X-Rebirth

[Zewp]

The Steam forums are already providing solid gold comments, such as this one.

The trolls have convinced me to buy this game
Because something that makes people whine this much must be good.

Also, all the ♥♥♥♥ talking against Egosoft is unjust. You may have my 50$ Egosoft, and my patience.

This one if for the master ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ---> No matter how you look at it piracy is wrong. How can you expect them to fix things if everyone just steals it?

http://steamcommunity.com/app/2870/discussions/0/648811852345652564/

Everyone says it's shit, so therefore it must be good!

 

[Mortmal]

x-rebirth is to X3 AP what diablo 3 is to diablo 2 ,or what is oblivion to daggerfall, probably worse. AS for the walking in stationi think they could have skipped it,no its not the core of the game but you waste quite a bit of time in there:

I think this remains to be seen. It's a departure, but most of the core gameplay is intact. The shift doesn't seem as big as going from boss farming for items to AH surfing for them. Plus, there are some new gameplay elements:


Some additonal notable changes:

• The most important NPC in the game is your female co-pilot : Indeed heavily scripted companion forced upon you shouting "shut up betty" each time your nav computer gives you info, i am not kidding sadly.
• It is no longer possible to pilot a capital ship from the cockpit: Removing game features is nothing to be proud of.
• Less complicated to play : Another lie, interface is unintuitive and confusing both new players and x veteran, just have to read the many threads about people havign trouble just buying 100 energy cells.
• Once the main story is over, the player is allowed to do whatever he likes, the game and universe won't just end: Was like that in every preious x games, at least they did not remove it
• Stations are to have a bigger impact on the economy: There's a facade of an economy but ships dont interact with stations , ships n the highway dont even really exists, the economy is most likely fake .
• No longer need to land on stations to see its info : No, now you have to manually fly near to some information points each time you want to see something , reading every numbers from your ship was too convenient i guess
• Transportation through space will now rely more on interaction and proximity with other ships. There seems to be "ship lanes": Highway mini game, fake queues of ships, no surprise no challenge ,no risk, this is so different from X3, when entering a gate you could encounter a blockade of pirate capital ships.
• In combat it is now possible to identify and target the critical systems of a ship: Capital ships are sitting duck with little box protubering on them , just sit in the blind spot and smash buttons, they cant retaliate and you dotn even have to target some parts to take them down.
• You can see what is going inside of factories by physically looking at them:
• Improved graphics
• Space highways for trivial travel although portals do still exist: Boring new feature.
• Reworked AI system: Its exactly the same as X3
• Brand new engine which will take advantage of modern hardware

So yes it has improved graphics and demands better hardware, everything else is false.

 

[Raapys]

 

[Azazel]

Also didn't realize they went with a cell-shaded look until now. Sort of an odd choice for a space sim... even one more action oriented than the predecessors.

The game isn't cell-shaded. They turned the contrast and saturation up slightly on the textures in an attempt to make up for the fact that they are PS2 resolution and look like fucking garbage unless you are several km away from them.

 

[bonescraper]

I don't give a shit about ugly character models and i don't give a shit about awful voice acting, i didn't expect better. I don't give a shit about Star Citizen either, if i wanted a MMO i'd play EVE.

Now, i really wanted to like this game, despite the usual Cockdex butthurt when a new game is released. But FUCK. I got to the point where i need to buy 100 Energy Cells. I think i bought them (Egosoft is really fucking good at making unreadable, unituitive UIs), but my ship won't collect them. I don't know its status. For fuck's sake i can't tell if it's moving or not, not to mention checking its destination etc. I can't fucking order its pilot go go directly to the docking bay either. Why for fuck's sake? I ask WHY? I could do all that shit, and more in their previous games. How the fuck do you unlearn all of those fucking essential things, and release a interface barebones game like this, when you have years of fucking experience? In a goddamn game that took you 7 years to make?

WHAT THE FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!?

That's enough X-Rebirth for me. I'll check up on this game in a year or so.

 

[Echo Mirage]

Have any reviews been released for the game yet ?. I'm guessing Egosoft/Deepsilver don't have the doritos and mountain dew needed for a flawless review, so they should make for a good read.

 

[Angelo85]

Sad to say this but do not buy bros
for this one.

Played 14 hours now in hopes for redeeming signs but there are none to be found. Bugs aside (which are to be expected in an X game ) it's the design decisions that really made me sad, because this title was obviously aimed towards a broader, more casual crowd.
I let myself be suckered in with my own "hey it's an X game, how casual could it really be" mindset. Well the answer is sadly that it's extremely casual and the X series has been dumbed down beyond belief.

Even if the bugs eventually get fixed, the shallow gameplay and casual minigames will remain.

