Not any more…
Free weekend on Steam for those curious to give it a try for themselves. I liked X3. I didn’t like this, though - but I was too horrified by the weird looking alien (certainly it couldn’t be human, could it?) that boards your ship in the intro scenes and the rubbish “highway” travel system (it’s no Freelancer) to get far into it. I think I lasted ten minutes.
But it’s a BIG UPDATE. ;)
I’m gonna dive back in this weekend to see if it’s…any more bearable.
Life’s too short to play bad games, Brian!
But I play them so you don’t have to. I mean this is for the blog, not for ME. C’mon now…
Well, you do have a point there, I must admit. We can all watch the resultant Twitch stream or YouTube vids and think “Whew! Glad I dodged that bullet.” ;-)
BTW, are you still stuck with 15 minute max videos on YouTube? What did they think you’d infringed on?
Oh, thank you for asking! Thankfully that limit – which was the result of a copyright strike from a video of X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter – has been removed as of last week.
THANK GOD. It was really demoralizing.
X Rebirth is actually pretty good now. If you come into it with a fresh look, you might just like it.
Yuh huh…
I’ve downloaded the game, and I’m waiting on YOUR assessment to determine if it gets fired up or not. No pressure, of course.
I don’t know about the quality of X:Rebirth, but I just got a helpful email from Steam telling me that Albion Prelude is on sale. I bought X3:TC more than a year ago I think, but Steam has avoided discounting Albion Prelude for some reason… I’ve been waiting for the full package before I dived into X3:TC, but now I’m running out of excuses…
I briefly wondered if I might just skip TC and go straight for X:Rebirth (in the hope they might’ve removed some of the grindy hassles that I associated with X3:Reunion), but my favorite thing about X3 is still the super giant spaceships and the dream of captaining my own destroyer. Since they relegated the player to a single ship in Rebirth, I’m probably only interested if they patch in more capital ship gameplay.
I played half an hour of tutorial. I’d probably try it out if I had time. The tutorial is not let down so much by the B- voice acting, but by being a constant stream of go here, now here, now here. But there’s a nice feel of being in active spacelanes.
I have been also waiting for another sale of X3 with Albion Prelude, but actually did buy X:Rebirth at release and played it for a while. I never did try X3, though, so picked it up on sale and installed it last night to give it a try sometime soon hopefully.
If Brian comes back with good news on Rebirth, I may try that again first.
I have X3: Terran Conflict as it was included in some bundle. Are these complicated games that take a long time to learn, or if it easy to jump in and play?
There’s definitely a learning curve involved. Especially when it comes to getting to the good stuff.
So the entire X series is free for the weekend.
I DL’d and installed Terran Conflict, but haven’t tried it yet.
Brian Rubin, if you bought any of the series on this sale, what would it be? TC? AP? Rebirth?
So Star Citizen and the Xs do free weekends… on the same weekend?
Being an X Series Fanboy I hope i can jump in here and say just play X3:AP. It’s the best of the series.
X-Rebirth isn’t even an X-Series game in my book. They went in a totally different direction with the gameplay. And none of it gels into anything even remotely fun. Bugs everywhere and the gameplay still just isn’t there. I consider myself able to “get” a pretty steep learning curve, but even months later I just don’t see how anyone could get into this game and enjoy it.
There’s another thread where this is discussed at more length. You can’t go wrong with either TC or AP, imo. Even though I haven’t given the patched version of Rebirth a good try yet, I would caution against jumping in there. Its design is quite different from the later X games.
Rob, X3 is quite complex and definitely takes a while to “learn”. Much of its learning curve involves getting familiar with its unique interfaces and systems rather than training muscle memory and the like. It can have a glacial pace, is very sandboxy, and rewards those most who are excited to generate their own game goals.
If you want to understand how someone might play it in “a right way”, check out oomalley’s journal-like posts in the above-mentioned thread. I’m sorry, I’m in transit and don’t have the time to search for it.
Interestingly, you can get TC for $5.43 or both for $6.79, so it would be crazy not to get both at this point. I have already DL’d both and will try both this weekend, so thanks.
The earlier thread that Hotfreak mentions is specific to Terran Conflict. O’Malley’s diary (along with Buatha’s) begins here on page 11.