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Jun. 24th, 2014
In the past, I made a few posts about the X series of space-trading PC games, and in those I mentioned more than once that I was looking forward to the, at the time, still unreleased X Rebirth. Then, I never mentioned it again. This is a good reason why that is the case. I bought the game, played it for... *checks Steam* ...about 22 hours (which also includes more recent failed attempts to get back into it again), and then just went back to X3 Albion Prelude, into which I currently have 611 hours, according to Steam. This is not even counting the 484 hours I put into X3 Terran Conflict, which is more or less the same game as Albion Prelude.
X Rebirth was indeed "an appalling, broken mess" when it was first released. The previous games weren't remotely perfect on launch either, mind you, but nothing as bad as X Rebirth was. And the fact that X Rebirth "was originally conceived as an entirely separate game from the X series, with a new setting, different mechanics" is definitely evident for anyone coming in from the previous games. I agree that they'd probably have been better off just making it its own thing rather than shoehorning it into the X Series. That said, I knew that this (and many of the other things, such as only controlling one ship and such) was going to be the case going into it, so I don't hate the game nearly as much as some of the more vehement anti-fans in the comments under that RPS article or on the Steam forums or elsewhere appear to, but I'm not a big fan of it either.
If someday Egosoft manages to turn it around into an actually viable game, then I might go back and give it another go, but for now, well... I'm still not finished with Albion Prelude yet, which I recently restarted as a Terran in order to wrap up the Terran plotlines that I'd neglected by playing as a Commonwealth character for so long, well after the point where their plotlines had ended. I'll also continue waiting for a proper X4 as well, which X Rebirth most definitely was not and will never be. I hope they leave the whole "walking around on the stations" thing out of X4, though, assuming they ever do make it someday, of course.
X Rebirth was indeed "an appalling, broken mess" when it was first released. The previous games weren't remotely perfect on launch either, mind you, but nothing as bad as X Rebirth was. And the fact that X Rebirth "was originally conceived as an entirely separate game from the X series, with a new setting, different mechanics" is definitely evident for anyone coming in from the previous games. I agree that they'd probably have been better off just making it its own thing rather than shoehorning it into the X Series. That said, I knew that this (and many of the other things, such as only controlling one ship and such) was going to be the case going into it, so I don't hate the game nearly as much as some of the more vehement anti-fans in the comments under that RPS article or on the Steam forums or elsewhere appear to, but I'm not a big fan of it either.
If someday Egosoft manages to turn it around into an actually viable game, then I might go back and give it another go, but for now, well... I'm still not finished with Albion Prelude yet, which I recently restarted as a Terran in order to wrap up the Terran plotlines that I'd neglected by playing as a Commonwealth character for so long, well after the point where their plotlines had ended. I'll also continue waiting for a proper X4 as well, which X Rebirth most definitely was not and will never be. I hope they leave the whole "walking around on the stations" thing out of X4, though, assuming they ever do make it someday, of course.
