenshots of X3, then the screenshots of ED and ask them which game they would rather be playing, they would pick X3. FD are a business despite what you may be thinking, they don't exist to make astronomers happy, they exist to make money while making the MAJORITY of possible players happy. Stop being so anti-progress, it isn't helping anyone.

Maybe you haven't traveled far enough in ED to see the sights? This game is based on amazing astronomical objects, not painted backgrounds.

I went to a station last night, and saw this planet in the background:

Spoiler

And then there's this... a fun place to try bounty hunting:

Spoiler

Very cool visuals are out there if you look for them, and the realistic dark and dangerous look of space is the appropriate context for those objects. We don't need pretty painted backgrounds. There is, and will be, enough eye candy in this game to look at.

 

[Foreverowned]

Yeah, we both bought chicken soup and he wants fish broth. Star Citizen -> that way.

Nah he's fine where he is, giving an opinion on a game he bought, same as you.

 

[Interstellar]

Ok. I'm very interested in your ideas on how you would make each of the 400 000 000 000 systems in the galaxy "unique". See, to me, they already are, because I do not require a differently colored nebula in each one. Each has a unique combination of stars, planets and other stellar phenomena and is literally one of a kind.


What would you do?


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Yeah, we both bought chicken soup and he wants fish broth. Star Citizen -> that way.

Oh please, stop claiming to be the de-facto king of all things Elite. You have absolutely no idea where this game is going. I already listed a couple of ideas in a previous post. Things like tiny meteoroid fields that appear procedurally in certain sectors. Or high density radiation zones. Or areas with high volumes of space dust that reflect that particular system's star light and glow that particular color. How about solar flares that are spit out from certain stars and mess with your equipment. I could go on and on about things that would make each sector fun and unique, but no let's keep it boring as hell just so you can be happy. Face it, you are the minority. Space Engine -> that way.

Maybe you haven't traveled far enough in ED to see the sights? This game is based on amazing astronomical objects, not painted backgrounds.

I went to a station last night, and saw this planet in the background:

Spoiler

And then there's this... a fun place to try bounty hunting:

Spoiler

Very cool visuals are out there if you look for them, and the realistic dark and dangerous look of space is the appropriate context for those objects. We don't need pretty painted backgrounds. There is, and will be, enough eye candy in this game to look at.

Yeah, there is no denying that PLANETS in ED are far FAR superior, we were talking more about the whole sector in general. X3 had asteroid fields as well, but they all looked the same (no ice composition, etc). The potential in ED is there, it just needs to be tapped. I'm going to be making a separate thread about sectors, and improving them. This thread has derailed hard enough.

 

[Meritz]

Oh please, stop claiming to be the de-facto king of all things Elite. You have absolutely no idea where this game is going to end up so shut the hell up about it already. I already listed a couple of ideas in a previous post. Things like tiny meteoroid fields that appear procedurally in certain sectors. Or high density radiation zones. Or areas with high volumes of space dust that reflect that particular system's star light and glow that particular color. How about solar flares that are spit out from certain stars and mess with your equipment. I could go on and on about things that would make each sector fun and unique, but no let's keep it boring as hell just so you can be happy. Face it, you are the minority. Space Engine -> that way. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

First, you're judging the game before it's finished. I bet you don't even follow newsletters, or else you would know that the visual variety and the feature complexity of the game is still very much in the works.

Second, considering FD went to great lengths to model the known part of our galaxy according to actual astronomical data, I'd say the developers of this game are kinda keen on keeping things on this side of realism and accuracy. And since they are not funded by a publisher hell bent on pleasing the crowds, and have stated multiple times that they're making the game THEY want to play - I believe it is going to stay that way.

Third, even if they did everything you mentioned, when thrown at 400 BILLION systems, if you don't look at the details, it would still look all "samey". I don't think you comprehend just how big the 1:1 galaxy is.

By the way, you may get your glowy space dust fix when they introduce nebulas:

Spoiler

 

[Interstellar]

I created a new thread about what I was talking about, and what you were so against. Perhaps you will change your perspective on the idea. You have the wrong impression of my ideas. I never said to do away with the the scale and accuracy of the galaxy. You put that in your head for some unknown reason and you keep telling yourself that I said it. Go view my new thread. Here is the link: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=54844

PS. that nebula screenshot looks amazing.

 

[mse1075]

Thank you for the info in the thread interstellar. Long time X3 player (500+ hours TC alone) and since [the game following x3] been looking for the heir. Please keep the comparisons coming as the beta continues.

 

[troe666]

i for one liked reading your post OP. Just be prepared for the usual backlash these forums provide if you dare to say absolutely anything they perceive as 'against' ED.
Its a real shame, that this community seems to that way inclined.

ED is a wonderful idea. They have many problems to solve still though. Was interested to read about X3. I don't really like the look of star citizen yet despite having been a huge fan of privateer and wing commander series.

Elite and SC are a lot like Privateer and Elite FF. chalk and cheese.

