f13.net

http://www.egosoft.com/news/current_en.php

in case their site goes wonky:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LabrDe4XJo0

This was supposed to be announced on the 28th but they did it a week early for some reason.  Looks fantastic.  I love, love the traffic around stations. 

That video made me want to resub to EVE. :ye_gods:

Yessss. so excited. I have no words.

Darnit. Watched the trailer-thingy, started thinking "Hmmm voice-guy sounds like the guy from the original UO intro", so I went on youtube to find it - found it, and he didn't really sound all that much like the voice guy in the UO intro after all - but I did spot a link to a video visualizing the development of Iris2 UO client project (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSymT2p34B4) based on something called gource (http://code.google.com/p/gource/), which got me thinking it would be cool to do the same for some code-projects I have lying around here. Three hours later, and I'm still installing CVS stuff + Perl ++++ (on Windows 7) and I really should go get some sleep.

Also, yeah. I want to play this game too.

Squee.

yeah. I got an email on this this morning.

But the real reason I'm posting this is because I cant do anything else. This is an emergency call. My hard on for this is so intense, its pinned me to the desk. HAYLP!!!

I'm sure this game will continue to destroy my ability to comprehend WTF is going on while making me want to play it even more.

I thought it was JG Evolution  :ye_gods:

More X games are cool, but I'm guessing it's just single-player.  I'd really like to be able to interact with others in the X universe.

Was just about to say the same thing.

lolnuub u suks *azzrapez*

Feel better?  :grin:

I must be your mortal enemy forever now. :oh_i_see:

The line so long, the time so short...

MMO might be too much, but being able to host a small multi-player universe would be awesome.  X(f13).

Ok, that would be awesome.

I say that about a lot of games. So many games come out that have need of a multi-player system, yet do not. This is one of those titles, among many. Mount and blade was another.

I thought the new Mount and Blade added multiplayer.  X is so sandboxy though, it's just begging for a small server.

Its just your standard fair, Death match, Session based, Match, stuff.  I suppose I should have said Co-op ( Even though I mean to stab my friends :P )

Most friend schedules don't line up enough to do multiplayer shit together on a regular basis, even assuming your friends like random game Y as much as you. Also, most sandboxy and/or niche games aren't going to have enough playerbase for a random pickup game. Who would you play with? Who would you play with more the once or twice as a novelty?

Who's going to want to play an extended game without the other player being there?

No one. That's why multiplayer is silly.

Doubly so on a game that 'just gets going' after 10 hours or so.

I don't want a session based server. I want persistent. ( Ala Minecraft )

There's coop in M&B now. http://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/topic,150827.0.html?PHPSESSID=3a0f93m0o7ctuh5ebf2nvd3nt0 (http://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/topic,150827.0.html?PHPSESSID=3a0f93m0o7ctuh5ebf2nvd3nt0)

I know about this, but its not what we wanted. I suspect its not what a lot of people want. Its also buggy, and will jack up your saves, that and being requested to join at the frequency that 8 players are playing at is annoying.

The same people who like a small persistent minecraft server, as Bloodworth says.  X has a lot of fans.  It's niche, but those that like playing it would also like having a couple of people around.

There are many games I wish to simply start a server, and allow people to log into. I have no idea why more developers don't cater to this. They hear multi-player, and add death match, thats not what was asked for!

/derail

Did just that with Freelancer back in the day. I put up a Freelancer-server on a LAN we built between 12 houses in the area where I lived (total distance of about 550 meters in total as the crow flies), and I think we had it up for at least a month - maybe two - with us randomly logging in, flying around, trading, fighting one another, fighting space-bandits etc. Was good fun for a while, before it started growing a bit stale, as the game didn't really offer all that much variety.

Same here. But yeah, freelancer did not have much built in game for that sort of thing.

I'm cautiously optimistic here.   I loved the idea of all the X games but controls and interface have constantly left me really unable to get into them.   X3 was a vast improvement over X2 though so maybe they'll get it right this time.

An X game with a good UI and easier learning curve, without losing the depth, would be great. I hope this is the iteration that gets it right and look forward to the QQ from the hardcore vets if they do (omfg ez mode waaaah).

Absolutely!  I loved the Neverwinter Nights persistent world community and I wish more games would allow for that, hell, even without the toolset.  It was basically MMOs with a small like minded playerbase - the ideal.  I wish that model was more popular.

