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I'm not sure if I should call this a review or just me rambling or what, but here goes. I picked up X3:TC after the last post I made about X3 and Freelancer a month ago. It is a very different beast from X3, and a distinct, massive improvement. Let me run down some of the good stuff:
- The mission system has been overhauled and improved by a factor of several thousand. In the previous game you had to just fly from station to station, docking and looking at each bulletin board. You had no way of knowing if there was a job available or whether you would even be qualified to do it (based on your trade or combat rank). Once you started a mission, you got almost zero guidance, so if you didn't already know where you were going you were basically fucked. The new system only offers you missions that you are qualified for, first off. Second, they've added a handy mission-tracker and guidance system to help you get it done. Third, stations now have little symbols floating above them if someone on them has a mission available, separated into four easy categories: Trade (usually deliver stuff or FedEx-type missions), Fight (Kill Shit), Build (Construct this type of station, really only relevant after you've got a pretty strong financial infrastructure of your own) and Think (various oddjobs, including asteroid scanning, tracking people, and finding smugglers). There are way, WAY more types of missions too. The old game basically had "take me from here to there" and "go kill this motherfucker," with the occasional "take this stuff from here to there" thrown in for variety. Egosoft listened to all the complaints people had and built a new, almost perfect system basically from scratch. It's fantastic.
- General graphical upgrade. X3 was damn pretty, but in X3:TC they upgraded the ship models a ton (the level of detail on even the smallest scouts is fantastic) and improved the weapons effects something fierce. Explosions are particularly improved, and missile contrails are awesome. On that topic...
- Missiles are now fucking awesome. In X3, missiles were unreliable and usually underpowered, with one missile that was decent for taking down small fast things and a couple that were handy against big slow motherfuckers, and about twenty different varieties of useless crap. There are now new missiles, including awesome cluster missiles that can decimate whole wings of fighters, and all missiles are more accurate, easier to see (so you can both aim them better and shoot down incoming missiles). They're also very pretty, rather than the barely visible blobs they were in the last game. They really made them a major part of combat, and even designed a new ship class, the missile frigate, around them.
Then we get into the general, expected sort of improvements:
New systems. Tons. Including, for the first time, the Terran systems, which are RADICALLY different from anything in X3, but also more systems appended to the stuff in X3.
New stuff to own. New weapons, ships, even a couple of new goods to trade.
It's all totally awesome. They revamped how the story works, too. Rather than following this one guy who is Someone Important, the way to get the plot is apparently to play through the game as several different characters who are just generic sorts from different conditions. For example, you can start as a terran fighter pilot, an Argon (humans from the X universe) trader, or pilots and traders of various other races and backgrounds. I started as an Argon trader and have barely started on his portion of the plot, because as with all X games you can do as much or as little plot as you want. I'll probably do bits and pieces of it throughout for the often disproportionate rewards you get (ships, money, even stations sometimes), but they're much less intrusive and much, much less annoying than the plot of X3.
In conclusion: this shit is AWESOME.
- The mission system has been overhauled and improved by a factor of several thousand. In the previous game you had to just fly from station to station, docking and looking at each bulletin board. You had no way of knowing if there was a job available or whether you would even be qualified to do it (based on your trade or combat rank). Once you started a mission, you got almost zero guidance, so if you didn't already know where you were going you were basically fucked. The new system only offers you missions that you are qualified for, first off. Second, they've added a handy mission-tracker and guidance system to help you get it done. Third, stations now have little symbols floating above them if someone on them has a mission available, separated into four easy categories: Trade (usually deliver stuff or FedEx-type missions), Fight (Kill Shit), Build (Construct this type of station, really only relevant after you've got a pretty strong financial infrastructure of your own) and Think (various oddjobs, including asteroid scanning, tracking people, and finding smugglers). There are way, WAY more types of missions too. The old game basically had "take me from here to there" and "go kill this motherfucker," with the occasional "take this stuff from here to there" thrown in for variety. Egosoft listened to all the complaints people had and built a new, almost perfect system basically from scratch. It's fantastic.
- General graphical upgrade. X3 was damn pretty, but in X3:TC they upgraded the ship models a ton (the level of detail on even the smallest scouts is fantastic) and improved the weapons effects something fierce. Explosions are particularly improved, and missile contrails are awesome. On that topic...
- Missiles are now fucking awesome. In X3, missiles were unreliable and usually underpowered, with one missile that was decent for taking down small fast things and a couple that were handy against big slow motherfuckers, and about twenty different varieties of useless crap. There are now new missiles, including awesome cluster missiles that can decimate whole wings of fighters, and all missiles are more accurate, easier to see (so you can both aim them better and shoot down incoming missiles). They're also very pretty, rather than the barely visible blobs they were in the last game. They really made them a major part of combat, and even designed a new ship class, the missile frigate, around them.
Then we get into the general, expected sort of improvements:
New systems. Tons. Including, for the first time, the Terran systems, which are RADICALLY different from anything in X3, but also more systems appended to the stuff in X3.
New stuff to own. New weapons, ships, even a couple of new goods to trade.
It's all totally awesome. They revamped how the story works, too. Rather than following this one guy who is Someone Important, the way to get the plot is apparently to play through the game as several different characters who are just generic sorts from different conditions. For example, you can start as a terran fighter pilot, an Argon (humans from the X universe) trader, or pilots and traders of various other races and backgrounds. I started as an Argon trader and have barely started on his portion of the plot, because as with all X games you can do as much or as little plot as you want. I'll probably do bits and pieces of it throughout for the often disproportionate rewards you get (ships, money, even stations sometimes), but they're much less intrusive and much, much less annoying than the plot of X3.
In conclusion: this shit is AWESOME.