EgoSoft: X-Rebirth

Space and Scifi Gaming

It looks like Egosoft has been hard at work the past few years working on X-Rebirth while patching X3: Terran Conflict in the process to make the wait just a little shorter for the fans of the series. When can we expect to see X-Rebirth… hopefully in Q4 of 2011. Egosoft will be publishing more info on X-Rebirth on the 28th of April at a press conference at FedCon XX in Düsseldorf, Germany. So we will see what details are leaked out about the game story-line and gameplay to see if EgoSoft is really expanding the style of games they have been creating since the mid 1990’s. In general the X games are more of a hardcore space combat, trading and exploration game that tended to be hard to get started up in and from most feedback received a lot of people tended to not complete their games (myself included).

If you haven’t seen the X-Rebith reveal trailer check it out now… if you can, make sure you watch it at full screen 1080p.

You can definitely see the gfx facelift to the engine used and the ships and stations look great!

Egosoft really has the opportunity to start over and create a game that will appeal to more gamers. But what should they work on? If I had to pick five items that I feel would improve X-Rebirth over the rest of the X series of games they would have to be:

  • Seamless exploration with no jumpgate/wormholes for travel.
  • You can still have a economic and trading system, I would just try to design the system in a way that players can choose their level of involvement in the economics of the game world. Meaning that you can build your empire, but try to keep micro-management to a minimum. Build more automation into the system with managing your mining and factories, for patrols and protection of your assets. This way a casual player can just pay more attention to the story-line, quests, factions, exploration and combat.
  • A little faster paced combat and have selectable targeting system so you can attack specific ship systems.
  • A bigger universe. Egosoft does a great job with the artwork and ship/station design in all of the X games and I would think people would like to see more of that and if you tie that in with the seamless space flight you could spend countless hours navigating through sectors not knowing what you may find next. Oh I know some uncharted sectors.
  • A universe that will let you do almost anything you want and you have to live with your decisions. Meaning if you decide to take out an entire station or sector that it stays dead for quite sometime or stays dead. Failing any quest may have a impact on the game or in a sector in the game. Make things matter, make me a part of the game and keep me hooked into playing 50-100hrs at the least.
  • I know I said five… but having the ability to move around some of the ships and stations would be great addition to X-Rebirth.

To me, in today’s gaming its not often you see a game that really immerses the player into the game and really evolves the game around them. The space genre of games is a great place to build that immersiveness into a game. With a few good quality titles from various developers we could see space combat games rise back to the fame of 15-20yrs ago when Elite, Privateer, Wing Commander, Freespace and many others graced our monitors and wore out our joysticks. So let’s see what Egosoft has in store for us and lets hope it is epic.

There discuss this post and more Egosoft and X game discussions in the SSC forums: http://www.spacesimcentral.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=44

-D1-

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