New X Rebirth Preview with Bernd (video) (german)

Informer · Post by **Informer** » Wed, 16. Oct 13, 15:33

With some new footage.

http://www.gameswelt.de/x-rebirth/previ ... e-1,207959

HD:
http://www.gameswelt.tv/x-rebirth/studi ... soft,36777

ThommoHawk · Post by **ThommoHawk** » Wed, 16. Oct 13, 15:44

^ excellent. I can't keep up with all the news.

and here is a new sticky everyone should be aware of from now on:

http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=345192

located above in the main page of this XRebirth forum.

signed - Ren Otani

DaddyMonster · Post by **DaddyMonster** » Wed, 16. Oct 13, 15:48

And in all of them he's wearing his same orange interview jumper

Earth Ultimatum IV. · Post by **Earth Ultimatum IV.** » Wed, 16. Oct 13, 15:59

Unfortunately there is no new info.

DaMuncha · Post by **DaMuncha** » Wed, 16. Oct 13, 16:07

unfortunately ITS IN GERMAN!

SuckMyNova · Post by **SuckMyNova** » Wed, 16. Oct 13, 16:46

Earth ultimatum IV. wrote:Unfortunately there is no new info.

Oh yes there is: sadly, we will initially not be able to fine control captial ships. It will only be possible to order the captain to, e.g. attack a target or start mining. Bernd said though, that this is something on Ego's todo-list, so that you can, for instance, command the ship to concentrate its fire on specific surface elements. He said that what they're gonna implement after the release will depend on our feedback.

Also, there was a lot of stutter when flying through big stations. Makes me fear for my i5-2500k now, which ironically I bough 2011 in preparation for the rebirth release

A5PECT · Post by **A5PECT** » Wed, 16. Oct 13, 18:19

I didn't really see any completely new footage, just some extended scenes from existing clips.

I skimmed through most of it and don't understand a lick of German, but I think I caught the word "kommando" at one point. Was Bernd talking about boarding?

raya6789 · Post by **raya6789** » Wed, 16. Oct 13, 18:42

A5PECT wrote:I didn't really see any completely new footage, just some extended scenes from existing clips.

I skimmed through most of it and don't understand a lick of German, but I think I caught the word "kommando" at one point. Was Bernd talking about boarding?

"Kommando" in german is more like "order" in english. He talked about the possibility of giving orders to capital ships that include attacking modules or attacking in formations and so on.
Mainly talked about increasing the depth and strategy of space combat with fleets

A5PECT · Post by **A5PECT** » Wed, 16. Oct 13, 18:47

Oh.

Well that's pretty damn cool, too.

Saquavin · Post by **Saquavin** » Wed, 16. Oct 13, 19:01

SuckMyNova wrote: Makes me fear for my i5-2500k now, which ironically I bough 2011 in preparation for the rebirth release

Use your K version !
Put multiplier to 45 (4.5 GHZ) with 1.33 voltage, and believe me, you'll have a far better CPU than most people

Do it only if you have a real fan (not the sh*t one which comes with CPU)
My CPU is not going above 48°C after hard game.

Spacecoyote99, waiting for a translation

Abraxis86 · Post by **Abraxis86** » Wed, 16. Oct 13, 19:07

I can't believe they have a virtual boy on that shelf. Who would want to display that hideous monstrosity... silly germans

A5PECT · Post by **A5PECT** » Wed, 16. Oct 13, 19:08

Hey, as a gamer you have to acknowledge all of your history. Even the embarrassingly terrible parts.

SuckMyNova · Post by **SuckMyNova** » Wed, 16. Oct 13, 19:26

Saquavin wrote:Put multiplier to 45 (4.5 GHZ) with 1.33 voltage, and believe me, you'll have a far better CPU than most people

Of course I have overclocked it but, assuming they played on a modern rig, with such a low a frame rate I figure that that won't help much. This game will eat IPCs! Damn, I really should have gotten a 2600k back than; that hyper threading sure looks worth a 100 bucks now.

SuckMyNova · Post by **SuckMyNova** » Wed, 16. Oct 13, 19:58

Here is the gist of it:

* No game complexity is lost with Rebirth but the interface has been simplified resp. it is more accessible compared to before. They tried to drastically decrease the learning curve.