 

[Azazel]

"the truth in his case is simply that the game running at 20fps is more or less normal. Yes it may run faster if he changes graphics settings but this is not going to be running at first person shooter framerates ever. We are collecting an FAQ for the steam forums and ours and this is probably the #1 on that"

 

[Baron]

The Albion Shitbucket has no cargo hold. Yup, none.

I can't believe there is no cargo hold. Their motto is "Trade. Fight. Build. Think." for Christ's sake.

I don't care the Albion Spunk can't be upgraded to a megaship, I'm happy directing tankers about. But my own ship needs a cargo hold, and, if I choose the "Trade" path, I want to expand my ship's cargo space at the expense of speed or firepower.

Player B can shoot the shit out of pirates and score bounties. Player A, (me), wants to sell plankton and nostrop oil at a profit, and I want it in my frickin' cargo hold until I save up enough to buy my first tanker. That's a trading game. If I buy contraband and smuggle it into a restricted sector, then it should be on MY ship. I want to put slaves in my cargo hold, I want to forget to upgrade my cargo hold to have a lifesupport system, I want to sell 1,500 units of dead slaves as meat to some godless race of fishfaced quadropeds. I want to collect stolen goods and looted debris. Where's the personal risk, the fear of being scanned and shot down, unless contraband is in my immediate possession? Give me a cargo hold!

Damn, these updates are spirit crushing for space game fans. I'd bought Albion Prelude in anticipation of Rebirth's release, am enjoying the hell out of it. Think I'll stick to it for a long time to come.

 

[Mortmal]

I don't give a shit about ugly character models and i don't give a shit about awful voice acting, i didn't expect better. I don't give a shit about Star Citizen either, if i wanted a MMO i'd play EVE.

Now, i really wanted to like this game, despite the usual Cockdex butthurt when a new game is released. But FUCK. I got to the point where i need to buy 100 Energy Cells. I think i bought them (Egosoft is really fucking good at making unreadable, unituitive UIs), but my ship won't collect them. I don't know its status. For fuck's sake i can't tell if it's moving or not, not to mention checking its destination etc. I can't fucking order its pilot go go directly to the docking bay either. Why for fuck's sake? I ask WHY? I could do all that shit, and more in their previous games. How the fuck do you unlearn all of those fucking essential things, and release a interface barebones game like this, when you have years of fucking experience? In a goddamn game that took you 7 years to make?


That's enough X-Rebirth for me. I'll check up on this game in a year or so.

The 100 energy cell trip is just the beggining, not even sure its a bug either its how it is all the time . Ah, do you think its that simple in x rebirth ? Ordering a ship to go by and buy , no ahah.. hell no. The ship must be equiped by a specific drone carier and then it will move slowly(again no SETA), excruciatingly slowly towards the destination. Of course theres no goods locators anymore nor convenient sector maps so you will have to carefully search every single station you encounter in case you may need them llater.
Today its 100 energy cell but then they will ask other things for a far forgotten sector and you wont have a clue on their locations, even better your ships will have to cross several sectors to go fetch the goods spamming you with "we dont have enough fuel for the jumps", of course you have no clue either where fuel is produced.
Ok you think its still fine with the ships slowly crossing the dozen or so sectors ? Wrong the campaign made you kill on sight with plutarch, a bug prevent it to go back ot normal. So your slug ships will have to cross core hostile plutarch system , they will vanish out of thin air, likely being destroyed but you have no log to tell you that.

X3-rebirth experience was so nightmarish i had to edit my savegames to be able to rebuy a freighter and reset plutarch faction standings.

 

[Blaine]

Their motto is "Trade. Fight. Build. Think." for Christ's sake.

I think what's meant is:

Trade the game in for a different one if you haven't opened your copy yet.

Fight for a refund if you've already opened yours; request a chargeback if you didn't get the Steam version.

Build a small campfire in your backyard and burn all of your EGOSOFT materials in effigy.

Think long and hard next time before you buy a game they were clearly hiding pre-release and that showed some severe warning signs.

 

[Volrath]

Game is apparently only 32bit and can't use more than 4gigs of RAM?

 

[Blaine]

Game is apparently only 32bit and can't use more than 4gigs of RAM?

Well, they started developing it 6-7 years ago (yes, really) for consoles (unconfirmed, but not exactly slander either given the lack of HOTAS support, radial menus, gamepad being superior to mouse, etc.), so that's not terribly surprising.

The entire X3 Reunion/Terran Conflict/Albion Prelude series still used the same basic engine from X:BtF and X2: The Threat, and thus all of them could only utilize a single CPU thread, among other limitations—this despite the X games being an incredibly CPU-intensive series, especially as a player's save file progressed. Fortunately though, CPUs have come so far in recent years that that lack of multithreading support doesn't matter.

 

[MetalCraze]

FAIL

 

[Raapys]

Game is apparently only 32bit and can't use more than 4gigs of RAM?

