What's Going On Here

[mr.WHO]

@phantomrock2:
If you want to turn X-Rebirth into much better game - try this:
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=381043&start=0

Destroyable stations
Captureable stations
Destroyable factions
Wars between factions
Player owned Shipyards
Player can build ship and sell them to other faction to give their fleets a boost.

Better capship combat (still no more commands, but improved warship AI, logic and behaviour both movement and combat - e.g. dedicated drone carriers are now expensive....but badass).

Basically you don't need complex commands...because you don't have to micromanage - ships and fleets do what they supose to do on their own and you don't have to manually override/oversee every single ship on our own.

With this mod you actually can build meaningful empire with vast fleets and aim for galaxy conquest.
Or become power behind the scene selling ship to faction you wich to dominate...or sell to everyone to keep galaxy in ballance.

Vanilla X-Rebirth is boring, but CWIR mod make it valid stop-gap untill Egosoft will release the next game (which is still so early in development that they provide almost no info about it).

[bambikaka]

You are going to always be struggling with the game if you keep comparing it to X3, the scope is much more limited, no top end, like huge fleets, fleet commands and destroying other factions, or massive complexes of stations arranged in a loop to provide you with cheap wares.

Game is done with a new engine so the first instalment is not going to have as much content as the games with the old engine.

Trying to put in a timeline, you have:
X2/X3R/X3TC/X3AP
then the counter reset, and we have:
X Rebirth, and that is it.

Or pretty much, go back and play X2 with no mods and then it will became clear what X Rebirth is.

what? lol X and X2 were good games in their time, there were no similar games out, the team was new and unexperienced and the games followed each other pretty quickly so by the time you would get annoyed or bored there was a new release. X:R on the other hand came after 15 years of experience. having a new engine isnt an excuse for the quality of the game today. the scripts driving the game are clearly just thrown together to have something at all, the graphics is only good as long as long you dont look a bit closer and the mechanisms, that were already scripted once, were entirely missing or messed up. the bad UI became even worse and i could go on. also we are already over 3 years since xr and other than some similarly poor PAID dlc and some meaningless patch nothing happened... come on, x:r isnt only bad if you compare it to earlier x games, its bad for a casual game too. and fitting it into t restart timeline still dont justify its quality...

[Nanook]

... if you knew that you CANNOT destroy stations ...

yeah, Rebirth can be a pita. But reading threads demonstrating a mentality like "a game does not adapt to how I want it => out" makes me think about the quality of player's relations to other human beings.

"my girlfriend does not adapt to how I want her => out" - is it really that simple ?

Enough with the personal comments. Discuss the topic, not the OP.

[phantomrock2]

@phantomrock2:
If you want to turn X-Rebirth into much better game - try this:
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=381043&start=0

Destroyable stations
Captureable stations
Destroyable factions
Wars between factions
Player owned Shipyards
Player can build ship and sell them to other faction to give their fleets a boost.

Better capship combat (still no more commands, but improved warship AI, logic and behaviour both movement and combat - e.g. dedicated drone carriers are now expensive....but badass).

Basically you don't need complex commands...because you don't have to micromanage - ships and fleets do what they supose to do on their own and you don't have to manually override/oversee every single ship on our own.

With this mod you actually can build meaningful empire with vast fleets and aim for galaxy conquest.
Or become power behind the scene selling ship to faction you wich to dominate...or sell to everyone to keep galaxy in ballance.

Vanilla X-Rebirth is boring, but CWIR mod make it valid stop-gap untill Egosoft will release the next game (which is still so early in development that they provide almost no info about it).

This sounds interesting. Very interesting!

[kurush]

yeah, Rebirth can be a pita. But reading threads demonstrating a mentality like "a game does not adapt to how I want it => out" makes me think about the quality of player's relations to other human beings.

The thing I've been watching all these years is the steam player counter for Rebirth. It recently dipped under 70 So yeah, some of these 70 people may think like you do The question why other few thousand who left Egosoft wold should care about this opinion remains open. For the record, I am one of these 70 as I am running it as economy simulation (which also kinda sucks compared to previous games). And the game itself has absolutely nothing to be proud off. May be Egosoft somehow manage to redesign the gameplay while keeping their new engine, who knows. Otherwise, it is not even a niche game, it is a dead game. Barely worth $16 I spent on it.

