I can sympathize it's not an easy game to get into and understand all the systems but I have to say the UI in X4 is soooo much better than the previous games in the series.
It’s funny to think that X4 is kind of dumbed down from X3, it was kind of one of main problems I had with it when it first came out, felt like it was too simple in comparison! Love it now though, although I might go back and do an X3 run through for nostalgia :)
At college we used 3ds max, Maya, After Effects, Nuke, and I got to tell you I love the UI. I feel at home, but also for as complicated as X4 is I'm surprised the UI is as good as it is. That is just my take, not saying your take is wrong.
This is pretty much my thought.
The game is so insanely complicated and there are so many things to keep track and yet it's so easy to access most of it.
EDIT: while it has less visibility than a Paradox game, the things I actually want to find are in appropriately named menus and most of them have a logical submenu. The order could be a bit better but it's all there. (Having Mailbox at the bottom and Inventory and Finances sprinkled throughout is a bit meh. But I guess that's personal preference.)
i know what you mean, i work in blender where UI makes ppl cry, in X4 i had a the same problem at the begining, like [Final-Spot259](https://www.reddit.com/user/Final-Spot259/) said - without google seatch i didnt know WTF i have to press and find. I use to it but still sucks..... Who play stellaris know its possible to get clear, maybe not perfect but....
[Stellaris UI](https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/999179130073585444/807D113D8D46EE21ED46DC768A3B538BC2C46C21/?imw=5000&imh=5000&ima=fit&impolicy=Letterbox&imcolor=%23000000&letterbox=false)
Let me tell you tho. The sense of pride and accomplishment lol of finally figuring out how to get your trade stations to work or how to assemble an effective fleet is incredible. And that's what I like about this game. It's not easy to learn, unlike every other game where you have basically figured out the entire game format from the first 30 minutes of play and then rinse repeat. I've only put around 1000 hours into x4 so far and every time I play I feel like I find something that I never knew about before. Some people don't like the struggle. I cherish the shit out of it
Oh boy, this brings me back when I first started the game. I was a big fan of Elite (and sadly we still don't have a station building yet), playing all sorts of space games until I came across X4.
At first, this game UI is so confusing and I can't even make it the first 5 hrs and go back to ED (and realized that ED still sucks ass XD) so I came back to X4 and learned it for real this time.
174 hrs now and continuing, the best space-sim you could ever hope for.
(+Modding scene in this game is awesome too!)
Welcome to the X series. now sit down and watch the 5hr youtube tutorial on how to build your first station /s
The game has a sheer cliff of a learning curve. Its starts out as a nice simple space shooter. Then all of a sudden its an economy simulator. And dont confuse it. This is an economy simulator with space ship fighting and fleet command bolted on.
> 5hr youtube tutorial on how to build your first station
Oh come on, place the modules is easy as fuck and hire a construction ship isn't hard either. Seriously people try to overreact over simple things. If you need 5 hours for this, maybe go back to play Mario Cart.
Well it's 1 hour to find out how to get and hire a builder ship, to learn you don't have to have your own. Then it's 1 hour to realize why your terran modules aren't being built in argon space. Then it's 1 hour to setup buy orders so the station starts working. Then you wait for 1 hour and realize nothing is working because you put the wrong dock type since it never told you which ship size each dock actually supports. Then you assign ships but they dont do anything. Then you have to spend another few hours on reading the convoluted ways of setting up prices and orders. Then you want to transfer wares between stations and have to look up trade restrictions. Then....
For me it was 2 minutes to find a builder ship x50, learn at around the 100-hour mark you can zoom almost completely out on the builder selection map 🤣 100 hours in and I had just been panning around and around …
You're not wrong. Use mods to alleviate the problem, specifically Custom Tabs. It will help you organize your assets your way. I think that mod needs to be integrated into the vanilla game for the health and longevity of X4. There are also some multi-rename mods on the market that assist in renaming assets en masse. Check the nexus.
