They really should of started with something new, more approachable but equally deep, and crucially, at a scope that their small dev team could handle.
They should made a space game first, then maybe added the whole interiors and NPC interaction later on as an expansion.
Elite Dangerous is going to kill them I’m afraid.
That is in deed my next big hope for the genre, outside of Star Citizen, which won’t be coming for at least a year anyway. When is Elite coming out? Oh wait, that’ no where near either, is it?
Oh well. Unless the price drops really low, I’ll have to find a different present.
March, supposedly.
After several beers a few nights ago I said what the fuck and bought it. Completely ignoring all the crashes and show stopping bugs, I can’t think of any game more badly thought out.
In the old games one of the annoying things was travel distances. To go to a distant sector you had to set auto pilot , then go smoke, or do dishes for 20 minutes and come back to continue. Their solution? get rid of Auto pilot and make you actually drive for the full 20 minutes.
You can’t just capture an abandoned ship anymore . You have to go get a captain to make it do anything. But to make it do anything well you also have to pick up a pilot, defense officer, engineer, mechanic etc.
You can’t change ships. You are stuck in one. There is a bizarre deal where you can use a remote drone to act like you are controlling it, so one of your fleet is sitting around doing nothing. You can also walk around a space station. No fights nothing interesting, just walk over to someones office to ask them questions and buy stuff.
It is really like an Onion article Joke, from someone with a middle management fetish.
“Hey guys you know what would make a space pirate game better? A real time commute. And an HR department… And make it so you never actually leave your office, until you have to walk to the supply closet to get more space staples.”
It is a mindbogglingly stupid update to a series I once loved.
Damn, I’m glad you guys said something…I was thinking of buying this. :eek: Guess I’ll keep playing Kerbal and maybe look into Star Citizen when it gets close.
Sounds like what Space Trader: Merchant Marine should have been. As such, I’ll likely pick up Rebirth when it’s heavily discounted.
That’s a bummer about X-Rebirth. I’ve been playing X[sup]3[/sup] Albion Prelude recently and find it way too opaque to get into. I’ll give it a couple more days, but I’m guessing that this series isn’t for me.
I’m hoping that the upcoming Elite game is able to fill that accessible Privateer-niche until Star Citizen comes out.
This is currently rolling a 28 on metcritic. Now, I don’t pretend that’s a scientific survey or the great criticism handed down from the heavens. But damn. That’s bad.
To add insult to injury, there is evidence that X-Rebirth was developed for the Xbox 360, but died in development. It’s not even a port of a successful console game.
At least on the PC, the modding community can try to fix the game.
I’m a huge fan of the X series and have sunk many hundreds of hours into each of their previous games. I pre-ordered the collectors edition of X Rebirth fully aware of the changes being made and having watched all the dev diaries…
I am doomed to never learn from my mistakes. Every time I pre-order a collectors edition of a game I end up hating it. The game is just terrible. I’m not the kind of guy to get emotional about games but damn… How could they promote this game with a straight face? I don’t think even the modders can fix this one, the base underlying game is just so awful.
I own hundreds of games on Steam and this is the first time I have ever requested a refund (refused, naturally). I hope Egosoft can recover from this debacle, they were one of my favourite developers.
Still… Ever the optimist.
I picked up X Rebirth on the recent Steam sale and have been playing it.
In short, it’s not bad. They’ve fixed most of the serious game-breaking bugs that apparently plagued the early versions. Still, they failed in their goals. They wanted to reduce some of the complexity of the previous X games to make it appeal to a wider audience, while retaining the good parts. Unfortunately, what they shipped was a stripped down game that was no easier to understand than previous games. In fact, I think the interface is more difficult overall; simple things like commanding a trade ship to buy/sell are way more clunky.
There are some things I like. Capturing is now something of a minigame; I’m liking it. You have to progressively bring down a ship’s engines, jumpdrive, weapons systems, and shields to have any hope of a successful capture, and during the process you have to complete little mini-objectives so you aren’t just waiting around doing nothing. I enjoy zipping my craft in and out of hidey-holes to keep out of line of sight when taking down a turret or shield generator. I have quite a large fleet now due to captures.
The basic missions are, overall, very slightly better than X3. There’s a lot of the same “patrol these 5 sectors” stuff, which gets repetitive but is fun from time to time when you need some quick cash. The assassination missions are a good way to find capture targets (they frequently have some good-sized capital ships). And there are station building missions, which are somewhat boring but take the cost edge off building stations (which can get very expensive).
Speaking of stations, they do have the problem (again common with previous games) of the starter economy being in terrible shape. Just building one or two stations isn’t really enough to drive the economy, though now with four of them (somewhat upgraded), I’m finally starting to make some money. This is slow going because the stations take so long to build, but I’m making progress.
Walking around stations does get old pretty quick; fortunately there’s rarely any need. It would have been a great idea if there was more variety and stuff to do, but they obviously had limits on development resources.
In short, I couldn’t recommend the same unless you liked previous installations, and if that’s the case you’ll still have some big disappointments. Nevertheless, I’m basically having fun with it and despite all the problems, it’s still better than a lot of other games out there.