What the fuck. AGAIN, single player?!?! Why can't these guys just put out some god damned multiplayer?!?

The lack of good multiplayer space shooters is killing me. X3 rebirth? More like X3 retirement home.

**Ok i love these X3 games to death, and have made more then one TC mods for them, but jesus give us multiplayer.

*fuck me*

Want.

I'd take even session multiplayer, but not at the expense of a modern space sim if I had to make the choice.

Yay, I excited about this. I will start up a Chat Client on another screen and this will just be like Eve, but without somebody killing me all the time.  :awesome_for_real:

And without the mindnumbingly bad interface decisions. Oh god the UI, it haunts my dreams. :ye_gods:

The (oriiginal) X/X2/X3 UIs were worse than EVE's.
Let that sink in for a while.

I personally don't know of a game with a UI bad enough to give a relevant point of reference by which X2's UI may be compared.   You couldn't use the mouse and you had to enter something akin to a street fighter combo to push a button.

Good news and bad news.

The bad: X Rebirth appears to have been pushed back to sometime in 2012.

The good: X3: Albion Prelude, an expansion to X3: Terran Conflict, was released yesterday and if you have bought the X Superbox on Steam you should now also have a complementary copy of X3:AP.  I have read that there were a few problems with the distribution for X Superbox owners, but Egosoft has been pretty adamant that it'll be fixed.  For those interested, X3:AP looks like a more action-packed X3:TC and takes place during a very hot galactic war.  It will, however, take a few days for the script/mod-writers to get everything translated over to the new version, and mods have traditionally been what make these games really shine.

Well, they've finally announced a release date (http://www.egosoft.com/community/news_en.php) of Nov 15, 2013, and released a trailer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=eNs1rdSkUi8) and a reason for the delay (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEbL1p5vZpw).   They both look pretty good at fullscreen 1080p resolution, though they seem to lack the ability to render shiny metallic surfaces, and the narrator has a horrible voice.

One of the reasons for the delay is familiar to me from EVE:  they decided to implement walking-in-stations.  They seem to have done it, though, unlike EVE.

EDIT:  Sorry for the necro.

I look forward to the next update for this thread around the start of 2015.

Since it's an X game it's going to feel like a second job if you try to do the trading part seriously (especially if there are no mods to help you). Still I might fail to stay away from this and spend too many hours doing spreadsheets to grow a space empire! (and not forgetting the occasional pew pew)  :drillf:

I thought part of the Rebirth concept was to make it slightly more accessible.  Is that still part of the plan?

Still should be a fair bit more accessible than past iterations of the franchise.

This has been one of my more anticipated titles for awhile (three years or so), but there are a few things that have me a bit skeptical or annoyed -- primarily the space highway stuff and walking around stations, but we'll see how it actually plays out. That's if the game actually launches this year. This is the third hard release date we've seen, so who knows. Still, when it comes out I'll probably drop hundreds of hours into it, easily, and can easily see it being my most played game ever after enough time (if EU 4 doesn't claim that).

Thank you, oh internet space sim gods, for allowing people to leave their ship. May no more space games come to pass that do not.


Still single player isn't it?   :cry:

I loved X3 and this looks amazing, but I'm not entirely thrilled about the fact that you can only ever pilot that one ship.

Quoting this from 2 years ago for emphasis.

The fact that there is still no multiplayer in the X series is extremely disappointing to me.

X game without SETA (which couldn't really work in a multiplayer) would be a pain

SETA has been removed in this version. AFAIK. Everything is just speed up. Also the addition of gates and Trade lanes ALA Freelancer. Hell, you have a crew and co-pilot. Sad that you can't just LAN connect and take one over.

Good point. Should have a GTA/SR/SD style garage to store your ships.

In fact, the space sim genre could learn a LOT from the open world genre.

There's a poll (http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=309030) that shows a 60% to 40% preference for multiple ships, with enough replies to be significant and probably representative of what Egosoft's playerbase wants.  They went ahead with a single ship anyway. 

On top of it, the ship is ugly, and it's asymmetrical, with the engines at an odd angle that can't possibly work in any sort of realistic physics environment.

