Worried about the future of X

[DiveBomberDave]

I have to say that as a long time player of X games I am getting worried about where we are heading!

My concerns are;

a) Plot Missions: Since TC plot missions have been getting nerfed until now with AP nearly all missions are just long haul freighting. This is very boring! The best missions from the series are the hard ones, e.g. the race through the swiss cheese asteroid, fly through the teladi station, X2 rail shooter these missions were hard and you needed to try them a few times before you completed them. They were missions that gave you satisfaction when completed. I understand that these types of missions are more expensive to make than just modifying a standard random freight mission but Rebirth has been in development for years. Please some hard and interesting missions.

b) The Universe: Why are we making all new sectors huge (is it just because we now have the technology?) as to me they are very boring. I hate Terran space (great to get that boring long haul feeling), I have no interest in going there. Aldrin, another example of we have the technology so lets build a massive sector with a massive planet in the middle to ensure that the auto-pillock takes hours to get from point a to point b. Bring on Albion, lets not put in any gates to force players to get bored sitting on SETA getting from place to place and while we are at it lets fill it full of rocks so that auto-pillock freaks out and goes crazy and any satelites are promptly booted to the edge of the sector.
I get very worried when I hear "no more small sectors" as the traditional sectors (the small ones in Commonwealth space) are going to be nerfed. Does this mean that there will be jump beacons everywhere? If this is the case I guess this will be ok, I just don't want to be forced to long haul all the time. I think Commonwealth space is just about right for travel times between stations WITH the current jump gate system.

c) Game Progression: Since TC the game has become incredibly easy to make money culminating in the stock exchange that I view as as much of a cheat as nividium mining. As if Nividium mining is too slow to make money! Please can we have a hard rewarding game! Remember if it's easy it's not valuable.

d) Ships: Please I dont want to be an Aran, sure let me own an Aran type ship but I never want to fly it, Anything bigger that an M6 is a bit boring to fly.

I don't know what I'm going to get in Rebirth but hopefully it will be another rich and complex game and not some dumbed (please no more) down console game for people with no attention spans.

[Cavemonkey]

a) Well, at least from what I've read about Rebirth, the missions should be pretty complex. Some of the things you do in those missions include flying drones into stations' air vents and spying on people, hiding in the nooks and crannies of the massive stations from the police (and not losing notoriety ), mining, adding ship extensions, etc.
b) I honestly don't mind the big sectors. The way I see it, you get to see a lot of astonishingly awesome looking scenery. Plus, the new stations and highways will probably take up most of the sector.
c) Not sure what that will be like in Rebirth. All I know is that the economy will have completely changed from that of the previous X games.
d) You don't have to drive a capital. In fact, you can't; you can only "walk" on deck. You can certainly own and command one though.

As for Rebirth being "dumbed down", I don't see that happening. I think it will still be a complex game that is primarily for X veterans, but with some beginner friendly options. It's going to be an amazing game. Egosoft knows what they're doing, and none of their other games have ever disappointed me. It'll be worth the wait, just wait and see!

[BigBANGtheory]

tbh I only have one concern at this point, how somekind of strategic interface will be presented and what options will it give me.

[theeclownbroze]

My god if egosoft devs decide to make a strategic interface where all i have to do to command my ships to attack is just right click an enemy on a top down 3d displaye i would just... nerdgasm until i die, think about how easy it would make commanding your capships....

[lordstarwolf]

I too am concerned... Only having joined the x-series with x3: reunion, I found the freedom and sandbox refreshing. I loved my Hyperion, and swapping to my trusty Pirate buster (I completed the main story using that trusty buster). I love the large fleets of ships.

My biggest issue with rebirth is Only One Ship. I don't see any sense of ownership in drones. It's not "you" nor is it "yours".
I can see working out SETA, I'm sure that can be done, but honestly, this feels like what happened to the Silent Hunter series. We went from a sandbox to a "more immersive single ship where you get to talk to the crew". I don't remember it being well recieved. I picked it up for sale on steam, and it sucked. I couldn't believe they had dumbed down the greatest subsim like that. Unfortunately I have a large bin of crappy games that remains in my "crappy games" section of my steam account, unplayed and unused.

