X3: Terran War Pack

I enjoy a mix of arcade and strategy, and more shooting than trading or building, but there are aspects of Terran War Pack I like; and for 'Conflict' mods are still plentiful. It is in the tradition of previous games in the series, better than 'Reunion'; and with a learning curve trading and building ships and stations, I'm yet enjoying it very much: THANKS GOG! I am playing on an HP SFF/Intel i5, Windows 10, with 16 GB RAM and a standard Nvidia GT710 graphics card, and everything also runs fine.

I think, as a big fan of space sims and flight simulators, that this is closest to perfect that I've seen yet. Sure, not perfect, but still closest. Has it quirks, for me UI for example, but I've spent so much hours (I own this game here, on Steam, and have physical box with DVD) that I've actually forgot what the problem was... If base game itself is not enough - go grab yourself some mods, there are good ones. And, it just got free DLC. In 2021, over 10 years after release.

game will scale to 4k no issues but major issue is the UI will NOT scale. There is no remedy as it seems hard coded that way. Hopefully the game launcher comes straight with game resolution so it did not take any time to lower the game resolution down to 1920 x 1080. Not as pretty as 4k but I was expecting a lot worse considering roughly 4 times downscaled, the game still look amazing for its age! Tutorial in game is rather hard to get right away so stay receptive to anything happening on screen. Tutorial is really short and I suspect it does not cover all functions in ship(s) and in game. The game comes with manual so we are not totally lost. The game seems vast and expansive, yet sectors (where you evolve in a map with stuffs to do) is of decent size considering your ship speed. I went on a free wheel right after the tutorial and on my way to a gate to start trading, NPCs out of the blue started to become red and attack me so I attacked anything red bracket, yet it seems some red are not intended to be destroyed depending not to you but rather to your prestige or good standing with third party alliance. Eg: dont kill transport but kill "pirate" ships, or the game will eventually take the big gun out like it did to me by pulling a sort of corvette I assume "centaur... something". It was nonetheless a fun experience, I got into left and right click functions with ease which is essential to fly and fire. I will try again.... after I open the manual :)

I do not recommend it as your first X game. I only played the very beginning of Terran Conflict and the entirety of Albion Prelude. Both of them have a very high focus on the sandbox elements: you'll be free to do whatever you want at whatever pace you want, which is really good for people already familiarized with the franchise but not for new players. On top of that, the in-game tutorials are really lacking depth — X3AP will have a brief flight tutorial and X3TC will have a brief flight and combat (against stationary targets) tutorial and no factories management, which is 90% of these games —. You'll also get a PDF manual as one of the goodies by purchasing it through GOG but I can't speak much about it since I disagreed with it and tossed it into a supernova. Maybe the answer for my complaints about the lack of tutorials is in there but I'll never know now. The story exists, I guess. As I said, these games have a very high focus on the sandbox part. Mods still work, which is great since I'm highly dependent on them for any game I play. Egosoft is one of the few companies to fully support modding, and you'll see that a bunch of old download links still work in their website forum (well... at least the links for the mods I wanted to install still work, maybe 1 or 2 were broken). Outside of that, a bunch of old guides and websites also still works — what comes to mind right now is Roguey's Website and the Complex Calculators that will save you some headache. I don't know... It's a really fun game that I've placed quite some time in. My only complaint is that it's not really noob friendly, even for X's standards. If you're searching for a game that allows you to do whatever you want, this is a good choice. If you never played an X game or wants something more story driven, I would tell you to try X2: The Threat first and see how it goes, since that one will have a more complete in-game tutorial and a proper plot development that will teach you stuff as you go.

Better than EVE-Online without having to deal with people