Hi everyone,

I'd like to know how many fans of any X game(s) are already on these forums, what is your story about it, if are you still playing and so on.
And what do you want to see in LT from the X player perspective.


I've been playing X since X2, that was when I finally got my first PC. I remember I got a pc-games magazine called Score and there was a Buzzard all over the front page, it was kind of an unreacheable dream for me to get my hands on this game. But eventually I managed to get a copy and it was like a miracle to have even a computer on which I could run it. Well, very soon later I found out I couldn't due to legendary Egosoft's optimalization. But that couldn't discourage me from playing on. And then came the phase of biting through the endless heaps of possibilities and ways to take.
Well in the end I realize I'm not even close to know everything about the game mechanics till this day . But I love to dive in that space again and again. I love that freedom those endless adventures and those hardly achieved things I have set to myself.


I would love to see the empire building part of X in LT but less obstructed (not dumbed down), the economic model is also not so bad. The freedom of controling any of your ships anytime (multitasking). I'd love to have some kind of RTS mode to have better tools to manage empire and/or army. I really wouldn't like Egosoft's autopilot ... obviously.


What about you ?

Cheerz, Vl.

I played every game apart from X3 TC

so X beyond the frontier (best for story)
X tension (mainly to trade and empire build)
X2 more of the same from X tension and not a bad story but could have been a lot better)
X3 reunion (beta tested this and to be honest, the game started out very bad, very rushed even though it was patched later, weak story but more of the same from the other games) but probably the worst UI as well
X3 TC, never played this, but pretty much a 75% cut and paste from the other gasmes
X rebirth (still to come out, no idea when, and chances of getting is is pretty remote)


for me, I did like X2, but the real issue with the games are, they are pretty much a copy and paste, combat isn't their strong point, and is very weak, you can only have one ship at a time, even then there isn't really that much difference really between many ships, and the AI just just broken and horrible,

do I play them still? no, I got bored and burned out by the whole series, while egosoft cilaims that rebirth will be different, I have doubts, the real issue is, when X3 was in the making, beta tested, release, the game was a very poor runner, sure its probably a lot better optimised, but my problem is, even though people will have more powerful rigs, and hopefully rebirth will use duel cores, (the X series has so far been a single core / threaded game) and is very CPU intensive, so my fear is, once rebirth is out, people may not be able to play it, as it demands too much CPU power, / resources, and this is the biggest issue with the X series, sure they can keep adding sectors, but those sectors have got to be partly kept in ram, to a point, and the game really slows down once you got a few stations in a few sectors, so really, unless they dratically change things, or optimise the game a lot better, I can see rebirth handing like shit, X3 did in beta, and most if not all beta testers complained like anything, but we were ignored, they had planets which were massive, and did a massive FPS hit when turning into them, again we are ignored and it was our systems at blame for the poor FPS, not the game, even though later they changes things

beta testing for egosoft was a real stressful pain in the backside, they didn't respect testers or took onboard comments and feedback, just one bloody horrible experience after another,

and my NDA has expired, never again will I beta test for egosoft if their devs act so bloody high and mighty,

its a bit after that, the whole series just burnt me out, I have little or no chance of really wanting to play rebirth, unless they change a lot of aspects and its really is a new game, but if its anything like a 50 / 75% copy and paste from the others, won't touch it with a barge pole

that is all I will really say

matthewfarmery wrote:I have little or no chance of really wanting to play rebirth, unless they change a lot of aspects and its really is a new game, but if its anything like a 50 / 75% copy and paste from the others, won't touch it with a barge pole

I honestly believe them that they've build up a brand new engine and due to the time it takes to start betatest or even publish any news I'm really convinced the game will be built from the scratch without that 'copy&paste' you talked about. But this can be seen from another perspective ... it's a small game developer for small market therefore the everexpanding strategy ... but nevermind.

To be honest I've not really enjoyed the game untill X3TC (due to performance and VERY poor interface) ... in my opinion it's the best game of the series because the 'copy-paste' politics finally reached the level on which it was all worth it ... the overcomplex UI finally hosted an overwhelming functionality, number of sectors was finally so high that the universe was really huge and finally some of the sectors were totaly different from the classic cube-like ones and with the complex construction kit it was finally possible to really build an empire and so on and so forth. Eventually the game reached the complexity it has pretended (needlessly) from the early beginnings.