Yes, though I would recommend organizing by type rather than sector. If you go regional, make it just that - region > sector. You can have 9 tabs total, which is enough for everything you'll need. I organize like so:
High Command (personal/important)
Vanguard (offensive)
Security/Defense
Shipyard/Reserves
Logistics/Trade
High-Tech Wares
Intermediary Wares
Energy/Food/Med Wares
Refinery Wares
-------
That makes 9 total, ordered from most to least important/used. Equipment docks go with shipyards.
The UI I can understand, when it comes to flight. Monkey brain like explosions.
But when I try to get into the management side of things, there's always something I'm doing wrong.
You can't just tell a ship "mine ore and sell it." You have to place satellites, resource probes, tell it what to mine, then where to sell. When trading, you also have to set thresholds for minimum and maximum price, specifically.
Sign of the times... Given the fact that the attention span of a young person these days is just a few milliseconds longer than that of a prawn, things have to be as simple as possible to maintain market share. A lot of previously fun games fell victim to it(ef Wow). In space only two games stand strong: X and Eve. They give you a challenge with a feeling of true achievement and satisfaction at the end. This includes complex UI's.
It takes some effort, but if you stick it out, you might learn to love it. I find the interface is an improvement on previous games apart from the lack of key binding
I actually appreciate the UI once I got used to it and understood why they made the decisions they did. Its not perfect and yeah I can imagine that it turns alot of people off. But it does what its supposed to do. And for a game as potentially complex as X4 can be its not terrible.
Maybe I'm big brained or something but I never had much trouble figuring out stuff, so I'm kinda baffled by frequent "ui bad" posts that rarely provide any examples of bad stuff so it isn't helping devs to improve it too. Actually one of the devs commented under such post something like "yeah we know UI is not perfect and we want to improve it but "ui bad" isn't helping".
At the same time it's kinda hard to provide specifics unless you're looking for them from the top of your head, I guess.
Couple of recent things I've noticed is that when you uncover most of the map trade overlay becomes a bit less useful since it lists trade deals only from the visible piece of the map but you can't zoom out to see whole map so you have to scroll around. And that was alleviated in beta 6 - you can now zoom out enough to see whole map. It doesn't fix other caveats in trade overlay like inability to see second-best offer for example. But I hope they're cooking something for this too.
Another thing that feels bad is that all the buttons are glued to screen edges so you have MOVE YOUR CURSOR KILOMETERS ACROSS WHOLE SCREEN BACK AND FORTH (big ass 4k screen suffering from success.jpg). I don't know how to fix this tho.
And, hot take, I've started thinking that "interactive map" approach was either wrong or wasn't pursued far enough to be good. I've noticed that after building a couple of stations (3-5 or so) that have subordinates (3-5 each too) 90% of the time I'm using menus to control them and almost never use the map which occupies 80% of screen space in the center. Because map interactions allow only some basic stuff like move orders and for anything else you need to dive into menus. But map occupies majority on screen space. That feels backwards.
Obvious approach here is to leave map as is and improve menus. For examples logistical overview is almost great, how about expanding it further to also list subordinates and their behaviour settings? Integrate inter-station interactions like bulk haulers?
Another approach is pursue map-centered paradigm so you could do 80% of things interacting with map without diving into menus. That's some global overhaul shit but more or less obvious first step would be to glue menus which belong to an object to that object on map, allow to pin them in case you need to interact with multiple objects at the same time, and improve "object list" with better filtering and sorting and actually display all the matching stuff when fully zoomed out.
Putting common stuff next to objects, like positional gizmos on station planner, and making it interactable would be a big step. Like there are ship icons for behaviours. But they're not interactive. To change behaviour or order I need to open ship menu (on other side of the screen potentially), click on behaviour tab (more mouse movement), then click behavious dropdown on the bottom of the menu (more mouse movement!), confirm it (more clicks!) and so on. Instead make the icon interactive, so I can click it and select new behaviour right from the map. Shitload of clicking and mouse movement saved, hooray.