[BigBANGtheory]

So XR's solution to the X3 problem of UI micromanagement chaos of player assets was.... not to make the UI more user friendly but to remove the management altogether.

"This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.” - Douglas Adams

[UniTrader]

The thing I've been watching all these years is the steam player counter for Rebirth. It recently dipped under 70 So yeah, some of these 70 people may think like you do The question why other few thousand who left Egosoft wold should care about this opinion remains open. For the record, I am one of these 70 as I am running it as economy simulation (which also kinda sucks compared to previous games).

i dont think that number is representantive, because that would mean over 200% of the players use my relatively recently released mod (about 1 month ago)... (currently at just above 160 subscribers)

[bambikaka]

The thing I've been watching all these years is the steam player counter for Rebirth. It recently dipped under 70 So yeah, some of these 70 people may think like you do The question why other few thousand who left Egosoft wold should care about this opinion remains open. For the record, I am one of these 70 as I am running it as economy simulation (which also kinda sucks compared to previous games).

i dont think that number is representantive, because that would mean over 200% of the players use my relatively recently released mod (about 1 month ago)... (currently at just above 160 subscribers)

that only means they have subscribed. i have 5000+ subscriber on a skyrim mod... i think not even 10 use it actively so "i dont think that number is representantive"

[NewtSoup]

Oh really? Which mod? I still play skyrim regularly.

[kurush]

i dont think that number is representantive, because that would mean over 200% of the players use my relatively recently released mod (about 1 month ago)... (currently at just above 160 subscribers)

The peak players are actually around 250, I am talking about the lower night dip So your player base is covered here. It is fun to compare it to X3 games combined. They seem to beat it twofold even after all these years and some of them also had DVD releases/non DRM executables that wouldn't count.

[phantomrock2]

I don't know folks but there were times when I would make a major leap in TC & AP & I'd still be ready to take on more missions & plots. I'm just going to more than likely wait for a new release.

[bambikaka]

look for narrow blades, though its unsupported as not playing skyrim years ago there are 2 versions

[Alan Phipps]

Please let's stay on the X Rebirth topic.

Several thread topics from the OP that derailed or ended up going down a very similar path are partially merged here.

[pref]

The peak players are actually around 250, I am talking about the lower night dip So your player base is covered here. It is fun to compare it to X3 games combined. They seem to beat it twofold even after all these years and some of them also had DVD releases/non DRM executables that wouldn't count.

If you watch older but still working mods, they get a few players every day with a constantly increasing subscriber rate - while steam api's playercount stays around that of AP if you exclude the patch peaks.
Seems like many people come back to take a look and leave again.
Pity, with a years scripting work this game could have been made so much better with a little support from EGO.
Shape up ship commands, make the world more dynamic - CWIR achieved a lot too without a full-time dev team.

[RAVEN.myst]

I don't know folks but there were times when I would make a major leap in TC & AP & I'd still be ready to take on more missions & plots. I'm just going to more than likely wait for a new release.

That's what has kept me coming back to TC/AP - even years and years down the line, I find that from time to time I learn or figure out something new, and yes, sometimes it's even "a major leap". Admittedly, major new revelations have grown fewer and farther between, but that's natural - the fact that they still can and do happen after all these years of seriously intensive play is what amazes and delights me. Sadly, though, the latest chapter ha failed to deliver in this regard where I'm concerned, and so yes, much like you, I am also awaiting the next one (and playing TC and AP while I do so, heheheh!) I allow myself to imagine and hope for a title that takes advantage of the technical and even some conceptual advances made in Rebirth, but which re-embraces the deeper philosophies of its predecessors (XR flash with X3 substance, if you like); I call that X Utopia.

[Santi]

That "leaps" are because loads of content has been added to the games over the years, not only official content, but Mods made official and, on top of that, the Modders content.

It is the reason why I will launch X3 after a year of inactivity back in the day, to check what was new. I remember ditching my current X3 game to check the bonus pack for X2, and spent many hours playing it again.

The amount of stuff in X3 is mind boggling and except a very few people, I am sure nobody can exactly say what content is present in X3 Reunion and X3 Terran Conflict in the vanilla versions anymore.

I imagine is down to how everybody perceive X Rebirth, for me it is a new start and I had it clear in my mind that it will have a lot less scope that previous games and many faults. If you think of X Rebirth as a continuation of the series, then you are right to expect a lot more scope in features from the game.

