Yeah, yeah, I know. Everyone hates Frontier because of the removal of the offline mode. But it's a new and shiny game and I'm torn and wanted opinions on it. I don't exactly have the money to waste if it's horrible.

So is it any good? X: Rebirth has me cautious about new space sims.

Bump.

No one?

I think there is topic about this game already, and maybe more than one.

And yeah, X-rebirth was *sniff* surprising.

Is that a euphemism for complete shit?

Actually from what I've read lately about X-Stillbirth is that with 3.0 it's quite enjoyable. If it ever goes down to about 5 euros, I might consider getting it.

I bought Rebirth at launch hoping it's the new X4. Turns out to be complete shite. Until they add the ability to own and fly any ship in the game, I won't bother with it. Flying just one ship in the game is stupid.

Not quite. I've seen worse. Sadly GoG has no spoiler feature, so beware for wall of text.

Discussing X-Rebirth is difficult thing, as people take things emotionally (and rightfully so, given discrepancy between game's price tag and level of quality provided, multiplied by developers' behavior), and seems they have quite opposite opinions.
So here is my point of view, there are many like those, but this one is mine;). Egosoft's games never were examples of stability and polish upon release, so bugs' presense wasn't surprising really, You may call surprising the scale of problems and developers' response (or lack thereof), which was extremely annoying, especially early on. Surely, I'll prefer less talk, more wirk approach, but at earlier months there were little signs of work or any communications from developers. There were minor patches, but they resempled attempts to patch huge holes in hulls with bandaid. I don't think it was surprising that such actions caused an uproar, I won't go into quoting Saint-Exupery, but I think devs are responsible for handling their stuff.
For each his own, but I felt strong deja-vu with Gothic 3 release - game made impression that developers really bit more than they could chew, and release clustercluck of problems resembled Gothic 3 conditions. Thankfully no boars were present. Yet game had it's own problems. I'd understood should there be no new promised features, but losing features you consider necessary (or even mandatory), like lack of autopilor, cycling through targets, and no radar?
Personally I strongly dislike some new features, namely highways. It's like huge sewage pipe you fly through to get from one zone to another. Jump gates are there, but there are few, so it's highways now. Poo simulator - according to game I spent roughly 30% of my time there. Much fun, such graphics, so innovative, very exciting. Not.

I was hoping Egosoft will fix problems in approximately six months, but I was wrong. Guess if game was in development for 2 times longer, they added two times more bugs. Surely, I only scratched the surface of 3.0 patch, but it seems game now starts to resemble the way it should look like 13 months ago. Some improvementa are noticable, some probably I had to discover.

It may sound strange, but I managed to go through the campaign in early days, even if I had edit my saves two times to bypass then glitching scripts, and even got some fun from playing campaign. Heh, some fun even came from glitches, for exampe, like one where during one of local "epic battles" one of fighters turned to be invincible and entire enemy fleet shot at it. Freeplay mode had own problems, outside of broken missions scripts, yet it seems things are getting slightly better now. At least those "build-expand" elements seems finally working, and trading ships no longer pack in stacks or ram everything.

However, I can't recommend this game to anyone, until big discount (which we won't see until Egosoft will consider game fixed enough, to prevent even greater outburst of rage caused by newcomers), because you won't get what you'll pay for, even after 3.0 patch.

In addition few words into X-R's defense. Firstly, this game called X-Rebirth, not X-3Rebirth, so I don't have problems with single ship, in fact I like it (I still remember my WTFPWNGE-grade upgraded X-Craft in XbtF, that was cool ship), smaller galaxy, smaller everything, as bigger is not always better. Second, people blame most in-zone traffic ships as faux. True so, but those faux ships give a little bit of life to zones. When I launch earlier X-games, I can't get rid of feeling that even busiest sectors there are empty. So I prefer busier, even if fauxey areas of X-R. It's like Witcher or Gothic - their NPCs may not be more "alive" than their competitors, but somehow world seems more real. Graphics, while far from modern standards, at times generate pretty awesome pictures (though pretty shatted by one of updates (2.51, that added a lot of "dust clouds" to otherwise wonderful view), yet it times (up close, mostly) looks worse than X-3 (or maybe X-2).

