I've been excited for Rebirth ever since it was rumored, back then when it was only nicknamed "TNBT" by the forum dwellers. Back then we knew next to nothing about the new game, only that is was in the works. I think most of the community was pretty excited to finally get a new game in the franchise, a step up from the old and dated engine, a brand new X game where it can shed the limitations of a decade old technology and really shine as a space simulator. Updated graphics, maybe a wide open universe instead of small sectors (Evochron Mercenary pulled it off), new and redesigned ships, stations, new things to trade and manufacture, new ships to fly, a brand new storyline, etc. In short: "bigger, better, faster, stronger". After Deep Silver announced Rebirth for the fall of 2011 and ultimately failed to deliver, there was no info for a LONG time, nothing from the devs, nothing from the publisher, the Egosoft website went practically dead. I admit after so much waiting I gave up on the game ever being finished. Of course we got Albion Prelude, and I played around in it for a while, but it wasn't the same anymore. We all knew there was a way bigger and better game in the works, we wanted THAT game.
But then the details slowly started coming. "This will be not X4, this is a completely different game" the devs said, and most of us went "huh? what do you mean not X4? Different in what way?". And we then learned there will be only one ship to fly.... no more flying captial ships.... no more building a trade empire.... no more commanding fleets around... station building only in a few set places with preset scematics.... FPS gimmick... etc. Most fans were taken aback by these announcements, growing more and more skeptical this is the game we want to play, but most fans still stayed positive, "maybe it's different, but that doesn't mean it will be bad, right?...RIGHT?" The trailers and interviews basically told us the same PR fairytales over and over, how awesome and detailed and economic and trade and fly around huge space cities and explosions and cool highways and explosions and super story and explosions and NPCs and SO GALAXY, VERY SPACE, PRE-BUY VERY NOW!!! Of course in the later published dev videos the game runs seamlessly, and they were cautious to only show really small portions of the game going by a set script, so to the outside viewers everything looked great. The omnipresence of the Xbox controller was a little troubling to see, but like me, most of the fans kept their hopes up.
We had no reason to doubt Egosoft, they had an immaculate track record, always worked very closely with the community and we got to know them as honest, hard working people who only want to deliver us the games we (and them) want to play. Sure almost all of their releases were rocky and filled with bugs, but the underlying game was always fantastic, and they worked hard to patch everything up ASAP and on top of all that, they gave us huge expansions to the game in patches for free for years! We had no reason to doubt them when they said, Rebirth will be an amazing game. They knew this...
While a big portion of the community was pretty reserved and even skeptical about these new "features" and couldn't really piece together how it may work to be a good X game, even if it looked pretty terrible on paper, most of us said "don't judge until you played it!". Fair enough. But then last Friday happened...
I've been a game journalist for a really long time. In my 8 years in the industry I saw many horribly botched game releases and hordes of raging fans and customers demanding their money back, but this was....different. This was... personal! A few months ago I asked, nay, begged my EIC to assign me Rebirth for reviewing. He agreed, but as time passed, no review copies came. I was wondering why it did not arrive for a long time. Usually, publishers send out review copies way (at least a couple of weeks) before release, so we can complete the review and publish it when the embargo ends (usually on release day) to boost sales. I only received my review code a few hours AFTER release. That usually means the game is terrible and the publisher didn't want us to get our review out so fast, so it doesn't impact initial sales. This happened many times over the years, a late review copy was always the mark of a terrible game. This wasn't a good sign...
But I installed it and started a new game. I won't bore you guys with details of my endeavors, sufficed to say, the game was bad. Really bad. Riddled with game-breaking bugs, abysmal performance, horrible UI and controls, fugly NPCs, pointless minigames, etc, you know the list, I've seen most of it. It was definitely not the game promised to us and not even close to an X game. I know the devs said repeatedly "it's not X4", but even judging Rebirth solely on it's own merits, it still fails as a video game.
I tried to like it, swear to all gods, I tried to like Rebirth. Despite the crashes, the bugs, the horrible fps and everything else, I tried to at least complete the story mode, so I can write a complete review...but it was not to be. As many others, I got stuck on the "sell 100 ecells" mission, with my freighter jumping all over the place into empty space and doing nothing despite the full order queue. I mean, I played X games more than any other games combined, how could I fail at such a simple task? It was unthinkable! I tried reloading a few times, tried different approaches, but after one particular reload I couldn't find my freighter. I went to the coordinates it randomly jumped to, 3 sectors away, only to find it burning in space with most of it's systems destroyed. With no messages or event log, I had not idea what happened. I wanted to get it fixed and geared up again, but...I couldn't find a way to do it, since the ONLY command I could send the ship was the "take me to" command, which simply didn't do anything. I flew to some station to find something to help, then my game crashed. That was the point I gave up.
I took to the forums, and found a veritable sh*tstorm of angry and confused players frothing at the mouth, reporting all kinds of bugs, crashes, disastrous performance and getting stuck figuring out how to the simplest things, like making a ship trade, etc. I couldn't say I blamed them, I had exactly the same problems. But I had a job to do. A job, that became the most thankless task I've ever had. I found a savegame that pulled me through that stupid mission and I forged on, only to find even more bugs, horrible VO, bad story, stupid and pointless FPS gimmick, no control on other ships, and I just kinda stopped. I couldn't take it anymore. The game wasn't fun in the slightest, so why try to swim against the sh*t-tide...
I went back to the forums, I wanted answers. How could this happen? Why? Why this game? Why my most beloved franchise? Why the dev team I trusted unconditionally for so many years? It was too bad to be true. I desperately tried to hunt down answers, to make sense of this terrible mess that was Rebirth, but all I found was some equally confused, sad and angry players and fans. Some people still "see the potential", "they will fix it, they will patch it" they say, but there is no fixing this game, there is no fixing the broken trust...
In the past, I had no problem thrashing games in reviews when they were genuinely terrible. I had big fights with my EIC on some of them, because I was "brutally honest" about bad games. Sometimes he thought my scores were "too low" and the distributor will be angry at us if we thrash a game too hard, resulting in bad sales for them. But as I told my EIC, we are not PR for the distributor or the publisher, we are game journalists and reviewers, our job is to inform the consumers, the players, to tell them what a new game is like so they can decide to buy it or not. If a game is good, tell them it's good so they can enjoy it too. But if a game is bad, tell them it's bad, so they don't waste money on it. No sugarcoating, no bullsh*t. That was my creed for so many years. But now I feel horrible.
Now, I have the job to write a review on X-Rebirth. A game I waited for so long, a game I was hoping for so long....a game, that ultimately turned out to be bad. Really bad. In the past, I could keep my distance, I could keep my integrity no matter what. But, this time, it's personal. This time I got let down and lied to by THE development team I trusted the most. Rebirth is not something I want to play. It's not fun. It's broken in ways that cannot be fixed by simple patches. I don't want to review this game, because I don't want to be the one who tells people it sucks. I don't want to be the one who gets blamed by the EIC and flamed by fanboys in the magazine's forums. I wanted to love Rebirth so hard, I wanted to love the new X game so hard, I wanted to support Egosoft so hard....but....what am I to do now?
Honestly, I don't even know what to write, there is an empty Word document in front of me, waiting for me to pass judgment on a game I honestly want to have nothing to do with right now. Maybe in a few months when it gets patched to a basically playable level, but not now. But the deadline is coming, and I have a job to do. This will be the hardest review I've ever written in my life...
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