[RAVEN.myst]

Santi: for me, the content has not been changing much at all - I started playing the X3s a couple of years after release (I played TC first, and only much later went back to Reunion to fill in the story. Just before TC, I was playing X2, also starting long after its release, so I was playing it in its most final version as well) - when I started playing, X3TC was already at v3, so since then no new official content has been added, and still I manage to occasionally find new nuances ("newances"? ) I always played with Bonus Pack, and only vanilla (which I know very very well, by now, though not from a programmer's perspective, but rather that of a power user.) So the content platform that was I operating in was pretty much totally constant. It's just that the game has so much scope, that it's not necessarily new things about it I end up discovering, but new ways to interact with what's already known - in other words, the classic Xs manage to accommodate the player's imagination - an impressive achievement, in my opinion!

Regarding Rebirth being a new start: I've heard this argument before (many many times - too many), and (with all due respect) I'm afraid it doesn't hold water for me; it fails to be a valid excuse as too much previous experience that was applicable even for a revolutionary new iteration was thrown out unnecessarily or outright disregarded/forgotten about. I'll make one of them ever-popular automotive analogies: when a car manufacturer designs a new model, they don't throw out over a century of accumulated expertise (not just their own, but that of the entire auto industry) and then sit down to design the wheel and the internal combustion engine (and the steering mechanism, and the gearbox, and the indicator lights, and the headlights, and the alternator-...etc!) from scratch - they BUILD ON what is already known, and they may try to implement any breakthroughs that have been made in their R&D department in the meantime (or stolen from other companies' R&D!) But unfortunately, to me Rebirth (which I thoroughly enjoy, please understand - if only for a couple of weeks at a time, perhaps once a year) has always felt like it was approached in precisely such a manner. "OK, let's reinvent from scratch - we want to this be NEW and FRESH, unburdened by the excellence of our previous titles - we want to catch the gullible youngsters who are starting to play games; don't worry about the vets - they're loyal to us because they know and love our stuff, so they'll be back regardless. Forget about all the cool 5417 we have going already in our games, we're going to pretend that it can't apply to this New! Improved! product, and its shininess will hide those omissions and shortcomings from the eyes of our customers". I know, that's a bit hyperbolic, but I'm sure you get my drift (no, that's not "drift" in the street racing sense - though if it were, you can be sure those differentials with diff-lock that they use were also not invented from scratch, but rather from existing designs.)

To me, it looks like the sad mistake that was made was to consider the previous approach as monolithic, as one indivisible unit, in which the bad HAS to be taken with the good, without the ability to shed the outdated while keeping the excellent - and this is simply not true. That is, unless they no longer have any people on board who can understand the code of the classic Xs - which I don't think is the case. So what gives?

Anyhow, back to my harmless-rank, no-blood-on-THESE-hands X3TC playthrough Currently stealing ATF tech for the A.S.S. (that is SUCH an unfortunately named organisation! ) while feeding microchips to Ye Olde Hubbe...

[pref]

Im pretty sure adding the majority of the X3 command set, some additional functions for mass handling of assets and even some GoD-like functionality would have taken much less time to implement then station interiors and related stuff.

Its much more about the intentions and focus unfortunately. To me it seems like ES got completely bored of their old system, wanted to make a plot oriented casual game that reminds ppl of the old X games somewhat. Then they ran out of time becuse AAA style plots and NPC interactions take much more time then ship commands and ui scripting.
These AAA tites that barely have a game behind and are mainly just a story, can easily be done with a bigger team and a fat marketing budget from a couple cliches put together.
But try that with a couple 10 devs, and you will take decades to finish while your graphics will already be outdated at release (which is one of the main selling points in this scenario).
And even if it works out it will just be a forgettable story without a real game behind. Though it will turn profitsss if the advertisement hit the sweet spot initially.

Still then the player stats and all time peaks for AP and XR are worth a second thought. I mean the similar daily counters and the tenfold peak for XR. Had their base game been done well, they could have released more DLCs and hope for a better sales figure for the next title.
So having a less flashy game with well implemented mechanics would pay off long term. Even if big studios can afford to be flashy enough to drop the creative parts for a more precise roi calculation.

[Santi]

Regarding Rebirth being a new start: I've heard this argument before (many many times - too many), and (with all due respect) I'm afraid it doesn't hold water for me; it fails to be a valid excuse as too much previous experience that was applicable even for a revolutionary new iteration was thrown out unnecessarily or outright disregarded/forgotten about.