* There is a 1-2h tutorial plot you have to follow. After that, the universe will gradually open up with the story though you are not forced to play the story, same as in the previous titles. The main story should last about 20 hours.

* There are different view modes, e.g. the mode with where the station modules are colored differently. The colors serve as a hint to where particular modules are located in the station (storage, goods production, undiscovered parts etc.).

* They have a list of features they hope to implement after the release, depending on player feedback. The interviewer asked Bernd if he could name an example. Bernd responded that his team would like to improve resp. extend the tactical user controls of capital ship combat. He explained that atm you can only select the target as a whole (i.e. another capital ship), but he would like to see more detailed controls like commanding the attack of a particular module of a station. The vision seems to be a specialied fleet of ships where each is assigned to target a specific component (don't know if he meant only station modules or also (I think) turrets, shield generators and such).

Earth Ultimatum IV. · Post by **Earth Ultimatum IV.** » Wed, 16. Oct 13, 20:03

It would actually be nice to have a fleet of about 5 ships, each having a command to attack different module.

Once enemy comes in range, the shields, turrets, engines, jump engines and drone launchers get vaporised in seconds.

But this would be hard for the amount of your credits.

BigBANGtheory · Post by **BigBANGtheory** » Wed, 16. Oct 13, 21:18

Earth ultimatum IV. wrote:Unfortunately there is no new info.

Not true. We now know Bernd is very fond of his orange jumper.

spacecoyote99 · Post by **spacecoyote99** » Thu, 17. Oct 13, 03:20

Here we go... All I'll say is thankfully Bernd speaks a lot more clearly than these interviewers do.. As always corrections welcome!

[0:05]
Interviewer: Hello and welcome to the studio. I have here the great fortune to greet our guest, from Germany even, Bernd from Egosoft. You were with our editors and and showed us X:Rebirth. You made the other X games before, in X:R you're in the same universe but further ahead in time. Can you give us a brief explanation what this looks like?

Bernd: Historically this plays in the future. The older games were like this, time went ahead a bit each time since X:BTF, this time it's a much bigger distance. But much more important is the distance of the game play to the old universe. It's for good reason that we don't just call this X4, it's a 'restart' and so a 'rebirth.'

[1:12]
Interviewer: And how does this 'restart' look? I know in the old X games you needed to have a lot of time to get into the game. And that they were complicated "space operas" and "universe simulators", with a trading part. How have you changed this formula?

Bernd: We know we have this terrible expectation to overcome, that's exactly what our goal was.

Interviewer: It wasn't just a bad image, some people really loved that.

Bernd: That's true, it wasn't really for the old games but for the new one it's something of a prejudice we have to overcome. We realized ourselves early on that the games were getting ever more complicated.

When we came out with X:BTF we also gained an insanely active community. Those people were really hungry for space games, there weren't that many. And we very gladly worked with that community and usually that resulted in packing in more and more stuff. Bigger, more space ships, more possibilities. More freedoms. And that fits wonderfully with the concept, we made these things with great love.

But unfortunately that also led to the game ultimately becoming more and more overloaded with things that it wasn't really designed for. That were hard to control, complicated menus. Complexity in itself isn't a bad thing, I don't want people to misunderstand. Complex is how the game should be and Rebirth isn't an exception there. But complicated controls, complicated text menus, a long period to learn, and a heavy learning curve. Those aren't positive things. And after Reunion (2005) we noticed that it's not possible to keep building up and think that it would be user friendly for new players.

So we decided to split off, we'll start over from scratch and rethink universe games. Really think about what can we improve at the fundamental level. Something simple like travel times. How do we make the game faster? We want to prevent flying for ages through empty space. That we can present the size realistically. It was in the past not nearly as big as we would've like it to be. We had many sectors but each sector was 100km because otherwise it would've taken too long to fly through. There were things that needed fundamental change and that's why we've been working on it for 7 years.

[4:02]
Interviewer: So what does this look like? When I enter the game as a new player, what's my goal? Is it really so that I can fill in the game any way I like?

Bernd: Well, there is a plot follow and the first part you really must follow. There's a tutorial that introduces you that explains how the game is controlled, that amounts to about 1 or 2 hours that you're forced to follow the story. And the story will build up gradually. So there's a plot that you can probably play through in 10 to 20 hours. After that everything is open and that's really where an X game starts. But even during the plot you gain more freedom over time and we don't force you to concentrate only on the plot.

