X Rebirth - Egosoft - Q4 2011

[Ruvaldt]

Good news and bad news.

The bad: X Rebirth appears to have been pushed back to sometime in 2012.

The good: X3: Albion Prelude, an expansion to X3: Terran Conflict, was released yesterday and if you have bought the X Superbox on Steam you should now also have a complementary copy of X3:AP.  I have read that there were a few problems with the distribution for X Superbox owners, but Egosoft has been pretty adamant that it'll be fixed.  For those interested, X3:AP looks like a more action-packed X3:TC and takes place during a very hot galactic war.  It will, however, take a few days for the script/mod-writers to get everything translated over to the new version, and mods have traditionally been what make these games really shine.

[ajax34i]

Well, they've finally announced a release date of Nov 15, 2013, and released a trailer and a reason for the delay.   They both look pretty good at fullscreen 1080p resolution, though they seem to lack the ability to render shiny metallic surfaces, and the narrator has a horrible voice.

One of the reasons for the delay is familiar to me from EVE:  they decided to implement walking-in-stations.  They seem to have done it, though, unlike EVE.

EDIT:  Sorry for the necro.

[UnSub]

I look forward to the next update for this thread around the start of 2015.

[satael]

Since it's an X game it's going to feel like a second job if you try to do the trading part seriously (especially if there are no mods to help you). Still I might fail to stay away from this and spend too many hours doing spreadsheets to grow a space empire! (and not forgetting the occasional pew pew) 

[Hawkbit]

I thought part of the Rebirth concept was to make it slightly more accessible.  Is that still part of the plan?

[Ceryse]

Still should be a fair bit more accessible than past iterations of the franchise.

This has been one of my more anticipated titles for awhile (three years or so), but there are a few things that have me a bit skeptical or annoyed -- primarily the space highway stuff and walking around stations, but we'll see how it actually plays out. That's if the game actually launches this year. This is the third hard release date we've seen, so who knows. Still, when it comes out I'll probably drop hundreds of hours into it, easily, and can easily see it being my most played game ever after enough time (if EU 4 doesn't claim that).

[Mrbloodworth]

Thank you, oh internet space sim gods, for allowing people to leave their ship. May no more space games come to pass that do not.


Still single player isn't it?   

[koro]

I loved X3 and this looks amazing, but I'm not entirely thrilled about the fact that you can only ever pilot that one ship.

[apocrypha]

More X games are cool, but I'm guessing it's just single-player.  I'd really like to be able to interact with others in the X universe.

Quoting this from 2 years ago for emphasis.

The fact that there is still no multiplayer in the X series is extremely disappointing to me.

[satael]

More X games are cool, but I'm guessing it's just single-player.  I'd really like to be able to interact with others in the X universe.

Quoting this from 2 years ago for emphasis.

The fact that there is still no multiplayer in the X series is extremely disappointing to me.

X game without SETA (which couldn't really work in a multiplayer) would be a pain

[Mrbloodworth]

SETA has been removed in this version. AFAIK. Everything is just speed up. Also the addition of gates and Trade lanes ALA Freelancer. Hell, you have a crew and co-pilot. Sad that you can't just LAN connect and take one over.

[Sky]

I loved X3 and this looks amazing, but I'm not entirely thrilled about the fact that you can only ever pilot that one ship.

Good point. Should have a GTA/SR/SD style garage to store your ships.

In fact, the space sim genre could learn a LOT from the open world genre.

[ajax34i]

There's a poll that shows a 60% to 40% preference for multiple ships, with enough replies to be significant and probably representative of what Egosoft's playerbase wants.  They went ahead with a single ship anyway. 

On top of it, the ship is ugly, and it's asymmetrical, with the engines at an odd angle that can't possibly work in any sort of realistic physics environment.

What's somewhat funny to me, though, is that the game engine looks similar to the one that Star Citizen will be using, but the environments and the ships look better.  Judging by the couple trailers I've seen.  Granted, SC is not very far in its development cycle, but still, Egosoft's game showcases just how much work Roberts will have to put in.  All the people who were praising him and his game have disappeared from Egosoft's forums, like, vanished without a trace.

[Pennilenko]

I honestly think the two games are shooting for different goals. To my eye the graphic details are negligibly different. Also if I can get up and freely move around any ship in star citizen as well has have my closest friends crew a ship with me in multi-player, then I wont care if the graphics don't convince me that I am in real space. That said, I supported Star Citizen, but I still think the chances are good that it will deliver very little of what has been promised. I really just supported it with around the box cost because I want more companies and developers to see that there is interest in space games so that maybe we see some more people take a stab at making good space games.


