Anyone else played this?

I'm getting the impression that it doesn't want you to play it, the interface is so very...opaque.

What its promising would be better with a system like in Independence War 2.

Yeah. The interface sucks and the controls are kind of confusing. It's a really hard game to get into.

I never really got into it. Maybe I'll reinstall it and give it another try before my classes resume in September. It did have the potential to be a pretty awesome game. Let's hope they do a fourth installment that's a little more user friendly; and easier to get into, for that matter.

I used to play X Beyond the frontier when it came out, along with X-Tension, and X2 the threat, good games.

I played it for a long time, but the interface was annoying and it wasn't that...fun.

It's a decent game marred by huge aspects of it that are just crap.

Those aspects being primarily the main story and the interface, in that order. Even a few patches in, there was a bug in one of the later missions that made it impossible to complete. You don't get any real rewards in the form of ships or anything and the events are generic boring stuff. Complete waste of time.

Trading your way into a significant amount of money, building a fleet of trading ships and setting up patrols to keep certain areas safer for them, and then leading fleets of ships against the various groups of enemies, that can be fun. Setting up factory complexes and manipulating the economy can be interesting too. Exploring everything, thats another interesting part. It's fundamentally a sandbox game and should be played as such. I played it for a while a few years ago.

X2 the threat is the best game egosoft have made, especially with the amount of universe mods and scripts for the game on the egosoft forums, its an immense community.