I liked the trailer and it is a good move to do something like this since Egosoft had to push out release of Rebirth to next year. And since X3TC save games are not compatible I wonder how long game time will be in this game and will it be mostly action like the trailer makes it out to be...?

I'll believe it when I see it. 😉

There's a lot of great in the X games, but action ain't one of them.

But Pinback must be very excited that Egosoft released a new X game. 😆 😆 😆

Thank god it’s digital only. 😆 😆

Can’t play it or add to my collection.

Think they might be trying the same trick Bioware did with the DLC for Mass Effect which bridges the story gap between 2 and 3.

It's going to be released tomorrow, I'm definately interested to see what it will bring

Anyone have any thoughts about this yet. ❓

Well well there an unpleasant surprise looks like there is going to be a box version of the game in Feb 2012

http://www.egosoft.com/news/current_en.php

Also going to appear on the mac early 2012

If I remember correctly too is that if you buy the X Superbox you get X3: Albion Prelude for free.

Yes. You can register the community code of the retail version with Steam, and it will appear with the games you already have (With a Steam version of Superbox).

They really made your day 😀 😀 😀

Guess I will buy a copy might even play it, then again. 😆

Has anyone actually played this and how different is it to X3TC, I know theres some gameplay vids on youtube but they don’t really show anything. ❓

You know you can activate it for free on Steam if you have the boxed version of the X Superbox Pinback?

I do have the superbox but it become a problem with downloading anything over 500MB for me.

Beside I am very attached to box games and will buy it when comes out.

Although as to weather I ever play it is an entirely different matter.

DA DA DAA!!! Pinback strikes again!! 😆 😆

I will be starting fresh with the X series with X-Rebirth, I have had the same problems as Pinback with the inability to complete one of these games, usually I get burnt out on it or bored. I hope that the next installment will remedy this for me.

i got bored after 3 hours. but maybe it's just me duno..

I think the problem with the X games has always been if you are not into the whole empire building, gathering resources and micro management of the economic. Then they offer very little else in the gameplay dept.

Hopefully this new game will correct that by offering more options rather than just the dry economic simulation of the old games.

Agreed. X-Rebirth needs to concentrate on the background story they have build around the universe and you can still have these epic battles without the micro-management of everything. We should be able to go through a few command screens to issue everything we need to do, from telling units to capture a fabrication facility, telling them how to run it and what gets produced. This should be more than 1 min of my time and then let us worry about the open endedness of space and do the battles and skirmishes for gaining control of resources to build the empire needed.

I guess in simplicity it should almost have the ease of use like a RTS in that you set and forget and you just know when something is being attacked and you send forces to designated rally points or have them protect valuable resources.

I have become a huge fan of X3: Terran Conflict (X3TC). I started playing it a while back because it was the most-suggested game on this forum (as something to follow Freelancer). (As you probably know, X3TC is the most recent of the X games prior to Albion Prelude.)

X3 is the deepest game I have ever seen. I was impressed by Mass Effect's depth, but X3 blows it away. I have played for over a hundred hours and am still less than half way through the multiple plot threads. There are still sectors that I have not found, and I have yet to command a destroyer or carrier fleet. The game just goes on and on, seemingly forever.

But, wait... as both of you point out, a player who is armed only with the manual and in-game tutorials will soon find the game boring. There are too many tedious tasks that are not so much challenging as they are repetitive.

Luckily, the script engine is extremely powerful, and it allows scriptwriters (including me) to change the game in many ways. Even the Artificial Intelligence can be improved. Sometimes dramatically. And the script editor handles all of the syntax for you, which makes writing (or hacking) scripts easier than most other languages.

By using the very-nicely-done plugin manager and a variety of plugins, I have been able to "tune up" X3 into the best space sim I have ever seen.

EDIT: Also, the Egosoft forum has helpful tips that the player is unlikely to discover on his/her own. Without the forum (and the scripts), the game is not so much fun at all. But *with* the forum and scripts, X3 is the best there is, so far.

So I have high hopes for X3: Reunion, which is due in mid-March. The industry desperately needs a new space sim engine, and I cannot think of a team with better current experience than Egosoft. There is a lot of speculation about how it will all work out. Some X fans fear that the new game will be too easy. However, as Geraldine wrote in another thread, Egosoft has an excellent balance in mind ("complex is good; complicated is bad").

I hope they make it a winner. We could really use a great new space sim!

EDIT: Oh! I almost forgot... boarding capital ships with a team of marines is probably the most-fun thing I have ever attempted in any game. It is hard to do, but both fun and satisfying when you beat the game!

It’s what this game genre needs a hit.

Weather Egosoft can deliver a game which appeals to a much broader spectrum of game-players or if it’s just more of the same, only time will time.

Agreed. Although I doubt that it will be more of the same... they are creating a new engine after a decade of experience with the old engine. And they clearly intend to make the game more accessible to new players.

I am more concerned that they may not be able to make the game as much fun as X3TC. As you say, only time will tell!

Tacling the clumpsy Game interfaces means a opertunity to make this depth often called complexity much more accesable and with that a brake own of barrier for the game masses.

It can help sales drasticly.

