I would play x3ap and x3tc since you bought them. Rebirth will probably be on sale in July during the steam summer sale I would guess. have different ai limitations and quirks. In some ways more complicated because they automated stuff which you can't control and ships, drones, factories etc. Xrebirth is also complicated like x3 series. Watch lets play videos and tutorials and decide for yourself. The story telling in xrebirth is much better than x3. Xrebirth is more of a first person shooter. You can have lots of ships and factories but you don't really control them. In x3tc and x3ap you build and control an empire not really in xrebirth. Xrebirth is more like mouse click on a module/fine targeting, etc. Joystick seems to be missing fine tuning and is hard to control. You could play it with a joystick but the game doesn't seem to work well that way. For example, the Sheriff commands the police, the Warden commands the jail, the city inspector determines if something can get built, etc. This game has offices you can get which grant certain abilities. A game called The Guild 2: Renaissance does a good job with this. After one earns (to paraphrase Carl Sagan) 'billions and billions' of credits, what does one do with all of the money? In real life, after making their coin, some rich folks go into politics. How so? Is it playable with a joystick and a couple of keys on the keyboard? Or, do you need to memorize all of the buttons on the gamepad (not for me)? Hopefully, there is auto-docking (unlike the Elite nightmare:Would you like to start a new commander Y/N?).Īlso, I understand X:Rebirth is buggy, but does it have more content than X3 Albion Prelude (a game I tried, but the interface was daunting)?įinally, I have a content question. I read that X:Rebirth is attempting to make the game more accessible to beginners (like me). Point is, I have always found the 3-D console shooters quite daunting. But one person's fun may be another person's work. Yes, practice makes perfect, and hard work does give a sense of accomplishment. Having purchased the boxed version of the first Elite way back in 1985, I gave up in frustration of having to manually dock, crash, and restart the game.