Thursday, February 26, 2004
I was playing the X2 demo for a few hours today. The game has so many awesome concepts that give it some real potential. It has a picture-in-picture ability so that you can view alternate cockpits or turrets in the ship you're in, or in your remote ships. Let me explain:
One of the demo missions has you pilot a large cruiser (with about 6 turret positions). You are being attacked by about 12 enemy ships. The goal is to use your single person fighter to hunt down a specific ship (while you are fighting off the other ones by commanding your capital ship) and get some data from it so that you can single out which of the attackers have the big damaging missiles. Once you have that info, you take them out. Ofcourse, you do all of this from the bridge of your cruiser and just use smaller windows to command turrets (usually when enemy ships fly past their firing arc), and your remote fighter.
You can activate your ship and turrets to auto-engage any enemies just like it does with NPC AI, so you end up seeing the bridge of the ship with 7 windows which all have turrets firing and you can see your own fighter dog-fighting from it's cockpit window. It's pretty cool.
Ontop of that, the game has a trade system very similar to Tradewars, and ship upgrades, different varieties, and timecompression (thank god). You can get hired for short tasks at any station, or just freelance kill pirates.
Ofcourse, the game can't be this awesome without some massive ass. No multiplayer. Ouch. What would be more fun than fending off a squad of fighters attacking my cruiser that I worked hard to buy? If I was doing it with a group of friends in each turret and especially if the enemies were at least partly other players as well.
The nail in the coffin for any long-term play was the fact that the controls aren't remapable in the demo...which drives me INSANE since the default controls are designed for an octopus.
One of the demo missions has you pilot a large cruiser (with about 6 turret positions). You are being attacked by about 12 enemy ships. The goal is to use your single person fighter to hunt down a specific ship (while you are fighting off the other ones by commanding your capital ship) and get some data from it so that you can single out which of the attackers have the big damaging missiles. Once you have that info, you take them out. Ofcourse, you do all of this from the bridge of your cruiser and just use smaller windows to command turrets (usually when enemy ships fly past their firing arc), and your remote fighter.
You can activate your ship and turrets to auto-engage any enemies just like it does with NPC AI, so you end up seeing the bridge of the ship with 7 windows which all have turrets firing and you can see your own fighter dog-fighting from it's cockpit window. It's pretty cool.
Ontop of that, the game has a trade system very similar to Tradewars, and ship upgrades, different varieties, and timecompression (thank god). You can get hired for short tasks at any station, or just freelance kill pirates.
Ofcourse, the game can't be this awesome without some massive ass. No multiplayer. Ouch. What would be more fun than fending off a squad of fighters attacking my cruiser that I worked hard to buy? If I was doing it with a group of friends in each turret and especially if the enemies were at least partly other players as well.
The nail in the coffin for any long-term play was the fact that the controls aren't remapable in the demo...which drives me INSANE since the default controls are designed for an octopus.
