Phatose on 24/10/2008 at 21:01
Improved is extraordinarily subjective, in this case.
It's buggy as hell right now. More importantly though, combat has been rebalanced, apparently exclusively to target the people who cleaned out entire sectors in reunion with nothing more then a fighter. As it stands now, combat is absolutely vicious, with Xenon armed with weapons that rip through shields and do not miss (they have a short range, but there's no slide option, so staying out of range is much harder then it sounds.). Pirates have area effect weapons which are equally hard to dodge and absolutely rip things apart.
Mission are comically unpredictable. 'Hard' mission may spawn nothing but fighters and a corvette, while an 'Easy' mission could have an entire armada headed out at you.
Me - I played X3 to the point there was nothing left to do but blow things up in the doomsday ship that was the hyperion and watch numbers rise. Bought TC....shelved it. It just wasn't fun.
If you liked the XTended mod for X3 more then you liked vanilla, you're the target audience. If you didn't - or if you're new to the series - stay far, far away. X3 wasn't especially forgiving, and X3 is even less forgiving.
swaaye on 24/10/2008 at 21:24
Blew gobs of hours in X2 before I realized that it was a time sink with little rewards, IMO. If you are a sci-fi space fanatic that really, really likes the thought of balancing out the books and discovering how to take advantage of a strangely flawed economy to earn spacebucks, these games are for you. You can get to a point where all you need to do is sit in the UI and direct your slowly growing empire and its little mostly-automated robofreighters.
The combat is terrible. Voice acting laughable. Missions are lame and quirky, even if the storyline is semi-fascinating. And the name of the main adversary is one hell of a tragic choice....good for comedy though.
Space Economics Simulator with the goal being having everything and realizing it is all rather pointless. I foolishly bought X3 because it was only $20 at the time and only put a few hours in before I realized that I really didn't want to go through that kind of gameplay again.
catbarf on 24/10/2008 at 21:28
If they don't bother to include a half-decent tutorial, I couldn't care less.
swaaye on 24/10/2008 at 21:31
Quote Posted by catbarf
If they don't bother to include a half-decent tutorial, I couldn't care less.
Yeah it does have a scary learning curve.
Chimpy Chompy on 25/10/2008 at 18:46
I spent a lot of time on X2 but lost steam after a while. I realised that despite having dozens of factories working away, it was going to take a hell of a long time for me to be able to afford the big toys, ie a carrier or destroyer. I don't know if that's normal, or if I just failed to properly grasp the workings of economy. Maybe I should have just left it running overnight with the time-acceleration turned on.
Anyway I've love to try some form of X3 as I do like the general formula to these games. How does it compare (interface, combat, economy etc) to X2?
