I knew about the next game in the series since I was informed by e-mail a few months back.

I'm not sure what to expect at this time. I haven't bothered to investigate much, nor do I know where to look for information. I'm hoping that they improve the economy system for the game, and allow you to put stations together better (its clumsy right now). Being able to custimize your ships better would be nice too.

I've been a huge X fan and actually have every game. They were great games.

That said, I'm refuing to buy X3:TC untilI actually see the entire game in action.

I think that the game mechanics are for the most part awesome. Its heavily based on Elite and has great core gameplay. You can do everything you've wanted in space, from hunting pirates to owning cruisers and space stations.

The graphics are also very very sweet and the sound isn't bad. there's a tons of places to explore and the effects make the game world-- jaw dropping.

However, X3's killer has been its interface and lack of atmosphere.

Now its the same interface that X2 and XBTF had, and that's the problem. Egosoft apparently has not dicovered the Mouse and somehow still thinks DOS is still alive.
The game hybrids flight Simulation w/RTS, but you'll bang your head against the wall trying to manage well, almost anything. If I have 5 fighters and want them to attack 2 specific targets, I have to select each fighter individually and issue it the order through multiple text menues. There is no mouse to highlight my ships at once and issue a specific command (click, highlight, right click?) A simple contex based mouse control system would go a long long way.
Yeah theres a mouse pointer, but its limited to clikcing on menu items that already have hotkeys assigned to them, making it slow and useles.
Now try coordinating a large battle with that mechanism. The saving grace is that intrepid scripters have made scripts to help automate and control some of the hairier micromanaging nightmares (Yay for UT,BPH,Anarkis, and Xai!), but in reality, 3rd party volunteer work-arounds shouldn't even be needed. Hell, MS-DOS Shell had more mouse functionality.

Atmosphere is more of a minor thing, but its nice to actually leave the cockpit. X3 has it so you dock outside instead of inside the stations. So all you ever see is different overlays in your cockpit. Call me old or weird, but I think Privateer's station interiors helped out well with the atmosphere. You could see the different between a rich inner world and a hunk of asteroid with a mine. Also the places you visited were multifuntional. You would think that everystation in X3 would have some sort of basic maintainence facility or different shops set up by the residents to sell visitors. Unforunately In X3, you have 1 veiw, the inside of your cockpit and its a very lonely view.

If they seriously tackle the Interface and come out with a strong, customizable, truly mouse driven interface, I'll gladly jump in and pay for it. Hell my X3 copy was shipped direct from Germany (airfare was more than the game) cause I wanted to support them directly. They are a great company. The problem is that everytime I play X3 (its is a great game, really), I just keep thinking how many imporvements they could make to the interface and game world, and I end up getting distracted by what could have been...

It sounds like it may be the last X game too. I really hope they pull out all the stops for it and show everyone why the Space sims used to rule the computers...

X2 had interior docking.

You have to remember that X3 added a ton of content.

While it is irritating to order large scale battle using the current UI, I think it had to do with a change in staff at Egosoft. This game has been in development for three years. I'm expecting good things. For atmosphere, I'd like more ways to interact with the game world.

The one thing I really want is an overhauled UI.

Etrius

The interface does need some cleaning up and polish (and possibly a complete remake), but I'm not against the whole idea of a command console to order my ships. In some ways, its quicker and more precise than what I could do with a mouse. The only issue I have is that there doesn't appear to be a simple way to customize the interface. The most frequent commands I use are jump to this station, trade for this, return home to this station and offload purchased supplies, or sell this product to these guys. Some of the commands are at the bottom of the list, or require that I do them in a manual fasion.



What I want to be able to do is, dock inside my station and manage my empire from there, with seta set to maximum (for those who don't know, it speeds up time). Inaddition, I want to be able to manage vast ammounts of data about the market, not unlike eve online where you could get selling and buying information about a product for each station, and could sort by buying price, distance, or other criteria. Plus, I would like to set up trade routes with ease, and tell my ships what sectors to avoid. I want to be able to tell my ships to travel from this system to this system to this system in this order, to sell stuff along the way, and to stock up on supplies while traveling.

Being able to keep notes in game would help too. The personal logs seems to get lost in you e-mail (something that you don't seem to be able to place into folders and stuff).



I haven't heard anything about that. Whats your source of information about that?

The press release on the homepage (excerpt):

X³: Terran Conflict is a brand new, stand-alone game set in the universe of X³. It is the culmination of the X trilogy, with a grand finale that takes us all the way back to Earth's own solar system.

If I were planning on making more, I wouldn't call it a Trilogy or us the term "Grand finale." On the other hand, I could just be reading into it a little too much .



Yes, and I loved the interior docking. But still, once you dock in your "parking space" you still do everything from the cockpit.



In x2 you can, kinda. As long as you don't pull into your parking space, you've never officially docked. Hence you can just sit in teh station with SETA on 10x.





