I'm one of the people that like X2
IMO it does what it sets out to do pretty well - which is create a world with a fully functional trading system and giving the player freedom to do a wide range of activities like building your own trade empire, roaming around in giant cruisers smashing everything and waging war on entire races.
It does have flaws, one of those (for me) is performance - the thing runs at 5fps on my machine even after I upgraded from a GeForce 2 MX to a GeForce FX 5900 (I got +1fps from that...) so it really requires a massively powerful rig in all aspects (to run the AI for the entire universe) and there are no options to reduce it to speed things up.
Another flaw is combat, it just feels wrong compared to anything else - ships turn on the spot (this is what causes the AI to play bumper-cars with you) and battles degenerate into whoever has the bigger ship or runs away first.
Capital ship combat isn't much better since you can't damage subsystems and the turrets are weak compared to the more powerful fighter based weapons.
Basically its very simplified, but too much IMO.
The last flaw are combat fleets - all you get are handfulls of friendly ships 'on patrol' (randomly flying around) and enemy ships flying in line formation to a destination (typically only if you blew them up where they were in the first place). Pirates float around but don't do much until you build factories and annoy them, then they proceed to annoy you back
I believe this could be fixed by a user-built mod however I lack the time to try it out :/
That said the parts the game is focussed around are done well - namely trading and empire construction. As a player you can setup a semi-automated fleet of trade ships darting from place to place to capitalise on profit oportunities.
Or you can setup your own factory empire - players have built anything from a couple of stations in nice spots to dozens intertwined in their own network. You can purchase fighters, transports and the aforementioned capital ships to stand guard over your belongings and ensure everything runs smoothly.
Finally it just looks great, even at 5fps on low detail the views you get as you fly around are quite pretty
Compared to starshatter?
Well starshatter is more focussed on military conflict, there's no trade to speak of.
It models combat very nicely to suit the tastes of individuals (newtonian fanatics or arcade fans), has a very cool dynamic campaign system, planetary flight and combat and decent large-scale battles.
It's not as pretty, you can't build an empire and you can't roam around the place at will (unless you take an extended mission trip) but that's not what the game is about
On multiplayer:
X2 doesn't have multiplayer, the devs are reserving that for X-Online (a MMOG basically), I'd also imagine it would be exceptionally difficult to find someone willing to play for days on end with you to make significant advancements within the game.
Starshatter has mission based multiplayer (I don't know if you can play the dynamic campaigns multi?) which is almost expected of games these days. 15-20 minutes of fun suits multiplayer games well although I haven't tried it yet.
ORIGINAL: Hertston
I don't think there's any excuse for anything short of a fully rendered "astronomical" galaxy (or portion of one) in this sort of game - Elite: Frontier managed it - you could almost just play that game as a space tourist.
I disagree, a game is entitled to build its own world with its own technology and resulting galactic layout. Frankly I would find it quite boring to have several thousand stars modelled but only ever have reason to visit a handful of them (as happened in Elite).
Same goes for planetary flight. Oh yes it's so enjoyable flying over randomly generated, low-detail terrain with nothing interesting around
If there is no reason to include a feature other than "It might be cool" then why bother spending the resources (time, money) on it when you could be polishing something more closely related to the core of the game?
- Deathifier