Sadly the endless and informationless waiting for Rebirth really makes me off ... and I don't really care if it's because of the publisher or not.



edit: @matthewfarmery: Anyways is there anything from X games you would like to see in LT ?

the X series main strength is empire building, but if LT had this, it would bog the game down and become a very annoying thing, sure owning a planet / station is fine, but not building stations and assigning ships to maintain them, so I don't want to see that, and the X series had horrible combat, poor ships, poor everything really, as they really just kept adding new sectors for each game, and that apart from the stories, (good and bad) really made each game different IMO

as for the interface for X3, its a love or hate thing, I still prefer the X2 interface, to me, they did tray and streamline it a bit too much and lost a lot of functionality that was very useful for handing your large empire,, but this is really the other issue, once you do have an empire there is little else to do, as you are pretty much a god, the combat is lame, AI lame, why I just burned out from the whole series after that

I hope rebirth will be better, but yes they are very slow on releasing new information, so we still haven't a clue how it will really work, but I think for me to get it, the combat needs to be improved, the interface needs to change, and while the core of the game is the empire building, I think this it's weakness, due to the lack of anything else to do, as the AI is so pants and hardly any challenge, so they really got to change a lot, not just on the universe design, but a lot, and to stop you from been a god, I still want things to do, but I feel the whole empire building part will still be there, and be a limiting factor on the universe design . how big it is, that goes for for whatever engine they are using, because of the stuff going on behind the scenes, if you have too much, the game will simply fall flat on its face, and this nearly did happen during the X3 beta, as they went too ambitious, by making the planets really large at first, but then reduced them, so I feel unless they START listening to beta testers when the game does finally become beta ready, unless they do start to listen, and take onboard the feedback and not rush the game, then they might do a decent game,

but that is the really big IF! as in my time of beta testing X3, they hardly did listen to feedback, they are a terrible company to listen to0, if you don't listen to beta testers, where are going to be a small number of players anyway, but if they say, this doesn't work, that is causing a FPS drop, then release the game in such a mess, pretty much more may have the same issues, granted the game was rushed too, which doesn't help, and that is another concern, if the game does come out in a buggy mess,, rushed and unpolished, then people may have problems running it, so the copy and paste I mentioned isn't just a copy and paste of the game, but the whole of the beta testing cycle, and the way they do things

they really need to change a lot really, and tied to a publisher won't do them any favours

so to answer your question, there is noothing I want to see from the X series in LT, simply as that really

X?
Uhh yeah. Played that for a bit.

It's greatest strength is also it's greatest problem: scale.

How do you create a UI that makes it equally easy to control a single fighter and a fleet of 5 carriers with support ships?

If you do simulate combat and ship systems of a single fighter with enough depth to make this interesting, what are you going to do with all those fiddly bits when the player commands the 5 carriers?
Do you make the player manipulate all the fiddly bits of each of his 200 fighters one by one? The X series does.

There are still some valuable lessons to be learned from how they did it wrong, though. =P

i just hope x rebirth will give me the same fell for the first time when i picked up x 2 in 2006. i hope it will be one of the best space games i'll ever play

I played X3TC and played with the mod X-tended, version 2.0 just came out.

I basically just pirated the entire time, blowing things up, stealing wares, smuggling, and boarding. I really don't building stations or run traders.

I basically just pirated the entire time, blowing things up, stealing wares, smuggling, and boarding. I really don't building stations or run traders.

Dear Sir, I like you point of view and would like to subscribe to your newsletter...

Ah well, X, the other elephant in the room.
Well, I've played them all. In retrospect, that was not unlike firing up the game every now and then and installing a new mod/expansion pack. There was always a lot of recycling involved in my opinion. It's a bit of a love-hate relationship here.

As far as space games go, we're at the end of a long drought right now. But most of the time when I played the X games, it was because there was nothing else around. And so I braved the user interface and the annoyances of having to start on the lowest end of the food chain over and over again.