But ED can't ignore the fact that the goal of the sprawling universe does tend to combine with its current shortcomings to leave many people wondering what will be done to solve this. I play solo now as open is almost pointless without meaningful player interactions.

and unfortunately, my solo experience goes like this: jump from one nameless system to another. go to bulletin board. find no interesting or high profit missions. purchase cartographics, usually none left. check for ship upgrades, especially FSD. never available. leave station. jump to other station. check bulletin board. find some random mission for 1-20k CR. jump one or two or three times to destination. SC for minutes on end. possibly overshooting once. dock, hand in mission, get credits. Repeat. Over and over and over. mindlessly. occasionally finding an upgrade, very rarely. occasionally checking another USS, and very occasionally getting into a scrap resulting in a bounty or ship reset via insurance. repeat. Its just not fun enough yet. Not enough rewards. Not enough different things to look at. No interesting multi-player missions or scenarios. no engagement

a 'universe' of this size doesnt really mean much; every single system is a new instance. every single system's stations are similar , or its essentially the same old thing. when i jump into a system these days i literally sigh out loud when i see the station is 1,000ls away. great. no difference at all to a station 100ls away except minutes more of mindless supercruising. Its just unbelievably boring and grind-y.

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

1st off before I wade in, I will be upfront. I am biased, I am a complete elite fanboy, the 1st game is still my all time favourite game and I have been playing the game in 1 flavour of another since I was 8 or 9.... I also loved all of Chris Roberts' games, they were certainly better lookers than elite, but I always thought that they were more "Hollywood", with more glitz and glamour but without the soul of elite.

however back to elite............

So far I really like the way Elite is going......... the simulated milkyway in Elite is trying to stay as accurate as possible (in so far as we know from data we have) which to a point does limit a little what can be done at the "known" systems in terms of crazy phenomena. Those X skyboxes do look amazing but I suspect ED looks more realistic to what is really at those places.

as we move further away however I must admit I do hope we see a few crazy things.

As I said, I DO like what we have so far, but that being said, I do see where some are coming from. Whilst elite is not going to have 1 massive story which ends, I do think there is still a LOT of work to be done in the procedural mission engine to hopefully make it able to spit out interesting and hopefully fairly long and involved "novella" type stories which come and go.... also FD will be making "injected events".... rather than these being a 1 off, I also hope they can be fed into the procedural mission generator so that it can learn to create more complex stuff as the game goes on..

I like sandbox games, and DB has oft compared GTA to be like elite in a city....... but even GTA does have a few stories in there.

Also the missions need to be fleshed out, I want to "feel" like I am part of the military when I join one of the factions etc etc

The good news is I am confident what I am hoping for IS coming, after all, FD would not want to let go all of the games secrets before it is launched.

As for owning empires and space stations and setting up automated trade routes etc........ This is not going to happen, and has been confirmed by the devs, it is not the direction they want the game to go in....

BUT that is not to say that maybe we wont get mining equipment that we cant install in different areas which do their thing, and then we cant fly about in our ship maintaining them, much like a fisherman looks after his lobster pots...... and who knows, if we do this in an area enough, I am hoping maybe a small colony will start on a near by planet and hopefully if we take them some food and stuff on our travels, it will flourish, and in time grow. to ultimately be a small city, which will lead to the expansion of the known worlds.

So whilst we may never "own" our own space stations and the like, I am hopeful that our actions WILL lead to the creation of civilisations, and THIS could be one way to make your own story in the elite universe.

Of course on the other hand, maybe I am being overly optimistic, and none of the above will happen, and the game will just feel a bit empty, like what some of the naysayers believe.

If so, I will still get enjoyment out of the game, but imo it will have missed what I see as much of its potential. Time will tell, but AFAIK my hopes are at least in keeping with stuff that the devs themselves have talked about over the last 12 - 24 months.

 

[Meritz]

For those who need assurance FD are aware that you can't just generate 400 billion systems and call it a game, watch the latest developer video from the newsletter:

[video=youtube;Hb55EsHuXiQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hb55EsHuXiQ&feature=youtu.be[/video]

Particularly around 3:43

I think they're spot on with their vision and they haven't disappointed so far.

Interstellar, see 6:37

 

[Interstellar]

THANK YOU! All that video does is prove my point. They added sound effects into the game despite it being a scientific fact that in space we would not be hearing ANYTHING AT ALL outside of our ships. Go play Shattered Horizon to see how sound in space should have been handled. That means they chose gameplay > realism. There is no reason why the same thing can't be applied to my suggestions, and we are already getting "colorful" nebulas, so it appears that they agree with me that their systems are currently bland.

 

[Mu77ley]

THANK YOU! All that video does is prove my point. They added sound effects into the game despite it being a scientific fact that in space we would not be hearing ANYTHING AT ALL outside of our ships.

All sounds are generated by your own ship to aid pilot awareness. It's a audio HUD if you will. Hence the speaker systems you can see on the flight seats, etc.

 

[Interstellar]

All sounds are generated by your own ship to aid pilot awareness. It's a audio HUD if you will. Hence the speaker systems you can see on the flight seats, etc.