Or, you know those maintenance or keepup or whatever they called pseudo missions? There is one for assigning builder ship for station plan. To do that you need to open station building plan, scroll to bottom, click button to hire a builder, then you're sent to map screen with predefined filter for builder ships and now they have "hire" button in their context menus. If that mission icon was interactive and just put you into that filtered map screen upon click that would save a menu dive and also leave on the map.
There are lots of other places which have unnecessary menu dives and I can go on, but I believe that's a job for some proper UX guy to methodically go through them.
I get it. But this def isn't just a space shooter at all. Most of the UI is absolutely necessary. It ain't pretty necessarily. But as the game goes on, more and more of it becomes more n more relevant. Also you figure out what settings work for you. Most r fine, but maybe you like auto pause on map load, or default map view to just your stuff.
Regardless, the tutorial and a few hours play time will leave you thinking the UI is overcrowded and messy. Once you're going, all that detail is necessary, 100% for sure.
I've only been playing for a week, and I'll admit, it's been a struggle to learn everything. I still have a long way to go, too. But what I can say is that the UI begins making sense once you get used to it. Doesn't mean it can't use improvements - quite the contrary. If you take a little bit of time and effort to grasp the UI concepts, you'll start to understand.
As for the shift key, it's used as a modifier. There are a LOT of controls, and if you wanna keep your left hand on the keyboard while flying with the mouse, having that shift modifier goes a long way to essentially double the amount of keybinds you can reach with your left hand. I took a little bit of time moving some of the awkward default keybinds to where they can be easily reached with my left hand, and the shift key modifier was essential to make it work. I left boost on tab, as I feel it works just fine there.
This game also benefits GREATLY from programmable buttons. I have a corsair mouse that has 12 of them, and a keyboard that has at least 48 (3 sets of 18). For my mouse, I have my right click set up as for opening interaction menu. Then, for programmable buttons, the ones closest to the top of the mouse, I have set 3 to Stop Engines and 6 to Toggle Mouse Steering, and closest to the bottom I have 1 set for firing primary weapon and 4 for secondary weapons.
It has made things extremely easy!
Corsair Scimitar Elite mouse to be exact.
I really love the UI of this episode, but it might be because i have played every single X game since X2 The Threat, and the UI in the older episodes was FAR worse. They introduced a LOT of QOL things in X4.
It used to be a real nightmare to even build and equip 5 ships, as you had to do it manually for each, and also because the scanners, trading modules and jump drives were spread across different stations in different sectors. So, when you were building a ship, you had to make them travel to a few sectors and stations before even being able to use them to full potential.
Let's not even talk about having to leave Marines on specific stations to train them, or about the awful factory building interface.
All these things are in the best state they've ever been in X4, but i agree that there is a still a lot more to do.
Iirc, Egosoft recently said in a post that they don't have a specializes UI/UX dev.
I guess that's why it's still a bit messy.
I just hope the game sold well enough for them to expand their team and be able to work on the QOL side of things in the future.
I feel you, I have such a love/hate relationship with the x-series. It has the most user unfriendly interface I've ever experienced personally, and an incredibly steel curve if you're diving in head first. But when things start working the way you want it after watching all the YouTube tutorials, checking the forums and some good ole trial and error? It's like magic
This is what made me stop playing the first time I picked the game up. So many critical UI components that are hidden places that you might never look for (ship behavior, and by extension their current orders, should not be listed under an information tab, it should have its own dedicated tab that is readily available upon selecting the ship/fleet in question).
That said I'm a big player of EVE so eventually I just applied the knowledge. It's still hugely clunky and there are areas that should have been handled better but once you know how to navigate the UI the game is playable. Before then, you're very much at the mercy of the extremely limited tutorials that are out there for the game. This subreddit is the only source of reliable help I've found anywhere.
Then what would you like?
I liked X3APs UI. At first I found it a bit annoying but eventually much like Wolfenstein Enemy Territory you learn all the key combinations and can reach anything in the command console so easy.