My main issue with the game was the scale. I'm not really interested in building an empire. I'm not keen on managing a fleet of transport ships to haul stuff to the factories I own. My "sweet spot" is when you own a small carrier or a swarm of fighters, and then start doing interesting things with them. As such, my favorite ship classes were the first of the M6 craft (back when they would carry a single M5 fighter and handle like a slightly sluggish fighter) and then the Hyperion (which admittingly was overpowered, but was the damn best multi-role ship the game ever had - I sincerely hope that Kinetic Void or Limit Theory will allow me to recreate something in this scale - a subcapital ship with limited hangar capacity and decent handling, coupled with awesome firepower and automated turrets).

Sadly, there wasn't much to do at that scale. The combat AI is among the weakest point of the series, the enemies are sparse unless you intentionally piss off a faction (and in that way, remove your access to several key items that you can't get anywhere else), and even accepting combat missions would quickly get you to the point where you basically *needed* a destroyer, with little to no way to go back to earlier, more fun opponent types.
Piracy was next to impossible. From the dumb trader AI to the problem with the cargo hold sizes and the relative low value of most items, piracy was an exercise in frustration. Also, the universe felt smallish and cramped, the games were crawling with bugs on release, and the user interface more often than not got into the way of actually doing things (try boarding a ship via a M6 type ship with the stock keybindings/menu structure. Makes you want to pull out your hair, really...).
In my humble opinion, the economy system sucked terribly - most of the interesting items were in extremely short supply, outfitting ships without resorting to exploits was a pain, and depending on your version of the game, the universe was on the way to either a total economic collapse or dismantled itself while you were busy. The answer to "Geez, I need a couple of missiles" should NEVER be "okay, then let's build a factory for them.".

But hey, it was space, and at least you got to fly a variety of ships.

I'm unsure on whether I want to try rebirth, really. Limiting the player to a single ship is bad enough, but making said ship an ugly clunker and naming it "Albion Skunk" to boot is adding insult to injury. There's a couple of titles that look way more interesting (Kinetic Void, Drifter, Limit Theory, and, of course, Star Citizen and Elite: Dangerous), so Rebirth would need to have some really awesome features to sway me.

Tusck wrote:I basically just pirated the entire time, blowing things up, stealing wares, smuggling, and boarding. I really don't building stations or run traders.

That's what I love about X ... each single (wo)man likes some specific part(s) of the X game(s) and is having fun within X space his own way and some people are sharing their enthusiasm for specific actions (like warmongering, empire building, pirating etc.) and some other people have their very own ways of enjoying X (4example I love to start building economic installments here and there .. over and over). And all these people are 'united in diversity' and are all sharing some common universe called X.

I really believe that LT will possess at least some of this kind of atmosphere. (and lots of other supergreatcool stuff )

P.S.: Best wishes into the new year to everyone and especially to you Josh !

I love empire building. Love it. Despite X3's issues it is my favorite part of the game. The issue is that X3/LT should be just as enjoyable as a single fighter, a man with a small fleet, to a mini nation. That will be a hard balance to fight.

Love it or hate it, an in-game scripting engine is something that very, very few games can possibly claim to have.

The unfortunate part is when design/implementation decisions are so bad that you have to whip out that script editor to "get anything done". Such as automating multi-waypoint convoys, fitting multiple ships, etc.

jimhsu wrote:Love it or hate it, an in-game scripting engine is something that very, very few games can possibly claim to have.

The unfortunate part is when design/implementation decisions are so bad that you have to whip out that script editor to "get anything done". Such as automating multi-waypoint convoys, fitting multiple ships, etc.

Yes, the complexity of the game pushes the developers to rely on the scripting community to make these things easier. And the result is ofthen that it has couple of solutions and (mostly) all of them have usage difficulties. Part of the problem is that the game is so much over-engineered that using these scripts needs at least some basic programming consciousness and/or some time of practise in using it.

And this is one of the things that I hope will be ballanced hugely better in LT .. complexity vs. ease of overall control

I like the X games. Though I only played X3 with XTM, then TC and now AP. I'm looking forward to Rebirth. Though looking at Limit Theory, I'm wondering why Rebirth is taking so long. I'm also wondering what a team of Josh could pull off with the egosoft budget.

What I love most about X is the empire building. I love to create factories and setting up logistics chains. I love how there are a bunch of wares that are dependant on other wares. And I love running my fleet as a oiled machine. At least as good as X lets me.
As others said, the biggest plus of X is also it's biggest problem... It's scope. Once you're big enough there's no real challenge left.