Edit: Also, I don't really see myself playing a new X game, I have tried for years to learn to play their X series (I have every version except for the very first old one). I just can't figure that shit out, maybe its because I suck at space games, I don't know.

Second Edit: I just took a look at Rebirth and apparently I didn't have a clue what they are shooting for, so I will be more than happy to try out both SC and X:Rebirth.

[Mrbloodworth]

Interiors for all ships, including a seamless transition between everything, and entire capital ship interiors is where SC is vastly different than X Rebirth. Also, beyond walking around a bit in Rebirth, in what I suspect are copies of interiors for stations with some variance seems to be the only activity. Where as SC will have that, and combat in seamless interiors. There is much more work going into Star citizen in many many areas. X Rebirth is on the right track in terms of where all space games should be of this type. I Half suspect, as SC is referenced by the development team for X many times, the delay was adding in the interiors and player toons to attempt to match SC in some fashion. The likely reason there is only one ship in X, is due to it not being an easy task to put all functionality you may need into a ship that has an exterior and interior. There is a tremendous amount of work going into each ship in Star citizen, including engineers on staff. Going as deep as to also standardize ship to ship docking ports.  

[ajax34i]

Or because Egosoft's initial idea (about 2? years ago) of cutscenes moving you from one place to the next inside the ships and stations, with no actual WASD control, was stupid.

[Mrbloodworth]

That too. I Can admit I have not followed the development of this title, due to the taste in my mouth about previous installments. But rebirth is clearly Triumph for them, it shows in just the videos.

I Just do not think the two titles are very comparable on the ship and interior level. World and trade? Maybe, in parts. The largest difference will be you can run an entire corp in X alone, using AI. In Star citizen, a majority of that gameplay uses other players.

If we wana talk about what looks better, toss Black Prophecy on there too. That game is stunning. But its all surface.

[Lantyssa]

There's a poll that shows a 60% to 40% preference for multiple ships, with enough replies to be significant and probably representative of what Egosoft's playerbase wants.  They went ahead with a single ship anyway.

Uh... what?

That's a dealbreaker.  Half the fun of the X series was being able to change ships.  I'll trade walking around for multiple ships, thanks.  Hope the fans mod that stupid decision out quick.

[Ceryse]

I might be mistaken, but I believe they went to one flyable ship for a couple reasons; interiors, storyline, mechanics, progression with consistency.

First one is pretty much a 'meh', its interesting but hardly worth any kind of trade-off on its own. The storyline reason makes some sense and it will really depend on how well its pulled off. Mechanically, and progression wise, is probably where most people are going to bitch about the change, and have an actual case for it. However, personally, with them bringing in drones that you can remotely pilot (and basically act as the fighters of previous X games in terms of mechanics and balance, as well as acting as bombers and other more niche ship types) and the player ship (the Skunk?) starting off as a weak ship that progressively gets stronger due to its modular design (you can unlock/buy/manufacture different modules as the game goes along, I believe) is enough for me, personally.

But, to be fair, I always wound up with one ship type I preferred and always used that and found swapping ships largely pointless as most ship types tended to be worse than another type within its class, and most classes were of the sort I hate to play. So I can understand, and personally agree with, their decision.

I expect it won't take long for the modding community to change, however.

[Mrbloodworth]

I bet we see ship + story DLC's.

[Stormwaltz]

Available for preorder now, and for once, North America is the gaming ghetto.

Steam-only in NA
German boxed version
Collector's box for Germany and UK

http://www.egosoft.com/shop/

All versions require Steam as DRM.

[Mrbloodworth]

X Rebirth - Trading And Mining Trailer

[Stormwaltz]

I'm not sure what I think about that one. The deep mechanics (what it was actually about) are interesting, but the walking-in-stations quest NPCS actually make the game look a bit worse to me. A bunch of look-alike, dead-eyed NPCs sitting or standing around doing nothing, recycling a few lines of personality-free dialogue. It's like an MMORPG town circa 2005.

I'm interested to see what modders do with can do with this. Maybe we can really bring them to life.

[Reg]

Yeah and if we have to walk around looking for the useless NPC vendors to buy things I'm not playing.

Anyone know if Albion Prelude is worth getting?

[ajax34i]

It's $9 on Steam, so yeah.  It's currently patched to version 3.1, with the last two patches being modder-created plots and bug fixes.

If you get it, feel free to ask questions on the Egosoft forums, the community is pretty helpful.

[Sir T]

The walking in station past Quest NPCs were some of the worst parts of freelancer, that I skipped after about three rounds of it.

I have every X game bar Albion, and I have zero interest in this tbh.

