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[Biowraith]

I've no idea what the current state of the game is, but I figure those that own X-Rebirth and don't get the news through other routes might like to know: there's a DLC called "The Teladi Outpost" being released in December.  The part you might like to know is it's free if you own the game and 'pre-order' before it's released.

[Retropunch]

Have the updates improved it a lot/enough? X3 is one of my all time favourites so I'd really be interested to see what they've done with it and if the DLC will introduce big changes

[jhxmt]

Apparently they're going to release a 3.0 patch at the same time as the expansion, but the patch features haven't been revealed yet.

RPS article: (link)

Firstly, their method of releasing this is rather odd - free preorders to existing Rebirth owners, but after that everybody pays?  Why not just provide Steam vouchers (or just automatically provide the DLC) to all owners, rather than rely on them picking up the preorder?

Secondly, some of the comments on the RPS article say it best.  Even if 3.0 were to fix every bug, even if the expansion were to add sectors and races and good galore...I still don't think the game would, simply, be any fun.  It doesn't provide nearly the amount of enjoyment and engagement that previous X games* have provided, for me at least.

I count Rebirth as one of my most disappointing purchases ever.  I'm not even going to free-order the expansion.  It'd be artificially raising my own hopes just to be dashed all over again.

* Or, indeed, any other space-sim/space-RPG/hell-even-space-action game that I've encountered.  I've played games far shallower than Rebirth and enjoyed them more.  It's stuck halfway between being an exploration RPG and an economic simulation, and it doesn't do either of them well.

[Retropunch]

Firstly, their method of releasing this is rather odd - free preorders to existing Rebirth owners, but after that everybody pays?  Why not just provide Steam vouchers (or just automatically provide the DLC) to all owners, rather than rely on them picking up the preorder?

I think this is mainly in the hopes that some people who have the game won't preorder it (or won't see it), and that the DLC will be so good that they'll pay for it anyway. This could well be the case if modding becomes a big thing (and then the DLC is required) or if future patches just expand on/require the DLC content.

To be honest, I'm not sure about it never being able to be fixed. Having never properly played it (I did do a few minutes at a mates house) I can't really comment, but there have been a few games which have been rubbish until a patch/expansion made them actually good, so I wouldn't knock it down before I've seen it.

Still, from the reviews I've read it does seem a bit farfetched that they'll make big enough changes to turn it all around.

[10ebbor10]

I think this graph gives a nice final verdict.

http://steamcharts.com/app/2870#All

Or maybe it doesn't. XCOM and other single player games have similair declines.

[miljan]

Read this thread:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/2870/discussions/0/613941122693790527/#p2

Looks that most of things are fixed, and the free DLC is not released yet

[BigD145]

The newest DLC adds two new sectors. 20 DLC and 100GB later and we might have a proper X game.

[Sergius]

New DLC! You can now rotate sideways!

[BigD145]

New DLC! You can now rotate sideways!

/facepalm

[Sensei]

Does it have joystick controls now?

[Gabeux]

*Reads weird book found on a dark tower full of corpses*
*Performs rituals*
*Reply screen opens*

So, after reading that with the new expansion thing X Rebirth is now somewhat playable, I decided to go ahead and try my hand at it, finally.
Bear with me as I revive this post and your memories of this game.

I've spend at least an hour checking the encyclopedia, changing controls, and just trying to adapt to what seems a step in the wrong direction to the series many of us love and want to be successful.
I can feel the poor optimization in my soul, and the weird graphical glitches and weird flight model that makes me think "These dudes made the other X games?"
The other X games had their flaws..but what is this? 

Anyway, I guess all the crap that had to be thrown at this game was thrown two years ago. However, I'd like to share the moment that it got me interested:
I think an hour into the game, I'm still doing the tutorial thing, since I wasted a lot of time poking around the menus to try and make the game crash with no success yet.
So I was investigating a station, since it seems that if you fly near them you acquire information and unlock..stuff..that I have no idea how to properly access..and suddenly a Plutarch Mining Corporation police ship came to my face and started dancing around saying "Drop me some cargo and we'll let you go" and stuff like that.
I thought it was a glitch, so I ignored. Few seconds later, there's four police ships with sirens on (sirens in space, amazing  ), spamming me that I should give them something so they can go on their way.
In the encyclopedia, I read that the PMC are now crazy corrupt bastards. As I remember that, the police says "Hmm...what's that? Looks like contraband to me.." and suddenly the whole zone turns red.

