I’ve come to post a review and discussion of X Rebirth, as I’m rather keen to share some of my thoughts about the game. I’ll be quite honest and up-front about this thread, however - I am a disappointed customer and my impression of X Rebirth is, sadly, really rather negative. If you don’t want to read negative reviewing, you have been openly fore-warned. I would re-iterate, however: I am a disappointed customer, not an angry one – I’m here to be constructive in my negativity, not destructive.
As such, I will not be:
- Spewing forth personal attacks and vitriol at the developers
- Accusing Egosoft of fraud
- Demanding a refund
I’m going to go over quite a huge amount of text, so I’ll separate it into consecutive sections in quotes, in order to better format it and save your eyes and the board layout from a wall of text. To start, though, I think it’s only fair that I identify and explain about myself before I go into questioning the creation of others:
I have only played X3 Reunion, Terran Conflict and Albion Prelude in the X series before, upon which to base my expectations, and I enjoyed these very much, despite my lack of great skill at them. I am a 4th year medical student – I have no professional background in marketing, publishing or games development (I do have a background in sticking needles into people). I do have some experience in some relevant areas:
The first of these is as a modder. I fully recognise that working on even some larger mod projects is only marginally comparable to the full-scale development of an entire game, but having worked on various mods for various games (Empire at War, a dabble with Skyrim, some Total War and StarDrive) that varied in the scale of the project from personal tweaking to large-scale total conversion project, I have encountered both deadlines and the attitudes of one’s audience to changes along the way. I’ve also led a modding team on one occasion, a mod which sadly never made it to completion, which though mostly beyond my control, I was not blameless for: I have met failure in ‘development’, and realise that sometimes it’s not possible to make a ‘correct’ decision.
The second of these is more recent, and that’s in my capacity as a Global Moderator at ZeroSum’s StarDrive boards – a game not without some controversy of its own, and certainly a subsection of its community who have produced quite a big backlash to some development decisions and future plans for the developer. Certainly, when I get back to some of the contact Bernd has had with the Steam forum, we have had no shortage of the abusive and aggressive complaints on our Steam forum, which have sadly been complicated by the lead developer – for whom StarDrive was his very first game – actually rising to their taunts on occasion, which we as moderators try to help him to ignore and deal with on his behalf, as he is very emotionally invested in his work, which I personally know he does for the love of it, and not simply as an EA-type cash cow.
Let’s say I know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of torrents of abuse, accusation and demands when people complain about a video game product, and I understand why it’s often the best course of action to simply ignore the least constructive and trouble-causing posts, which some people view as simply avoiding questions. The best results are gained from trying to be reasonable and constructive, which I shall endeavour to be from here on. Egosoft, I’m going to be brutally honest in how I’ve found the game and what I think of various aspects of it, but I’m not going to be rude. I’m about to be highly critical of your work, your ‘egg’, as it were, but it’s motivated by honesty and disappointment, not hostility.
Probably the best place to start would be with a brief summary of my first moments playing the game:
I load into the game, and, on first impression, it’s beautiful. Well done on that count – simply to look at, it’s very attractive. And then we see the 3D cockpit, the spinning chairs and centre console – it all looks very nice initially, as the game controls the movements, view and animation. At this point, I feel optimistic as I go back-ship to meet this lady who has entered through the airlock: optimism that this is all going to have some purpose. That I’m going to be able to walk around this ship, between its compartments, that the contents are going to be interactive; that it’s all rendered in 3D for a reason – that I can prep and configure my drones in the back, that I can plan and access the airlock etc. in the rear cabin, that I can walk around the cockpit and use the various consoles for important in-game features!
Unfortunately, this was a swiftly shattered optimism: as it transpires that the rear cabin is just there for no real reason, and the cockpit is locked entirely to three preset animations: walking in and sitting down; checking the centre console; and getting up and walking out. Four if you count pulling down the drone controller. And there was the first crushing feeling in the game – when I realised that the 3D cockpit, the ship interior – it was all just eye-candy. It had no function, no interactivity, no exploration value.
To me this immediately (and not for the first time in my experience of Rebirth so far) begged the question: why? Why even have a 3D cockpit and an interior at all, when it serves no function? I don’t object to eye-candy, of course, but the 3D interior is surely one of the reasons why you can only ever fly one ship in Rebirth, contrasted to the previous games wherein you could fly any of dozens (hundreds, modded) of vessels of so many different roles and sizes – making 3D cockpits and bridges for all of them would be a massive use of resources, so we’re limited to one ship for now, I had previously reasoned. But to then find out that the 3D cockpit was purely for looking at – well, as I’ve said, the question that sprung to mind was ‘why’? Why sacrifice so much breadth of detail for a purely aesthetic change?