[Father mike]

So I picked up X3: Reunion a while back in a bargain bin and never installed it.  Would it give me a good feel for Terran Conflict and Albion, or has the game changed significantly in those releases?

[Ceryse]

If you're not going to get the new one, I'd say get Albion Prelude or Terran Conflict. I would not go near Reunion or any other X game that came before Terran Conflict because its just not worth it from a new-to-the-series point of view. Most likely you'll just get frustrated and quit because the UI and difficulty curve were designed by some of the biggest retards in gaming history. That's my opinion, anyways. I found Terran Conflict much, much easier to get into than the previous games (all of which I gave up on within 5 hours of starting). Even then, Terran Conflict does have a bit of a curve and some horrid UI design, but there were mods that made a lot of it less vile.

As for the new version.. I'll probably get it on release and futz with it now and then till some mods come out. If everything has to be done by walking around on stations and such to sell/buy or get quests and so on? I'm going to end up screaming at my screen "GIVE ME MY BLOODY MENUS BACK!", or something similar with a whole lot more swear words. It just doesn't look good, doesn't appear to have any point beyond the "look at this feature we crammed in because we saw others doing it!". Also, I dearly hope there's more automation to your trade fleet ships than shown in that video, otherwise trading is going to be such a pain in the ass later on in the game.

Hell, about mid-way through Terran Conflict, through using mods, I have 40-60 trade ships going around on the pre-programmed trade routes just based off my own factories, and I never had to worry about them unless they got blown up. In that video the big worry for me was the idea of having to have them in your fleet group or something. We'll see, but there's a lot of minor issues with this game that could be devastating until the modders have time to tear into it.

[Father mike]

Thanks, that's exactly what  I needed to know

Since Reunion is so far behind the usability curve, I guess I'll just have to base my purchase decision on how badly I need my space sim itch scratched!

[Ceryse]

So, this just got released. I pre-ordered largely based on the fact I've put a lot of time into the X series and enjoyed it, especially X3: Terran Conflict. I've mucked around with it for a few hours now and haven't crashed (a number of people are reported various crash issues) nor is my fps low even on maxed settings (a number of people are having serious fps issues regardless of settings). However, while the game has some promise it clearly shows that a lot of the worries about the game pre-release were well justified.

Station-walking aspect? Largely trash; its mandatory (if there's a person on a station you want to talk to you have to go aboard and run to them to be able to talk to them -- you cannot just call them up from your ship), character models are pretty bad, as are animations -- what few there are, they're sparsely populated and basically involves just talking to everyone and asking them to show you their skills. Also, you can loot tons of containers just laying around for that sole purpose, which just feels weird. Also, its possible to get stuck and have to reload a save; so I hope you saved!

Highway system is pretty 'meh', in my opinion. Just.. doesn't feel right or all that intelligently put together. Personally I miss the gate system of travel.

Trading is a pain in the ass now, largely because your ship can't trade in, well, trade goods (just inventory trading of minor stuff). This means all your trading, especially at the start requires you to fly around, find trade deals (and don't forget to fully scan a station to get the best deals, which is a decent annoyance to do) and then tell one of your freighter ships to actually do the trading. All that would be okay.. but its not always so easy. For example, in the tutorial mission about trading, I had my freighter buy some energy cells, traveled to the destination (thus dragging my freighter with me, basically), and sold the energy sells. Unfortunately it took almost fifty four minutes for the ship to get from the highway exit to the station and sell the goods. Why? Pathing issue. It got stuck around the highway for almost half that time.

Also, the interface is even worse than expected of an X game (and if you've played X games before you know the interface has always been bad). Its clunky and instead of nested menus you've got a number of completely separate menus that are fairly clunky and generally require you to stop flying your ship and paying attention to anything else -- and several of the menus require your character to turn away and looks at a pop-up menu meaning you can't even look out into space to see what's around you (or if there are incoming hostiles.. or if you're uselessly driving into something -- thank god for no collision damage!)

The HUD itself is pretty bad. They've gone for the cockpit view (and it is the only view), which has about 40% or so of the screen covered, of which only about half of it is used for anything, meaning you've lost most of your screen real-estate for not good reason.

There are also a number of bugs, including related to flying your ship (as an example, my accel/deccel sometimes doesn't want to take more input for awhile until I move my mouse around first).

This all isn't to say there's nothing good about the game. I just didn't get far enough into it to find it yet. So far the game looks like it'll need some heavy support from the modding community and official patches to make it worthwhile to anyone who isn't seriously into the X series.

[Mrbloodworth]

Well, that's disappointing, if not expected, sadly.

