X: Rebirth

Thanks jhwisner, I'll read that! (And whatever else I can find!)

A couple of enemies have dropped something... weird. It got a red circle around it so I thought it might be some sort of mine at first but it doesn't blow up, it just sits there. I can bump into it and nothing much will happen. If it's a lock box then I sure don't see the locks I'm supposed to shoot. If I do shoot it, it simply explodes.

As usual for an X game, there's lots of learning to do!
 
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Thanks jhwisner, I'll read that! (And whatever else I can find!)

A couple of enemies have dropped something… weird. It got a red circle around it so I thought it might be some sort of mine at first but it doesn't blow up, it just sits there. I can bump into it and nothing much will happen. If it's a lock box then I sure don't see the locks I'm supposed to shoot. If I do shoot it, it simply explodes.

As usual for an X game, there's lots of learning to do!

It might be cargo. Your ship can't carry real cargo, you can only carry a smaller class of wares that aren't used in production chains. To pick up real cargo you need a ship with the proper cargo capacity type, free space, and cargo drones to collect it.

They also might be drones from the ship you destroyed which I think go inoperative once you kill it, not sure. Cargo containers should be easier to tell than that though.
 
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I'm using keyboard/mouse. I've got a joystick here but I haven't tried it. There's always a good bit of management to be done so I think I would be switching between the two pretty constantly if I tried to use the joystick.

I did run into a nasty hole in the game. I've got a big freighter packed with wheat that I wanted to sell off at a station but I guess somebody got there first because the deal never happened. OK, fine, that happens. I'll just sell it somewhere else. Except there is nowhere else! The only places buying barely want any! OK fine. I'll do some exploring and maybe I'll find some place. Nope. OK fine, I'll just dump the cargo. I'll lose a lot of cash but I can make it back if I can just get that freighter moving again.

Nope. There's no way to drop cargo from a freighter! Well, OK, there are a couple of weird ways. You can hack your own freighter and convince it to drop its cargo. You can also simply sell the freighter then buy a new one. But... seriously? There's no "just dump it" option!?

Oh well, I'm still having fun. The campaign is moving along pretty nicely. The station I'm supposed to be building isn't going anywhere but I'm sure that's just because I haven't bothered to find out what I'm doing yet.
 
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I finished the main campaign though there's still a lot to do. Where the older X games had multiple plots (that often were a bit buggy), this one has a single plot that's a lot more solid but then it drops you into the sandbox after it's shown you most of the known galaxy and how all the mechanics work. So the plot doubles as a 70 hour tutorial.

So the new things in Rebirth…

  • Highways: These I like. The old X games had jump gates everywhere and, between the jump gates, there were stations. They felt like tiny little islands. The new jump gate + highway system makes space feel MUCH bigger!
  • Station Interiors: Good idea but Egosoft just doesn't have the production values to back it up. The game must have over 100 stations but, as far as interiors are concerned, there's "junky station" and "clean station" and that's pretty much it. The result isn't just repetitive, it's terribly immersion breaking when you find some long lost colony of aliens has exactly the same station rooms with exactly the same entertainment bar playing exactly the same two measures of music over and over.
  • Always in the galaxy: When you do go into those stations and ships, though, you're still part of the universe. On some occasions I cut my trip short because I could hear a battle going on outside and wanted to scavenge the dead… uhh, I mean, help out in any way I could. Where it really made my jaw drop, though, was when docked on a ship. For whatever reason, the people controlling a capital ship stand inside a clear bubble stuck on the outer hull. It's a strange design but it lets you see ships flying around while you're talking to the captain. I loved it!
  • Small talk: Another nice idea that Egosoft couldn't get even close to backing up. In order to establish trade agents on a station (which will keep you updated on the buying/selling prices for wares on the station) or to find the best NPCs to fly your ships and manage your stations, you need to run through this minigame where you have to push a button at just the right time to get your character to talk like a not-dimwit. It could have been a nice way to impart a lot of X universe lore and get a good feeling for what NPCs think about what's going on. Unfortunately, there are only about a half dozen conversations so you end up having the same conversations over and over AND OVER AGAIN!
  • Managers/Captains: Good idea that's starting to work now. Instead of ships and stations just running themselves, you now have to actually put people on them. You're actually running a real network of people instead of issuing orders to bunches of AIs. You can even improve their stats - though that requires going through the small take minigame again.

Graphics are much improved, of course, and actually a lot more artistic as well. There were some pretty sectors in X3 but Rebirth beats them hands down. Omnicron Lyre in particular is downright stunning.

Unfortunately, it seems like they fired the music guy to get an art guy. There's some good music here and there but, as mentioned above, the music in the bars is about a 3 second loop that plays over and over. The music that plays in the highways is about a six second loop. Both of them really get painful to hear after not too long.

But this is still definitely an X game. There's a lot of depth here and it's fun and rewarding to learn how to use it all. That's always been the core entertainment for me in these games and this one doesn't disappoint. (At least not anymore!)

A few screenshots:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=385331896
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=385014484
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=385333234
 
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Nice screens Zloth. :)

I own all of the X titles prior to Rebirth, but I've never played them much. I wish I had the time to get into them.
 
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Thanks!

Yeah, Egosoft's games do take QUITE some time!
 
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A month later and I'm still playing hard.

It turns out they didn't fire the music guy - they just diced his music. The soundtrack came with the game includes the full songs the highway music comes from. Why they turned them into 6 second loops I have no idea... maybe because it was 32-bit at the time.

Anyway, it sounds like the X games will be getting a FREE WEEKEND next week (13th-16th) and a permanent price cut.
 
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Answering over here lest we incur the wrath of the Topic Cops ;)

How is the exploration in Rebirth? Do the various systems and stations have a lot of unique stuff to find - or is it mostly the same thing with randomly generated characters, or?
Not a lot of unique stuff to find or interesting characters BUT they sure have some interesting graphics. For instance, there's a hard to find Split station that is actually being grown, not built. It looks very cool on the outside! On the inside, it's exactly like any other dilapidated station - even the VR holo-dancers are human. That seems to be pretty much the rule: you can find very interesting looking things with exploration but functionally they won't be any different.

Mods have helped the "small talk" problem out a lot. Normally when you play you have to go through this fool mini-game HUNDREDS of times. Now you can use a mod to find out character skills immediately and another mod to set up your trade agents. These make the game far more fun.

I've got a guide that explains a lot of the game now.
 
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