Can someone expand more on X4? It has been lauded around these forums but everything I look up, seems like the game isn't very visually appealing. That's the thing about space games for me. They need to be visually appealing. I love NMS and to an extent (due to Odyssey), Elite Dangerous. I just want to make sure that maybe I've just seen videos from people with poop setups.
It's visually different, more than worse. For once, X4 used PBR rendering from the start, contrary to Elite which only switched to it with Odyssey and is currently a bit of a mess because they ported over most of the assets without updating materials to the new phisically based technique...so, broken paintjobs, wonky lighting, etc...but now that it mostly works, ships in Elite look beautifully lit and shiny, very similar to how they always looked in X4 (or at least, since they added bloom and glow to it, a few updates along the road).
Consider though that you'll never get the beauty of the infinitely dynamic space vistas of Elite, or the lush and colourful (and neatly anti-aliased) panoramas of NMS, given the nature of the game. Its interface is mostly functional and not immersive, and most of the time in the way of the scenery, not mentioning when you are simply playing "RTS" from the map. Also, its anti-aliasing is very subpar (the above shots are all taken at 4K), so if you are playing at 1080p it gives it quite a "not clean" feel to visuals.
Videos of standard "content streamer" gameplay (far external cameras, most of the time spent between menus and map) will hardly make it justice.
The space backdrops are wild. They are also just backdrops, so no flying down on around it. But you have planets split in half and other crazy stuff.
The planet split in half with a sector inside its remains was Albion in X Rebirth, sadly (and then there were a couple back in X3 as well), that one truly had some wild backdrops. Also, to be technically correct, you can fly around them, it's just that it's totally useless, it involves flying in straight lines at 15000 m/s for hours, and is generally met with a "Warning, entering atmosphere", immediately followed by an unceremoniously quick game over.
Pluto in the new DLC is just a few thousand km from the system center and can be easily reached in a few minutes even with the snail-paced Terran ships, but....as above.
Some backgrounds are still pretty good anyway:
See, Elite? That is a white dwarf in the process of becoming a type Ia supernova.
And then there's the pulsating dark red star inflating and shedding its outer layers across the whole system every few minutes...and the one with space particles streaking through it (only visually of course)...ok, there are some wild backdrops.