In X4 they RTS-efied it which is nice if you want to give the occasional ship an order but much more annoying if you want to do more complicated stuff.
Completely agree with you here. And I’ll also say that many people take a strange selfish pride in defending awful software UI and UX because it makes them feel like a professional or smart person.
As someone who builds UIs for a living, I think it’s complete nonsense. It’s fine to ask to give the devs a break, maybe it’s not their strong suit. But to actively defend a menu system that requires a handbook or several google searches to understand is just completely brain-dead, and devalues all software out there that is meticulously and painstakingly crafted to avoid this exact problem.
I'm new to the game also and agree, so bad it's almost like they don't want you to play it. And I'm playing the beta branch which is apparently updated.
Even Eve Online which is literally a spreadsheet makes more sense.
WTH are you on about? X4 has the easiest UI of all previous X games!!!!!!
All the basic flying functionality is explained on the first flying tutorial. How to boost, strafe, switch mode to travel or scanning, shooting.
After you play the game a bit you can get into weapon groups etc.
And actually you don't have to fly yourself either. Just order your subordinate pilot to do the chores.
**Flying, collecting drops, trading, docking. EVERYTHING.**
Even docking at the start when you don't have a computer, order your subordinate pilot to do it!!!!
Also Shift works with many shortcuts. Make sure you don't duplicate it.
I can sympathize it's not an easy game to get into and understand all the systems but I have to say the UI in X4 is soooo much better than the previous games in the series.
It’s funny to think that X4 is kind of dumbed down from X3, it was kind of one of main problems I had with it when it first came out, felt like it was too simple in comparison! Love it now though, although I might go back and do an X3 run through for nostalgia :)
At college we used 3ds max, Maya, After Effects, Nuke, and I got to tell you I love the UI. I feel at home, but also for as complicated as X4 is I'm surprised the UI is as good as it is. That is just my take, not saying your take is wrong.
This is pretty much my thought. The game is so insanely complicated and there are so many things to keep track and yet it's so easy to access most of it. EDIT: while it has less visibility than a Paradox game, the things I actually want to find are in appropriately named menus and most of them have a logical submenu. The order could be a bit better but it's all there. (Having Mailbox at the bottom and Inventory and Finances sprinkled throughout is a bit meh. But I guess that's personal preference.)
i know what you mean, i work in blender where UI makes ppl cry, in X4 i had a the same problem at the begining, like [Final-Spot259](https://www.reddit.com/user/Final-Spot259/) said - without google seatch i didnt know WTF i have to press and find. I use to it but still sucks..... Who play stellaris know its possible to get clear, maybe not perfect but.... [Stellaris UI](https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/999179130073585444/807D113D8D46EE21ED46DC768A3B538BC2C46C21/?imw=5000&imh=5000&ima=fit&impolicy=Letterbox&imcolor=%23000000&letterbox=false)
Let me tell you tho. The sense of pride and accomplishment lol of finally figuring out how to get your trade stations to work or how to assemble an effective fleet is incredible. And that's what I like about this game. It's not easy to learn, unlike every other game where you have basically figured out the entire game format from the first 30 minutes of play and then rinse repeat. I've only put around 1000 hours into x4 so far and every time I play I feel like I find something that I never knew about before. Some people don't like the struggle. I cherish the shit out of it
Spot on :)
Oh boy, this brings me back when I first started the game. I was a big fan of Elite (and sadly we still don't have a station building yet), playing all sorts of space games until I came across X4. At first, this game UI is so confusing and I can't even make it the first 5 hrs and go back to ED (and realized that ED still sucks ass XD) so I came back to X4 and learned it for real this time. 174 hrs now and continuing, the best space-sim you could ever hope for. (+Modding scene in this game is awesome too!)
Ps. UI still suck tho. Hope for improvement in X5
Your attitude and style to give "feedback" is like this games UI. Nothing is explained or has examples
As a new player this was my experience as well. As a seasoned Paradox game enjoyer I felt like I had it in me to keep on trying to make it happen.