But unfortunately, to me Rebirth (which I thoroughly enjoy, please understand - if only for a couple of weeks at a time, perhaps once a year) has always felt like it was approached in precisely such a manner. "OK, let's reinvent from scratch - we want to this be NEW and FRESH, unburdened by the excellence of our previous titles.

It is a new start, they said they will build everything from scratch. You feel like it has been reinvented from scratch. So surely it is a new start and because of that, scope is not going to be same.

They took a creative risk, 3 years later, after many hours playing X Rebirth, it is easy for me to say that a better approach could have been to draw a lot more from the previous games. But if I put myself in their shoes after 10+ years working in the same game, and I was offered another 10 of the same or create something new, I know what I will choose.

[RAVEN.myst]

But if I put myself in their shoes after 10+ years working in the same game, and I was offered another 10 of the same or create something new, I know what I will choose.

Ah, but therein lies the whole problem, and my very point - it need not be such a binary either-or, a simplistic and reductive black or white: the two options are not mutually exclusive, and neither extreme is the best approach, while in fact a "best of both worlds" approach would, by its very definition (BEST of BOTH) yield superior results. To opt for only one or the other is to exclude the possibilities offered by the other, and inevitably is doomed to achieve less than is possible.

A "fresh start" need not imply the abandonment and discarding of all that went before. A fresh start that retains the knowledge and wisdom learned from past experience is the one that will most likely succeed. How about an X3 gameplay analogy? Seems appropriate Let's say you start a new game from scratch (be it because you've outgrown the available endgame, to try a different role-play, or to see whether you can do some things better this time around). Yes, you go back to square one - but you are going to the start with the knowledge you've gained. You're not going to be making the same mistakes (or too many of them, one hopes), and you're almost certainly going to incorporate things you've learned on your previous go-round much sooner than previously - the first time around you didn't know what CAG and CLS were until quite late, let's say - maybe you put off learning about them and applying them because it seemed all a bit daunting; but the second time around you're going to put them to work a lot sooner, right? Or missiles: novice players often shy away from missiles on the reasonable grounds that they cost money to use, and because the wide selection means that the player must first become familiar with them for effective and appropriate use - but the experienced player has already done so, and can start using missiles sooner, realising how and when they can provide a worthwhile advantage. Likewise with combat drones. And generic missions types. And pretty much everything else. Are you really going to discard all your game expertise when you "start afresh"? And in a game (a relatively consequence-free environment), it's MORE likely one would do so - maybe you want to try something radically different (say, a combat-only pilot without the use of freighters, so no CAG/CLS, for example), so you do so, because the risk is insignificant - if it doesn't work out, so what? It's merely cost some hours of gameplay, nothing more. But when making a business decision, such a risk carries far more serious implications: potential loss of revenue in the short to medium term, and tarnishing one's reputation with the client base, meaning possible loss of market in the long term.

Personally, I don't think it was truly a risk (in the true sense of the word) in the first place - a risk involves a conscious "gamble", if you will. I think (totally speculating here, of course) that a poor directional decision was made, misunderstanding what was needed going forward, pure and simple. This, to me, sounds a lot more plausible than "hey, let's take a gamble - if it works out, we probably snag some new customers and so more profit$$$, but if it blows up in our faces we risk failing to capture that new market share and, even worse, we risk alienating our stable customer and fan base, possibly doing considerable damage to our company reputation and our livelihood. Sounds good?" [ASIDE: This talk of "company reputation" makes me think of Corporation Troubles in X3AP ] This scenario doesn't strike as very believable...

Just in case it sounds as though I hate Rebirth - I really don't (I even enjoy it very occasionally in a limited sort of way.) I know I keep saying this - I do so because it may not be obvious, from many of my expressed views. But despite the fact that I don't think it's downright horrible, that doesn't mean that I don't think it couldn't (shouldn't!) have been much better. And it also doesn't mean I don't think ES made a mistake - I think they very much did. But making mistakes is human and unavoidable - as long as we learn from them (both our own AND those of others, mind you), we grow in wisdom - so I dare to hope, as ES have shown me in the past that they are NOT fools, and fairly responsive to their fans/customers.

Good hunting!

PS: Well, once again I managed to drag what I had to say out to ridiculous lengths - my apple-orgies, it seems I simply can't help myself!