Well, they started developing it 6-7 years ago (yes, really) for consoles (unconfirmed, but not exactly slander either given the lack of HOTAS support, radial menus, gamepad being superior to mouse, etc.), so that's not terribly surprising.

The entire X3 Reunion/Terran Conflict/Albion Prelude series still used the same basic engine from X:BtF and X2: The Threat, and thus all of them could only utilize a single CPU thread, among other limitations—this despite the X games being an incredibly CPU-intensive series, especially as a player's save file progressed. Fortunately though, CPUs have come so far in recent years that that lack of multithreading support doesn't matter.

Well, only because they've optimized for it, which means making sacrifices. Single-threaded performance hasn't increased all that much since the Core2.

Modders are still suffering from the singlethreading curse though. Because of it, they have to put very strict limits on their scripts, and generally limit the amount of scripts, just to avoid wrecking performance. And with more cores to use, things such as OOS combat would be a problem of the past. So it would definitely benefit the series as a whole. Heck, if any game needs to be multithreaded, it's this. And Dwarf Fortress, of course.

 

[Zarniwoop]

The Albion Shitbucket has no cargo hold. Yup, none.

I can't believe there is no cargo hold. Their motto is "Trade. Fight. Build. Think." for Christ's sake.

I don't care the Albion Spunk can't be upgraded to a megaship, I'm happy directing tankers about. But my own ship needs a cargo hold, and, if I choose the "Trade" path, I want to expand my ship's cargo space at the expense of speed or firepower.

Player B can shoot the shit out of pirates and score bounties. Player A, (me), wants to sell plankton and nostrop oil at a profit, and I want it in my frickin' cargo hold until I save up enough to buy my first tanker. That's a trading game. If I buy contraband and smuggle it into a restricted sector, then it should be on MY ship. I want to put slaves in my cargo hold, I want to forget to upgrade my cargo hold to have a lifesupport system, I want to sell 1,500 units of dead slaves as meat to some godless race of fishfaced quadropeds. I want to collect stolen goods and looted debris. Where's the personal risk, the fear of being scanned and shot down, unless contraband is in my immediate possession? Give me a cargo hold!

Damn, these updates are spirit crushing for space game fans. I'd bought Albion Prelude in anticipation of Rebirth's release, am enjoying the hell out of it. Think I'll stick to it for a long time to come.

It wouldn't have been so bad if they left it as an X game. After all, i usually use automated freighters to do most of the work and they give you a HUEG one in Stillbirth for free. But yes, not even being able to carry 100 (or even 1) energy cell is pretty damn disastrous.

Long story short, AP is the best the X series is ever going to get. Have fun, and enjoy the Zephyrus and/or Magnetar. And every time you have a minor gripe with the menus or controls, just think about how very fortunate you are to be playing a ("PC exclusive" ) that was built from the ground up to work on consoles.

 

[Baron]

Wait- so what's in the Albino Spunk, if not cargo? Can't you walk around the ship now and talk to crew? What's in this thing?

Quite some time ago I played and to the extraordinary goodness of Sundog: The Frozen Legacy... and yes, you could put cryogenically frozen farmers in your cargo bay. You (as a small circle) could walk about your ship, check your damaged system and replace engine parts. It was a blast. PLUS you could trade, pirate, bounty hunt, land on planets, walk about cities and get into a lazer shoot out with muggers.

Sure, the graphics weren't flash, it was an Apple IIc / Atari ST game, but it had all the best features of a space trading game. Anyway, what can you do in your ship in X-Rebirth? Anything decent? Anything would be good, but god damn, why doesn't someone do a tinkering with the engine thing? An old drag racing game, street rod, or something.. would let you pull apart the engine of your cars and let you adjust them for performance. Always made me feel like a mechanic tuning those vehicles. I'd love to have X-Rebirth engines lose a bit (or a lot) of performance with wear and dogfights. Just to change some broken parts, run some bypasses, and fiddle with advanced alien machinery whilst floating aimlesly in deep space. They should have had some big empty sectors to cross, some downtime from the frantic dogfights, had an autopilot (or hell, maybe let that co-pilot take the reigns until you cross the galaxy) while you wander about the ship poking around with a screwdriver.

 

[Zarniwoop]

You can walk around the crew area which is about the size of a caravan and talk to crew members in Mass Effect dialogue-wheel style. That's pretty much it.

 

[theSavant]

The shitstorm seems to have calmed down their forums. Hardly any rant posts anymore. Weird... it's like the players accepted the shit and shut their mouth.

 

[Zewp]

Pirated it to check what all the ruckus is about. It runs like shit and is unplayable even though my specs surpass the minimum.

*uninstall*

 

[Echo Mirage]

It seems the words on the lips of old and young alike in most of the threads Ive seen are "Star citizen, Elite dangerous". As for everyone else they still believe Egosoft can patch in an X game somewhere between the 7 years of wasted and fundamentally flawed design.

