Just played X-Rebirth again after two years or so. It's not the best game by any means - I managed to be an millionaire within 90 minues by looting air vents in stations, which is absolutely ridiculous - but I just noticed again how freaking cool the game looks.
The stations, the highways - GREAT. The look is great. The implementations of the assets is another matter.
In opposite to many people, I actually enjoyed to be in the highways. The sense of speed, the visuals is top notch. Yet it's absolutely confusing. The map looks like some Picasso painting. I took a ferrying-job and spent over five-minutes highwaying, with absolutely no sense of where I am. Only the arrow kept me going.
In general, the arrow reminds me of the autopilot in Elite: Frontier and FFE. Without an autopilot, navigation was pretty much impossible. The same is true for that arrow in X:R. Except that the reason for the impossibility made sense in Elite (Newtonian physics), while in X it just looks as if the highway-designers were high.
Playing this game again made the realize something: There was no need for the ditching of the gates! Why couldn't they keep the great chess-board layout of the universe AND add the visual fidelity of the highway system? I see no reason why the Albion system couldn't have the chessboard layout even with the highways (or upgrade the gates with the new visuals)
Same with the stations: They are a visual marvel (in space), but finding something on them is a quest in itself. The old small-scale stations looked far less impressive, but were far easier to handle.
Anyway, it's patently obvious to me, that the engineers ran wild on this one, with not much oversight and constraints from the game-play department. That's my verdicht for X:R. The whole game has that "awesomish - let's see what we can do, not should do"-feel.
As a tech-demo, X:R is awesome
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my main problem with the highways is that the current layout they are not very practical, they go in rounds and some systems are a pain to live in. They also add fake traffic... fake traffic!! for what? There is enough real ships travelling to them to fake it, luckily there is a mod to get rid of the fake traffic.
Hope next game is more about playability and less about pointless show-off
Hope next game is more about playability and less about pointless show-off
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spankahontis
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- Joined: Tue, 2. Nov 10, 21:47
ezra-r wrote:my main problem with the highways is that the current layout they are not very practical, they go in rounds and some systems are a pain to live in. They also add fake traffic... fake traffic!! for what? There is enough real ships travelling to them to fake it, luckily there is a mod to get rid of the fake traffic.
Hope next game is more about playability and less about pointless show-off
They missed a trick there, they should of built a factory that manufactures civilian crafts.
Enough of them in a zone can trigger a Police Scan mission or a Prison Break.