[4:56]
Interviewer: I also peeked over my colleagues shoulder to whom you presented the game and there was, among other things, a space station, and you flew around it a bit and we saw different color codes on the station. So different parts of the station had different colors. What exactly does that mean for the game?

Bernd: That's a new mode, a special mode. It's kind of an advanced function of the game. You can configure the HUD, the UI of the player ship to show different information. Default is an all-round mode, which shows you friends and enemies, which is pretty similar to Albion Prelude, the previous game in the series, from there we proceeded. You could also control it with the mouse cursor, click on things and get a context menu is you controlled it with a mouse. That's still the same, it hasn't really changed much. But additionally the controller controls are very good.

But what you saw was the special mode that was programmed for a special task. In this case to display the separate modules of the station by color separation. So you can recognize in the big structure of the station where the production modules are, where the storage is, where military components are. So I can identify the parts that I don't recognize, that I haven't seen/discovered/encountered before. So you're moving through these giant space cities that consist of lots of parts. On the one hand the modules that are really the large parts but also on the modules really a lot of surface elements.

That's really one of the big big differences with the previous games. Before we also had big space stations, but that was one monolith, one thing. You only ever did anything with the station as a whole. Now there are a lot of surface elements, on the one hand you can have hundreds of turrets on a station to destroy, there are rocket launchers. There are also interaction points where for example there are mission offers. There are the info points you saw that you fly to to gather information about the station.

[7:20]
Interviewer: And you can also enter the station. So what can I do on board a space station?

Bernd: Most of all you can talk to people and gather information. For two reasons. The first is that you can hire people to work for you. So there are character classes that you can employ to manage your own universe. That's also a slightly more advanced element, when you're running your own station, when you have a lot of capital ships for example, then you need pilots, managers, commanders. These are all character classes in the game that you can recruit on other stations.

[8:00]
Interviewer: So I also hear from you that there are many different ways I can give form to my game as I progress. So how do you personally like to play? Are you a trader, do you go on robbing sprees? How does it play out with you?

Bernd: Well, I'm really forced to play every way because I have to test everything once. And when I play I'm mostly testing. If I could play whatever way I wanted then I'd probably be a trading and building type, because that's what I like. Also the long-term effects, that's what really makes the game. When you get to the late game, when you're running your own stations and you can see other people transporting goods for you and when it no longer comes down to flying personally from A to B. When you're effectively managing the money and other people...

[9:03]
Interviewer: These building components, so how big can I make my own stations?

Bernd: Just as big as the AI. All of these huge cities you see you can run for yourself. But of course that's only possibly in the advanced game. There are no limits. You can own many ships, you can have large capital ships, we just changed the way you control them radically. And also made sacrifices for this, we also had to let some features go. One of the best examples are the capital ships, which I can't control from the cockpit any more.

[9:45]
Interviewer: Please explain briefly for the people who don't know X, what is a capital ship?

Bernd: Well capital ships are big ships.

Interviewer: Giant ships!

Bernd: Giant ships! They start at maybe 200-300 meters in length, below that is what we call the smaller ships, which you could still control reasonably well, but everything that's over 100 meters that becomes impossible to handle. These are the ships that do the bulk trading, the counter part to the game's "item trading". And these big things you used to be able to control from the cockpit. So you sat there with your joystick or game pad or maybe the mouse and steered to the left for 2 minutes and watched while thing giant thing turned. That's not very fun. It's very cool to sit there and feel like...

Interviewer: It's something you do once and then never do again..

Bernd: Exactly. Instead now these are under your command, so you can say "I want to use this ship for myself", as opposed to giving it to you factory, which is also possible, "No I want to use this for myself" and it will trade for me personally. Or it will collect asteroids and mine for me personally, there are a lot of things you can do with them. But you're giving them commands, indirectly.

So for example when mining, that's a good example, I can fly through an asteroid belt and again I have a choice: "Here captain, collect asteroids, make it so!" then I go away, wait for half and hour and it starts collecting completely realistically and I can watch how it collects the rocks into its cargo bay with drones. And how it, in a believable amount of time, because something like this takes time, you can't just do this in 5 minutes, collects rocks.