That was pretty awesome, I have to say. Reminded me so much of Freelancer. Actually, this feels more like Freelancer 2 than an X game.
I just wish they optimized the graphics a bit, and I really think they managed to make it all look worse than X3.
I DO love the small shuttles and drones though. That's something I always wanted to see, and loved to see a little of it in X3: Albion Prelude.
But the shuttles, they look like crap. Actually, every fighter-sized in this ship look like crap to me.
This coming from a dude that plays DF in ASCII.

Anyways, I'm not sure if this is worth playing, but it got me curious.

PS: Hopefully I won't get hammered since I think this is the place to post about it.
PS2: Everything combat-related looks and sounds like shit. I rear space police sirens but I don't hear enemy lasers. Go figure. 

PS3: A few hours into the game, my eyes finally adapted to it. I'm by no means happy, but I see what they were trying to accomplish here.
The scale of all things feel much different from the previous games, and that's really interesting.
And Egosoft FINALLY made a campaign that makes sense (at least to the point that I am in), without being broken and full of fetch quests.
I'm getting to the point were I can capture capital ships and freights and do other stuff.
There's many neat details etched in the game, and I can only weep for their wrong decisions and lack of time for proper implementation.

[JimboM12]

I don't think Egosoft ever made a perfectly optimized game, tbh. But X:Rebirth holds a lot of hope with me: once Esoft gets it up to a more than playable level, the awesome modding community will descend and turn X:Rebirth into what it shoulda been (they already are working on great mods, but in particular, the Capital Ship Bridges mod, Better Scan ranges mod, and any of the fleet command mods will make the game much, much better). I remember one of the other big gripes being locked into a single ship the entire game, which was never a problem for me. In X3 I always stayed in my trusty Springblossom or if I could get it, Hyperion.

I tested the game recently and was pleasantly surprised at the progress, mind you I didn't delve too deep, but the lag I used to get hit with right off the bad was greatly reduced, which is great for me, lol.

TL;DR: holding on a little hope for this game, lots of potential and potential modding under the bugs and stuff.

[Gabeux]

That is true.

I also liked the variety on the type of missions, on combat for instance: patrols, protection, destroy rigged asteriods, destroy minefield, destroy enemy agent..and maybe more. I bet only the combat missions are already more varied than what previous X games used to have.

And I also don't mind the single ship thing. I wish we could get to customize it a bit, though. The customizable cockpit is a step in the right direction.

I've also seen many people disliked the highways..but dude, it's an interactive loading screen that usually takes less time than loading a new sector in previous X games. And you can kick ships out of it and shoot unsuspecting people out of your way!
And all you have to do is the occassional lateral thrust to move away from the traffic.

I for one, got really satisfied that they finally got their crap together around campaign missions: yesterday I even had to think! "If I hack this station, they'll come after me. If I stay here, they'll kill me. If I stay there, they'll kill me. Maybe I should stuff my ship somewhere really stealthy and isolated in their own station and launch the drone from there."
The missions aren't telling you every single thing you must do. They provide enough information without being an eternal tutorial. Some reloads might be necessary if you fail - and it'd be great if they improved loading times - but I'm not facepalming violently like I used to do in X:Reunion or X:TC.

I also have to praise the Betty VO. They made item, ware and equipment descriptions longer, weirder and more complex than all the previous games together. You can even hear the poor woman almost going out of air in some of those. Therefore, also praise their fluff writing - but the real useful info isn't in the game most of the time.

The other things I think they should look into, not counting the big obvious ones like graphical optimizations, are:
- Equipment descriptions: I have to google every drone, every upgrade to make sure it really does what it says it does.
- "Show me your wares, pLeAsE??": What does this audio play every time? Put a cooldown on it or something. It already sounds stupid, but playing every time you talk to a trader can make someone go crazy.
- Skippable Smalltalk minigame VOs: A lot of people have already listed this, but if they really want players to go through these (especially to get the NPC training items), they really should make it skippable.
- Mission payments are crazy: Some very silly and quick missions pay 1 million CR where some really absurd and long combat missions pay 2 million CR. This give me a good "space is crazy man, you could always find a better offer on the next station!" vibe, but it doesn't feel right.