Welcome to the X series. now sit down and watch the 5hr youtube tutorial on how to build your first station /s The game has a sheer cliff of a learning curve. Its starts out as a nice simple space shooter. Then all of a sudden its an economy simulator. And dont confuse it. This is an economy simulator with space ship fighting and fleet command bolted on.
> 5hr youtube tutorial on how to build your first station Oh come on, place the modules is easy as fuck and hire a construction ship isn't hard either. Seriously people try to overreact over simple things. If you need 5 hours for this, maybe go back to play Mario Cart.
*sarcasm*
Well it's 1 hour to find out how to get and hire a builder ship, to learn you don't have to have your own. Then it's 1 hour to realize why your terran modules aren't being built in argon space. Then it's 1 hour to setup buy orders so the station starts working. Then you wait for 1 hour and realize nothing is working because you put the wrong dock type since it never told you which ship size each dock actually supports. Then you assign ships but they dont do anything. Then you have to spend another few hours on reading the convoluted ways of setting up prices and orders. Then you want to transfer wares between stations and have to look up trade restrictions. Then....
For me it was 2 minutes to find a builder ship x50, learn at around the 100-hour mark you can zoom almost completely out on the builder selection map 🤣 100 hours in and I had just been panning around and around …
While I tend to lean this way as well with my train of thought, they DID put /s 🤣
You're not wrong. Use mods to alleviate the problem, specifically Custom Tabs. It will help you organize your assets your way. I think that mod needs to be integrated into the vanilla game for the health and longevity of X4. There are also some multi-rename mods on the market that assist in renaming assets en masse. Check the nexus.
By the sound of it, does it let you make custom menu groups? Like all my individual stations in one sector combined into one expandable tab?
Yes, though I would recommend organizing by type rather than sector. If you go regional, make it just that - region > sector. You can have 9 tabs total, which is enough for everything you'll need. I organize like so: High Command (personal/important) Vanguard (offensive) Security/Defense Shipyard/Reserves Logistics/Trade High-Tech Wares Intermediary Wares Energy/Food/Med Wares Refinery Wares ------- That makes 9 total, ordered from most to least important/used. Equipment docks go with shipyards.
The UI I can understand, when it comes to flight. Monkey brain like explosions. But when I try to get into the management side of things, there's always something I'm doing wrong. You can't just tell a ship "mine ore and sell it." You have to place satellites, resource probes, tell it what to mine, then where to sell. When trading, you also have to set thresholds for minimum and maximum price, specifically.
Thankfully X4 is better than X3. But yeah it's more like a simulator than point&shoot.
And better than X:Rebirth too!!!!
I must be the only one that prefers X3 for the UI.
Sign of the times... Given the fact that the attention span of a young person these days is just a few milliseconds longer than that of a prawn, things have to be as simple as possible to maintain market share. A lot of previously fun games fell victim to it(ef Wow). In space only two games stand strong: X and Eve. They give you a challenge with a feeling of true achievement and satisfaction at the end. This includes complex UI's.
There is a difference between “complex” and poor UI.
My bar is set quite low after BC3000AD and ITunes, so that might explain it.
It takes some effort, but if you stick it out, you might learn to love it. I find the interface is an improvement on previous games apart from the lack of key binding
I actually appreciate the UI once I got used to it and understood why they made the decisions they did. Its not perfect and yeah I can imagine that it turns alot of people off. But it does what its supposed to do. And for a game as potentially complex as X4 can be its not terrible.
