Yeah, I'm getting errors on their forums too.

Game is active but it is still downloading content

I see what you did there

92% and climbing... wonder what the download contains, must be quite large as it has been running for a while at 10MB/s

Can't start it yet, will check out after a while though. School function day, gotta pick up b'fast for my girl and head out.

I'm holding off until you guys give the nod

Looking forward to the "first contact" Dead-is-Dead reports in the AAR section! *hinthint*
Meaning AARs of players taking on the campaign without any extensive training and/or exploring.

I actually consider it rather daring to make such a release on a Friday - may make for a rather uneasy weekend if something serious pops up...
Their new Rebirth Technical Support forum sections seem to grow significantly faster than the others; but I can't comment on the "quality" of the reports, as their forum keeps failing on me

Well the CE content downloaded:
Video quality - Good
Audio quality - Meh - Stereo 16/48kHz, not worth wasting a Bluray disk on and the file is slightly too large for a standard DVD - 43kB too big, not a happy camper there.

Right got a few minutes to try the game now as the wife has just gone out

Ok guys word of WARNING
If you are a HOTAS user like me (WARTHOG)
Prepare to be VERY disappointed. Cant use rudder pedals, alotta buttons can't be mapped. The game looks nice but as far as function for Multi ID HOTAS systems youre outta luck

Just found that out too,(Cougar) Sigh, doesn't respond to control inputs very well, left spinning in the hold and had to give the game a "three fingered salute" to get out of it

I keep an old MS Sidewinder 3D around for just such occasions, but I did get the impression they were sort of shooting for a mouse+keyboard Freelancer-style control layout.

Personally, I'm waiting to see what people say about performance and bugs before I buy it. I will buy it eventually for sure, but past experience with them suggests it might be a couple of patches before it's really ready, and for once I'd like to experience an X game that works okay from the first time I play it.

I see some rumblings on the Steam forum about poor performance on high-end systems, but then you always have that. Doesn't mean much until there are clear trends among hundreds of people. I haven't been able to get on Egosoft's site all day.

I almost bought the game yesterday. Then I reminded myself of my experiences with the series on release and decided against it. Waiting for more first impressions. I love the X series but Egosoft has a habit of releasing their games a tad unfinished IMO.

Thanks for the info guys. Still going to wait on purchase then.

Need more info on the "self levelling" and the HOTAS issues. I am sure the HOTAS side of things will be recitified fairly quickly (one hopes)

I'm getting scared to buy ANY game at release now. People will have a VERY hard time getting me to pre-order anything ever again.

I'm not big on space games, but the trailers and premise of this look interesting. Was just ducking in here to see what people thought about the game. Steam forums are the usual combo of scary and infuriating...

...and it doesn't help that the Egosoft forums have been down for several hours now... on release day. Not really professional. I'm sure a lot of people would love to browse the official forums for some 1st impressions instead of wading through the cesspool that are the Steam forums.

Well, technically the forums are not down but overloaded. I managed to get in sporadically. E.g. I mentioned the fast-growning Technical Support sections - that was basically two posts that were replicated 5 and more times.
Reported isssues were crash/hang-up due to sound settings (alicatt mentioned something regarding 48kHz) and performance.

Only got to start it and run 30mins before work today, for me there was no crashes, performance is working fine at 1080p 4xAA, and the XB360 controller is working great (I never used HOTAS in the past and don't plan to this time either).

Too early to give first impressions since I am still getting used to the new mechanics and highways (and no SETA), so far so good for me, but the steam forums seems to have people having performance problems and the expected others who didn't buy it and want to crap on it due to the new softer focus.

So I think for any of you on the fence I would wait a few days to let the initial typical EGOSOFT launch issues shake out and to see the reviews, for me it is working ok and I enjoyed what I played so far, looking forward to diving in later today.

It doesn't manage to get my screen resolution. I can either start the game without menus and with the image centered on my middle screen OR I can change to landscape mode, tilt my head, and get a menu. I cannot find an ini file to edit either. I'll just have to spend the night playing something that works, cliffs of dover (never thought I'd say that).

I thought triple screen support was a no-brainer but I guess I'll just have to wait.

-C-

For anyone else on the fence, I see people streaming X;Rebirth gameplay on twitch now, one example:
http://www.twitch.tv/frooglepete#/w/7505707248

AHA! My tilt head menu attempt generated a config file under my documents\Egosoft\ where before there was none. A quick edit and in the game we are... in full 3600x1920 glory.

So if you are running in portrait mode and having problems. Set your screens to landscape mode (tilt head ;-) ), start x rebirth and set the resolution to something new. Exit the game, set your screens back to portrait mode. Go to your windows drive and under documents you will find the Egosoft folder. In that folder you should now have a file called config.xml in that file you can set your resolution to whatever you'd like.

-C-