What's somewhat funny to me, though, is that the game engine looks similar to the one that Star Citizen will be using, but the environments and the ships look better.  Judging by the couple trailers I've seen.  Granted, SC is not very far in its development cycle, but still, Egosoft's game showcases just how much work Roberts will have to put in.  All the people who were praising him and his game have disappeared from Egosoft's forums, like, vanished without a trace.

I honestly think the two games are shooting for different goals. To my eye the graphic details are negligibly different. Also if I can get up and freely move around any ship in star citizen as well has have my closest friends crew a ship with me in multi-player, then I wont care if the graphics don't convince me that I am in real space. That said, I supported Star Citizen, but I still think the chances are good that it will deliver very little of what has been promised. I really just supported it with around the box cost because I want more companies and developers to see that there is interest in space games so that maybe we see some more people take a stab at making good space games.


Edit: Also, I don't really see myself playing a new X game, I have tried for years to learn to play their X series (I have every version except for the very first old one). I just can't figure that shit out, maybe its because I suck at space games, I don't know.

Second Edit: I just took a look at Rebirth and apparently I didn't have a clue what they are shooting for, so I will be more than happy to try out both SC and X:Rebirth.

Interiors for all ships, including a seamless transition between everything, and entire capital ship interiors is where SC is vastly different than X Rebirth. Also, beyond walking around a bit in Rebirth, in what I suspect are copies of interiors for stations with some variance seems to be the only activity. Where as SC will have that, and combat in seamless interiors. There is much more work going into Star citizen in many many areas. X Rebirth is on the right track in terms of where all space games should be of this type. I Half suspect, as SC is referenced by the development team for X many times, the delay was adding in the interiors and player toons to attempt to match SC in some fashion. The likely reason there is only one ship in X, is due to it not being an easy task to put all functionality you may need into a ship that has an exterior and interior. There is a tremendous amount of work going into each ship in Star citizen, including engineers on staff. Going as deep as to also standardize ship to ship docking ports.  

Or because Egosoft's initial idea (about 2? years ago) of cutscenes moving you from one place to the next inside the ships and stations, with no actual WASD control, was stupid.

That too. I Can admit I have not followed the development of this title, due to the taste in my mouth about previous installments. But rebirth is clearly Triumph for them, it shows in just the videos.

I Just do not think the two titles are very comparable on the ship and interior level. World and trade? Maybe, in parts. The largest difference will be you can run an entire corp in X alone, using AI. In Star citizen, a majority of that gameplay uses other players.

If we wana talk about what looks better, toss Black Prophecy on there too. That game is stunning. But its all surface.

Uh... what?

That's a dealbreaker.  Half the fun of the X series was being able to change ships.  I'll trade walking around for multiple ships, thanks.  Hope the fans mod that stupid decision out quick.

I might be mistaken, but I believe they went to one flyable ship for a couple reasons; interiors, storyline, mechanics, progression with consistency.

First one is pretty much a 'meh', its interesting but hardly worth any kind of trade-off on its own. The storyline reason makes some sense and it will really depend on how well its pulled off. Mechanically, and progression wise, is probably where most people are going to bitch about the change, and have an actual case for it. However, personally, with them bringing in drones that you can remotely pilot (and basically act as the fighters of previous X games in terms of mechanics and balance, as well as acting as bombers and other more niche ship types) and the player ship (the Skunk?) starting off as a weak ship that progressively gets stronger due to its modular design (you can unlock/buy/manufacture different modules as the game goes along, I believe) is enough for me, personally.

But, to be fair, I always wound up with one ship type I preferred and always used that and found swapping ships largely pointless as most ship types tended to be worse than another type within its class, and most classes were of the sort I hate to play. So I can understand, and personally agree with, their decision.

I expect it won't take long for the modding community to change, however.

I bet we see ship + story DLC's.

Available for preorder now, and for once, North America is the gaming ghetto.

Steam-only in NA
German boxed version
Collector's box for Germany and UK

http://www.egosoft.com/shop/

All versions require Steam as DRM.

X Rebirth - Trading And Mining Trailer  (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfJOYeJfD9c&feature=youtu.be)

I'm not sure what I think about that one. The deep mechanics (what it was actually about) are interesting, but the walking-in-stations quest NPCS actually make the game look a bit worse to me. A bunch of look-alike, dead-eyed NPCs sitting or standing around doing nothing, recycling a few lines of personality-free dialogue. It's like an MMORPG town circa 2005.