I progressed past this initial thought, reasoning that perhaps I’d find new features in the interior later on – it was, of course, right at the beginning of the campaign ‘tutorial’. The voice acting was disappointing, and the story really rather difficult to follow throughout the first basic missions (in fact, it still is much later on, to be honest, guys) – but I could and did forgive this at the time, as I reasoned – this is an X game – what it lacks in story and voice acting, it’ll make up for in scope and depth.
Sadly, I was to be disappointed further, but I’ll cover specifics in my full reviewing as I continue. I think that a lot of this disappointment follows the same theme that arose with regards to the 3D cockpits: a lot of superficial new features have nominally been added, but which don’t add much to (and can even detract from) the experience. And the trade-off seems to be that a lot of has been discarded from previous titles to make ‘room’, sadly.
Moving on from this, I should get into the flesh of the game; the gameplay of course. I’ll split my assessment of the gameplay so far into 3 broad headings: Space gameplay, Interior gameplay and General gameplay – corresponding to broad aspects of the game: gameplay controlling your ship, gameplay exploring ‘interiors’ and then general business such as the timescale and non-specific functions.
I will not be covering performance, bugs and crashes – I don’t hold either against a game until they reach the ‘unplayable’ status that you get with the likes of Battlefield releases and Rome II, where the games were noticeably untested on release. I personally have had no problems whatsoever in terms of stability and crashes in X: Rebirth, my performance is acceptable (if not amazing) and bugs have so far been minor – usually missing localisation strings for the names of in-game objects.
I think we should start with Space gameplay, as this is surely the core of any X game:
Unlike many who seem to nitpick in a very hostile manner at minor details, I have no problems with the controls. The movement is apparently not correct to physics? I honestly don’t mind, we’d all be having a miserable time if they were. We have limited-range on projectile weapons, missiles with range dependent on their type and jump drives, physics is honestly irrelevant so long as the movement model is a good pseudo-representation of physical principles, and there is a consistent theme to spaceflight throughout the game, which works well. It succeeds on both counts. The only complaint I have is about the auto-roll, which can of course be disabled anyway. But really – if auto-roll is the intended norm for Rebirth, why even having roll in game at all? You can’t roll manually with it enabled, after all.
I have yet to encounter truly large-scale fleet combat, but so far the combat system is perfectly decent; the methods of dogfighting are largely the same as previous titles, and the AI behaves quite reasonably most of the time.
Sadly, linked in here is one of the first major downfalls of Rebirth - in my opinion of what I liked in the X series. All the weapons have been simplified – no more weapon control groups, specific ship mountings, differing setups of what fire simultaneously, ship energy levels pertinent to the capability to fire your energy weapons. In fact, the entire enjoyable system from X3 and Terran Conflict/AP is thrown out of the window in exchange for simply having 4 different individual weapons at once, exponentially reducing the amount of variety regardless of how many types of weapon there turn out to be in game.
Unfortunately, it had to be this way – because the entire concept of there being hundreds of types of ships with different weapon mounts and turrets that can utilise different types and size of weapons has been thrown out, in favour of having just one player ship. This is a central design decision I will keep referencing, because as I have just elaborated, it’s not just as simple as stripping out a huge chunk of gameplay from the X series, but the knock on effects mean that everything from weapons to trading are all grossly affected – in this case, weapon variety and loadout specialism is completely gone, replaced by a somewhat arcade-like jack-of-all-trades ship which can select from 4 different weapons. Ultimately, it brings me back to the central question – why was this decision taken? When I come to talk about the city and capital ship ‘interiors’, I will re-iterate this again, because it seems as if this huge variety and ability to pilot anything in the X universe has been removed in exchange for a 3D cockpit that is purely a graphical toy, and a set of interiors, and when we see these interiors, I can’t honestly come close to justifying this exchange.
So far, it seems I've only been able to find 4 types of missile in the entire game, and the different types of weapons seem highly restricted, too. Are you serious? You've taken the entire X Universe of equipment, and for the 'biggest X game yet', reduced it down to a mere handful of generic weapons in numbers that you'd expect to find in the original Half Life?
Talking about trade, development etc. overlaps with interiors – mainly because I now have to get out of my ship and go talk to people inside the space station if I want repairs, to trade, to recruit, to get missions. This wouldn’t be such a terrible thing, were it not for the fact that interiors are entirely unenjoyable – which I will cover momentarily in more detail. Were the interiors truly amazing experiences, it’d still be unwanted, as in a space sim that is putatively so complex and detailed, you really don’t have time whilst running a trade network, an empire and a military campaign to be getting out and manually running around a station to find what you need, instead of simply hailing it from a few kilometres away.