Eventually someone will get around to modding rebirth to something playable, which is fine because I'll just pick it up when it's 88% off on steam a couple of years after release. It seems to me that the number of sandbox games are only decreasing. "accessibility" and "ease of use" and "learning curve" are terms I hear tossed about as excuses. I wouldn't be surprised to see a UI optimized for an xbox controller at this point (skyrim anyone?).

That and I don't like the screenies I've seen of the "playership" (even the term sounds bad)

[TonyEvans]

I don't think the guy read any of the threads or Q&A.

Sad, just sad

[Cavemonkey]

I do agree with lordstarwolf about the "one ship" thing. Even though you get to upgrade the ship, it's still being confined to one area the entire game. I prefer more options- maybe some people think driving a capital is boring, or switching ships is a hassle, but to not be able to do those things makes me feel limited. But who knows? Maybe ES has some surprises in store for us.

[Aragosnat]

Also the weapon selection of said ship will also be restricted in the way there will be no need to choose the lay out for it as well as being plot restricted on when we can use some of them too.

[DiveBomberDave]

I have read all of the "Sticky[info]" threads and finished the plots for AP which are supposed to give me a taste of what is in store in Rebirth but saw no highways just jump gates.

Also if there is only one Albion Pride mothership and all other ships are drones does that mean that all npc ships are drones? Or do the npc's have motherships too? that we can cap? or has capping been taken out of the game?

[_Zap_]

In order to appeal to the masses of noobs who play a game for three hours and then tell all their friends how much they mastered it and never play it again, the plots and everything that gets suggested to you in the beginning will have to be quite easy. But Egosoft doesn't strike me as the company that wouldn't add a fair number of actual challanges.
Now we have stuff like the Aran. Its hard to find and you have to know how to proceed if you want to capture it. The Hub plot with its steep resource requirements is another example of such a challenge.
These things are partially very repetitive and time consuming tasks, but the process of problem solving and in the end having overcome these huge obstacles are very rewarding, regardless of ingame-boni you might get from them. Thats the attraction behind that, and I'm pretty sure most folks who call themselves gamers can tell one another how rewarding it was to finally finish that mission they had to try 15 times with many different approaches.


One of the larger concerns of mine is the announcement to make stuff more "interesting" by having the user engage in conversations with crew members, station owners etc. for stuff that will be used on a regular basis. I don't want to see someones face a hundred times a day if I'm just playing trader carrying around bofu, nor do I want to talk to anyone to alter behavior of my ship, or whatever I happen to remote-control, if I just want to change stuff like turret target priorities.
These kind of things fits well into automated menus and are likely easier to understand and use. I'd hate to see pregenerated sentences in pointless conversations that I'll need to decipher for myself into a definitive answer, especially if the game is "spiced up" by serving me different versions of one sentence for the same underlying fact.
This is what makes the current mission briefings annoying, it takes a while until you know what you have to look for to determine if you need a TS for a taxi mission or if your m5 is sufficient.
Currently the communications menu is emulating conversations with other characters, so I don't see much point in saying that it needs to be added/expanded in a noteworthy way unless large parts of the control you exercise in the game are transferred to this sort of interface.

Another point of my worries lie with the transportation streams/beams/whatevers that you will apparantly have to traverse the universe in until you get jumpdrives which won't have any gates to connect to anymore.
My biggest fear is that you will be forced into a constant minigame of evading other ships in that stream or following its curve, if it has some. Pics suggested that. I can foresee that becoming really boring, really fast. Then your auto-controlled freighters etc. will probably have to use them as well, and if they are indeed crowded... well, lets hope they spent some time on a new autopilot.


tl;dr:

• - You have to balance easy gameplay versus hard challanges to appeal to everyone.
  - Conversations to perform mundane tasks might get annoying.
  - "Highways" as a minigame being forced upon you in form of steering/evading for transportation could become boring fast.