I'm interested to see what modders do with can do with this. Maybe we can really bring them to life.

Yeah and if we have to walk around looking for the useless NPC vendors to buy things I'm not playing.

Anyone know if Albion Prelude is worth getting?

It's $9 on Steam, so yeah.  It's currently patched to version 3.1, with the last two patches being modder-created plots and bug fixes.

If you get it, feel free to ask questions on the Egosoft forums, the community is pretty helpful.

The walking in station past Quest NPCs were some of the worst parts of freelancer, that I skipped after about three rounds of it.

I have every X game bar Albion, and I have zero interest in this tbh.

So I picked up X3: Reunion a while back in a bargain bin and never installed it.  Would it give me a good feel for Terran Conflict and Albion, or has the game changed significantly in those releases?

If you're not going to get the new one, I'd say get Albion Prelude or Terran Conflict. I would not go near Reunion or any other X game that came before Terran Conflict because its just not worth it from a new-to-the-series point of view. Most likely you'll just get frustrated and quit because the UI and difficulty curve were designed by some of the biggest retards in gaming history. That's my opinion, anyways. I found Terran Conflict much, much easier to get into than the previous games (all of which I gave up on within 5 hours of starting). Even then, Terran Conflict does have a bit of a curve and some horrid UI design, but there were mods that made a lot of it less vile.

As for the new version.. I'll probably get it on release and futz with it now and then till some mods come out. If everything has to be done by walking around on stations and such to sell/buy or get quests and so on? I'm going to end up screaming at my screen "GIVE ME MY BLOODY MENUS BACK!", or something similar with a whole lot more swear words. It just doesn't look good, doesn't appear to have any point beyond the "look at this feature we crammed in because we saw others doing it!". Also, I dearly hope there's more automation to your trade fleet ships than shown in that video, otherwise trading is going to be such a pain in the ass later on in the game.

Hell, about mid-way through Terran Conflict, through using mods, I have 40-60 trade ships going around on the pre-programmed trade routes just based off my own factories, and I never had to worry about them unless they got blown up. In that video the big worry for me was the idea of having to have them in your fleet group or something. We'll see, but there's a lot of minor issues with this game that could be devastating until the modders have time to tear into it.

Thanks, that's exactly what  I needed to know

Since Reunion is so far behind the usability curve, I guess I'll just have to base my purchase decision on how badly I need my space sim itch scratched!

So, this just got released. I pre-ordered largely based on the fact I've put a lot of time into the X series and enjoyed it, especially X3: Terran Conflict. I've mucked around with it for a few hours now and haven't crashed (a number of people are reported various crash issues) nor is my fps low even on maxed settings (a number of people are having serious fps issues regardless of settings). However, while the game has some promise it clearly shows that a lot of the worries about the game pre-release were well justified.

Station-walking aspect? Largely trash; its mandatory (if there's a person on a station you want to talk to you have to go aboard and run to them to be able to talk to them -- you cannot just call them up from your ship), character models are pretty bad, as are animations -- what few there are, they're sparsely populated and basically involves just talking to everyone and asking them to show you their skills. Also, you can loot tons of containers just laying around for that sole purpose, which just feels weird. Also, its possible to get stuck and have to reload a save; so I hope you saved!

Highway system is pretty 'meh', in my opinion. Just.. doesn't feel right or all that intelligently put together. Personally I miss the gate system of travel.

Trading is a pain in the ass now, largely because your ship can't trade in, well, trade goods (just inventory trading of minor stuff). This means all your trading, especially at the start requires you to fly around, find trade deals (and don't forget to fully scan a station to get the best deals, which is a decent annoyance to do) and then tell one of your freighter ships to actually do the trading. All that would be okay.. but its not always so easy. For example, in the tutorial mission about trading, I had my freighter buy some energy cells, traveled to the destination (thus dragging my freighter with me, basically), and sold the energy sells. Unfortunately it took almost fifty four minutes for the ship to get from the highway exit to the station and sell the goods. Why? Pathing issue. It got stuck around the highway for almost half that time.

Also, the interface is even worse than expected of an X game (and if you've played X games before you know the interface has always been bad). Its clunky and instead of nested menus you've got a number of completely separate menus that are fairly clunky and generally require you to stop flying your ship and paying attention to anything else -- and several of the menus require your character to turn away and looks at a pop-up menu meaning you can't even look out into space to see what's around you (or if there are incoming hostiles.. or if you're uselessly driving into something -- thank god for no collision damage!)