Fleets and RTS and crew and wing man depend on good AI and with such depth the requierment for complex AI are high.

Its a huge task to do well.

So they support high-end rigs.

Would give it a spin on my.

5870 or GTX580 game rig.

any reviews?

Albion Prelude still uses the X3TC engine. The major rewrite is for Rebirth, which is scheduled for a March 2012 release.

Reviews on the EgoSoft web site (about Albion Prelude) say that boarding is improved. Boarding is one of the most fun features of the game, IMHO. Instead of destroying that expensive enemy carrier, after you have killed all of its fighters and collapsed its shields, you send in a squad of your highly trained marines to attempt to capture it. I say "attempt", because some enemy ships carry marines of their own (or other defenses), so the boarding op isn't over until your marines fight their way to the ship's computer core and hack it to make the ship your own. Your marines must successfully complete several tasks before they can claim the ship. If they fail, then chances are that some of them will not survive the mission.

Xenon (sentient AI) ships are the most difficult to board. They have no organic marines for your own squad to shoot -- there are only automated defenses which try (viciously) to kill your commandos. And the AI is fully capable of wiping out an entire squad of your best SEALs, so don't even try to board a Xenon ship until you have mastered boarding vessels operated by organic life forms.

Did I mention that you have to train the marines first? Training requires many hours (days, actually) of game time in an expensive training program. And, ultimately, they are not at their best until they have completed several successful boarding operations. Civilian freighters are easier targets than military vessels, which gives you good reason to do a bit of pirating. You can pirate ships from the pirates if you want to maintain your rep with the Commonwealth races.

Because of all of the training and preparation, it really stings when one of your marines dies. It hurts more than losing a heavy fighter (or even a corvette), because you can just buy a new ship (if you have enough credits). Marines have to be trained and cultivated with care.

Both the game immersion and the mechanics of boarding ops are thrilling... I still get chills when my team first cuts through the hull of the enemy ship, because I know that the next few minutes will be an intense life-or-death struggle for my elite special forces. It is worth the effort because a successful boarding op results in adding a new capital ship to my fleet, which is worth tens of millions of credits. Boarding is high risk, but the rewards are equally high.

That said, there are some details about boarding that are a bit too difficult in X3TC. Luckily, there is a script which fixes most of the issues (called Improved Boarding). Even better, most of the features of Improved Boarding have been built into Albion Prelude.

People generally like the other new features of Albion Prelude as well. However, there is a bug that requires a script to fix. Look for a thread called "[AP] Performance mods" for the full story. A full fix from EgoSoft is planned for later this month.

Personally, I have not yet tried Albion Prelude because I am waiting for the non-Steam version.

Think of Albion Prelude as User Downloadable Content (DLC) for X3TC.

If you are looking for "X3 but with a prettier interface" then you will have to wait for Rebirth.

Bought x3 TC and Albion Prelude on a steam holiday sale. Haven't had much time to sit down and play it but from what little I have played of it the learning curve is really high. Kinda like a first person eve offline. I look forward to the day I can really sit down and delve into this game.

People often talk about the learning curve for X3, but my experience is that the learning curve is part of the fun of the game itself.

EDIT: The "curve" never really ends, because the objective is to learn how to "beat" the game, which is a challenge that continues as long as you play the game. When the learning ends, so does the game itself. So don't worry about learning everything all at once, because that is impossible. Instead, learn one thing at a time. Look up what you need to know for the next mission, and do not be concerned about what you do not yet understand.

You will make mistakes, but so what? The game is tolerant of mistakes. In fact, the game assumes that you (and your AI pilots) will make plenty of mistakes. Eventually, you will find it easy to earn millions of credits. That is intentional and it helps you to recover from any poor choices you might make along the way. You can recover from just about anything in X3. (But save often anyway.) 🙂

X3 never ceases to be fun for me. Even if I spend some time outside the game, on the Egosoft forum or looking at plug-ins, it is still all part of the fun.

For people who have real lives and only want to play X3 an hour at a time, there is a pretty good walkthrough here:

Humble Trader Start / Walkthrough for New-ish Players

I only read the first post and the comments from other readers (because I don't like to read *too* many spoilers), but the first post is an excellent balance for giving the new player a quick start into the game. The first post does contain a couple of minor spoilers (the locations of two abandoned ships that you can claim for yourself). That might be a bit of "cheating" but, let's be honest... X3 is almost impossibly time-consuming to play if you never seek external information (and if you keep the game 100% vanilla, with zero plugins).

The above walkthrough is not perfect, but it's a good start. One caveat: I would not be in a hurry to sell ships that you find abandoned, or ships that are given as rewards during a plot line. Sometimes those ships are unique, and cannot be easily replaced later. Specifically, the Iquana Vanguard is a rare (and good) ship that you might want to keep. It is the fastest TP-class personnel transporter in the game, and it is a uniquely good ship for boarding operations, which you will want to do later. Similarly, M5-class scout ships can be far more useful than the walkthrough suggests.

So, if you want a bit of help in what direction to take, read the first post of the walkthrough, and then perhaps the comments that follow the end of the walkthrough. Some of the comments are more reasonable than others, but there will always be differences in choices and playing style... that is part of what makes X3 great!