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[Mizhara]

Aaaand it's fixed.

Yeah, six hours in and still feel like I need another fifty to give a good first impression post but here goes.

This seems to be Egosoft's attempt to marry the Quality of Life improvements from X: Rebirth with the amazing sandbox of X3 and frankly, it seems to have worked. I have so much more to work on and figure out (I'm still shy of hiring traders, miners, running stations etc) but having poked at all the bits and pieces a little, it seems like it is the same old impenetrable awful mindgrindingly obtuse sandbox of X3 with a whole bunch of visual, UI and gameplay improvements to bring it into a modern world.

The graphics are pretty swanky, even if demanding for their looks. The dockside animations/NPCs etc are absolutely awful as they should be (fuck off with your space legs bullshit, this is Interne... this is Singleplayer Spaceships god damn it), and the ships handle amazingly. No seriously, the flight models are delicious. I'm wholly convinced they actually take your cargo into consideration when they calculate your inertia. My mining ship needing several kilometers of screeching sideways before it slows down enough to even be able to maneuver after picking up a load of Ice is delectable to feel.

So much weight and feeling of flying a big ass ship, which has been missing from both Eve and the X series up until now. Hell, it felt better than Elite: Dangerous.

What is much less enjoyable is how difficult it is to find things to do. You can do anything, you just... you know...

... sandbox. This sorely needs several plotlines injected, which if X3:TC/AP is any indication, there will be eventually. For now, it seems Egosoft prefers to polish the sandbox.

I'm enjoying it quite a bit, but I can't at all recommend it unless you were into the previous X games and is thus prepared for the learning curve that makes Eve look like Tic Tac Toe. If you were into X3 etc, this is Egosoft's wholehearted apology for X: Rebirth.

Edit: OH! One awesome little new tidbit just for flavor: Your ships are built to order. No buying a ship off the rack, now you pick the ship, the initial fit etc, then they build it for you while you wait (or go off to do something else in the mean time). It feels so -right-. Also makes a bit of sense given how these games tend to end up. Saving a particular fit for Trader Freighter Variant #21: Energy Cells in Sector X, Y and Z, then building a few of those when needed and sending them off to do their trading, and having another fit saved for mining vessel this and that, etc etc.

[Mizhara]

The Caldari, appropriately lizard people, now like me. So I've got that going for me. Which is nice.

The ship captain I hired to take my 'newbship' full of antimatter cells and smack it down into an anomaly managed to attract pirate attention and died in spite of me descending upon the bastards with fury and... well okay, I'm still in a shitfit cheap ship so it was mostly just 'about twice the firepower of the first ship, which largely amounts to peeing forcefully in their general direction' but still. So now I have to make enough money for another ship, another captain, another set of antimatter cells and so on.

The NPCs you hire are kind of stupid. This might tie into the whole 'training them up' thing, but still. Very very stupid.

[Mitara Newelle]

Very interesting. Thanks for taking the time to post your feedback on this, Miz!

[Mizhara]

They do seem to be working hard and patching out the worst issues, either with temporary work-arounds or full fixes. Post-Launch support seems to be quite good, but at the same time some of the things that people report to be fuckered (NPCs using Turrets, autotraders, etc) are kind of essential for a lot of gameplay.

[Mitara Newelle]

I think I'm pretty sold on getting it just a matter of when now.  If I hit a 'geez I'm bored and don't want to log in to eve... what should I do?' will probably be the trigger

[Mizhara]

Well, since it's singleplayer, I would recommend patience. This is the kind of game that'll age like wine, as mods and patches come along. It'll also mean wikis and guides and so on will populate.