How different is Rebirth to TC/AP - thinking of buying.

[Mr Morita]

Hi, I've read around and have seen a lot of different thoughts surrounding Rebirth, and I'm not sure if i should get it or not.

As a background, I tried getting into X3:TC twice a while ago. And then about a month ago I tried again and finally got addicted. Built an empire, loved everything about it, finished all the plots recently too. Just started on AP, the plots are less involved I've found and shorter - would of loved another massive HUB plot that takes time and planning but there we go.

So whenever I've managed to build up in AP and take over the Terrans, would moving to Rebirth be a good idea? What are the main differences? I have seen on Steam it has a Mostly Negative overall and Metacritic is 33/100. I love some games which have been like that though so need more detail.

I have read that there are no jumpdrives, everything is in highways and there a lot of issues. I'm in absolutely no way a 'veteran' of the X-series but from what i've read a lot of the elements are changed, or watered-down as people put it. I read in a few places it was for more casual players, but I want the steep learning curves and little details!

What would I miss out on, or is it all just bad press? I enjoy almost all of X3:TC and AP; the complexing, trading, boarding and fighting. Is there improvments on these, are the plots involved, is it challenging and what's the general feel of the game? Is there still big issues to be solved, and what can I expect from it?

Thankyou for your help, if it seems like a game I can plough time into like TC and AP I will definitely get it, if it's not as good as I've read I might pray for an X4 that isn't watered down.

[Sparky Sparkycorp]

It's a very different game. Same game universe and lore but different mechanics.

Some people like it and some don't. Most early buyers got their finger's burned by many, many bugs, and a disappointment with available features. Low review scores followed, then the metacritic reflection of that.

Over time, bugs have been regularly patched out, some frustrating aspects have gained work-arounds or changes, and features have been added.

Whether you will enjoy it or not, I have no idea (just like any game) but the bug-fixing and feature additions will allow you to discover for yourself

[DiArmada]

while the previous X titles have been building on each other in terms of graphics, universe size, ships, etc. they worked from the same principle.
Rebirth continues the X storyline, but in most other aspects it feels different (because it is)
is this a bad thing? not really.
a lot of issues have been fixed and what's left is quite a nice game.
it feels like a sequel of XBTF (X1) which is great in my opinion.
it will probably take some time to get used to the new game, some like it, some don't.

[GCU Grey Area]

I have read that there are no jumpdrives, everything is in highways and there a lot of issues.

More accurate to say there's no jumpdrive in the player's ship, though there are mods which install a jumpdrive if this is a major issue for you.

Capital ships have jumpdrives & it's possible to dock with them & order the captain to take you to your destination. Need to use the highways to map the universe, but once that's done you never need to use a highway ever again if you don't want to.

Also if you've read any gripes about highways in early reviews you should be aware this aspect of the game has been significantly improved compared to the original version - used to dislike them intensely, now they really don't bother me at all (although I still prefer to do the majority of long distance travel aboard one of my capitals, it's quicker & I get a better view of the universe around me while I travel).

[Gligli]

As a background, I tried getting into X3:TC twice a while ago. And then about a month ago I tried again and finally got addicted. Built an empire, loved everything about it, finished all the plots recently too. Just started on AP, the plots are less involved I've found and shorter - would of loved another massive HUB plot that takes time and planning but there we go.
So whenever I've managed to build up in AP and take over the Terrans, would moving to Rebirth be a good idea? What are the main differences? I have seen on Steam it has a Mostly Negative overall and Metacritic is 33/100. I love some games which have been like that though so need more detail.

The less you waits for functions or mechanics as Sparky said, the more Rebirth will fits you
From both lore and development aspect, the commercial "universe" have shrink massively.
Finally if you are a issue-proof player, Rebirth won't be a problem for you, even a bit easy...

I have read that there are no jumpdrives, everything is in highways and there a lot of issues. I'm in absolutely no way a 'veteran' of the X-series but from what i've read a lot of the elements are changed, or watered-down as people put it. I read in a few places it was for more casual players, but I want the steep learning curves and little details!

Imo, everything is true except the casual thing. You still have a steep/difficult learning curve, sometimes even with a bit of frustration.

What would I miss out on, or is it all just bad press? I enjoy almost all of X3:TC and AP; the complexing, trading, boarding and fighting. Is there improvments on these(...)

You'll miss an useful empire and war fights
Improvements/changes are on Building and Trades

are the plots involved, is it challenging and what's the general feel of the game? Is there still big issues to be solved, and what can I expect from it?

