This isn’t Star Wars. This is the 2001: A Space Odyssey of space sims.

A lot of people find Kubric’s flicks baffling, including myself on occasion. I was a bit baffled by X3:R, but X3:TC has fixed that. Still, you may actually have to sit and think a little, just like you should be doing as the credits roll on a Kubric flick.

I’m holding out hope for NorthStar, that seems like the only game in this genre that’s at least trying to go in the right direction.

Lets get a few things out of the way : EVE is not a space sim, like Homeworld isnt. Jupiter : Nexus incident isnt either ( all nice games btw )

So lets recap. First, we had Elite. In few tens of kilobytes, practically infinite galaxy and endless fun. We had X-Wing, perfected by TIE fighter. What more can an army space cadet want ? Duh, some Kilrathi action of course ! Hence Wing Commander, perfected in the four-CD epic with movie scenes with Mark Hamill and porn stars in Wing Commander Prophecy. Does a story get better than that ? Well, if you are not just a military type, yes it does. We had Star Control 2 ( reborn as Urquan masters btw ) with so incredibly immersive gameplay and imaginitive story that could kill days. Not a real space sim too, but a great space story.

Of course, the adventurous ones of us, not wanting to take orders from military commanders above, bought our own ships and kicked some Kilrathi ass in Privateer. Smuggled, cheated and had wonderful times chasing that elusive green alien bot around this corner of galaxy.

So then what happened ? Lucasarts tried to milk the Tie-fighter cow some more with X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter, didnt turn out that great, and XWA in its initial incarnation wasnt really much to afterburn over either.
But then, out of the blue, BAM ! Descent Freespace. Wing Commander fans rejoiced, the routine was familiar, the alien faces were new, and we didnt really feel sorry for the Vasudans.

Of course the many fans of Isaac Newton got to enjoy I-War series, and a few of them tried to get to mars with Terminus ( turns out that mars was that one red pixel )

Elsewhere, Novalogic got ahold of Bruce Campell and they went to the Fringe with Tachyons. So we got back to our privateerish habits and got a choice of two plates, Galspan or Bora. Not that much freedom but fun all around.

Volition remembered they forgot beam cannons off the capships, and Freespace 2 was delivered. Incidentally they put so much awesomeness in that the greatest space sim of all time was born. After that, it only went downhill.

Freelancer ? Meh. DarkStar ? Meh squared. Space Force Rogue Uni *cough* X series ? They put GRIND in a single-player game and hid it well away under incomprehensible UI , Wow !?

Anyone remember Microsoft Allegiance ? Good idea, wrong time. Vendetta Online ? Still ticking in some corner of the interwebs, with both users logging on now and then.

So we rest our hopes on Infinity Universe and the remote chance that David Braben might pick up the phone and call Ian Bell again. For the fourth installment. But our patience wears thin.

So where are all the great joystick adventures set in the Firefly universe ? Or Culture universe of Iain M. Banks ? You know, where upgrades look cool and you have to work for them, best missiles go straight in swarms and aliens dont speak english ?
Hey, we would even be happy to pilot ships from the Sienar Fleet Systems again provided that there is no Jar-Jar Binks in the jump radius.

And a bit of a clue : graphics engine with economy engine with cinematic sequencer does not a game make. Whatever happened to fun, stories and imagination ? Its not like there arent any good sci-fi writers or the field would be void of existing stories to borrow from. I want to land on a barren moon of Saturn to meet creatures of light, run around with robots on sunny side of mercury or bump into a monolith this side of Jupiter, for chrissakes, why cant i have that ?

Oh well, i guess the little indy stuff has to bide the time and reliving the Master of Orion in Galactic Civilisations kills the years too.

signed,
Certified Space Nut

I want to love this game, and it has HUGE potential. They should really make it more accessible to us a bit more casual gamers that don’t want to spend most of our time micro-managing trade fleets. From the comments it’s going in the right direction.

I’m on a clean install of XP with latest drivers and I desperately wish I read about Steam’s lack of return policy. I’ve done technical support research on their forums (and the internets at large), but nothing has worked.

The open-universe simulation going on in these games makes me wish them success, but this one is not making me want to give them another chance in the future.

