X Rebirth (Egosoft/Deepsilver) reveal trailer (coming to PC - 2011)

K

KongRudi

Regular
wohooo..

http://youtu.be/LabrDe4XJo0?hd=1

Infamous 2, Dark Souls and Uncharted 3 are no longer my most anticipated titles this year.
A new X game is coming, it got a brand new engine, new universe, easier to get into for noobs, but still got deep gameplay. :)

As you can see,

I'm a fan of their former game, it's pretty good value for a single-player-game.. :)
Egosoft is also pumping out alot of updates, and the previous game were very mod-friendly, so there is allways lots of new content if you want to change up how your game plays. :)

Any other people here who likes space-sims who's looking forward to this?
 
My problem with these games has been the gameplay not the graphics. ;) You spend a zillion hours playing space accountant with an annoying interface and in the end the AI can't keep up so you're a super cosmic business tyrant with not much to do really. The space combat and the missions haven't been particularly compelling either.

The highlight to the series is the soothing synthy music, I think. :D
 
If it had the combat of freespace it would rock

ps: its not really 3d, when you think about it
everything is on a 2d plane you have no reason to fly up or down there is nothing there
(just north, south, east, west)
 
Yeah the 2D plane thing is somewhat strange. Of course they do it because they don't want to cause extra disorientation. Lots of people have a hard time with that z axis. :D
 
I didn't like the Frespace-combat as much, if I recall correct you're ship were allways supermanouverable, while the AI were usually flying in a straight direction, slower, with minor turns giving a illsuion of dogfighting.
Well, I liked the games as I do with most space-games, but I like it better the way it is in X now. The old X-games weren't any better back in the day, had basically the same solution on what I assume were bad AI. :-/

You can simulate the Freespace-combat feel pretty well tough, in some space-crafts, but theire not allways as easy to outfit, and dosn't suit all opponents, and one unique craft is very hard to get.

As for the 3D-thing, you're wrong. :)
The way the sectors are built up, is that they are basically a three dimensional cube.
And then there is a image wrapped around spherical ball on the outside of the cube.

This way all the systems get their own distant stars/planetary images and similar, and all the sectors (cube) vary in size.

So if you point your ship in one direction, and speed up time, and go away for a few hours, Your ship will come back on the other edge.of the cube, and start over again on the other edge, like in the old game called 'Snake', if you went out of the side, you came back on the other side.
It will never reach the distant stars on the image bent around the cube.

There is a few sectors where you can go to the planetary parts of the image pasted on the ball around the cube, and if you fly to long towards that your ship will be destroyed by atmosphere, on the planet.

But for the most part you need to use a Gate or a jumpdrive to leave the current sector (cube), or you wil come back to the start.

As for the Z-axis it is very usefull to be aware of when building space-station complexes with lots of complexes together, it is very hard to build a big station-complex very close to eachother without using the height axis.

Hit the insert key while on the sector-map, and the map will turn from X-Y axis, into Z axis, and hitting Inert-key again will turn the map back to the original X-Y axis.
It's alot easier to keep track of where you are in space, when you are able to orient height and depth direction.

Most of the objects usually gets generated within 50 km from the zero-line, on the Z-axis, so most of the big objects/stations aren't to hard to discover if you get the best radars, without having to orient too much in the heigth/depth of space.

This isn't allways the case tough, in the treasure hunt plotline, i've experienced to find some plot-items up randomly beeing generated allmost 100 km from the center on both sides of the Z-axis, and that is the range of three, and playership need to fly within scanner-range to discover it, kind of annoying in a big system like Akeela's Beacon..

Alot of people want planetary landings and similar in the next game, but I don't.
The big rock in Aldrin is bad enough..
 
swaaye said:
My problem with these games has been the gameplay not the graphics. ;) You spend a zillion hours playing space accountant with an annoying interface and in the end the AI can't keep up so you're a super cosmic business tyrant with not much to do really. The space combat and the missions haven't been particularly compelling either.

The highlight to the series is the soothing synthy music, I think. :D
Click to expand...

Install X-tended mod and problem with being overpowered will be gone :)

BTW I've always wanted to play X3, but didnt have good enough PC for it, then EVE Online came out and i forgot totally about it, but when X4: Rebirth came i just couldnt not buy Terran Conflict.