Or I go in personally, I switch to a different mode like we talked about before, which helps me identify the best ore rocks, I'll get them highlighted, and then tag those. So I pick I want this one and that one. So I radically increase the yield and have a lot more ore in the same cargo bay as when I left it to the captain who's not as good as I am.

[12:01]
Interviewer: So there are space stations as you said, are there also planets you can travel to?

Bernd: No. There are tons of features we would love to add to the game and we'll certainly continue to do so after 1.0, it was always like that.

Interviewer: You wanted to concentrate on the universe and the stations..

Bernd: We worked on this for 7 years and well..

[12:25]
Interviewer: And how about the online components? Can people travel to your stations and trade with them. Wouldn't it be really cool if you could do this with other players? So that the market can be influenced by other people. (ed: please god no

) Will there be a multi-player component?

Bernd: Not in the near future. You're not the first person to suggest this and of course it would be cool and we want to keep working in this direction, but it's just an unbelievably complex game with many possibilities. For after release there's a long list of features we want to put in first and improve step by step through updates.

[13:15]
Interviewer: Can you give us an example:

Bernd: Well there are lots of examples. One thing we would love to work on is the strategic possibilities when you have large numbers of capital ships. When you fight with cap ships now it's possible to attack stations with them right now you just have the option of giving the command "attack" and then the AI does it for you. You choose the target that's it. But we'd like to add more strategic game play, that you have more depth and options for putting your fleet together and controlling the attack.

But there are just so many things. We also want to finally reach the point where we can include the community, when we have something out there to play and then hear..

Interviewer: To get something out there so people can give you feedback..

Bernd: The game is already gigantic. We could easily work on it for another 10 years, but we need some feedback from outside. We need to hear what's most important for these people.

[14:27]
Interviewer: Then there's the new consoles. Is that an option? Are you saying we're busy enough with the PC version?

Bernd: Well we've been busy with the PC, but no it is a goal, long-term. We have two things that speak in favor of this. First that's that the new consoles may for the first time make this possible. The amount of memory has stood in the way of this. This complex universe with hundreds of agents that are really trade and exist, that aren't just faked, just need memory. That needs a lot of space and that was difficult until now. So that means it's possible now.

And the second thing is controller controls which was also a core goal. On the PC, Steam now with its controller mode has advanced this. This "living room story", Big Picture mode, right, for which it's also useful. That's functioning now, we made that our goal.

And so, yes some time. Right now..

[15:40]
Interviewer: Ok, some time, right now we're here, wanting to make sure everything goes right. So when does it kick off? Not long right?

Bernd: Not long, 15 November.

Interviewer: 15 November, then it's time, then X:Rebirth is launched and breaths fresh life into the Space genre which has been somewhat asleep recently and you can create your own little fleet or maybe large stations.

Abraxis86 · Post by **Abraxis86** » Thu, 17. Oct 13, 03:55

Thanks a bunch Coyote, really appreciate the time and effort to translate these

Informer · Post by **Informer** » Thu, 17. Oct 13, 04:11

thks for the translation m8. Great work.

A5PECT · Post by **A5PECT** » Thu, 17. Oct 13, 04:56

I'm completely clueless when it comes to German, but I wanted to see if I can help:

We know we have this terrible image to overcome, that's exactly what our goal was. (I took some liberties here, literally they said something like "prejudice" or "bias", not "image", but it doesn't really flow in English.)

"We know we have this terrible expectation/stereotype to overcome..."

I'm assuming Bernd is referring to large-scale simulation games like the X series are notorious for being intimidatingly complex.

So you can recognize in the big structure of the station where the production modules are, where the storage is, where military components are. So I can recognize (?) the parts that I don't recognize, that I haven't opened up yet (?)

"So I can identify the parts that I don't recognize, that I haven't seen/discovered/encountered before.

What Bernd seems to be describing is a sort of "scan mode" that acts like a deeper, more fleshed-out version of the Trading System Extension and Freight Scanner from previous games. It allows the player to gain information about the individual station modules and ship elements they come across.

The idea reminds me a lot of the scanning system used in the Metroid Prime series, if anyone else remembers it.