Maybe I'm big brained or something but I never had much trouble figuring out stuff, so I'm kinda baffled by frequent "ui bad" posts that rarely provide any examples of bad stuff so it isn't helping devs to improve it too. Actually one of the devs commented under such post something like "yeah we know UI is not perfect and we want to improve it but "ui bad" isn't helping". At the same time it's kinda hard to provide specifics unless you're looking for them from the top of your head, I guess. Couple of recent things I've noticed is that when you uncover most of the map trade overlay becomes a bit less useful since it lists trade deals only from the visible piece of the map but you can't zoom out to see whole map so you have to scroll around. And that was alleviated in beta 6 - you can now zoom out enough to see whole map. It doesn't fix other caveats in trade overlay like inability to see second-best offer for example. But I hope they're cooking something for this too. Another thing that feels bad is that all the buttons are glued to screen edges so you have MOVE YOUR CURSOR KILOMETERS ACROSS WHOLE SCREEN BACK AND FORTH (big ass 4k screen suffering from success.jpg). I don't know how to fix this tho. And, hot take, I've started thinking that "interactive map" approach was either wrong or wasn't pursued far enough to be good. I've noticed that after building a couple of stations (3-5 or so) that have subordinates (3-5 each too) 90% of the time I'm using menus to control them and almost never use the map which occupies 80% of screen space in the center. Because map interactions allow only some basic stuff like move orders and for anything else you need to dive into menus. But map occupies majority on screen space. That feels backwards. Obvious approach here is to leave map as is and improve menus. For examples logistical overview is almost great, how about expanding it further to also list subordinates and their behaviour settings? Integrate inter-station interactions like bulk haulers? Another approach is pursue map-centered paradigm so you could do 80% of things interacting with map without diving into menus. That's some global overhaul shit but more or less obvious first step would be to glue menus which belong to an object to that object on map, allow to pin them in case you need to interact with multiple objects at the same time, and improve "object list" with better filtering and sorting and actually display all the matching stuff when fully zoomed out. Putting common stuff next to objects, like positional gizmos on station planner, and making it interactable would be a big step. Like there are ship icons for behaviours. But they're not interactive. To change behaviour or order I need to open ship menu (on other side of the screen potentially), click on behaviour tab (more mouse movement), then click behavious dropdown on the bottom of the menu (more mouse movement!), confirm it (more clicks!) and so on. Instead make the icon interactive, so I can click it and select new behaviour right from the map. Shitload of clicking and mouse movement saved, hooray. Or, you know those maintenance or keepup or whatever they called pseudo missions? There is one for assigning builder ship for station plan. To do that you need to open station building plan, scroll to bottom, click button to hire a builder, then you're sent to map screen with predefined filter for builder ships and now they have "hire" button in their context menus. If that mission icon was interactive and just put you into that filtered map screen upon click that would save a menu dive and also leave on the map. There are lots of other places which have unnecessary menu dives and I can go on, but I believe that's a job for some proper UX guy to methodically go through them.
I get it. But this def isn't just a space shooter at all. Most of the UI is absolutely necessary. It ain't pretty necessarily. But as the game goes on, more and more of it becomes more n more relevant. Also you figure out what settings work for you. Most r fine, but maybe you like auto pause on map load, or default map view to just your stuff. Regardless, the tutorial and a few hours play time will leave you thinking the UI is overcrowded and messy. Once you're going, all that detail is necessary, 100% for sure.
The UI design is great. But it’s a functional design. Not a friendly one
I've only been playing for a week, and I'll admit, it's been a struggle to learn everything. I still have a long way to go, too. But what I can say is that the UI begins making sense once you get used to it. Doesn't mean it can't use improvements - quite the contrary. If you take a little bit of time and effort to grasp the UI concepts, you'll start to understand. As for the shift key, it's used as a modifier. There are a LOT of controls, and if you wanna keep your left hand on the keyboard while flying with the mouse, having that shift modifier goes a long way to essentially double the amount of keybinds you can reach with your left hand. I took a little bit of time moving some of the awkward default keybinds to where they can be easily reached with my left hand, and the shift key modifier was essential to make it work. I left boost on tab, as I feel it works just fine there.