Oh please, you made that up just now on the spot. I understand the speakers for the computer's voice, but you are saying it also reproduces your engine accelerating, guns firing, other ships zipping by? Yeah right, talk about far fetched. Even in the video they said that it was unrealistic but they did it for gameplay reasons. If something unrealistic adds good gameplay to the game, clearly they aren't above adding it. Hence my suggestions still have merit.

 

[Robert Maynard]

There is no reason why the same thing can't be applied to my suggestions, and we are already getting "colorful" nebulas, so it appears that they agree with me that their systems are currently bland.

.... except that, if your suggestions do not fit with Frontier's vision of the game, then there's a reason.

I'm willing to bet that in 3 months, the game will be closer to my vision, than it will be of yours. And knowing that, I can leave you there sitting in your chair contemplating what will happen to the game that you oh so love, and that makes me quite happy. Have a nice day

.... or you could simply petition the company behind X3 to make a sequel....

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Oh please, you made that up just now on the spot. I understand the speakers for the computer's voice, but you are saying it also reproduces your engine accelerating, guns firing, other ships zipping by? Yeah right, talk about far fetched. Even in the video they said that it was unrealistic but they did it for gameplay reasons. If something unrealistic adds good gameplay to the game, clearly they aren't above adding it. Hence my suggestions still have merit.

The ship's internal sounds would transmit through the hull itself to an extent, i.e. engines, weapons, etc., whereas the external sounds are generated by your ship.

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

Oh please, you made that up just now on the spot. I understand the speakers for the computer's voice, but you are saying it also reproduces your engine accelerating, guns firing, other ships zipping by? Yeah right, talk about far fetched. Even in the video they said that it was unrealistic but they did it for gameplay reasons. If something unrealistic adds good gameplay to the game, clearly they aren't above adding it. Hence my suggestions still have merit.

No he didnt......... all sound is provided via your computer and if your ship gets smashed up and your canopy breached then you lose much of the sound.

 

[Interstellar]

No one knows what their exact "vision" is. FD is composed of many people and I'm absolutely sure that they have differing opinions regarding practically everything. We also don't know how closely they will stay to this "vision" of theirs.

I have asked for X4 many times before and especially after the travesty that is X-Rebirth. Until it becomes a reality all I can do is bring my experiences from what made the older games great and bring them here.

It's implausible to think that your ship is generating the sounds of players shooting their multi-cannons 500 meters away. These "super speakers" are just a convenient workaround to bypass reality, and FD clearly admitted to it themselves, so I don't understand the blatant white knighting.

 

[Unfluffydave]

THANK YOU! All that video does is prove my point. They added sound effects into the game despite it being a scientific fact that in space we would not be hearing ANYTHING AT ALL outside of our ships. Go play Shattered Horizon to see how sound in space should have been handled. That means they chose gameplay > realism. There is no reason why the same thing can't be applied to my suggestions, and we are already getting "colorful" nebulas, so it appears that they agree with me that their systems are currently bland. I'm willing to bet that in 3 months, the game will be closer to my vision, than it will be of yours. And knowing that, I can leave you there sitting in your chair contemplating what will happen to the game that you oh so love, and that makes me quite happy. Have a nice day

Have you ever had your canopy blown out? the sound produced by the game is far different when you are piloting in a vacuum so they ARE sticking with realism as far as they can. Like you say some realism has to go, we are after all flying spaceships howeveer not every system has to have shiney bling to keep the easily distracted interested. There are millions of systems to explore, most of them WILL be boring collections of ice planets. The chance discovery of something different or valuable is what drives exploration.

Think of it like this, if your mattress is stuffed with diamonds whats so special about finding another diamond?

I played X-BTF, X-Tension and X2: The threat and enjoyed them no end, if I can get them working for WIN 7 then I would probably still play them. I never played X3 and couldn't get into X:Rebirth, it had some very good mechanics with stations, scanning etc but the jump systems, rivers etc was too far a change to have the game feel like an "X" game. ED still feels like one of the "Elite" series which is important (for me). Pixel crack isn't.

 

[Interstellar]

No he didnt......... all sound is provided via your computer and if your ship gets smashed up and your canopy breached then you lose much of the sound.

I haven't had my canopy breached, nor did I know it was even possible. Will have to give it a shot in one of the tutorials.

Man you guys are really blowing my suggestions out of proportion. No one is asking for "pixel crack". Stop putting words in my mouth.
All I said was that ED has boring solar systems, and the procedural nature is dragging down the quality. This is a fact which is echoed by many critics and players all over the internet.
Mark my words, if we kept the game the way it is now, it won't last a month post release. Many people, including myself are only playing the beta in the hopes that it gets better, because right now I'm bored to tears.

 

[karel]

There is absolutely no way to compare X3 (hell we don't even know what X3 you are talking about, there are 3 stand alones, one from 2006, one from 2008, one from 2011 and X3TC is EXTREMELY different from reunion!)

Basically none of the aspects of the games can be compared. This looks like the threads on star citizen forums where they compare SC to basically anything they can think about, from skyrim to cs and lemmings just to keep the intellectual masturbation happening.


Stop it, man. ED is ED, X is X and there is even less to talk about since the catastrophic failure X rebirth is, effectively killing the X license... sadly, as X3 TC is a game I spent 900 hours of fun on.