Better immersion, in station walking...
One big tutorial plot, tree dedicated starts +1 on dlc
No fleet management

Thankyou for your help, if it seems like a game I can plough time into like TC and AP I will definitely get it, if it's not as good as I've read I might pray for an X4 that isn't watered down.

There is a lot of hours in sight, but don't compare with TC/AP
It's always a good idea to wait for discounts.
Don't wait for X4 already, its too early, imo.

Oh. and search for egosoft trailers on Youtube

[Getsune]

I have seen on Steam it has a Mostly Negative overall and Metacritic is 33/100. I love some games which have been like that though so need more detail.

That's a problem with many reviews/scores - they're not being updated once the game gets patched because the reviewers
don't give the game a chance anymore. Most of the negative reviews were written prior to 2.0, when the game was in an
absolutely horrible state and Egosoft still tried to figure out how to respond to the situation.

The score is slowly getting better now, but breaking through such a bad image can prove to be very challenging.

I have read that there are no jumpdrives, everything is in highways and there a lot of issues. I'm in absolutely no way a 'veteran' of the X-series but from what i've read a lot of the elements are changed, or watered-down as people put it. I read in a few places it was for more casual players, but I want the steep learning curves and little details!

There are still jumpdrives, though only capital ships can jump now. Rather than jumpgates, they now jump to
jump beacons placed throughout the galaxy. Traveling in X Rebirth is a combination of normal flight, highways,
super highways and jumpgates, though highways will feel dominating most times.

Regarding the steep learning curves, it is now much easier to get into the gameplay basics than in the previous
X trilogy. Trade can be either very easy or extremely frustrating. Fighting is much more fun than in
the trilogy IMO, but we still lack a dominant enemy faction in X:R, so building fleets stops to make sense
at some point. Like in the trilogy, it is very easy to get to credits if you know how to.

What would I miss out on, or is it all just bad press? I enjoy almost all of X3:TC and AP; the complexing, trading, boarding and fighting. Is there improvments on these, are the plots involved, is it challenging and what's the general feel of the game? Is there still big issues to be solved, and what can I expect from it?

No big issues anymore as far as I know it, though devs are still fixing some smaller bugs. The next patch, 3.60,
is currently in the Release Candidate phase.

The campaign itself is rather short but quite useful as a tutorial for beginners. The devs themselves stated
that they now want to focus on fixing bugs and adding new features first, so it's not very likely that we'll see
a content patch in the near future.

There were quite some changes to stations and how they work. We're no longer able to place stations wherever we want.
On the other side, you can now create your own "zones" and name them, similar to owning a sector back in the trilogy.
Additionally, stations can finally defend themselves from enemies, depending on how much you invest into their defense
(they destroy capital ships with ease if you get it right).

Summary: I won't lie: I wanted to bid Rebirth farewell when I saw what happened at the release date.
Sky-high expectations from the community, bad economic decision of the company, game-breaking bugs everywhere.
But Egosoft got their act together and avoided a total failure, with the game getting better ever since 2.0.
Even though it's still far from surpassing it's ancestors, I found myself enjoying the game more than I expected
and am planning on switching to it when the next big patch gets released.

Thankyou for your help, if it seems like a game I can plough time into like TC and AP I will definitely get it, if it's not as good as I've read I might pray for an X4 that isn't watered down.

You might want to keep track of this topic either way.

[Snafu_X3]

One thing that seems to be consistently ignored/overlooked by the 'no jump drive' whiners is the facility to hop onto any neutral/friendly capship going that way, & cadge a lift for free

[Karmaticdamage]

Lack of content once you become rich and powerful and lots of unnecessary tediousness is the biggest difference to me. You pretty much have to mod X:R to make it worthwhile. Luckily unlike the previous game their is no "modified" tag so you can mod and still get achievements. Its not as good as the previous game in my opinion but from what I understand their making a new game now that more resembles the older games. I was one who preordered the game and got burned bad on its release so I would definitely wait before buying the next one.

[yoyolll]

Lack of content once you become rich and powerful and lots of unnecessary tediousness is the biggest difference to me.

I would say this is the biggest remaining issue. Despite all the patching, the economy has not seen much love, and empire building is just not really there. It's tedious to do and there is no payoff. This has the unfortunate effect of the game "ending" once you become rich and powerful, because there is nothing left to do. You can't conquer sectors, you can't take over the markets, you can't control large fleets etc.