Edit: The game is a huge success it seems.

About our ongoing work - Patches, Updates, Bugfixing on X Rebirth
Hello

Unfortunately I have not written much here since the release.

First, I would like to apologise to those of you who have had technical problems. I have started a thread in the Steam forums where I have listed the most common errors and have now collected a lot of information about this. All of this will of course be made available here in our support forum as soon as our server is able to remain stable under the load.

Secondly, I would like to say how amazed we all are here by the huge success of the game. Number one on Steam for several days in a row at this time of year when the big hitters come out... wow, we never expected that. It's crazy to see that more than 10,000 people are playing our game at any one time on Steam (even more if you include those who are in offline mode). Madness!

Great though it is to see that the game is so successful and that many people are having a lot of fun with it, it pains me to see every case where the game causes problems. Sorry folks, I can only apologise for that.

Now, on to the reason for this post: I want to set out our priorities for the next few weeks. These are, as it were, the results of the feedback so far.

1) Language bugs - the German Betty, french text and other problems will be fixed.

2) True crash bugs fixed. There are undeniably some program-related crashes, and we are are trying to sort these out by sending those who experience particularly large numbers of crashes special versions of the EXEs. From the feedback it seems that some people are affected much more frequently than others by crashes. At the beginning of the week we will build a group of new computers and will try to reproduce your problem PC (same motherboard, same GPU, etc.). Those of you who believe you are particularly badly afffected (and no, it is NOT safe to use 32-bit Windows) should contact us at info@egosoft.com for the special EXE.

3) AI bugs with trade ships (please make sure you are using the trade menu correctly before assuming you are affected by this bug).

4) Performance improvements: It seems ironic that most customers who are particularly dissatisfied with performance are those with the fastest computers. This may partly be because we made no special attempt to optimise for fast PCs. It even seems as though the most extreme high-end PCs barely have higher framerates than mid-range ones. We will be tackling this issue aggresively and will be stocking up on high end hardware for tests, to try out things like SLI and hex-core systems. Of course optimisations will also benefit other systems. Tips for configuration are in my post on the Steam forum and in the Egosoft Support forum.

5) Improvements for the near future: We will now begin to organise our plans and your wishes by priority. There are a few major development areas that are sure to take us into the beginning of 2014 for an update, and many small things that we would like to address as soon as possible. Here are just a few examples:

- Smalltalk on platforms: Once you unlock a reward you can ask for all the rewards we currently have already. If you ask for a good NPC you can further filter by job type. So you effectively find e.g the best pilot in your vicinity.

- NPC classes are to be clearly marked to make it clear who does what.

- Improved joystick support - there seem to be problems at the moment with joysticks. Some may not yet be configured in a satisfactory way (we're working on it). There is also a suspicion that certain joysticks crash the game at startup when they are plugged in.

- Improved menus - feedback regard some menus which should be improved accordingly. What I hear most often at the moment are problems with managing the Trade Order list. This should be shown in every ship that is in your squad and can then be removed from the Info menu. There are also other improvements in various menus that will need to happen gradually over several updates.

- Shortcuts - currently veterans miss many hotkeys such as "T" for next target, Shift-"D" to dock, Shift-"R" for the property list, etc.

OK... this should give you all just a brief insight into our current work. For those of you able to play without problems, I wish you continued fun. For those who have technical problems, and as can of course be seen on here on the forum there are many of you, I want to apologise again and ask for your patience.

Thank you all for the huge success!

-Bernd

 

[Kane]

I would imagine they sold more than they ever did of their previous games thanks to Steam.

 

[Blaine]

I'm not too sure about that. The X games have been available on Steam for years, and the only "hype" surrounding this launch was while Rebirth was on the front-page Store marquee—a treatment the X3 expansions also received when they debuted. Perhaps I'm mistaken, but it seems to me that only actual simmers and grognards are aware the series exists.

On the other hand, the general populace has never failed to impulsively reward developers for bad games, so I wouldn't be surprised, either.

 

[Vival]

So the "release before the reviews come crashing down"-maneuver to quickly cash in on the hype was successful. Too bad it probably killed off their community which was quite impressive for such a mixed bag of niche franchise.

 

[Blaine]

So the "release before the reviews come crashing down"-maneuver to quickly cash in on the hype was successful. Too bad it probably killed off their community which was quite impressive for such a mixed bag of niche franchise.

Yeah, the community (I've been a member since 2005—many have been there since 2002) was pretty great for what it was, all things considered. EGOSOFT have lost at least half of their hard core of fans, I'd say. X3's release was nothing like this. People were seriously pissed off this time around.

Even if they've gotten away with releasing a shitpile this time (truly mind-boggling), I don't believe they'll be able to get away with it the next time.