That make sense. X3 was originally planned as a expansion to X2, then suddenly changed to a new game. While X3 did add content (most noteable graphic advances), it also removed a good amount of content (cockpits, station interiors, abilities for ts/tp to dock in tl's, m4/5 docking in m2's, etc). Additionally some of the new Content were bonus pack scripts written for X2 that were ported and integrated into X3 (not a bad idea though - I like companies that support/reward their modders).



I couldn't agree more. The Console is amazingly powerful. Some commands and customizations you just can't do with a mouse. My point is that its rather poorly organized and many simple commands that you could carry out w/ a mouse in everyother similar game simply aren't available.

Why can't we have simple right/left click order/menus when you click on a ship/object on the map? Highlight some ships, click on an enemy - order to atack. Click on an asteroid - mine and collect, etc. RTS's have been doing this for alteast a decade, you'd think a 2005 game would have something similar.

If they totally redo X3TC from the ground up, I might be really into it. But after X3, I'm definitely gonna wait till I see some reviews and more info.

Now you all are making me want to dig out my old X2 copy and reinstall it, There goes my social life again...

  

X2 is a lot of fun. I think X3 can be easier to use (the UI is somewhat better, but not much), so I usually in enjoy X3. Both are awesome games.

Etrius

Forgot to mention that I completely agree with this. Perhaps that is what will be in Terram Conflict, since it is not an expansion. X3 would be a hell of a lot easier to play that way.  

I really do hope so. Several of us mentioned it in the DevNet quite some time ago. Being able to do a lot of the simple task managing with the mouse, would be amazing.

I also kinda dream of treating the cockpit like a windows desktop. I mean, some of the instrumentation boxes already have the X on them to close. Why not be able to drag them around to arrange the cockpits you our liking?

This would be interesting. It would be easier to see ships in the upper left screen corner.  

By the way, did you read Forgboy/Draginol's dev journal about how Stardock, Ironclad, and Gas Powered Games are working together to create better multiplayer?

I never got into X3. Looks like I'll be picking it up when this expansion comes out. Time to dust off the flight stick and throttle. Hell, maybe I'll just install Freespace 2.

Etrius: No, I hadn't heard that part, but I'm stoked that GPG is publishing through Stardock. Demigod looks to be interesting. Moreso than SupCom was at least.

Check out the X3 site. They got all kinds of stuff there, including a forum.

For Demigod: It looks awesome, but Stardock has pushed back the release date so they can circulate beta (big suprise there   ). I cant wait for X3: TC and Demigod.

@Garion: x3 was actually harder to play if you tried to fly with a stick.

If they make it so you can actually complete the single player game without waiting 6+ months for patches and maybe some kind of in game tutorials so you can scale the mammoth learning cliff.

I loved x2 & 3 but everyone else I know played the first 20 minutes and gave up on the insane interface. Even those who loved elite and privateer.

For anyone who hasn't played the X games. Imagine driving down the road and you have to disconnect your steering wheel and press period,right,right,enter,left,up,up,up, on the keyboard in the back seat in order to tell if that building you are about to pass is a gas station or a museum. And ocassionally you'll have to swerve like a maniac to a avoid the mountain that just appeared out of the fog while praying the tanker truck you just spent an hour filling up at said gas station can turn fast enough not to get smashed.
Then tab over to a spreadsheet and keep track of where it was you're considering building that factory.

But once you master that (3-5 hours of hard work and frustration).. It REALLY is a gem of a game and It's time well spent, it's just not for the faint of heart (or those who want to play the story based game)
But the first time you get your own cap ship and a handful of fighters and you go wreak some havoc, that is a gaming moment you'll be you will remember forever. Dangit now I have the urge to revive my empire...

This style of play is stupid; I don't know what egosoft was thinking. What the need to do is put important function right where you can see them, not like a DOS interface     . I really hope they pull out all the stops for X3: TC.

Also, why didn't Egosoft call this X4 Terran Conflict? Since it isn't an expansion, why are they staying at three? This wasn't a Trilogy, as we switched characters in X2. Egosoft is just weird this way, I guess...  

Perhaps is has to do with the fact that X3:Reunion was supposed to be an expansion to x2. To me that why I feel X3 felt unfinished as is was essentially X2 with new graphics and a few new feautures.

If they are really building X3TC from the ground up, I can only hope they'll fix a lot of the shortcommings. Perhaps I was spoiled by growing up on x-wing and tie-fighter, but I really felt that a lot of the X interface , especially in teh cockpit was just.. half baked. I mean being able to target object within you radar range from the cockpit (cycle trhough enemies, allies, etc), target closest enemy, etc; those have been around in space sims since 1993 or before. Why not in here?

that said, I thought X3 did a good job in teh background. The New way friehgters work (act like UT's instead of being latched to a hombase) i though was a great idea. Also same thing with complexes. Over all this seems to reduce frieghter traffic, hence better performance.

i don't even know where to get an original copy of X1, i had to download a copy from torrents. If anyone can tell me where i can find a mint copy, i would love to get my hands on it. Of course, i want the expansion too.