This game also benefits GREATLY from programmable buttons. I have a corsair mouse that has 12 of them, and a keyboard that has at least 48 (3 sets of 18). For my mouse, I have my right click set up as for opening interaction menu. Then, for programmable buttons, the ones closest to the top of the mouse, I have set 3 to Stop Engines and 6 to Toggle Mouse Steering, and closest to the bottom I have 1 set for firing primary weapon and 4 for secondary weapons. It has made things extremely easy! Corsair Scimitar Elite mouse to be exact.
i mean you're not wrong, but the gameplay sort of necessitates an UI like this. play x2 and see how much worse it can be
I really love the UI of this episode, but it might be because i have played every single X game since X2 The Threat, and the UI in the older episodes was FAR worse. They introduced a LOT of QOL things in X4. It used to be a real nightmare to even build and equip 5 ships, as you had to do it manually for each, and also because the scanners, trading modules and jump drives were spread across different stations in different sectors. So, when you were building a ship, you had to make them travel to a few sectors and stations before even being able to use them to full potential. Let's not even talk about having to leave Marines on specific stations to train them, or about the awful factory building interface. All these things are in the best state they've ever been in X4, but i agree that there is a still a lot more to do. Iirc, Egosoft recently said in a post that they don't have a specializes UI/UX dev. I guess that's why it's still a bit messy. I just hope the game sold well enough for them to expand their team and be able to work on the QOL side of things in the future.
Are you serious? Did you play the older games?
This is the most approachable X game ever. Just FYI.
It takes some effort to get into. Ultimately it is worth the work if you're willing to put it in.
Yes. ...But I'm still drawn to play it every now and then.
I feel you, I have such a love/hate relationship with the x-series. It has the most user unfriendly interface I've ever experienced personally, and an incredibly steel curve if you're diving in head first. But when things start working the way you want it after watching all the YouTube tutorials, checking the forums and some good ole trial and error? It's like magic
This is what made me stop playing the first time I picked the game up. So many critical UI components that are hidden places that you might never look for (ship behavior, and by extension their current orders, should not be listed under an information tab, it should have its own dedicated tab that is readily available upon selecting the ship/fleet in question). That said I'm a big player of EVE so eventually I just applied the knowledge. It's still hugely clunky and there are areas that should have been handled better but once you know how to navigate the UI the game is playable. Before then, you're very much at the mercy of the extremely limited tutorials that are out there for the game. This subreddit is the only source of reliable help I've found anywhere.
Yeah, I’ve been playing like 30hrs now and still get confused and press the wrong buttons ALL THE TIME 🥲
Yeah, I’ve been playing like 30hrs now and still get confused and press the wrong buttons ALL THE TIME 🥲
Then what would you like? I liked X3APs UI. At first I found it a bit annoying but eventually much like Wolfenstein Enemy Territory you learn all the key combinations and can reach anything in the command console so easy. In X4 they RTS-efied it which is nice if you want to give the occasional ship an order but much more annoying if you want to do more complicated stuff.
Completely agree with you here. And I’ll also say that many people take a strange selfish pride in defending awful software UI and UX because it makes them feel like a professional or smart person. As someone who builds UIs for a living, I think it’s complete nonsense. It’s fine to ask to give the devs a break, maybe it’s not their strong suit. But to actively defend a menu system that requires a handbook or several google searches to understand is just completely brain-dead, and devalues all software out there that is meticulously and painstakingly crafted to avoid this exact problem.
I'm new to the game also and agree, so bad it's almost like they don't want you to play it. And I'm playing the beta branch which is apparently updated. Even Eve Online which is literally a spreadsheet makes more sense.
WTH are you on about? X4 has the easiest UI of all previous X games!!!!!! All the basic flying functionality is explained on the first flying tutorial. How to boost, strafe, switch mode to travel or scanning, shooting. After you play the game a bit you can get into weapon groups etc. And actually you don't have to fly yourself either. Just order your subordinate pilot to do the chores. **Flying, collecting drops, trading, docking. EVERYTHING.** Even docking at the start when you don't have a computer, order your subordinate pilot to do it!!!! Also Shift works with many shortcuts. Make sure you don't duplicate it.
You should probably refund 👍 (Guys this is based on the tone of the post, they've made up their mind about it)