X Rebirth

[Ethric]

Fans of spaceship games rejoice! The next X game, as you know, will be a new game, and not the last one with more stuff.

A new forum is up, with a lot of info:
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewforum.php?f=109

Some bullet points:
- gates mysteriously stopped working, and a new technology for travel had to be invented: highways.
- highways allows fast travel between points of interest within systems, and between systems. You steer your ship along in a sort of pod race. You can leave in-system highways at any time to nose around, but you can't leave interstellar routes before your destiantion (it's dark out there...)
- you only get to steer one ship this time around, but it's supposedly a special ship. And it's got a crew and you can upgrade it along various paths. When I first heard you only got one ship I went "Booh!" in outrage like everybody else, but...
- you get a variety of drones to use, which you can control directly via VR (so no dying inside)
- you can still OWN capital ships, just not steer them. Because that is boring (direct quote). And you get to custom build them.
- the same goes for stations: custom built.

This sounds awesome

[Kalah]

Well, they're certainly not afraid to renew themselves and as such things will not be repetitive, at least.

And as long as you can upgrade your ship, being forced to only have one is OK too, I guess. I'm worried about that capital ship thing, though. The great weakness of capital ships in X3 were their complete ineptitude in sector combats. They were good OOS, but once you were present in the same sector, they would be stupid enough to not even try to dodge incoming fire ... and as such the only effective use of a capital ship in-sector was by taking control of it yourself.

[Ethric]

That's the beauty of a new engine: they can scrap the current OOS-system and make one that... works.

And again, they say you can HAVE more than one ship, but you can only fly one of them yourself (which they make out to be a sort of Ebon Hawk; a special ship with a History). There'll be captains in your employ on the others.

[Kalah]

Yes .. although I did enjoy the typical "work-your-way-up-from-a-small-ship-to-a-deathstar" growth of the game, I guess some of the same feeling could be had from building and expanding your single ship. The rest (not being able to actually hop out into space and switch ships) is trivial and soon gets old.

I get the impression, then, that the series is shifting away from the personal experience to the large-scale planning and managing. Less fighting and more empire building. Actually, if true, I'm not sure I like that. The thing I enjoyed the most with X3 was dodging incoming fire with my small fighter and testing my mettle in torrid dogfights against swarms of enemies.

[Ethric]

Sure, but reloading a difficult battle 17 times, is that fun? I like the idea of rather flying expendable drones.

Flying capital ships is a nice option, but it's one of those options that are nice more by it's presence than by it's actual usefulness.

Besides, this game will be mod-able to, I'm sure things can be altered for those who prefer a different style of play.

[hatsforclowns]

Besides, this game will be mod-able to, I'm sure things can be altered for those who prefer a different style of play.

Is it? From what I heard it's supposed to be some spooty mission editor or something ... but no real modding support.

[Ethric]

Considering the history of modding in the series, preventing it would be disastrous. You know, requiring online play and banning mods and similar crazy schemes...

Don't think there are much in the way of official modding tools for current games either, however, aside from the script editor.