The HUD itself is pretty bad. They've gone for the cockpit view (and it is the only view), which has about 40% or so of the screen covered, of which only about half of it is used for anything, meaning you've lost most of your screen real-estate for not good reason.

There are also a number of bugs, including related to flying your ship (as an example, my accel/deccel sometimes doesn't want to take more input for awhile until I move my mouse around first).

This all isn't to say there's nothing good about the game. I just didn't get far enough into it to find it yet. So far the game looks like it'll need some heavy support from the modding community and official patches to make it worthwhile to anyone who isn't seriously into the X series.

Well, that's disappointing, if not expected, sadly.

From what I've been hearing elsewhere, the game is pretty much garbage at this point. The UI is worse than X3's, there's no SETA or autopilot, the campaign is buggy and broken, and possibly unwinnable.

The game was also designed for a 360 pad, which seems to account for many of the UI woes.

They had a special dev video on just how well the game would be controlled by a 360 pad a long while ago, to which my worry was "game will support joystick like the others in the series, right?" They replied after a few weeks, along the lines of "yea yeah but look at the sweet 360 pad controls."

I've put some more time into it (the sad thing is that right now, I feel like playing an X game and am tired of the ones I got other than Rebirth and as such am throwing myself into Rebirth again and again... what's the definition of insanity again?);

A number of issues with the game were readily apparent pre-launch and seem to have caught the Devs by surprise; such as differing camera options, the want for free look and so on, that they addressed these as forthcoming, but that it could take some time. Talking to people on stations via comms seems to be something they intend to hurry to put in due to the sheer number of people pissy about having to run through identical station interiors every single time they want to do something (like trade, get personnel, buy upgrades, buy a drone, and so on).

The game does seem overly designed for a game pad, which is curious considering it is a PC only title (a number of the 'wtf?' design decisions seem to have been pet issues/projects for lead designers -- such as the HUD and UI). The mouse controls aren't bad, but the lack of being able to customize the buttons of a lot of mice is extremely baffling (there is no option for mice in the key config beyond inverting and sensitivity). Most of the game plays well with the keyboard. The problem is they stripped a couple of the control schemes (such as direct control via mouse movement, rather than the follow the mouse cursor that is currently in) which is a big no-no, especially as the two main control modes they removed seem to have been the most used by hardcore X fans.

Horrendous joystick support (don't have one personally, thankfully) is beyond idiotic considering the sheer number of X players who use joysticks. A number of even the more popular joysticks are not even recognized by the game. They are working on this, but to launch with such anemic joystick support when you've advertised the game as controllable via mouse/keyboard, game pad and joystick is.. interesting, to say the least.

The UI is worse than X3, which is saying something, and largely stems from them trying to make elements of the cockpit serve a point (and ease game pad control) -- but any kind of flying game where your character (and thus the camera) has to swing to the side to look at menus (some, such as sector maps, are things you'll want to look at while flying) and thus prevent you from moving or seeing what's going on around your ship is downright bad design. It does look like, however, they attend to address some of it and most of the rest may be fixable with mods or when they add other camera angles in (which could be a few months).

No SETA was a known quantity going in, and I honestly don't blame them, nor do I mind, honestly. I think the removal of SETA is one of the few gameplay decisions they got right, and I loved SETA. The problem is that there are elements to the game that can just take forever without SETA now that trading has been somewhat removed from the player (i.e., the playership cannot trade, well, trade goods). Long term, however, I think this will be a good change.

There is an auto-pilot. Sorta. There's an auto-pilot if you're using a drone and you can pre-plot some courses, I think (haven't tried.. I was never a big user of auto-pilot). However, some of the time when you need auto-pilot (such as when you're looking at those side-menus...) there isn't any. Should be added, imo. No reason not to have it, especially since collisions do no damage.

