You are kind of incredible. I will see what I can afford to get. Was thinking of getting an AMD R3500 or some such next year if they are good value for money but maybe I can find something else before that. Now time to do something about lunch. <loud tummy rumbles>

Finally Egosoft, releasing your game right away on gog :)

One of the very few preorders I ever made, despite being aware of XRs background - which I still enjoyed quite a bit once it came to GOG as somewhat finished.

I mean, on one hand we have a Star Citizen which supposedly promises a DRM-free (but still online connected...???) SQ42 spinoff, and hasn't materialized in years. On the other hand there's the always connected Elite Dangerous. And some loneley outsiders like EVERSPACE.

If this is our only chance to get a really deep, open-world, and most of all SP-focused and DRM free Space Exploration/Trading/Fighting game then I'll risk the 50 bucks.

Rebel Galaxy:Outlaws might be the other contender but it has a different game scope and hasn't officially been announced here.

Being always online even if playing alone (like with Elite) is being DRmed, don`t let those Devs or companys tell you any different. they think most people are either too young or too obsessed with the game to see different.

And Star Citizen is a huge scam.

No, I expect to live for about ten to twenty more years but you never know.

After "spamming" all the Egosoft channels (forums, discord) asking them to bring it here I'm so happy to see this announcement. It made a lot of sense having this game here when all other Egosoft games are on GOG already but honestly I didn't expect them to bring it on release day, kudos Egosoft. Finally something that can pull me away from X3LU.

PS: Now I need to go back and thank them on those channels :)

Here is my "problem".

I have played most of the previous X games, but not enough to be even remotely close to the end of any of them.
I plan on starting to play them from the first one one, to completion where possible, sometime in December when I move to a new place. After all these years, I plan on playing them properly and finishing them.
My question is, while I do want to support any effort to bring new games to GOG, including the latest X game, which I am sure I will like at some point, wouldn't it be silly for me to buy it now when I know I will probably not be able to play it months and months later after I have finished the previous games?

Intersting dilemma. If you know you won't be playing it for 1+ year or whatever time it takes until the first ever sale on this game then financially speaking you want to wait of course.

If you are going to play it in <6 months it seems unlike it'll get a sale until then so you'll get it at the same price.

In either case there's one more aspect: the higher the price you're going to pay the more money the devs get (and btw, if you buy it on their site, they get 100% on that sale, without the Steam/GOG cut, unfortunately they only sell Steam keys on their site) so optimizing for the game price runs counter to "helping the devs". Up to you :)

That's the weird thing about the market. Pre-ordering doesn't feel right without alot of trust, so we feel bad for not pre-ordering. We're just too afraid to be honest that even though we want to encourage the first day release, we don't actually feel it valuable enough, so we're trying to blame the game for that, when in reality we don't think it's enough, and we don't trust egosoft to deliver the experience that we've got in our individual heads. Preorders are a tremendous show of support, and, effectively, an advance on pay, which should only come with extreme trust. That's really what this comes down to, in the end. Personally, i think whomever came up with this pre-order idea is a little in over their heads, and they're pitching the game to us like they would investors, and it's probably not going to be the exact thing that we expect, which is going to set them up for bad reviews and sales. Pre-ordering will only magnify this to No Man's Sky levels, and make people hesistant towards the genre as a whole.

I think that if they can get a cool enough modding community to write decent enough mods for quests, then they properly adopted them like they did alot of mods before, they could turn the game around. However, the trick to this is short selling the game early on, then using word of mouth of "oh my god, this game's amazing, you need to try it" like minecraft did to really make the sales take off. The problem is, they typically make a really, really good space simulation, and with some really cool tools that can do alot of things, but without a reason to apply the tools, it's like me making a pokemon game where you can have ultraballs, super strong attacks and pokemon, but all the opponent trainers simply use level 5 pidgeys throughout the whole game. In X, you have to generate your own challenges and objectives, and that just isn't going to go well when people are pre-ordering.

Given they'e open ended games other than their incredibly short storylines, you can't really finish them, anyway.

Honestly, i feel as if Egosoft should either start hiring writers to become The Elder Scrolls in space, or develop multiplayer. At the end of the day, we all see the potential of X, but even minecraft relies on multiplayer for that to manifest itself in a meaningful way. The lack of any tangible end goals that similar games (and i'm specifically referring to Bethesda Titles and sandbox titles like GTA and Minecraft) have is precisely why they do better. With multiplayer, it's cooperation and/or competition, while with a proper single player game it's usually to max your character, discover things, beating challenge X, or something like that. As much as i hate the concept of achievements, these games could benefit from that, even if only to simply create an objective.

Feel guilty? Why should anyone feel guilty for not pre-ordering a game?


Hahaha. You have it the wrong way. They are trying to sell a product to US. We owe them NOTHING. We most certainly don`t owe any game publisher to pre-order.

They should be thanking us, that we are prepared to buy.

Thank you for harassing. I will name a non-critical Space Station module after you ;)

Keep in mind, however, that NMS was up for pre-order for a year or even longer while this pre-order is up for pretty much a week, at least here on GOG - I wouldn't know about steam as I wholly ignore/disregard that platform. It's an epic move and greatly appreciated that they're pulling a day 1 release here and as a big sucker for X ever since BtF I naturally bought the collector's edition while writing. :)
I would've done the same for Rebirth - yes even in hindsight considering the amount of bugfiXes it needed - but since they took their time releasing over here... Well, better late than never. My biggest gripe right now is the need of upgrading to (much, much) better hardware and questions that come along as for eXample whether vulkan and directX can run along on the same machine because from what limited knowledge I have they're both for graphics rendering and stuff...

I completely agree with you on the rather short storylines in X. Though honestly I never really played the series for them, the open space is what's the core and the storylines are little more than fluff for me - eXcept for maybe the very first because due to its limitations (only one pilotable ship for eXample, overall "lack of space" compared to even X-Tension) kind of "forced" you on delving into it. I'm unsure whether I'd like a "storier" X universe, the X:R campaign is quite pushy in my opinion so I started two other games with empire builder and verge eXplorer, both the latter each having several weeks of raw playtime into them.

A "X Online" is Egosoft's "TNBT" I'm yearning for but with EvE around since '03 (playing myself since '09) and it's average usercount declining for a while now, currently stagnating at around 30-35k peak online players during EU primetime (despite technically being f2p now) I'm unsure whether there's a market for an online X universe, as much as I'd like to have one. Still, I can dream about it and maybe we'll get a X game along the way with accurate zero-g physics since that's pretty much the thing I miss since forever in the series. Edge of Chaos completely spoiled me in that regard ..... xD

Personally, over all, if i had the money and a rig that could handle it, i'd pre-order it, too, 'cause i know of their track record and do trust them. However, for people who are new to the series, which is who is really being aimed at, it's really no different from NMS. If not more story, things need to cost less. This idea that you can get to the end of the game having experienced only 1/3rd of the content available and having no goals outside of the story is really off-putting. You can't just give people something to do, but you need a reason for people to do them. That's what Bethesda's learning right now with fallout 76: there's alot to do, but no reason to much of any of it beyond going after Mothman. The trick to "X Online" should not be MMO. It should be like stardew or minecraft: you invite people to your game. Making it an MMO would just further increase the desire to make the game more boring by increasing the prices of everything even further to milk the players. It needs to be peer-to-peer or distributed servers or something.

As for zero-g, supposedly X4: Foundations has it according to one of the videos.

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.