X Rebirth - Egosoft - Q4 2011

[Ceryse]

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.

[Jherad]

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.

[Modern Angel]

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.

[koro]

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, which would be fairly amazing if true.

[Modern Angel]

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

[Sky]

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 

[Soulflame]

"added"

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

[ajax34i]

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).

[Der Helm]

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.

[luckton]

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

[Der Helm]

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. 

[Modern Angel]

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.

[Samprimary]

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

[Ceryse]

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.

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.

[Sky]

They added gamepad support to X3AP.  

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

[koro]

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

[satael]

After reading all the comments here and the Wot I Think 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)

[ajax34i]

I'm waiting a few months.

They are actually doing daily patches to fix things, and typically Egosoft is decent at fixing and improving their initial offering.   Also, some people are discovering complexity beneath the skin, 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.

[Lantyssa]

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

[Ceryse]

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.

[DraconianOne]

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

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?

[ajax34i]

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).

[Reg]

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?

[ajax34i]

Here are the mod details; 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.

[Reg]

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?

[ajax34i]

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.

[Reg]

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.

[Yegolev]

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?

[WayAbvPar]

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

[Ceryse]

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.

[Lantyssa]

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.

[ajax34i]

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.