Timelines is in the top three worst gaming experiences I've ever had.

A preface: Egosoft is talented, obviously. I don't think I need to mention it but some people might take this the wrong way if I don't say it, so I'm putting it front and center.

Timelines is garbage. I'd prefer to play Lords of the Fallen, Parkan 2 or Starpoint Gemini 3 instead. It's as if it's trying to be bad on purpose to make the rest of the game that much better by comparison. Poor design, frustrating, tedious and buggy with some of these bugs and issues being so obvious you have to play a mission once to see, and for some salt on the wound there are some rare fun missions to give you hope and thoroughly crush it.

I'll make a neat bulleted list of the issues for emphasis.

  • The AI voice-over. I'd rather have plain text. If it's gonna' be a half-assed voiceover that sounds like a recording at 1kb/s, there's nothing wrong with not having it at all and letting people get immersed in the top-notch music.
  • The bugs. Holy shit. In an hour of Timelines I've run into so many glaring bugs that I'll just list them in a second bulleted list instead of trying to have them all parsed here.
  • The mission rating system is fucked, with some being so trivial to get rank 5 in that you can do it while AFK (Border Conflict) and others requiring an extremely specific set of actions and a lot of luck (Rise and Mine) because there's no leeway.
  • Related to the above, the difficulty of the missions themselves are completely random. The most difficult ones are at the start, the most irritating ones are at the end.
  • Spacesuit missions when the suit controls like it has a full ton of lead strapped to it.
  • The way some missions seem to assume you'll replay them after gettng a 0 due to some gimmick is just insulting.
  • The amount of leeway you're given doesn't increase with mission length; a single bad fight means no rank 5 for you on Brennan's Trial unless you spend 20 minutes killing more Xenon, yet One Last Haul has 20s of margin but takes half a minute tops.

As for the bugs...

  • A quality aspect of every "gather ore/ice/etc." mission is when the cargo item visibly phases through the ship. If you're trying to get rank 5 on any of these missions, when that happens, there's no recovering from it.
  • If you pause via hitting escape during the end result dialogue, the script breaks and you can't unpause ever. Don't listen to the text that tells you the mission progress was saved, either, because it wasn't. Imagine how absolutely livid I was when my 32 second One Last Haul run was wiped thanks to this.
  • The AI will sometimes ignore commands. Imagine my frustration when repeatedly telling a destroyer or group of bombers to target a specific ship, only for them to either fire on a random unrelated enemy a mile away or sit in my hangar uselessly.
  • The mission that requires you to destroy turrets on a station doesn't seem to account for the fact that those turrets can shoot through the station at angles that are unreasonable.
  • Related to the above, in that mission the ship you're in will spontaneously explode for no reason at all. The only common factor I can find is grazing the station at a low speed and horizontal angle. Apparently this is because the Graviton turrets' projectiles can collide with you through walls.
  • Some racing NPCs will get stuck on physical objects, sometimes including the racing gates themselves.
  • Repair lasers' repair rate is dependent on framerate and frametime, meaning utilities like RTSS can cause them to be substantially less effective.
  • Ejecting from a ship and taking control of another breaks several missions, most notably Pre-Battle Skirmish.
  • The Plutus in Mine Your Own Business fly uselessly in a circle for long periods when ordered to mine.

As for what you can do about it, Egosoft? I'll go mission by mission and tell you exactly what you can do to make them less ass.

  • All missions: allow skipping specific missions so long as you have the total ranks required for the final mission for that graph.
  • Incursion of the False Pontifex: this one's fine.
  • Asteroid Dash: apparently the new flight model broke a lot of ships' handling in racing missions.
  • Impeded Extraction: make the AI obey commands.
  • The Fade: don't spawn a second H if the player renders the first immobile for long periods. It's stupid to punish someone for doing well.
  • Spaceport Stride: the new flight model broke a lot of ships' handling in racing missions.
  • Against the Tide: give the player more laser towers and mines.
  • Rise and Mine: add a tier 2 docking computer. Why tf does a miner not have one already?
  • Hazing the Newbie: remove the ton of lead attached to the space suit.
  • Attack on Antigone: trim the number of Xenon you fight using the freighter by 3.
  • The Recruitment Mission: remove the trap options or just make the mission instantly fail if you select one, since there's no leeway and yet it pretends like there is. Think an instant fail is unreasonable? Me too.
  • Station Circuit: fucked top-to-bottom. The ship being used is not suited for the short distances between waypoints, so you never get to see the capabilities of the ship and it feels clunky to use. This is probably yet another extension of how there was a flight model update.
  • Seasoned Miners Like You: seriously, why does an even bigger mining vessel that's in an active combat zone not have a docking computer?
  • The Admonisher: this one's cool.
  • Brennan's Trial: this one's fun but sitting in the back for a full ten minutes killing Xenon to fill the rank 5 quota's stupid. Decreasing the point requirement by 20-30% means you don't need to ignore the superweapon for a long period of time to grind points.
  • A Merchant Mind: again, I like this one. Plotting out perfect routes while pausing the game or autopiloting is great and there's enough leeway that you need to be precise but not perfect for rank 5.
  • One Last Haul: a docking computer and fixing the asteroids not spawning is all that's needed here.
  • Repair Duty: still suffering from the 1-ton block of lead strapped to the chair. I wonder if the flight model changes affected how the suit controls? I can't imagine your tiny mass and inertia is supposed to be harder to control than an Osaka.
  • Defanging the Defense: one-shots or getting shot through walls, air blocking line-of-fire, a penalty for taking your time, it's a long list. If there's one thing I'd suggest above all, it's stronger shields that can tank three Graviton shots so you don't have to play "find the magic pixel" with the walls and turrets.
  • Pre-Battle Skirmish: you can teleport to and take control of other ships so having it score you based on the hull of the ship you start in is stupid, as is the fact it bugs the mission out if the starting ship gets destroyed. Fix the turret targeting, "target missiles first" does not mean "shoot at everything but missiles." Reduce the number of Ares by 2 and increase how far they are from the mothership.
  • President's End: nearly perfect. Without the AI voicework it has an incredibly good atmosphere for a pseudo-survival horror experience and I wish, I REALLY WISH, there were more missions like this and fewer like Rise and Mine. I bet this is the only one I'm going to ever replay, but it's so good.
  • Mine Your Own Business: either fix the fact the Plutus mining ships fly in a circle and never once touch an asteroid when ordered to mine, or reduce the numbers of Kha'ak. I bet this mission wasn't playtested, it's so bad.

I'll update the list as I do more.