Anyways, I had fun with it and I'll keep playing it to see how long it will take until it breaks, because I'm expecting that.
I'm curious to see how station management/construction and fleet management/construction works now. So I'm looking forward to it.

[Gabeux]

I'd just like to give an update, just in case someone still wonders about X:R.
After a week of intermittent playing, I finished the 3.53 campaign. It only took..25 mods to make the game bearable, otherwise you just get stuck on all the boring minigames, stupid AI, and everything else. X:Rebirth makes me want to hug X3:Albion Prelude and cry.

Mind that I only write this because when I played X2 back when I was 14~16 years old, it really made me go crazy about sandbox games. So to me, X is one of those games that you can get mad at and throw the CD out of your window (goddamn digital distribution!), but that you'll always end going back to. 

Even if I was shocked by the terrible designs decision like everyone else, after all that I've read I noticed how much effort the devs put into trying to fix their mistakes.
A LOT of mods have been integrated in the game. I don't think there's a list of integrated mods, but if you check the top mods from older (1.0~3.2) versions, most if not all the best ones got implemented one way or another.
This makes me yell what everybody yelled back when X:R was released: "WHY DIDN'T YOU HEAR US!?" 

In any case, it felt really good adding mods little by little. I went to ~30% of the campaign playing full vanilla, then started adding a few mods here and there. Once I was around 60% campaign, I started adding a good amount of them. By 75% I probably had all the best ones already.
So it felt like I was buying software/gaining skills in-game that allowed me to not struggle with so many minigames, that made boarding smarter/better, that shut up all unnecessary chatter, that allowed me to contact shipyards remotely (how the hell isn't that vanilla? That's how it used to be all the way from X2! It used to feel so good buying 10 freighters from the other side of the galaxy!), and so many other things. It didn't feel like cheating - just felt like I was really progressing.

However, I still can't recommend the game, unless you're a real fan of the X universe..and if you are, you probably read a book about it anyway and dropped the game. If you ever insist in playing this, like I did, just follow my advice and do your best to finish the campaign - THEN think about going after your sandbox goals, because:
There's no proper fleet management, AI is insanely stupid to the point that makes CapShips almost useless (unless you use mods), manual trading will make you give up on trading once you have more than 10 ships (due to bad UI), and so on.
Such things make the sandbox part of the game very undesirable, unfortunately.

Again, I really enjoyed the work they put in the campaign. However it ends up being overshadowed by the fact that 30-60% of the time you spent on it will be just flying to the destinations. Unless you use a freighter/capship as a jump ship and babysit it so it doesn't die horribly.
And as always, there were some awkward things later on. Like some battles that were supposed to be epic have very few allied ships (which some were invincible as to make those battles impossible to lose), and an escort mission that will bring you all the nightmares you can possible imagine that involve you autopiloting behind a slow freighter.
Plus, the campaign ends in a very, very awkward way that will make you picture a Producer just telling the developers to "compile, commit and publish the game, RIGHT NOW!". I kinda understood what they were going for with the ending, but it felt like they ALMOST threw all the progress they've made down the drain. It'll basically will make you scratch your head trying to understand if they are going to patch in the rest of the story, or if it's a cliffhanger for a possible X:Rebirth 2...or a DLC..or..something..

All the characters and dialogue were much better and interesting than before. I really enjoyed playing SOMEONE - since in X3:AP it's just weird that you're a random unnamed person after playing with Gardna since X2 - and I don't understand people who "hated" the protagonist. He was just a random dude scavanging around and ended up being forced to play along.

Anyways, maybe in a year or two they'll make X:R actually interesting. All they have to do is integrate some 30 mods and - for the love of god - make NPC chatter skippable and bombard that freaking sidemenu from orbit. Those 2 things together made me die more than anything else in the game.

I just don't understand Egosoft. They always have the greatest concept in mind, but the execution is always incredibly weird/poor.

Conclusion: There's hope, but will take a (long) while.

[forsaken1111]

does the annoying copilot with the boob-window spacesuit still tell your computer to shut up all the time? Because that got old after about 0.001 seconds.