And then, of course, your one wonder-ship can’t carry cargo. Not sure why not, it seems to have a cargo-bay when you look at the docked model. You can’t carry a damned thing, which means all your trading has to be done by non-pilotable ships. I cannot comprehend what the purpose or value of this is at all. It’s a mystery, and one that causes problems with regards to the lack of SETA, which I’m afraid absolutely is an issue in Rebirth, no matter how many highways there are.
Highways are alright, for the first 4 times you fly in them – then you realise that you can’t go grab a cup of tea when navigating them, because to travel at anything close to a reasonable pace along them, you have to play the ‘minigame’, wherein you jump into the slipstreams of faster ships. Artificially-spawned faster ships that disappear on leaving the highway, I might add, in a game whose trailers promised that ‘every ship is part of a functioning economy’. Does that bother me so much? No, but it does rather emphasise the fact that highways are not particularly revolutionary so much as just a different way of doing jump-gates: ‘zones’ are the new sectors, and highways are the new gate network, they don’t make anything quicker in the grand scale, and to go anywhere quickly on them, the minigame is compulsory.
With regards to hailing things and ‘kilometres away’, the interaction with the game environment is really very clunky. To the point of displeasure, I would add. For some reason, you can only select stations and ships as targets when you pull up exceptionally close to them; and landing pads are a particularly bad culprit: one seems to need to be practically landed on them already just to be able to select them. Despite icons hovering in the distance, clicking on them does absolutely nothing, and there are no longer any hotkeys for cycling through targets, selecting the next enemy, etc. – amazing for a game developed for PC. This really falls more into ‘interface’ discussion later, but it affects gameplay drastically, mainly by making it painful.
On the topic of painful, the maps are, well… They don’t work. I can’t tell which sector I’m in at any given time, let alone where in a zone I am. The lack of a gravidar on the HUD or the cockpit (once again – the cockpit entirely wasted by not even having a map or interactive consoles) makes local navigation and spatial awareness impossible (particularly with no 3rd person view option), and having to repeatedly play an animation to turn to the centre console to try and use the woefully inadequate maps is horrendously time-consuming. I’ll cover maps, too, in the interface discussion later.
It’d be unfair to finish talking about the space gameplay without mentioning Yisha, who frequently chastises the onboard computer for telling you useful and relevant information, and tells it to shut up. I would much rather have Yisha shut up – permanently. Her voice acting isn’t great, but that isn’t the problem – the problem is she has useless and mundane lines, that are repeated infinitely. Every time I dock, she says the exact same sound file requesting to dock. Every time the computer announces something, she tells it to be quiet. This is so frustrating for players that people have actually already made and distributed mods that stop her from talking. Nobody wants to hear the same two lines spoken over-and-over-again for the entirety of the game.
In contrast, drones are a good addition, the way they work is nicely done. Unfortunately, this is another case of a small thing being added in, whilst removing the entire drones, fighters (and your ability to pilot fighters!) from previous X games, so I see the drones really more of a small piece of earlier games preserved in a form that has been called a ‘new’ feature.
And I almost forgot: there's no autopilot. This makes the game harder and more tedious to navigate than X3, as you have to manually steer your ships across every single zone into every highway to get anywhere (where you then have to play the minigame to go at any reasonable speed), and you have to go and manually hover on landing platforms to dock every single time. This is terrible. There was no need to make the games more hands-on in excluding these automation functions, the result is that we now have to baby-sit and constantly steer and play minigames, and it causes a pretty poor experience, an experience in which navigation and exploration is more tedious than X3 ever was.
Moving swiftly onto the Interior gameplay.
I want to be constructive, but I can’t really say much for this entire aspect of the game. It was touted probably as the single biggest new feature in Rebirth, and I can’t help but say that there is nothing good about it. Not one thing.
I don’t disagree with the broad design principle. It’s a great idea to add to the X series, were it mechanically done well and then really lovingly fleshed out and designed. Unfortunately, guys – and I’m sorry to so directly put down your work – it’s neither, by any stretch of the imagination. Notwithstanding the graphics (particularly the poor people and their lack of animation) and the (lack of) immersion in character movement, the actual end-product in terms of interior design is poor, there is no nice way I can phrase this. Every single freighter and capital ship – and many stations – have identical ‘cargo bay’ interiors, wherein the crew for some reason are all squatting on this circular landing pad around your ship, completely still. Oh, and each and every freighter and capital not only has this same, entirely boring and pointless clone of an interior, but even the ‘loot’ is in the same place on each – and don’t get me started on ‘loot’ yet, as that will come later.