Campaign.. I played some more of it and it itself is not very buggy. It isn't. A number of things causing an out-cry are simply badly documented or intended (such as how slow trade ships are -- that was expressly pointed out by the Devs pre-launch.. I think most simply didn't expect it to be as slow as it is). Another big issue with the campaign is simply that this is an X game and it still has a decently steep learning curve (which is kind of sad considering how many aspects have been dumbed down for game pad support) and that, in general, gamers are bloody idiots. My new game (before I ended up having my game crash for the first time!) saw very few actual bugs in the campaign once I sorted out how to do things (the game tells you how, but it only stays on your screen for about two or three seconds.. and some of them are a bit wordy for that if you weren't looking right at the dialogue box).

Overall verdict: Wait at least 3 months before considering purchasing this game. Waiting that long should see them suss out some of the major issues (or expound on why they won't be) and, more importantly, will give the mod community time to take things into their own hands. Most people forget that most X games are horrendous on launch, because Terran Conflict and Albion Prelude weren't -- which was mainly because those games were mainly just X3 relaunched in a finished state with the most popular mods added in).

You know what, speak for yourself.  If your point is that it's a good game and just you're an idiot at interacting with it, that's fine.   I think it's a bad game and everyone's level of intelligence is fine, and certainly sufficient to call a bad game when they see one.

Uh, no. My point was that it is a bad game but a portion of the issues people have raised in the forums (both official and steam) aren't actually issues, but the people being, well, dumb. For example, two of the most cited issues are; trouble docking and how to transfer crew to a ship. Both of these are fairly blatantly explained right before you are tasked with them. There is no reason for either one to be an exceedingly common issue, yet it is. Hell, a decent number of people couldn't grasp trading because they didn't think they needed to move a slider. Why? Because in general gamers are idiots. Just like people, in general, are idiots (especially as a group). Sure, its an asshole-ish thing to say, but I hardly think its incorrect.

The game does a plethora of things wrong. No question about that (as my previous posts went into), its just a portion of the issues aren't actually issues but the general stupidity of any mass of people rearing its head. Combine that with one of the worst UI's in recent gaming history, bugs, questionable design decisions, and a game from a series known for its steep learning curve and you have a recipe for disaster.

So glad I held off on buying this. From the videos/reviews I'm seeing, the rage on the Steam forums and the utter bewilderment on Egosoft's forums - this is a real departure from X3:TC/AP. And not in a good way.

Seriously, no radar, no 'target nearest enemy' bind, having to find individual NPCs to sell to at each station, and looting crates in stations as a primary income source? Wow.

It's bonkers how bad it is. I mean, I was expecting it to be pretty rough but there's shit which is just inexplicable.

Now that people are starting to comb through the X: Rebirth files and seeing more of the game's inner workings, it's now being speculated that Rebirth was a back-port of a failed 360 title (http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=349638&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0), which would be fairly amazing if true.

The _xbox marker sounds pretty damning to me. That is not cool at all.

Ceryse is sounding like Smerek Dart. There's another end to that spectrum, yo.

It's nice they added 360 gamepad support, I tried to make that work with whatever X version I have and it was crap. But I'm too stupid to waste my time with this series  :why_so_serious:

"added"

You mean "built around, then revamped as a new project altogether"?

They added gamepad support to X3AP.  They presented it as if they'd "added" it to X-Rebirth also, but it's pretty obvious (from that thread) that their plans were like this:

X-BTF - released
X2 The Threat - released
X3 Reunion - released
Let's make X4 a console game!  PC games are dead, cause of all the piracy, console is the only viable option.
X3 Terran Conflict - released to tide us over until X4
Crap, our X4 exceeds the RAM specs of the Xbox 360!  Let's port it to PC and announce it as originally a PC game!
Oh, hey, we can use Steam to prevent pirated copies of our games!
X3 Albion Prelude - released on Steam to tide us over until X4
Crap, our X4 hogs more than 3 GB RAM!  Minimum specs:  64-bit Windows required!! (the game is a 32-bit process with large address aware).

TL DR: I bought this. Do not make the same mistake.

I came very close to throwing something at the screen (or the screen out of the window) very early during the campaign. I am supposed to get personnel for my freighter which is idling around in some sector. First I get attacked by 2 small drones. Since I can see only  a tiny part of the action because "cockpit view" it is actually quite difficult to dogfight when drones zoom across your screen in split seconds. I got killed 5 times before I decided to fuck it, killed my engines and just let the stupid AI drones fly towards me where I could pick them off. I won the battle in 15 seconds.