A wasteland can be filled with rocks, and tin cans and still be a wasteland :)

I understand that X3 is not a planetary exploration title, its a trade, empire building and shoot shit title. Add planets as resources in that case. Let me set up mining colonies then have to run back to defend them when pirates come a knocking. Let me dogfight down alien canyons before shooting off into space – sticking to the X3 genre, I think so. There’s nothing wrong with procedurally generating the planets surface – check out this video showing off the Infinity Quest for Earth engine. The planets are procedurally generated there – doesn’t look too boring to me. The entire galaxy in Frontier was effectively generated procedurally, and while the galaxy in Evochron Renegades is hand crafted I can at least go anywhere I want, including the planets and some of the best dogfights I’ve had in that game are ones where I’ve had to cope with air friction and gravity.

I guess what I’m saying is that when I jump into a sector in X3 it feels like what it is, a box in space where the large empty area is filled with rocks, stations and other ships. It removes the vast feeling of space, it completely destroys my immersion because I know that there are edges out there and places I can’t go. Even if I can’t land on a planet I know it has no impact on me in X3, it exerts no gravity, I can’t slingshot around it using the gravity well to outrun the bad guys while trying not to bounce off or avoid burning up, its nothing but a pretty backdrop. X3 doesn’t convey the sense of being in space and while I have my own ship, it doesn’t convey the feeling of freedom – I’m locked into jumpgates and small station filled sections of space. You could take the entire game and transplant it onto a planet surface making it naval with sailing ships and ports and it would be the same, but you could never make landfall and exploit the natives, nor could you drop anchor and go diving for treasure and you certainly couldn’t stray from any carefully mapped out trade routes to cut across clear open waters, maybe discovering a new island on the way.

So yes, you’re right, I am after a different game, but my original point was that I am seriously disappointed in the fact that X3 is the premier space sim of our times and yet it brings nothing new to the table, that it does exactly the same thing its done since X:BTF and by default all the other space sims copy them (Darkstar One, Spaceforce Rogue Galaxy etc) it completely fails to reinvigorate the genre, push the boundaries and offer something, anything, new. As much as I hate Derek Smart and his awful awful games, at least he is trying (in his own twisted way) something different. As I said before, I blame YOU the consumer for continuing to support this regurgitated pap and claiming it’s ambrosia rather than demanding a game that takes advantage of the years of technological change and game design since Frontier.

Stop buying this crap, support the indy devs of games like Evochron and Infinity so that they have more resources to make a better game. Egosoft doesn’t deserve our money, not for something which is effectively the exact same game we paid for before – only with all the shit they fecked up fixed.

re: more imagination in x3:TC: when you say “X3″ do you mean “X3:R”, which is the older game, or “X3:TC”, which is the new game? The only time you mention playing “x3″ you’re talking about the xtended mod which implies “x3:r”, and if so I don’t see the relevance. (x3:r is a game which I personally really enjoyed but which I would never have reccommended to anyone who hadn’t played the previous games. x3:tc I would)

not being able to land on planets is only a problem if you’re after a game about landing on planets really :D you refer to a gam and say the whole point is planetary exploration… well, that’s not the point of the x series. it’s set in space, and only in space.

you say the game is a wasteland yet you also say it’s filled with stations? there’s a contradiction there. The planet Earth has 510,072,000 square kilometers of surface area, of which 148,940,000 is land. You can’t create content for even one planet without resorting to procedural content generation or a very large amount of copy and paste, or by not including much detail at all.

For an uninhabited planet, procedural content would work very well, I suppose. For an inhabited one, I cannot see that it would be anything other than bland and samey.

In the old game frontier, there was 2 types of spaceports. Ones which you could undock from easily, and ones at the bottom of a gravity well that you sometimes couldn’t climb back out of. There was no other difference from a gameplay perspective, with the possible exception of earth and a few other unique planets. Freelancer took this to the logical conclusion: a planet was just a very large kind of space station, with a different kind of docking cutscene.

To me this is immersion breaking of the worst kind. I’d rather be flying above it, leaving the planet itself incrutable, in a ship adapted for space travel which has no planetary landing capability at all, and be part of a dynamic system. Apart from anything else, remember the X games model the behaviour of every object in the game all the time (although the flight simulation is only modeled for your current sector) Now try to think how many ships and factories etc. might be present on the surface of a world. Now try to model them.

I think basically you are after a different kind of game. which is fair enough. but that’s not the game’s fault :)