What excites me most about LT is the expanding and random universe. I'm pretty new here so I'm not sure if LT will feature factories and logistics, but I do hope so. The way egosoft is doing factories in Rebirth sounds good to me. I'd rather have factory modules that can be expanded, than the horror of creating factory complexes.

One of my favorite scripts in X was one that let me use my capships as mobile factories. I'm really hoping this will be possible in LT, because it opens up great gameplay mechanics.

Greets!

X rebirth is taking long because unlike limit theory all of X rebirths assets will be made manually, yes im talking every ship, station, missile, DRONE, character, new highways, new entire star systems, scenery are all made manually, Limit theory's assets are made procedurally, like 100% procedural, at least Thats the goal, plus also the fact that because of all these assets there going to be countless tweaking, balancing and bug fixing, according to the x universe news last 2012 Christmas it was stated that "We have now been working for more than five years on this huge project, and right now everything is finally clicking together-bernd" maby all the bug fixing is almost finished and maby X rebirth has almost finished their beta phase, I remember when deep silver planned to release the game Q4 2011! this was obviously not going to happen and so the delay and lack of any information because deep silver started the marketing campaign too early, egosoft devs were not finished yet and so Deep silver cut funding into the marketing campaign and acted as if nothing happened, there was a bit of an information leak from a person who was going to be voice acting as one of the main characters called "yisha" who would most likely be your co-pilot of you single player ship in the game, this happened around august last year which suggests that x rebirth will have much better voice acting than past games. so the egosoft devs had to do something about the delay and made X3 Albion prelude quickly so to keep most of the x fans in a state of "ok then" and also retain a supply of cash. most of the others probably forgot about rebirth altogether.

X3 was lacking because the game had not much attention to it, X3 Terran conflict was just a expansion to X3 reunion and used the same graphics engine, the only major overhaul was the GUI, whilst X3 Terran conflict was selling, the devs started the rebirth project and have worked on it since. Thats why x3+ games were lacking because it wasn't high priority over X rebirth. X rebirth on the other hand will (imo) be phenomenal because of the amount of effort i think the devs finally put into the game. This time. Everything is new. new voice acting, new characters, new story line which i'm looking forward to e.g what supernova event changed everything? what happens to Julian Brennan and his father Kyle Brennan? why did the jumpgates fail?, who are the outsiders and what about the war between terrans of earth and argons of argon prime? etc..i could go on...new way of fast travel Highways? what about stations and space factories?? now this part will definitely be new, no more tubes! maby new factions? maby less factions? new USER INTERFACE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! If they do the interface right! all heaven will break loose! - well it's my take on why X rebirth is taking so long and why the x3 games where rusty around the edges.

Yeah, I've played the X series, mainly X3TC and X3AP (the add-on expansion to X3TC). Personally I wouldn't like to see anything imported from X. The thing I disliked the most which just broke the game for me was the economy. EVERYTHING was spawned from nowhere. The AI NPC's had infinite credits, and all the ships for the wars and trading were just spawned, and sometimes I would even see them (ships and stations) spawn right in front of me! It really broke the game's immersion and any strategy element that there could have been. I think the idea that X has the right idea (a sandbox space sim with different aspects of gameplay), but a terrible way of going about it. There's just no point for me in playing any type of empire building/ strategic gameplay in X.

If all I wanted to do was fly around the sectors, then X would fit the bill just fine, all though there aren't too many sectors. The way I see it is that the AI and the Player should play on equal terms. The other thing (and this was mentioned by another user on the forums) was that the race interactions and AI were rather generic and static. The Paranid for example were said to be highly protective of their goods and very restricting with trade, but when we played the game they were like any other race. The split were said to be very aggressive and even fighting the Boron in some sector, but when we played the game there was no fighting in said Boron sector and the Split were just as peaceful as all the other races. Also pirates don't act like pirates, but rather are marauders, and there are no racial interactions.

So to break it down, my biggest grife with the X series has been the unrealistic (as in spawn-based and cheating) economy, the "show and tell" illusion (they say one thing for the lore, but in gameplay we see nothing of the sort happening), and the AI (which is all the same and each race/faction acting uncharacteristic of how they should be acting).

X, thus, needs to have a 1) Dynamic Economy, 2) Dynamic Race Relations/Interactions, and 3) Make the lore blend with the gameplay.