Almost precisely it is one year ago, that I played X Rebirthz last year, and after some days and weeks abandoned it, waiting for patches and updates and mods to add their impact.
And now, as I predicted
, in this foggy and dark time of the year I got appetite again to try what the passing of one year may have done in change and imporvement, or not. Since some days I am playing it again, with a fresh gamestart, and version 2.51, while version 3.0 is looming at the horizon.
I did so since the videos I saw on youtube about Elite Dangerous, did not really hook me. Also, their business model seems - seems to need getting used to. Its not cheap. However, the space seqeunces, the exterior design of stations and spacecraft gave me more memory of the computer era twenty years ago, than I feel comfortable with in 2014. I just do not get hooked.
In X Rebirthz now, a lot has changed. The whole game is 64 bit now, runs smooth and stable for me. The menus, still not optimal, have been improved a lot. Trading interctions I tested via the m enus instead of running around on the stations, worked reliable so far. The economic functions of the whole world system, before somewhat broken, seem to work now. The AI has been given much more competence and aggressiveness in fighting, before, every shot-out was a piece of cake. Now, it became drama battles quite frequently. There are many more details that have been chnmaged or added, and they all did their share to improve the general quality. It actually makes sense now to start to build a fleet of traders, defence forces, and finally: stations.
The status now shows what the game should have been like on release day 1. There is still room for improvement, and indeed they are working on it., but it would be malicious to claim that the game has no future and sees no chnage for the better: it does, and quite substantially already.
I got hooked again, and will play this now for quite some time to come. I only hope that the upcoming version 3.0 is downward compatible. Rumours say it is.
I also added some mods tweaking some details, scanners, trading, comms, AI, and faction policies. There actually now is war raging between factions, and I found that it depended on my actions whether I was seen as a neutral observer, or a participating fighter that was seen as a valid target. There is much more life, traffic and battle in the universe.
To me, the game concept offers more than the game concept of Elite Dangerous, I admit. And the exterior views of space stations in XB I prefer any time over those to be seen in Elite videos. I wonder whether Elite will offer an as-complex economy simulation as XB does.
So: the trend-indicator for XB points upwards, definitely. Those of you who had, like me, shelved it to wait and see, consider to try it again now or when 3.0 is out at the latest. The disastrous start last year - is a thing of the past now. All objects of criticism indeed have been worked on and still are being further tuned and improved.