I really hope so that Rebirth will have coop mode, it would be so awesome to play this with friends.

Ps. Egosoft is the most user friendly developer out there, not only they release many patches with not only fixes but content too [Terran Conflict got 3.1 patch sometimes ago], but also help community with mods and mods tools, even when their games are so enormous [hundreds of hours of gameplay].
Who can accept paying for DLC or expansions when game gets mods that overhaul every aspect of the game like X-tended or ToTT [over 700mb of content each]. Just compare it to 3 maps in CoD, its just scary how industry is sometimes sucking consumers off.
 
KongRudi said:
As for the 3D-thing, you're wrong. :)
Click to expand...

I didnt say you cant travel up and down. What I said is there is no point in doing so as every thing is built on the same plane if you are level with a space station there will be other buildings to your left and right as well as in front and behind you, but none above or below you
 
After thinking more about it, I'd describe the systems as little spheres. They are 3D but not really space-like 3D. These little spheres are often in orbit of a giant planet or other cool space phenomena. N,S,E,W don't really make any sense in space and the game's use of them really defines its intended faking of space. It's just pretty space backdrops with space industrial zone spheres. Simplified Space Managerial Sim Game. The SSMSG. ;)

One thing that X3 lost compared to X2 was all the unique cockpits. That was a major loss IMO. Oh how many dozens of hours I spent in X2 freighter cockpits. It made space trucker "compelling" before I built up the cash for several stations. Then I had all autopiloted freighters and just sat in a base and ran turbo time while watching the spreadsheet. After some hours of that, I quit the game for good, deciding that wasn't how I wanted to spend my time.
 
Davros said:
I didnt say you cant travel up and down. What I said is there is no point in doing so as every thing is built on the same plane if you are level with a space station there will be other buildings to your left and right as well as in front and behind you, but none above or below you
Click to expand...

Oh. I see what you mean, it could be explained tough.

There aren't a conventional north-pole in outer space, so a compass won't work normally there.

Usually there is up to four gate entrances into each sector in the X-games, and 0, 0, 0 on the X-Y-Z-axis is usually set somewhere in the center of the discovery of those gates, they are slowly drifting apart tough over the milleniums, since gravity affects them differently then the rest of the objects in that part of the universe.

The west gate isn't actually in the 'west' direction, it's just designated that for our mapping purposes.

So if you leave Argon Prime's south gate, somewhere south in the system, you come out of the North gate in Home of Light, and even tough the Universe map says Home of Light is south of Argon Prime, it's not actually in that direction.

It's just made that way on our maps, so we can navigate easier.:)

Naturally people will build the space-stations where the customers don't have to fly far away in order to get to your station from any of those gates, so a cluster of stations appear in the center of the sector, However in some cases like with illegal goods like Slaves reformation center, Space Fuel, Space Weed and Pirate Bases and similar it sometimes benefits to move away from the main shipping lanes if only to avoid police border control-patrols, So it might be abit longer to access to them from those four gates, But it might pay off if the police or military dosn't discover the base as quickly.:)

Also some of the ore mines tend to go up and down on the Z-axis, due to the asteroids, but most regular products stations is naturally placed in the the cluster between the gate-entrances. But other than that it's probably best to keep to the center of the sector to get most customers.

You can also see it when doing station-build missions aswell, if you don't remember to change the z-axis you will fail the missions pretty often, since you miss the Navigation Buoy put up by the person who ordered the station.

A gateless sector like Aldrin for example have stations all over the place, thousands of km up and down on the Z-axis, But jumpgates weren't a factor for Aldrin.
Thus probably leading to the planet beeing their center, a belt of asteroids and stations all around the planet wich you can follow when exploring there, it's really hard to discover all the stations. The autopilot is also very hard to use there because of all the rocks and planet at the center of the sector.

Atleast that is how I figure it is. :)
 
swaaye said:
One thing that X3 lost compared to X2 was all the unique cockpits. That was a major loss IMO. Oh how many dozens of hours I spent in X2 freighter cockpits. It made space trucker "compelling" before I built up the cash for several stations. Then I had all autopiloted freighters and just sat in a base and ran turbo time while watching the spreadsheet. After some hours of that, I quit the game for good, deciding that wasn't how I wanted to spend my time.
Click to expand...