[koro]

From what I've been hearing elsewhere, the game is pretty much garbage at this point. The UI is worse than X3's, there's no SETA or autopilot, the campaign is buggy and broken, and possibly unwinnable.

The game was also designed for a 360 pad, which seems to account for many of the UI woes.

[ajax34i]

They had a special dev video on just how well the game would be controlled by a 360 pad a long while ago, to which my worry was "game will support joystick like the others in the series, right?" They replied after a few weeks, along the lines of "yea yeah but look at the sweet 360 pad controls."

[Ceryse]

I've put some more time into it (the sad thing is that right now, I feel like playing an X game and am tired of the ones I got other than Rebirth and as such am throwing myself into Rebirth again and again... what's the definition of insanity again?);

A number of issues with the game were readily apparent pre-launch and seem to have caught the Devs by surprise; such as differing camera options, the want for free look and so on, that they addressed these as forthcoming, but that it could take some time. Talking to people on stations via comms seems to be something they intend to hurry to put in due to the sheer number of people pissy about having to run through identical station interiors every single time they want to do something (like trade, get personnel, buy upgrades, buy a drone, and so on).

The game does seem overly designed for a game pad, which is curious considering it is a PC only title (a number of the 'wtf?' design decisions seem to have been pet issues/projects for lead designers -- such as the HUD and UI). The mouse controls aren't bad, but the lack of being able to customize the buttons of a lot of mice is extremely baffling (there is no option for mice in the key config beyond inverting and sensitivity). Most of the game plays well with the keyboard. The problem is they stripped a couple of the control schemes (such as direct control via mouse movement, rather than the follow the mouse cursor that is currently in) which is a big no-no, especially as the two main control modes they removed seem to have been the most used by hardcore X fans.

Horrendous joystick support (don't have one personally, thankfully) is beyond idiotic considering the sheer number of X players who use joysticks. A number of even the more popular joysticks are not even recognized by the game. They are working on this, but to launch with such anemic joystick support when you've advertised the game as controllable via mouse/keyboard, game pad and joystick is.. interesting, to say the least.

The UI is worse than X3, which is saying something, and largely stems from them trying to make elements of the cockpit serve a point (and ease game pad control) -- but any kind of flying game where your character (and thus the camera) has to swing to the side to look at menus (some, such as sector maps, are things you'll want to look at while flying) and thus prevent you from moving or seeing what's going on around your ship is downright bad design. It does look like, however, they attend to address some of it and most of the rest may be fixable with mods or when they add other camera angles in (which could be a few months).

No SETA was a known quantity going in, and I honestly don't blame them, nor do I mind, honestly. I think the removal of SETA is one of the few gameplay decisions they got right, and I loved SETA. The problem is that there are elements to the game that can just take forever without SETA now that trading has been somewhat removed from the player (i.e., the playership cannot trade, well, trade goods). Long term, however, I think this will be a good change.

There is an auto-pilot. Sorta. There's an auto-pilot if you're using a drone and you can pre-plot some courses, I think (haven't tried.. I was never a big user of auto-pilot). However, some of the time when you need auto-pilot (such as when you're looking at those side-menus...) there isn't any. Should be added, imo. No reason not to have it, especially since collisions do no damage.

Campaign.. I played some more of it and it itself is not very buggy. It isn't. A number of things causing an out-cry are simply badly documented or intended (such as how slow trade ships are -- that was expressly pointed out by the Devs pre-launch.. I think most simply didn't expect it to be as slow as it is). Another big issue with the campaign is simply that this is an X game and it still has a decently steep learning curve (which is kind of sad considering how many aspects have been dumbed down for game pad support) and that, in general, gamers are bloody idiots. My new game (before I ended up having my game crash for the first time!) saw very few actual bugs in the campaign once I sorted out how to do things (the game tells you how, but it only stays on your screen for about two or three seconds.. and some of them are a bit wordy for that if you weren't looking right at the dialogue box).

Overall verdict: Wait at least 3 months before considering purchasing this game. Waiting that long should see them suss out some of the major issues (or expound on why they won't be) and, more importantly, will give the mod community time to take things into their own hands. Most people forget that most X games are horrendous on launch, because Terran Conflict and Albion Prelude weren't -- which was mainly because those games were mainly just X3 relaunched in a finished state with the most popular mods added in).

[ajax34i]

in general, gamers are bloody idiots.

You know what, speak for yourself.  If your point is that it's a good game and just you're an idiot at interacting with it, that's fine.   I think it's a bad game and everyone's level of intelligence is fine, and certainly sufficient to call a bad game when they see one.