So it really depends on what you liked about X3. My favorite part was economic domination and creating a space empire. I am disappointed with XR, to say the least. Your mileage may vary.

[Assailer]

Lack of content once you become rich and powerful and lots of unnecessary tediousness is the biggest difference to me.

I would say this is the biggest remaining issue. Despite all the patching, the economy has not seen much love, and empire building is just not really there. It's tedious to do and there is no payoff. This has the unfortunate effect of the game "ending" once you become rich and powerful, because there is nothing left to do. You can't conquer sectors, you can't take over the markets, you can't control large fleets etc.

So it really depends on what you liked about X3. My favorite part was economic domination and creating a space empire. I am disappointed with XR, to say the least. Your mileage may vary.

It's still worth a good 200 hours of great game play, but of course every game ends. This one doesn't have a win animation, you have to realize it yourself and restart it

I also would love to see DLC (or whatever) which adds more things to do like conquer/war. This would be optional, so only those who want to do war would buy it. This way it's not forced to those players who do not like to fight.

[BigBANGtheory]

I also would love to see DLC (or whatever) which adds more things to do like conquer/war. This would be optional, so only those who want to do war would buy it. This way it's not forced to those players who do not like to fight.

I think it is fair to point out that not every player is equally motivated by combat (which is also true for trading). What we do know is that the in game feaures supporting these gameplay styles are not equally weighted they are "out of balance", and what we do not know is by and large how important that is to people.

So what you could do is release a DLC based on deeper trade and economic focus AND a DLC which introduces tactical and strategic combat and then see which one does the best. In terms of paying for DLC that would be of interest IF the changes are substantial enough.

Could Egosoft do that without exposing itself to huge commercial risk i.e. develop the DLC and then not achieve a return? Well that is the real problem imho

A better way to deal with the whole "I don't want to fight" PoV is to:
- Find out how many players feel that way and how important is it to support gameplay style X in the sandbox
- Bring all gameplay styles upto roughly the same level of support i.e. exclude no one, favour no one but then invest the more popular styles (possible with DLC if the core game is up to scratch)
- Make the universe more dynamic/re-active to player actions so if a player isn't aggressive they in turn have options not to get dragged into combat e.g. they play a bit of politics and pay for defence or simply make a lot of fiends

Should you buy XR though that is the question... Imho yes when combined with a good sale because there are some really good parts to XR particularly if you like exploration. It has some deep problems still but I'm sure you'll find some value in the good parts.

[Karmaticdamage]

A lot of the community is gone now, especially the ones who like combat. All that is left really is the people who don't want to fight and it seems they want that trend to continue with the next game, aggressively attacking any post that challenges this point of view or any ideas that add more fight to the game.
Polling to see what people want now is irrelevant. This small group left isn't enough to justify a game based around their needs. Making games is is also about making money and egosoft will definitely want to broaden the horizon of its customer base, that means more fight whether you like it or not. Unless they want to sell like 10 copies to the carebears and sustain a business with that.

[Gligli]

I also would love to see DLC (or whatever) which adds more things to do like conquer/war. This would be optional, so only those who want to do war would buy it. This way it's not forced to those players who do not like to fight.

I think it is fair to point out that not every player is equally motivated by combat (which is also true for trading). What we do know is that the in game feaures supporting these gameplay styles are not equally weighted they are "out of balance", and what we do not know is by and large how important that is to people.

So do the four axes, probably.

So what you could do is release a DLC based on deeper trade and economic focus AND a DLC which introduces tactical and strategic combat and then see which one does the best. In terms of paying for DLC that would be of interest IF the changes are substantial enough.

It could be a good idea at first look. But divide those axes on dlc can't be, as it looks somewhere as "pay to win" games... "Sorry, buy *this* dlc to achieve this function..."
No!

Could Egosoft do that without exposing itself to huge commercial risk i.e. develop the DLC and then not achieve a return? Well that is the real problem imho

Of course, that can't be. The actual engine didn't prove its value to a majority of "elders". And it's legit/normal.

A better way to deal with the whole "I don't want to fight" PoV is to:
- Find out how many players feel that way and how important is it to support gameplay style X in the sandbox
- Bring all gameplay styles upto roughly the same level of support i.e. exclude no one, favour no one but then invest the more popular styles (possible with DLC if the core game is up to scratch)
- Make the universe more dynamic/re-active to player actions so if a player isn't aggressive they in turn have options not to get dragged into combat e.g. they play a bit of politics and pay for defence or simply make a lot of fiends

No need of dlc for that.