tl;dr, X-Rebirth may be a reboot of series (and may even prove itself as worthy game), but it definitely had to spend at least a year in early access, with much less of an uproar and without 33 on metacritic. I can't recommend it for purchase, because I think it's overpriced and far from state I could consider "finished"

Some folks kinda uncovered in the files that they initially made X-Rebirth for the 360 and the PC. Somehow that backfired when the game was rejected by M$ or some publisher. By then the game was already quite made and so they continued making it for the PC instead of scrapping it entirely. But the design decisions were already set in and implemented and they couldn't turn back on them. So when it was near release, they kept emphasizing on the Rebirth portion that it was a completely different game from the X2-X3 games. People bought the game at launch, those were pretty much conned and the game stayed at top selling lists for a few days. True enough, the game didn't know what it wanted to be at the start, whether it was a PC or console game or a multiplat game. Controls were atrocious on both the kb and gamepad, the ability to walk in the stations were advertised quite a bit but they're nothing but the same repetitive, generic hubs, also there were bugs aplenty.

I can't stand being in one ship which is why I played from X2 onwards. My typical endgame play in X3 involved me bringing in an entire fleet of M1 Carriers full of fighters, with M2s Destroyers and M6 Corvettes escorting the Carrier. At the battle itself, the Carrier or Carriers would launch its entire fleet of fighters which would swarm the enemy. Except they would crash all the time without mods. I'll normally be switching between all the capital ships or dogfighting myself in a carrier launched M3+ or a good M6 like the Hyperion. Getting to that part of owning a fleet like that is one of the fun part of X3. Funny thing is I knew about the single ship in Rebirth for quite sometime before they even released the game, but I still got it anyway.

Shame we cannot play elite, but we can play this in consolation.

The Elite Refund Quest Text Adventure:

http://melhadf.itch.io/refund-quest

Yeah, I read about that on several boards, even Roguey mentioned that, IIRC. Personally I don't know whether it was true or false, some claimed older X also had 360 references in their files. So I won't pick sides here (no, it's not related to Witcher saga:)).
Though again, this reminds me rumours we had when first Gothic was released, someone said it was console project that was rejected, so thank consoles for horrid controls. Do not remember all the details - it's been more than a decade ago. Controls worked, so technically they were fine. But lack of certain options we got used to over decade (autopilot, following, look around, you know them) was not.
As for hubs, well, I cant' say I'm an expert on lore, but wouldn't it be wise to have common layout for logistical simplicity? I admit, visits those stations in X-R were nearly useless and pointless (especially crawling through ventilation shafts and looting lockers), but we live in common buildings, use common vehicles, few things really unique. Sure, unique areas would greatly improve overall impression, especially if we had access to beautiful areas, like greenhouses, or those little "garden" domes seen from outside - instead of those red trensparent dancers, bleh. I don't have problems with single ship really, as long as you can fine-tune it to your own preferences, as it was with X-Craft, and to lesser extent, all other crafts in subsequent games, excluding Albion Skunk, really - those upgrading options aren't, exactly fit my preferences. It could've been me, of course, but generally I picked a favorite craft (not necessarily most powerful one), and used it, switching seats only when there really was need (mostly precision movements, or super-fast runs somewhere). Surely, having options is a good thing, but I miss X2 unique cockpits. As much as I liked building a fleet of capships, I think X-universe wasn't ready for real big ships, as it lacks realistic cockpits for them (I exclude mods on purpose).


Returning back to topic - that acquaintance of mine I mentioned in another thread, is really enjoying his Elite. But he is hardcore fan, not casual.

On the Frontier forums a player of alpha and beta is having a worse time in the final release:
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=85102

Thank you for providing what seems to be the only post that has real information about how it's going in the time I scanned over this thread.

If someone else did provide real information, I apologize if I missed it. Got a bit frustrated with no one answering my question but being quick to talk about X Rebirth negatively when my only point about that was that I'm cautious of buying into Elite because of it.