- The game randomly and suddenly dips far below even 30 fps on my i7, GTX 675M, 16GB RAM laptop. On most occasions, this is solved after a little while, making it a possibly necessary annoyance if this is due to asset loading. HOWEVER: This also has a chance to never resolve itself, making exiting the game the only way to fix the problem. The game also constantly crashes. While the reason is never alluded to in the popup message, every one of my dump logs state it is a permissions error. This occurs even when the game is running on Admin mode, so I'm befuddled as to why this never showed in testing.
- Not only is your character either Hermes or a wheeled droid, given how disorientingly fast he goes in stations, he also has a tendency to get stuck, be it in the ceiling after trying to get to the air ducts on a scissor lift or between locker doors and an NPC because the character can't close containers. Granted, this is easily resolved by going back to the ship, but it's annoying that you have to do that, re-dock, and potentially get yourself in the same exact situation. There's also the fact that your copilot, which quite honestly just seems like a slightly more humanized Betty, sometimes nags you to get back on the ship due to hostiles. Not only does this sometimes not make any sense (as most docks are internal), but, out of every time she has done this (aprox. 10), only once was it because of an actual issue. There was also one time she thought a civilian ship was a danger. My desk has yet to recover from that.
- 'Small talk' is both never explained nor is it consistent (I often hit near the center of the target, only to get a result of 2), making it extremely frustrating.
- Some objects, such as the mine near the Badlands Colony in Dormant Bear, do not appear to read their data correctly. In the aforementioned example, the name of the station is, quite obviously, the name of its variable (I believe it was along the lines of "argon_mine" something, I didn't take a picture). Not only that, but some factions have no actual name assigned to them and/or default to the Grey alien head icon.
- Instructions provided by the tutorial messages are sometimes incorrect. The most jarring of incorrect instructions I saw was telling me that, in order to scan using a Beholder drone I was to use Right Click. After looking it up on the internet I found it was actually bound to R (or whatever missiles are bound to).
- Game and ship properties, such as sound, LOD, speed, scanning power, etc. have absolutely no context. There aren't even any kind of tooltips associated with them, it's just assumed we know what the hell they mean. It actually took me a second to realize that the value of speed was in m/s and I still have no idea what this setting for LOD actually does. Not only that, but the items' properties lack very important information. For example: The shields never state their recharge rate/time and the engines never note their impact on auxiliary thrusters. Also, why the hell does the trading software have the properties it has? I don't think software could ever affect the ship's hull.
- A consistent, gamebreaking bug: In every campaign game I've played, the freighter the player owns is always dead in the water (with an astounding speed "effect" of 0 when engines are at 100%). I don't even.
- An inconsistent gamebreaking bug: The player is occasionally unable to hire personnel for some reason, despite having both room in the Skunk and the funds. This appears to be limited by job, however, since I was still able to hire a Defense Officer when I couldn't hire an Engineer.
- Ship-tossing. Sounds like a sport don't it? Sadly, my ship has been a victim of this a few times, being flung over 30km away from civilization after exiting a superhighway or being suddenly launched at highway-speeds in one direction or another into a station after being in the menus. The latter, thankfully, only occurred once.
- Controls are rigid and sparse. One of the things I enjoyed about X3 was that you could assign any number of hotkeys to almost any operation in the game. You could even have duplicate controls, if their contexts were different. In X Rebirth, only a select few controls can actually be bound, some controls actually have multiple uses despite what the action says (ie. 'launch missile' is also 'scan', which has no entry on the list), and there's no way to bind individual menus, save for maybe the maps, to hotkeys.
- No AI piloting and no SETA. Now, you're probably thinking this is just nostalgia talking. It's not. While the new boost system is perfect for combat scenarios, it is no replacement for the SETA drive, seeing as, unlike the boost, SETA is not short lived. Basically, Boost is ideal for combat, whereas SETA is ideal for trading and navigation. AI piloting also made navigation a snap, making it unnecessary to be 500m away to start docking or have to go around for a good 30 minutes just to get a crew so you can dock your new ship. I mean, a crew would more effective than AI piloting, but why toss it out completely?
- The most intriguing aspect of the game, the ability to walk about stations, has resulted in me loathing every second I have to spend in them. the NPCs are shallow, if not 0-dimensional (hell, even the PC seems remarkably like a robot), there's only about 6 voice actors and 30-50 lines of dialogue for most NPCs, the dialogue is dull, repetitive and has only the slightest hint at emotion, not to mention some lines completely breaks the flow of conversation, making it feel wholly unnatural. It's even a pain to identify NPCs as you have to be looking into their face, not just at them. Given the location, posture and orientation of some of the NPCs this can be a little teeth-grinding.
- Locations are copy/pasted to the point that, for each dock type, there are only 1-2 versions with very minor variations. While this would have been acceptable to some degree, given the manufactured, modular nature of space stations, even stations on opposite sides of the map have the same layout, style, even the same locations for NPCs. You'd think major regions and factions would have some unique aspects.
- Finding anything is tedious given the painfully short range it takes for the ship computer to register an item. This is made even worse by the point that the ship's boresights must be pointing directly at the item in question's icon, making it impossible to passively pick up information, like in previous X games.
- Stations are extremely X2 sagt Bussi auf Bauch. Even if I'm in combat, fighting off the people they hired me to kill, and using my weakest weapon, I suddenly find myself an enemy of the entire station because a few rounds missed the intended target and struck the station dealing virtually no damage to the station in question. In the past X games, I would have gotten a warning, not a kill-on-sight order.
EDIT: Oh, before anyone asks, I did, in fact, verify the game cache. It was one of the first things I did both after DLing the game and noticing some of the errors.