THEN I get the mission to pick up a pilot . For finding the pilot I get a way point to a docking point (stations have LOTS of these, all over the place and the stations are really big), where I have to walk to some guy and recruit him, he gets on my ship and I fly him back to the freighter.   I fight of some pirates or something (same trick as before, but I took a bit of damage, this time). Then I have to find some defense technician or something. Game tells me to look for him in the station and to look up different docking ports to find him. No way point this time. So I fly back to the station. Then I proceed to fly around, looking for tiny tiny (like, smaller than the mouse courser tiny) icons to show up to signify that there is a docking port. Then to dock and wander around to see if I find someone who I can recruit. No defense guy here, ok, next port. After 2 or 3 times I get a popup that tells my that I can just fly close to the port and see on some part of my cockpit what personnel is there. Great. 15 minutes of walking through identical looking space stations. I hope I somehow just triggered that popup at the wrong time. Did nobody test this stuff. OK, lets see how many ports there are. After 30 more minutes of me flying around this station and "scanning" ports I still have not found my guy. What I DID find was lots and lots of "police" drones or ships who appear to scan my ship, sound their sirens, bump into my ship and then blast of to somewhere else. I feel like I am being stopped and frisked every 1-2 minutes.

Oh every time my computes announces something (which is quite often), my co-pilot yells the same text to the sound of "Shut up, Betty!" Gets annoying pretty quickly.

So, out of the blue another text pops up. "If you are looking for something/someone you can ask other ships for directions" My vision turns red. Adrenaline is rushing through my body as it prepares for fight or flight.

A nice cup of tea and a few minutes later I decide to give this a try. You have to get pretty close to a ship to open the com-menu. So I fly toward a ship, chat the pilot up, ask him for directions, navigate myself through a dialog-tree 5 or 6 branches deep and get an answer that sounds like a pretty thinly veiled fuck off, I don't want to talk to you. Another 30 minutes an about 20 ships later not a SINGLE one of them gave me the information I needed. For some reason I decide to dock at a random port. On a whim I talk to the guy standing next to my space ship, oh look, you can ask these guys for directions as well. AND HE GIVES ME A FUCKING WAY POINT all the way to the guy I was looking for.

If I had a button that would kill all people who worked on this game and released it as is, there was a split seconds where I might have pushed that button.

Also, the game runs like shit. I can play stuff like MW2 on high settings without a problem. This never gets over 20 fps EVER and drops lower often.

Whoa... sorry for that rant, but I had to get it out of my system before I start punching people in the face.

tl;dr - This is not the EVE Offline you're looking for.

So far I would say that if you could play Eve Offline as it is, that would be a far better game.

More polished and better UI as well.  :ye_gods:

Yeah, I'm thinking this one isn't salvageable and potentially a studio killer. There are fundamentally wrong decisions. You can fix incompetence but it's a lot harder to reverse engineer those bad decisions down in the guts of the game. I've no idea of the modding difficulty when the game's infrastructure is all xbox oriented but I've seen at least one person say that it makes it more complicated.

It does make me want to play one of the decent X3s, though.

I like how this one pulled a micro simcity 2013, in the sense that the game's so shittastically buggy that it couldn't be immediately obvious to quite a few people that underneath the bugs, the game was also just shit

Albion Prelude is probably the best of the bunch, especially with mods.

Rebirth is broken, but it may be salvageable with a combination of modding and fixes, but it'll probably take far too long for most and it'll never be as good as it should have been.

Oh, I think I have terran conflict. Oh, well.

Albion Prelude gets cheap enough during sales that I may grab it anyway, just to have the potentially last good X game.

After reading all the comments here and the Wot I Think (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/11/21/wot-i-think-x-rebirth/) I feel I won't be losing anything by skipping this game (which is a big disappointment since I was so looking forward to this)

I'm waiting a few months.

They are actually doing daily patches (http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?p=4214779#4214779) to fix things, and typically Egosoft is decent at fixing and improving their initial offering.   Also, some people are discovering complexity beneath the skin (http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=352173), as the bugs that prevented them from progressing past the most newbie level of a gameplay feature get fixed (guy first concludes that the trading game is simpleton crap, then gets past a bug and disagrees with himself by pages 3,4).

X3TC and X3AP weren't "good" until versions 2.5 / 2.0 respectively.  X3AP improved hugely at patch 3.0.  Typically, anything 1.0 released by Egosoft has been almost unplayable.  They just outdid themselves with the bugs this time.

