Yeah, I'm actually enjoying X Rebirth as well. A lot of things are being blown out of proportion, and some reviews are outright false (I recall the "Worth it or Not?" video linked in this thread specifically).
For example, if you actually spend time playing the game, you'll find out there a ton of different station layouts (that is, internally), there are more voices, there are a lot of areas, etc.
Also, not sure about the hate on the station-building. I haven't gotten there yet, but it makes sense. As opposed to the previous X Games, where you could build anywhere in a sector, and the game just loaded different sectors you were in, X Rebirth is practically fully-open; there's no dedicated "sectors" (now zones), and you can fly between zones without the use of the highways. I believe that you can also fly between sectors (which is just a space housing a group of zones and highways) without the use of super highways. Allowing the player to build stations
anywhere would almost be a poor decision choice in that matter. Like I said, I haven't gotten to station building, but if you have minor freedom placing the stations in a given zone, it's functionally the same thing as in previous X Games. Otherwise, you're not losing much at all with that loss of freedom, given that there are no longer gates like in previous X Games, just highways which you can access by pathing into and out of them rather than having to go through an entrance or exit (although you can still do that).
Also, the "trader getting stuck" bug is blown way out of proportion. This is less of a functionality bug and more of a "the player doesn't understand what's going on" and "it's taking too damn long" issue, which are issues but it's not a game-breaking bug. The trade ships get queued up behind NPC trade ships and your ship just looks like its sitting there when it's waiting in queue (which can unfortunately take a very long time, and the lack of SETA doesn't help). It can also be a bit quirky and only queue up for one of the docks rather than any available dock, apparently. So, it's still an issue, but it's not a game-breaking bug like everyone is complaining about. There *is* an actual game-breaking bug regarding trade ships, but this is a far more rare issue than people complaining that their trade ship is stuck during the tutorial. It's an actually legitimate bug.
People will also hear a lot of complaining about how they can run every other game on max settings at 60 fps but Rebirth is nothing on and ~30 fps. This is another issue Egosoft is looking into, and it has to do with non-optimization for high-end rigs. I have an upper-mid-, lower-high-end rig, and while I do have some issues, the game runs well with minor hiccups most of the time.
There are also some misunderstandings about crew. For example, you can't hire a captain for your own ship. They don't count as a crewmember for the Albion Skunk, because you, the player, are the captain of that ship. However, you can hire a mechanic who will show up on your ship because they are an actual crewmember. You remote contact the captains, pilots, etc. because you usually only contact them when you're aboard another vessel where you want them to work and therefore wouldn't meet them in person on your ship beforehand.
Also, for the XBox 360 stuff, can anyone confirm that isn't just about XBox 360 controller support, given that Egosoft is cooperating with Steam to push for controller support for Big Picture mode, like they did recently with X3: AP, and that the XBox 360 controller is still the most widely supported controller for the PC?
So there are bugs, there are CTDs, the voice-acting is bad, the character animations need to be fixed, there are performance issues, but the game is definitely playable. The only real issue is with design choices, and some of the bigger issues people have (like the lack of auto-trade for cargo ships) may be able to be fixed without that much hassle.
I think the biggest thing is that X Rebirth got AAA reception, AAA hype and expectations, and what ended up happening was a 16-man dev team that was split up for working on multiple titles with little financial support that's known for poor voice-acting and character animations released a very buggy BBB title.
toady is a small independent, a company with a few dozen dev guys and a flock of testers & QA guys from a publishing company is not
but hey i guess that's just in my world
egosoft is not a 'small independent'
even if they were, what kind of response would you prefer from 'the gaming culture'? gee thanks for this $50 turd egosoft, may we please have some more?
16 devs isn't small independent when it operates by itself and is not a subsidiary of a larger company or under a giant umbrella publisher? Or when those 16 devs are split up working on a number of other games instead of just X Rebirth?
As for a response, I would have preferred how people reacted to Spore. "Gee thanks for this game that we thought was going to be ridiculously better but we should have expected otherwise, our bad."
Also, I don't think Deep Silver has any QA. They mostly do international ports and marketing in Germany, so good job being just completely wrong on everything.
TBH i think they spent the last years actually making the game, and most part of those 7 years of development they were making the new engine. that's why the game looks so shallow. they spent more time with the engine (graphics among all) and didnt focus in actually putting the game in a playable state...
Most of the 7 years of development was making the engine with a much smaller group of devs while most of the team worked on releases that could actually bring in money working off of an engine they developed in the 90's. After X3R and X3TC, they gradually began shifting manpower over to X Rebirth. After X3AP, released in 2011, they switched their priorities to mostly working on X Rebirth given that they could survive long enough until they release it. The only other thing they were working on was a big update for X3AP and patch support for X3AP and X3TC.
There are "small independants" that released games that were not as buggy as this and that actually fulfilled the expectations people had. It's not really an excuse.
Name one indie studio that released a AAA game in the past 8 years or so. I would be extremely surprised if you could.
Author
Topic: X-Rebirth - It's really happening (NOV 15) (Read 50359 times)