The cities, likewise, are clones. Copy-paste clones – I’ve seen 3, maybe 4 total varieties if I’m lucky, which only vary ever so slightly from each other. They all share a common theme – they’re lifeless, functionless and there’s no real reason for them to be there, and they’re copy-paste clones of every other station in the game. The important NPCs are all arrayed in the same places, sat/standing in the same positions with the same animations (often even just duplicates of each other), especially in that ubiquitous locker room.
No love has gone into crafting these interiors. I hesitate to call them ‘interiors’, because they are practically not plural; but two different class of interiors that have been copy-pasted across every single capital ship and city in the game. Why would anyone want to get out of their ship to visit the very same, non-interactive, lifeless copy of the last 25 cities they’ve docked with again? Why would anyone want to land on their 8th freighter or 12th capital ship, when every single one has had the identical cargo-bay/landing pad with a few generic crew chucked onto it standing around?
And this brings me back to that ultimate question again: why? Why has the design choice been made to sacrifice so much – pilotable ships, complete player control – in exchange for about four different interiors that are cloned across every capital ship and station in the entire Rebirth universe? The trade-off isn’t even vaguely worth it – these interiors detract from the game, if anything. Where did your development time go, to not have even a semblance of proper ship interiors and practically no interaction or unique city interiors? In developer interviews, you spoke to us about how you want us to be able to explore space cities, ‘on the inside as well as the outside’. Well, we can’t. We can explore the same 3-4 lifeless, purposeless template clones over and over again, because we have no choice but to do so if we want to actually advance in the game.
And then, there’s the loot. Stashes of credits just sitting in air vents, stealing the contents of every single locker and box (placed in the same cloned locations) on every station and in every hangar. I just don’t know why this made it into the game. There is no justification in such an in-depth space sim such as an X game why you should be crawling through tunnels like Super Mario collecting coins, and looting minor pieces of goods from the same boxes in the same position in every station. I can only think that these incredibly ludicrous loot stashes were added to try and incentivise people to dock on the simplest level possible: free money - in the knowledge that interiors were awful.
I’m going to stop here, because I have not one good point to make about interiors, and if I continue I’ll descend into an Angry Joe Show rant, instead of trying to remain sensible. As a final note, even the player’s ship’s interior is completely non-interactive, as is the cockpit. These two ‘big things’ were not worth trading out the capability to pilot and configure any ship in the X universe.
Finally, General gameplay.
There’s just one big point to make here: SETA. Absolutely, we’ve got boost now. Unfortunately, our freighters don’t, and we cannot trade directly with our one wonder-ship, as it can carry no cargo. Which means we’re back to waiting 20 minutes for a freighter to arrive merely to buy 100 energy cells. Just like X3, except now we can’t use SETA to make 20 minutes into 2 minutes. Highways are identical in function to warp gates, except to get anywhere quickly, you have to play the minigame. Your freighter captains evidently do not play this minigame. Zones are the new sectors, for all intents and purposes. Nothing is faster, and SETA is absolutely needed, because as it turns out, your gameplay decision to limit the player to one wonder-ship means you absolutely do have to spend 20 minutes waiting for your AI-controlled ships to arrive to do anything at all.
I have yet to work out what any of the HUD ‘modes’ do. They change my windscreen a funny colour, and that seems about it, with the exception of the Long Ranger Scanner, which flashes up asteroids for a long distance, but I find isn’t really clear enough to actually spot anything specific or of use on.
Graphics – they’re good, not many complaints. The windscreen on your cockpit has a nice refraction effect at its corners where the ‘glass’ is curved. Sadly, graphics don’t make up for gameplay, particularly when those graphics – like the cockpit and dashboard elements – are non-interactive and there purely to sit there looking fancy.
So, following on from graphics – the Interface.
The interface of any game is always contentious, and X games have traditionally had quite complicated user interfaces. What amazed me, however, is how – for keyboard and mouse – the interface in Rebirth actually seems to be worse than the interface in X3, which had a rather complicated and hard to learn interface to start with.
My first impression on this was the main menu, which has no mouse rollovers and requires two clicks to confirm a selection. The only place I have experienced this before is with console game ports. I don’t want to get into the console/PC flame-war, but when one releases a game for the PC, one would expect to have an interface tailored to a mouse and keyboard, and not to a gamepad or controller.