[pref]

Based on what you wrote i'd recommend AP, and only buy XR if you want to support egosoft.
The positive aspects you mention (complexes, empire building, little details, enough stuff to learn for that curve you mentioned) are greatly reduced or non-existent in XR.

In return you get much more visual details, and generally superior looks. XR is easy to play unless you run into bugs or unfortunate game design.

The way they designed AI is also weird - AI has full control where you dont really want it (station supply/sales, how your ships behave), and there is no automatization where it was really needed (buy or equip ships, waypoints for traders, ship assignments, ingame design of complexes etc..).

With a low number of assets (handful of ships, plus a few stations) it works out, so you can have ~50 nice hours out of it. Unfotunately when you arrive to the point where X3 started to be really interesting, the game just turns into frustration, as it can't really support nor reward larger scale operations, or more intricate trade empire configurations due to how its designed.
If you decide to play it i'd recommend to mod it right away to remove some unwanted features, or add necessary ones.
For ex eliminate speech and other annoying animations when issuing commands, or the CLS equivalent mod.

[Lord Crc]

It's been a while since I played X3:TC/AP, but when I did I really enjoyed it.

After several aborted attempts, I've picked up XR again recently (v3.53) and have been finding myself having a good time. Though it should be said I prefer empire building over warfare.

There are some fundamental things that I dislike about XR and which makes it harder to recommend as a straight "upgrade" to X3:
- Single ship... if they had blatantly copied DarkStar One, or if they've added ability to enter capships and issue strategic and tactical orders etc I wouldn't have minded as much. But as-is it doesn't really work for me at all.
- Fleet control is limited and tedious.
- Performance... you need a supercomputer to get decent framerates.

On the positive side, here's what I think XR does much better than X3:
- If you have the hardware to crank up the graphics, it looks stunning.
- I found the station building in XR to be much smoother than in X3. No quirky positioning.
- I really enjoy that one can fly from zone to zone without using the highways.
- The hacking minigames and such adds variety.

[yoyolll]

With a low number of assets (handful of ships, plus a few stations) it works out, so you can have ~50 nice hours out of it. Unfotunately when you arrive to the point where X3 started to be really interesting, the game just turns into frustration, as it can't really support nor reward larger scale operations, or more intricate trade empire configurations due to how its designed.

This is a great way to put it. I find that in X3, this was the part of the game that I actually considered *the game*. The build up to this point wasn't all that fun for me, but once I got to the point where I had ships and stations to command/manage, it became an absolutely fantastic game. In XR, the whole part of the game seems like the build up, and then there's nothing more.

[BigBANGtheory]

With a low number of assets (handful of ships, plus a few stations) it works out, so you can have ~50 nice hours out of it. Unfotunately when you arrive to the point where X3 started to be really interesting, the game just turns into frustration, as it can't really support nor reward larger scale operations, or more intricate trade empire configurations due to how its designed.

This is a great way to put it. I find that in X3, this was the part of the game that I actually considered *the game*. The build up to this point wasn't all that fun for me, but once I got to the point where I had ships and stations to command/manage, it became an absolutely fantastic game. In XR, the whole part of the game seems like the build up, and then there's nothing more.

In all fairness you could say that wtih XR over the past 2years Egosoft has impoved the build/explore/trade phase and what is left is now more a series of gaps or compromises in overall gameplay. Its a problem whether you want to throw in the shallow its not X4 arguement or not i.e. regardless of the title of the game that missing gameplay needs to be there and working well for the overall game to work.

In one sense I agree that the late game post build phase should be the jewel in the gameplay crown, X3 had it but it didn't pull it off particularly well imho due to (yep you guessed it) Command & Control issues with the interface but atleast it was there. So again imho the build up phase or journey in X3 was the stronger element in practice with the late game being quite frustrating. I guess it was one feature too far or too soon for Egosoft to tackle amounst everything else, so if you can live with that and the single ship XR in its current form probably can work for you.

[pref]

X3 had it but it didn't pull it off particularly well imho due to (yep you guessed it) Command & Control issues with the interface but atleast it was there.

It wasn't really existing in X3 vanilla either. You could just get much closer, and then roleplay the end if you wanted. And there were many possible smaller goals on the way to keep you going, but that is more of a content issue.

UI is a huge problem - and i just cannot see how could a proper interface be developed for real fleet control and deeper eco interaction while keeping controller compatibility a high priority.
These worlds just don't intersect enough (consoles and more serious simulation of anything). I sense an undecided target audience from ES communication so far.