I didn't think that much about it, I am fine with the HUD the way it is.
I like watching most of my enviroments tough, and HUD on a helmet cam gives you a pretty unobstructive view, especially on big ships.
Inside the rotating jaws of the Kh'aak destroyer in X3 is pretty spectacular tough.

But I agree that each ship had alot more unique look in X2 due to all the cockpits, especially slow tradeships, but more ships like in X3 with different feel to them more than makes up for it I think. :)

There is a few cockpit-modifications tough, if you'd rather have that.
This one is pretty popular: http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=254635
(Includes sample screens)

I never let the game run on turbo-time/Space Engine Time Accelerator, if you keep it on for a while (or stop fighting in general) your fighting rank will drop, and that will lead to more boring fight-missions, and less payouts.
I prefer to make the money by piracy and fighting rather than trade, even tough I have my share of space-stations to help earn money, I only engage SETA when travelling from A to B on Autopilot.
 
I am very excited for this, but there are a few things they really need to fix to make this the game it should be:

1) Combat. The main problem is simple: bullets go too damn slow. This makes strafing hilariously effective, since even in the slower ships you can dodge 95% of incoming fire. And the AI ships don't know how to strafe, effectively making you a god in your M4.

2) UI. It must be rebuilt from scratch. The series has evolved tremendously over the years, and what may have worked when it was just you flying around in your Buster is completely insufficient for managing a fleet of 100+ freighters and warships in hundreds of sectors across the universe.

3) AI. As the scope of the game expanded the AI didn't. AI fighters are useless against large targets since they go into emergency collision maneuvers before they reach weapons range. Autopilot is a catastrophe on all but the simplest of courses.

4) OOS combat. There is an enormous disconnect between in sector and out of sector combat that must be rectified. In sector, an M2 loaded only with heavy hitters like PPC will never shoot down an M5. OOS the M2 will instakill the M5. I understand the complexities of representing 3-dimensional combat with a simple numbers game, but perhaps the solution does not need to be so complicated. Simply adding a "Hit %" variable to each weapon vs each class of ship (or each individual ship for bonus points :)) would alleviate many of the issues.

5) Stations' storage capacity for large wares. A typical equipment dock can carry like 4 PPCs. That is not enough to fill one battery on an M2. Makes no sense. Though I see why they did it, tying storage capacity to ware value is not good.

And lots of other little things such as:
- Cannot carry more than 1 jumpdrive or software package per ship.
- Jumpdrives are only available in like 3 places throughout the universe.
- Exiting a gate in a bigship can be catastrophic; if I don't have an active satellite in the destination sector I have no way of knowing if I will plow right through the Boron royal family upon arrival. Some sort of traffic control would be nice.
 
I've not had any problems with running into ships for a long time since they bent the gate-halo, but I rarely build more than 20 stations in a system, if you've entering really over-developed system with lots of stations and traffic, collision detection can be abit wonky, and require quick strafing.

When going through gates on autopilot of with jumpdrives, I allmost never suffer shipcrash anymore, flying through manually used to pose troubles until I saw that ships allways exited on the upside of the gate, so if you enter on the downside you should be pretty safe. :)

The most cool things I'm excited about is that the new game will have a expanding universe, I think. Maybe endlessly. And we will also be able to target individual weapon systems. The current gate-network from the ancients is closed, so the universe as we know it will be pretty different, even tough some of the systems are there. :)
 
Looking good. I played 1 & 2 a lot but didn't bother with 3 as it just appeared to be a rehash.

Being stuck in the same ship from the start seems a bit limiting, one of the main things about space games is the "levelling up" in new ships.
 
jimbo75 said:
Looking good. I played 1 & 2 a lot but didn't bother with 3 as it just appeared to be a rehash.

Being stuck in the same ship from the start seems a bit limiting, one of the main things about space games is the "levelling up" in new ships.
Click to expand...

If it's customisable enough, it should still work. Looks like they are trying to go a bit more mainstream and less spreadsheet. In fact, some of what they are doing sounds more like Elite: Dangerous rather than X.

It sure does look pretty though.
 
I am looking forward to this game more than a christian looks forward to the second coming of jesus christ.
 
They've always made pretty games. The gameplay hasn't done well with me though. The cheese is thick and the actual action has been not so smooth. Here comes the Khaaak! ;) The space trucker aspect is sort of meditative though if you let it be lol.
 
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