This seems to show throughout the game. Menus are navigated with a set of menus that one constantly has to go ‘forward’ and ‘back’ through, with no hotkeys directly to specific menus themselves, and no ability to toggle a menu on and off directly. The main ENTER-key menu is, mysteriously a Mass Effect-style ‘wheel’, completely unsuited to using a mouse with, unlike X3:TC’s sidebar that worked perfectly well for PC. Once again, this seems tailored to using a console controller for, using an analogue stick to direct which option to ‘select’.
Sadly, the problems don’t stop at the input methods. When you do click options in the ENTER-key menu, for example, there is a ~1 second delay before the next submenu is loaded, and a ‘click’ sound is played. This means that I can’t load up an information menu quickly by hitting e.g. 1-2-1, but instead have to wait after hitting every key for the animation to fade in and the ‘click’ sound to play. This is painful.
Then, of course, comes the centre console in the cockpit. Very pretty guys, looks great, lovely animation. Sadly, it’s a complete pain to use, and unnecessary for most things. I could see it being a nice graphical feature for certain menus: in-depth trade menus, fleet command and control menus – things that require you to stop what you’re doing and properly plan such as these would make excellent things to house on this separate display.
Sadly, maps and every single basic information menu are not the things that work well on this display. Information on selected objects and the maps are things that the player needs to be able to quickly access and toggle on-and-off at will without having to relinquish control of his vessel. Because they’re on the centre console, I now have to go through a 3-second animation as I swing my chair round and the screen pops out every time I open or close the map. It’s inefficient, and it makes gameplay really quite painful to endure. X3’s simple overlay menus are far superior, as they give instantaneous, toggle-able access. Given you put so much effort into the 3D cockpit, I’d have thought the best way to implement these would be as a HUD overlay whilst still controlling your ship, but even a simple pop-up menu would be better than the current set-up in which I have to constantly wait for the animations to finish.
Then – other than the lack of hotkeys for targeting etc. – targeting and selection of objects is a pain. For whatever reason, stations cannot even be selected as a target until you’re practically in docking range, sat about 100m off their superstructure. Many ships can’t be selected even though they’re surrounded by the ‘blue box’ of detection. The lack of ability to cycle through or select nearest enemy means I have to manoeuvre my ship around just to select a new enemy with my mouse – because it’s not possible to free look around the 3D cockpit to see them, so the entire ship’s nose has to be tilted.
Finally, with regards to developer communication:
I’ve seen some of the discussions on the Steam forums between Bernd and some of the less polite members of the community. Mostly, he manages to ignore the truly vile, vitriolic ones and gets on with addressing questions. However, when he does choose to answer them, the answers provided have been like:
Which I felt were mildly symptomatic of a slightly bigger problem, though I sympathise entirely with him for having to deal with these people. Any sentence starting with you don’t need in relation to a sandbox game is very worrying. If people honestly didn’t need these things, they wouldn’t be requesting them.
- You don’t need SETA, we made the game so you don’t need it anymore
- You don’t need full control over your fighter squadrons, just let your carrier captains control them
Take SETA, as an example. We’ve been asking for this because we are having to wait in excess of 20 minutes for a freighter to arrive just to be able to do any trading, not because we all just are missing the X3 experience! No amount of highways or boost is going to fix that. A developer wading in and telling the people who are playing and experiencing the game that they’re simply wrong is not only going to fuel the vitriol, but it’s also rather foolish.
I think the most worrying thing that was said, however, was roughly:
This may not be X4, but in terms of advertising and the way that it was marketed and trailered, that’s what almost everyone who pre-ordered and bought it these last 48 hours believed Rebirth was. That’s what it has been hyped up to be, and that’s what they understood they were buying, from the grandiose trailers and interviews promising the biggest X universe experience to date.
- This is not X4, it’s not a sequel to X3. We may make an X4 in the future, but this is not it
In the end, it seems there was a warning bell when I pre-loaded after pre-order: the X Rebirth download was 2GB smaller than the Albion Prelude download alone – and Rebirth has much higher texture resolution and model poly-count, no doubt, so should have far greater art asset space consumption. With the graphics space surely increasing per asset, the only conclusion I can draw is therefore that Terran Conflict/Albion Prelude has more than 2GB more raw content, size and mechanics than Rebirth, which was marketed as the ‘biggest’ X universe to date, and supposedly was going to keep 'all the depth' that X fans expected.
I’m sorry devs - I really wanted to be able to love this game and herald it as the next big thing. I hope you can take something constructive from this, and I would love to hear some replies and your points of view on what I’ve covered here too. Practically everything you promised in the trailers is not in-game. The universe is tiny. The selection of weapons is miniscule. You have released us a completely unfinished (by a long margin) console port, I'd sadly bet money (the £39.99 cost of the game, incidentally) on the fact. This gives me no joy.
What joyous fun.
