X3 The Reunion

[Bateluer]

I installed the rolling demo for it a while back, looks really badass. But how is the gameplay and storyline? Gamespot gave it a 7 or so, but they've been way off in the past.

 

[SpareFlair]

I think X3 is a fantastic game. What you have to realize is that the storyline is completely secondary, more like an add-on to the game. The game is actually designed as a free space combat/trading/empire building/exploration simulation so it's like a large open universe with open-ended gameplay. You can join and leave the storyline anytime you want or skip it entirely.

I prefer this because with the plethora of FPS's around, I prefer an open-ended game that I can play for months and even years on end without stopping. The first release was buggy because the publisher really made a mess of things by demanding an early release from the developer for pre-Christmas sales. The 80 page manual printed is the wrong version, the game is very slow, some boxes were sold with the wrong discs, etc. Be sure to download the latest patches. Even the offical patches are not most up to date. There were graphic glitches with the X800/X850 series videocards that were fixed in a beta patch only available to registered owners...but it's a good sign that the programmers are reading the forum complaints.

In my opinion, what makes this game great is the open ended nature and inbuilt modibility of the game. If you check out the X3 forums at http://forum.egosoft.com/
you'll see there's a community of over 200,000 people and there is already a heavy amount of mods for the game if you like to create your own sort of universe.

Again, don't expect any long storyline, it's secondary. Gameplay is great if you like exploring and building and doing your own thing like amassing a fleet and constructing an empire of stations, etc. (will take months to do). It's the most fun space sim I've ever played (and I've played them all), but again, the limited story can hamper those of you who are only interested in that. Treated as an open game, you could play it for years on end and this is game that will never leave my harddrive (while Doom, Far Cry, Quake 4, and AOE 3 have all gone already). The game could still use a few more patches to fix it up, but it's still great fun. All my issues are with the publisher, not the developers mainly because on their forums, you can see the programmers and moderators active interaction with gamers and addressing their concerns which has made the game excellently playable. The original release was really really slow, to the point of getting something like 12fps on 7800GTs - Many online reviews were based on the buggy first version.

 

[Dethfrumbelo]

Pretty good. The point is essentially to build one's reputation and credits up high enough to buy destroyer class ships and then blast out the Xenon sectors or annihilate a race or two, whatever you want to do actually. You can even genocide the entire universe if you choose.

The main storyline is nothing to get excited about, however.

They fixed a lot of things in the most recent patch, but they screwed up some other things at the same time like mass driver and shockwave generator video performance.

 

[Bateluer]

Hmm, I might pick it up next month or so, when my funds build back up.

 

[SpareFlair]

Originally posted by: Dethfrumbelo
Pretty good. The point is essentially to build one's reputation and credits up high enough to buy destroyer class ships and then blast out the Xenon sectors or annihilate a race or two, whatever you want to do actually. You can even genocide the entire universe if you choose.

The main storyline is nothing to get excited about, however.

They fixed a lot of things in the most recent patch, but they screwed up some other things at the same time like mass driver and shockwave generator video performance.

The mass driver and shockwave generator bug was actually fixed in the 1.3.1 beta patch only available inside the X3 forums.