So I'm giving them some time to fix them.  It will probably be an ok niche spaceships game in about 6 months.

Let me know when they let me fly any ship I own.  That's still my sticking point.

Likely take an expansion pack or sequel, sadly. From what I've read from some of the modders is there's a lot of code that ties the player to the Skunk and much of it they can't change.

What makes it the best of the bunch? What are the selling points over TC and Reunion?

Also, what mods for any of these games are recommended?

Selling points over TC:

- improved UI
- rebalanced ships
- improved out-of-sector combat scripting (so it's no longer "first shot wins" when it comes to capital ship combat when you're elsewhere).
- AP expansion 3.0 introduced new plots made by the modding community (they're arguably much better than the plots Egosoft usually cooks up).
- also, there is a mod that lets you play all X3TC plots in X3AP, so, you can play those then disable the mod and continue with playing the AP plots.

I'm guessing TC vs. Reunion is like AP vs. TC (I haven't played Reunion).

Ah awesome! So I can install the mod and do the TC Terran questline and get my Springblossom and then turn it off and do the new stuff?

Here are the mod details (http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=324236); it looks like you don't even need to uninstall it, as it just continues through; once you finish the TC plots you get offered the AP plots in one seamless plot sequence.

EDIT:  Also, a lot of the "rare" or "mission reward only" ships in TC are available for sale at shipyards in AP, provided you have the faction standings.  I can confirm I can buy Springblossoms by the truckload from the Aldrin shipyards.  Also, all Terran weapons.  You can complete the war plots as an Argon and then just fix your standings with the Terrans and get access to their stuff.

That's great. I had just bought Albion Prelude but I started a new Terran Conflict game to refamiliarize myself with the controls. Now I can just go ahead and use Albion Prelude with the better UI.

Does it still need all of the "essential mods" from Bhodi's X3 thread from 2010? MARS, Complex Cleaner etc or does the bonus package cover all that now?

I have no clue; I just play vanilla + bonus back and it's enjoyable for me.

They incorporated some of the MARS turret stuff into the vanilla game; NPC ships pick the best weapons for the task, and will auto-switch their turrets from the big artillery to the flak or faster shooting guns depending on target.  Like if they're shooting capital ship vs. capital ship and you attack one from the side with an M3 fighter, they will switch to anti-fighter weapons for the turrets on the side of the ship facing you, while continuing to blast each other with the big guns with the remaining sides.  For your capital ships, the behavior is customizable via turret scripts.

The bonus pack is bigger in AP, includes Satellite Warning Network for enemy alerts, and the Hephaistos complex-building (aligns the fabs in your complex geometrically, making it pretty).  So perhaps that covers the "complex cleaner" stuff on Bhodi's list, I don't know.  I don't know much about Bhodi's mods because, as I said, I just play vanilla.

Thanks for the info. I think just play with the bonus pack as well. Now that I know I'm not missing anything I won't bother with the X3TC quest mod. And if I turn out to be missing something good I can always add the mod later.

I saw something about X Rebirth 2.0 and wondered:
1. Is it possible to patch this game to goodnesss?
2. Anyone going to take one for the team?

Why bother when Elite is coming? Sounds like they are doing it right.

I'll probably get around to trying Rebirth again soon. I have the damn thing so all I'd be wasting is time.

It'll probably be after I re-stock the vodka, however. Some things shouldn't be done sober.

Unless one of the patch notes is "You can now pilot any ship you own" I'm not interested in even beginning to try.  I didn't see that line in the patch notes, just one about two optional cockpits.

Though I'm still trying to figure out how they thought fucking up the top space sim series of the last fifteen years was a good idea.

They wanted to increase sales by switching to consoles.  Ran into (licensing?) issues, so they cobbled up what they had and released on PC.  And now they've patched in PC stuff like joystick support, keybinds, better menus, etc.

They had major bugs fixed at version 1.30 - 1.31.  What they now call v. 2.0 would have been simply 1.40, more major bugs fixed.  However, they added a minor plot, and called it 2.0 in order to generate some more publicity and sales (discounted price = $20 now).

The game still has issues, and I'm guessing they won't be able to get rid of the limitations imposed by the console design until they release the next "full" game ...  X-Toddler or whatever.