Hi everybody,

Are the story missions worth the time to play the whole series or are they all just basically the same sandbox game with evolving features and graphics ?
I just started with "beyond the frontier" and until not it's been a bit of a chore, just flying from A to B over and over again to earn money without anything else to it, but I'd be willing to bear with it if it gets a little more intense later on. If it's only for the sandbox part I'd propably just switch to the latest one.

It's been ages since I've played X:R or X:TC but despite having spent 100's of hours on them I never finished the story missions lol. I can't really say as I spent most of my time trying to build up station complexes to support buying and equipping the big Cap ships. Which, iirc, is necessary to do some of the later missions. With mods/scripts you can create auto trade ships (run by AI) that will make you a fair amount of credits w/o having to fly from point A to B yourself. Just keep in mind that the ships are vulnerable to attack by pirates, etc so you do have to baby sit them to some extent. I remember there was a satellite mod that alerted you when there was hostile ships in sensor range of your network. I tweaked it to warn me only when hostile ships and my auto trader ships were in the same system.

All in all I'd have to say you spend more time on the sandbox aspect.

If I'm being honest I would have to say no, the games are not worth it for the story and if you buy them and play them for that you will be disappointed. The main draw of these games is the sandbox aspect of building up your empire and accruing credits by any means necessary; trading, pirating, ferrying, mining and businesses etc. The plot missions are only worth it for some of the goodies you get from some of them as rewards.

Tony.

I persevered through the (admittedly buggy and badly presented) campaign storyline in X:R and ultimately enjoyed it. If you want to skip straight to X:TC you can though - AFACIT you're not going to struggle to follow the plot in TC from doing this.

The story has never been the strong point of the X games. The novels are better in that regard.
The X series' speciality is complexity, sandbox play and moddability.