X-Rebirth Pre-Review and Impressions (Gif Warning)

Update- Egosoft have responded to at least address concerns players are having (reproduced here in part from http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?p=4193602 … because the forums are going down under load …):

###### Tricks & Tips ######

– Dont run game in 32bit Windows and make sure you have enough memory free

– Make sure you have latest drivers installed.

– If you have problems with the game, reset all settings in the driver to default

– If you suffer performance problems set the LOD and view distance to low values. The game should still look good but this helps a LOT. Consider turning off shadows, consider medium or low shaders if your GPU is the bottleneck.

– Trading: Some people report problems that trade ships do not work as expected. In most cases this is not a bug with the trade ship AI but the ship did not get the right order through the trade menu. As mentioned above, we definitely want to improve this menu further, but most importantly you have to make sure that when you add a trade order to a ship, you click on NEXT after selecting the order and assigning it to the ship selected at the top of the menu. Then you select the amount and confirm the order. After this you should see that an order was added to the ships order queue. One thing we want to improve is management of this queue and show it more clearly in trade ship info menus.

– There seems to be a bug with menus remaining open sometimes. If you end up with a non working menu, please see if changing the screen resolution or AA settings (ESC – settings – graphic settings) helps to make the menus work again. You can undo those changes after it works again. If this happens repeatedly please email information on how you reproduce this to info@egosoft.com

And some upcoming features:

###### Feedback about feature requests: ######

– Map and other menu improvement: We have a number of menu and map improvements planned. This includes more control over the map like the zoom that was suggested here and changing the layout of some of the text menus. We are also considering showing the “minimap” on the eventmonitor whenever there is “no signal” at the moment. These are a lot of individual improvements some of which will happen soon.

– Autopilot / SETA: We will add some autopilot support. However it is our goal with X Rebirth that you do not need to run the game semi-automatically for extended periods of time. This is also he reason why we will not support SETA / SINZA time acceleration. There should never be a need to wait 20 minutes for your trade ships once you have multiple ships. You can queue orders and do many things in parallel. Time acceleration as a trick to accelerate trading will not be in X Rebirth.

– Facial animations: We will look into improving facial animations.

– External view / Ability to turn around in cockpit: This was asked for a few times. Yes we will look into this but it will be part of a larger update and take more time than just a few weeks. It will also be combined with support for looking around in the cockpit (e.g with a joystick POV hat) and maybe also support for Oculus Rift style VR. So please be aware that this feature will take some time to add.

– Targeting hotkeys: Another feature that was requested a couple of times. Yes we will do this. Based on your feedback that is for one of the earlier updates even though such “explicit” targets only work in the mouse / keyboard mode. Not with controllers!

– Talking to people on stations: We have a plan for an early patch (early december) which will make the conversations and finding NPCs for jobs a lot easier and more accessible. This has a high priority.

– Skipping conversations: We will look into this, but I can not promise that this is always possible.

– Joystick support: We are aware that joystick support (as opposed to gamepad) at this time is not perfect. We definitely will make this a priority for one of the next updates, but please allow a little time for this.

Now on with the impressions!

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A game like X-Rebirth takes thousands of hours to explore, enjoy and ultimately wrap your head around. This is in theory of course, because you may not like what you see, but the point is it makes a proper timely review difficult. I’m not going to try to do a full review yet, because that wouldn’t do the game justice.

Having said that…there are some things you should know before buying the game:

First the positives:

• Flying around in space is just as awesome as the gifs and screens would have you to believe. The game is pretty at its best, with is a huge sense of scale but there is still enough detail to blow you away.
• The interiors look decent enough and there is a bit of variety to be found.
• The controls are fine and fighting in space is fun. It is a bit fiddly to dock and perform other operations but there is nothing too game breaking. Note that the this does not apply to walking around, which feels floaty (like you are in a hovercraft) and kind of messed up.
• Unlike the previous X titles, this game does make some effort to show you how to play. This increases the chance of you actually getting into the universe.

Which is all fine, but that is where the fun stops.

The negatives:

• The game runs terribly. Not in the delightful “I need a new PC” kind of way, but in the “I have a good PC why doesn’t changing the settings do anything?” kind of way. Getting low fps? Well there isn’t a lot you can do about it. Changing the LOD and draw distances can apparently help but not in ways you’d expect. The short version is there are a lot of fixes that need to be done in this regard. It doesn’t feel fundamentally broken, just buggy, but that is enough to hold off for now.
• Note that the game seems particularly CPU bound at this stage. So if you are considering upgrading your GPU to brute force it, you may not get the results you are after.
• Users are reporting plenty of crashes including a nasty bug at launch related to your sound settings (see steam forums). There are workarounds to get you flying, but you can expect to be using google as part of your pre-launch checks.
• Once you are out of space, the character models are terrible and broken in some ways. Not only does your co-pilot need to expose her breasts but she often doesn’t blink…and then blinks too much. This is carried over to the other NPCs which are just as poorly designed, often repeated and have terrible voice acting. As mentioned before, actually moving around to talk to them does not feel right at all and you’ll often miss your target.
• The voice acting would be ok if people had something good to say but they do not. The dialogue is pretty terrible as a whole and in general most of your time spent out of the ship is time that will make you want to jump back into it.





