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Nexus 2 - Jupiter incident Sequel! - needs you

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BobTheJanitor:

--- Quote from: Lancefighter on August 19, 2011, 08:42:09 PM ---x3 isnt quite as difficult as it was - If you had started in x-btf.................. THAT was fun.


x3tc is just kinda easymode in the beginning. Compared to x2, where the starting option was a disco.. or a disco without weapons/shields.
And back then discos were useless, too.

--- End quote ---

I've got X3 TC, and I put a little bit of time into it. The problem is that everyone describes it as being the easy one to get into, and then immediately follows that up by saying 'just watch this 10 hour series of youtube videos!'

Which I have actually watched some of. It does look like a perfectly good game, I just can't get excited about it right now. Maybe one day I'll have the time to really learn it, but these days I seem more inclined to get into games that can give me more instant gratification. It's not that I'm opposed to a deep, involved experience, it's just that I have a job and a life to deal with, and spending hours upon hours learning a game and building up my way in the universe just so that I can eventually get to the meat of the game isn't as much of an option for me as it used to be. Freelancer is quite dated now, but it does get you right into flying a ship with easy mouse and keyboard controls and the story isn't terrible either. And it's hard to make space look bad, even with old graphics engines.

Lancefighter:
well, thats kinda it - The 'meat' of the game is wherever you put it.

I tend to have more fun early on, somewhere between having an m3 and getting my first destroyer - past that, I tend to lack distinct goals (still looking for a good mod to fix that), and before that is just really really grindy feeling. Of special notes are the parts where you have an m3 and are trying to board a m6.. And with an m6 trying to board your first m7.

And seeing as getting a hyperion is my number 1 goal in virtually every playthrough I tend to play (love that ship so much), ill be playing the boarding game fairly often ;)

eRe4s3r:
Worse once you reach capital ships you quickly notice that the game wasn't made with them in mind and I always found that x3 loses all its charm once you get an destroyer or above because you simply have no easy way to fight anymore, everything becomes so detached and clunky.

This is probably why they are gonna cut this down in X Rebirth to 1 expanding core ship (so that you can modularly expand it with race-unique tech and it grows to maybe a heavy corvette or M3+ but not beyond that. That way your ship can grow in size, looks and power but not actually have the downsides of switching between destroyer and m3.

Echo35:

--- Quote from: eRe4s3r on August 19, 2011, 02:50:57 PM ---Heh its funny that the thing i love most about nexus is the engine physics, when such a large ship goes from standstill to full 100% energy assigned thrust it looks absolutely visceral, like a real shockwave of particles streams out of the engines and propels the ship forward in a sudden movement (even the camera has a slight "delay" and heavy rumble when accelerating which strengthens the effect) it all makes the ships feel actually physically massive. And in combat, when you power down engines to have more power for shields those wimpy RCS thrusters lighting up to keep the ship in a controlled rotation....

Its a rare case of everything fitting together, though its true the game is more like a table top game, difficulty of later missions is brutal...

--- End quote ---

My favorite part was when they turned, all the thrusters would fire all over the ship, and gave it a really heavy, realistic look.

BobTheJanitor:
I know this is an older topic, but as sedately as this forum moves, I don't feel like I'm going to offend anyone by bumping it. Although I don't really have much to say about the sequel, I wanted to say I did pick up the original Nexus during the recent steam sale, where it was something like $2.50. I've only played a handful of missions so far, and the gameplay seems fine, although the UI is a bit clunky about making it easy to see what orders are being executed by what units. Anyway, that's not the point.

What bothered me was that the game tries to look realistic, and unfortunately doesn't quite get there. And since it's put the effort in half-way, it makes the faults all the more glaring (at least to space nerds). The intro got my attention almost immediately. The ships look reasonably like what you would expect early space-faring civilizations to use. They look big and blocky and not at all aerodynamic, which is good. They have rotating sections for artificial gravity, which is great. Some of them even have long struts separating the fuel tanks and engines from the living areas, which is correct. So we see these ships leaving earth to head out to Jupiter, a journey projected to take 8 months or so (I'm not sure exactly, but it was a reasonable time frame) and they are heading out from earth orbit with their big main engines firing (while their rotating sections were still moving, which isn't strictly the best idea, but I was willing to cut it a little slack). So far so good. But all my hopes were dashed when they pulled up to Jupiter 8 months later, with their main engines STILL firing and still pointing back in the direction that they had come from. Bad, bad, bad.

And when they reached the station and then cut their engines and somehow coasted to a stop, well then I could only hang my head and sigh. Even disregarding the impossibility of those magical space brakes, their built up velocity from firing that engine for the last 8 months in one direction would probably already have them going an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, and they'd be a LOT further out than Jupiter by that time. (Never mind where they got all of the fuel... probably picked it up at the same store that sold the space brakes.)

And yes, I did notice later that in game you actually do have reverse thrusters that fire when you stop, which is good. They fire for a much briefer time and can apparently bring you to a stop in a few seconds from a speed that you've accrued by firing you main engines for a full minute. Which begs the question, if those thrusters are so powerful, why don't they put them on the other end of the ship instead? But I digress.

If the game had been a bit less realistic, this wouldn't have been so offensive to the intelligence of anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of physics. If the ships look like contoured dolphins and fly by shooting rainbows out of their tailpipes, then fine, I'm willing to throw realism out the window and play space dogfighter. Like I've mentioned, I thought Freelancer was great fun, and its physics are firmly in the realm of fantasy. But when I see realistic ship designs and get my hopes up that here might be a game that gives Sir Isaac Newton his due, and then to see it fail so obviously, well, I can't let that slide.

Anyway, rant over. Just had to get it off my chest. I do think there's an unfilled niche out there for a space combat game with a strictly realistic physics simulation. The hard sci-fi crowd would love it. Actual Newtonian physics, having to pay back any velocity you build up in order to change direction. No ridiculously silly 'boosters' that speed you up until they run out of juice, at which point you suddenly fall back to your 'maximum' speed. Yeesh. Unfortunately it seems that the game world is infected with the same hysteria that plagues Hollywood, believing that people don't want real sci-fi. They want disguised fantasy, or airplanes in space, or just a vehicle for horror movie monsters. But maybe one day someone will take up the challenge. Well, I can dream, anyway.

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