So, after 5 hours, here's my impression:
Wow. This is just so bad. I mean, the gameplay seems to have some depth beneath it, but it's an HCI nightmare. I would be fine with the first person perspective, just as I was in X3, except for the fact that you can't see anything because the useless cockpit HUD takes up half your FOV. The HUD is terrible, and due to the tiny size of semi-transparent and rapidly moving icons, gives almost no information. The poor FOV combines with the delayed turning, lack of usable 3D indicators, and complete lack of ability to move other than forward (aside from a token gesture from maneuvering thrusters) results in a terrible spinning around constantly to try and find what you're looking for. Not only does this become disorienting really fast, but due to the terrible graphics and clutter, it becomes nauseating.
Being required to walk around in the stations is annoying because of the waste of time the largely empty hallways present; and it's made infuriating by the control-locking conversation with NPCs, whose dialog you need to wait to finish
even if you turned off the voice sfx because they are all terrible. No, I don't need to spend an additional 3 second per conversation to have an npc say 'fuck of, wanker;' which is basically what they say to you when you end a conversation. They didn't even try to make dialog immersive or witty in the least. After talking to a station commanded, I end the conversation, and she says "Go boil your head." Another was "That was a great conversation -- NOT." That's just stupid! Did they hire a middleschool student to write this shitty dialog? And yeah, the half second pause required between each UI interaction (or more, if it's an in-cockpit hud element) is absolutely abysmal. Especially since it usually takes several of such interactions to get to the bottom of the very deep nested command trees. In dwarf fortress, to build a door, it's 3 commands. But it isn't bad, because you can hit "B-C-D," in an immediate sequence and within .25 seconds, have 'build door' selected.
Also, the fact that it randomly crashes and, so far as I could find in the options, has no autosave feature is not appreciated.
So yeah, there might be an interesting game in there somewhere, but I can't seem to see it. Though, granted, my vision is obscured by a massive cockpit overlay, so it could be right in front of me.
Edit: And it seems RPS agrees with everything I have to say:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/11/15/x-rebirth-preview/If there’s a game under all this ‘immersion’, I intend to find it.
Author
Topic: X-Rebirth - It's really happening (NOV 15) (Read 50674 times)