Olvel played X3: Reunion

X3 has a crazy-steep learning curve.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing... I like EVE, after all. But there's absolutely no tutorial at all. The manual isn't as helpful as it could be. And there's very little information available in-game. It feels very much like the developers just assumed that anyone playing X3 would be a veteran of the other X games, and would already know how everything works.

The end result of all this is a lot of frustration on my part.

Continued on the storyline stuff last night... They sent me after some pirate who had stolen a magic crystal. They gave me a jump drive. They explained that the pirate is going to jump away and I'm going to have to follow him.

So, off I went...

I tracked down the pirate ok. He sent some fighters after me, which were dealt with fairly easily. Then he jumped. A moment later I was told to jump. I hit shift+j to activate my jump drive, picked a destination, and nothing happened...

I tried it again, and again, and again... Nothing happened.

And while I'm working on following this pirate with my jump drive, his fighters are pounding away at me. Eventually they killed me.

I loaded up a saved game and tried again. This time I killed all the fighters before trying to jump. Since it was much quieter, I was able to hear the game tell me that the jump drive was out of energy. I'd burned through a lot of power killing the pirates, so I waited for my guns to recharge. Nope, still couldn't jump. So I waited for my shields to recharge - still couldn't jump.

Eventually I went looking on-line for help... Turns out you need energy cells to power a jump drive. It would have been nice if someone had told me this...

They could have mentioned when they handed me the jump drive, that I'd need to pick up energy cells. Or just as part of the pilot-to-pilot chitchat. Or they could have sent me a message in game. Or they could have just added a couple notes to the description of the jump drive. Or maybe made the out of energy warning a little more descriptive.

Instead, they just assume that I need energy cells.