When comparing X4: Foundations vs FlightGear, the Slant community recommends FlightGear for most people. In the question“What are the best Space Sims on Steam?” FlightGear is ranked 7th while X4: Foundations is ranked 22nd. The most important reason people chose FlightGear is:
FlightGear has scenery that contains environments to fly in from the whole globe.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Constant bugfixing
The game gets constant and many updates that already fixed the most gamebreaking bugs. However they also introduced new.
Pro Universe sandbox
You can build your own empire with stations, ships, sectors. You can also fly any ship in the game.
Pro Worldwide scenery
FlightGear has scenery that contains environments to fly in from the whole globe.
Pro Free and Open Source
All code written for FlightGear is opensource and available for anyone to use.
Pro Crash animations in some aircrafts
Pro It has world-wide multiplayer
Pro Live cockpit
Pro A lot of aircrafts to add
Pro It has amazing graphics
Pro You can almost recreate real incidents
Pro No bugs
Cons
Con Poor performance
It performs poorly even on highend systems
Con Stations can't be destroyed
Sure in theory they can however until you have destroyed all the invisible modules (yeah! you heard right - unfinished station modules are invisible but you have to destroy them to destroy the station and to conquer a sector) an new construction ship has already built another defense station.
Con Too many menus
There are just too many menus you need to navigate, it fells more like MS Excel than playing a game.
Con Stations are unpopulated
You barely find any NPCs or life on the stations.
Con Weird pathfinding
AI gets stuck very often rusulting in endless docking attempts.
Con Graphics are outdated
Space graphics are still the same as with X3:Reunion(just a few new shaders/effects are added like FXAA, SSAO), NPCs and Character animations look like from the 90s. There are plenty of unsharp textures by zooming in-.
Con Failed to deliver
There were a lot of promises for this game by its developer like faction war over sectors, expanding empires. But none of them are in the game.
Con Only Xinput support
The game does only support Xinput so playing with a DualShock 4 is a no-go.
Con Needs to be online
With 2.0 the introduced an exploration mode that can be disabled however it is the only way to level up a crew.
Con Universe full of clones
There is no point for different races in this game since all use the same weapons, ship types and almost the same production modules. The whole universe feels the same.
Con No joystick or gamepad support
There is no proper gamepad or joystick mode that makes the mouse and keyboard obsolete.
Con Not as graphically advanced as commercial competition
Con Getting stuck upside down
After a crash a pilot may be stuck in an upside down position with no way to recover.