X3: Terran Conflict et al

[Phil.]

I stumbled on this game yesterday having never really heard a great deal about it, it seemed to be my kind of game so quickly downloaded the demo only to realise that it's the kind of game that requires some time to settle into.

Reviews have been mixed, some saying it's quite buggy, others it's very immersive.

It's been out for almost a year now and all the reviews i find are for the game at the point of it's initial release which doesn't take into account of all the patched since then.

Does anyone play this game? Is it worth investing time into figuring out how to play it?

I read there's alot of user generated content for it, is that just a nice gimmick or is there actual good stuff to download?

[ncrn]

For me X2 was a far better game, granted X2 wasn't nearly as advanced as X3 but it had a playable story line and the bugs were minimal.

I had major issues with X3, could barely get it to run and my PC is more than capable of dealing with the game. I also didn't like the story line much, it was a bit vague in areas as to what you were supposed to be doing. That and not being able to dock in stations pissed me off no end.

But if the making money in space side of things is anything like X2 then it should be very immersive and a lot of fun, whilst being really challenging. I got tired of X2 after a while after I worked out how to make money without depending on the AI ships and it got a bit dull after that.

From what I played of X3 it looked awesome, but it just didn't feel right after playing as much of X2 as I did.
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[WildGoose]

Found similar things with X3, I bought a 2007 game of the year version, and it was fully patched, and apart from a few texture glitches up close to big ships I found it fine. Despite every review giving 2 starts out of 5 saying its too buggy to play.

There is no tutorial, the simplest manual is 100 odd pages long (and there are several to be had), and in my opinion the interface is poor.
Although I preferred the ship control method compared to freelancer, and from what I understand they have incorporated a freelancer style control method into Terran conflict.

To say the learning curve is steep, would be unfair. It's pretty much just a 50ft high vertical wall.

People talk about depth, and i'm sure its there, but strip away the graphical interface and you could have depth in a pile of spreadsheets as that is essentially what this is, buy low, sell high, and spend hours flying across the galaxy to deliver it and getting ambushed by annoying triangles.

Never got as far as chartering AI ships for my business, in fact never got as far as doing anything of note, as everything is so vague, and I hate reading manuals online (paper manuals I can deal with happily).

The fact that to dock with a station you simply stick rigid in space outside it, from a game that claims to be such a graphical masterpiece is a bit of a joke. When are we going to see these games where you can dock properly (manually) and then get out and walk around.

The 'galaxy' is something like 240 zones, which 4 jumpgates in either corner, a generic spacey background i.e. with a planet that you never get any closer to, and loads of floating crap in between, and all the zones might as well be exactly the same.