• The interface can be hard to read especially at higher resolutions (not that you can really play at them). It needs a bit of cleaning up and doesn’t scale properly.
• The worst part about the interface is how trading works. You can’t just bring up a list of goods to buy and sell, no that would be too easy. Instead you have to wonder around and waste a heap of time working out where to buy things from. When you finally find some weapons? Good luck working out which one is better. It all just needs a lot more time to stream-line.
• The mod support that can fix all this things is still to come. So are patches with requested features such as auto-pilot. I’d suggest perhaps your money should be similarly arriving to the devs at a time TBD.

So all-up, X-Rebirth is currently a mixed bag. As it stands, it is hard to justify the asking price until a lot of patches come through. While that sounds negative, the fact is that nobody should have really expected otherwise given the ambition of the title and the history of similar products. If you are on the fence? Wait it out for at least a couple of updates. The good news is once all this is sorted out (no small task), the game could really turn into something special, even if it is not quite of the same scale or scope as the previous efforts.

And once the mods start rolling? We are all in for a treat.

The wonderful animated gifs in this post are care of http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=711931

Ghostship Aftermath – Mini Review

(Greenlight http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=175581955)

Popping up as the final bonus in the groupees greenlight bundle 4 is Ghostship Aftermath, a follow up to the action focused Ghostship.

It is a simple enough idea. There is a huge spaceship floating around in space. Some bad stuff has gone down and you are tasked with going inside to check it all out. Despite the game presenting a floating gun, you are not going to be shooting aliens here. Instead the game is more “A machine for pigs” than Dead Space as you wander around, solve some simple puzzles or complete easy tasks and progress through the environment. Whilst you can “die” this is more a result of you thinking “I wonder if I can die doing this” than anything particularly challenging or dangerous.

A game like this lives and dies by the immersion created and Ghostship delivers on this front. The perspective from inside the suit allows effects like a frosted visor which serves the dual purpose of nailing the atmosphere and also masking some occasionally shoddy graphics. Of note, the HUD elements are integrated into the suit, which is a great idea for keeping you involved in what is going on. Do you dare look down and check out your objective when something can be lurking around the corner? Well in this game you probably safely will, but it still makes for a good implementation.

Technically the game is a mixed bag. Occasionally you’ll hit a section of the ship which betrays the indie origins. In other sections, all the effects come together and you’ll believe you are playing something with a lot higher budget. It all works better in Aftermath than the original game, because the environment was always the strongest part and the aliens didn’t really live up to the rest. Hence with them removed and no distracting low quality gun effects, it is a much more even experience. Sound effects are not abundantly used, but the constant breathing through your suit hits the right mark and you are not distracted by an unnecessary orchestral score.

What does this all add up to? Well it is difficult to say. The trick with a game like this is always that the main event has already happened. Rather than being an active participant, you are simply unravelling the clues to discover the cause of some much more interesting events. Because there are quite a few games in the atmosphere/story genre now you’ll probably know if this is a draw for you. Given the somewhat unique setting and the relative pluses and minuses in terms of immersion and lack of variety, you could do a lot worse than stepping into space once more.

All that said, the main attraction here would seem to be the oculus rift integration. I don’t own one, so I can’t speak for how well it is implemented here but the draw is obvious. Whilst waiting for bigger name titles like Routine to appear, you could do a lot worse than check this particular attempt out if you are lucky enough to own one.

Betrayer – Steam early access

Every now and then a game jumps up and grabs your attention by being a little bit different. FPS survival type horror? Plenty of those. Games that go for a really different black and white asthetic? Well we have some of those too.

But all of that combined? Well it has probably been done at some stage. But it has been done again with Betrayer and the result is looking darn good.

Check it out on Steam early access: http://store.steampowered.com/app/243120/

To give you an idea of what it is? Here are some really well put together impressions from Grief.exe care of NeoGAF. He takes us through the early sections and demonstrates some of the mechanics and combat situations available:

There seems to be a long way to go, but the journey the game is on seems to be heading somewhere interesting. One to keep an eye on.