[DiveBomberDave]

In order to appeal to the masses of noobs who play a game for three hours and then tell all their friends how much they mastered it and never play it again...

This is what worries me, I'm not sure this has been a limiting factor for X games sales, in Australia the problem is that there was never any marketing done by any publisher/distributor, the only people I know that have ever heard about these games are your more intelectual types that are used to finding their own information and not waiting for info to come to them like mainstream people. I was just lucky to find the X2 box at the back of my games shop a long time ago. Also you may want to know that Steam is currently discriminating against Australians charging more for Australian IP addresses which will affect sales here, racist bastards! This could affect Australian sales.

Also there are many successful complicated games such as Elder Scrolls, WOW, Eve, Civilisation, Total War so to say that you can't sell a game to mainstream gamers if it is complex is just wrong. I can't finish all of Skyrims plots in 3 hours, I think it would be closer to the 26 weeks it took me to finish all TC plots.

Bottom line is that sales are dependent on marketing not easyness (not ease to play) of the game, I've even seen demand for products that don't exist that have been marketed as a joke by marketing students.

For those that want instant gratification we could bring back the arcade style training game that we used to have in X2, I miss this and this how I learnt to dogfight.

[Noahdilweed]

Personally I'm not worried at all. egosoft has a great track record of building games that we love and spend 100s of hours on. Who knows what these changes will translate into. and frankly egosoft has had several games now under their belt to see what they've done wrong and they have a wonderful opportunity to get them right( or better) on RELEASE.

[aka1nas]

I have read all of the "Sticky[info]" threads and finished the plots for AP which are supposed to give me a taste of what is in store in Rebirth but saw no highways just jump gates.

Also if there is only one Albion Pride mothership and all other ships are drones does that mean that all npc ships are drones? Or do the npc's have motherships too? that we can cap? or has capping been taken out of the game?

Basically, anything fighter sized is now an unmanned drone (i.e. like each one of your fighters was in X3 except for your personal ride). Piloting one remotely via the VR system is going to be similar to flying a fighter in previous X games, but if you die you'll end up back on your main ship rather than having to reload the game. Not a huge loss.

IIRC from previous tidbits, there will still be something like a boarding mechanic for NPC capital ships. It's also possible that we can disable and steal drones like we would cap fighters in previous games.

[jelf]

If having interactive crew, working cockpit, functional interiors and "free roam" mean I'll only get one ship, then so be it.

I'd rather have one truly working ship than 100 hulls only with different stats and collision boxes.

Also, most people only fly one or two ships 90% of the time anyways and those are usually M6 or M7.

[Batmaus]

I have read all of the "Sticky[info]" threads and finished the plots for AP which are supposed to give me a taste of what is in store in Rebirth but saw no highways just jump gates.

Also if there is only one Albion Pride mothership and all other ships are drones does that mean that all npc ships are drones? Or do the npc's have motherships too? that we can cap? or has capping been taken out of the game?

You say that you have read all the info Egosoft has released, but when i see your questions i can assure that you haven't read the Stickies or the Q&As. If you had, you'd already know the answers to your questions.

[Geek]

Basically, anything fighter sized is now an unmanned drone.

Not confirmed and not very likely.

Piloting one remotely via the VR system is going to be similar to flying a fighter in previous X games, but if you die you'll end up back on your main ship rather than having to reload the game. Not a huge loss.

There are ships and drones you can not fly at all in Rebirth, VR or not.

[Shaevar]

There are ships and drones you can not fly at all in Rebirth, VR or not.

Drones you cannot fly with VR? I was under the impressions that they drastically changed their conceptions of ships and drones in this game and that what we considered a fighter could be a drone in this iteration.

Morever, I was pretty sure that every drone could be piloted through VR. Where did you get this information? I might have missed it.

[Geek]

Indeed. From the Gamescon interview :

Question:
Last year, we were told, we could fly these mine drones on our own, if you wanted to mine ore on yourself?

Bernd:
Not these. There are other drones, all sorts of special drones, even those that can be controlled from the player ship. But these are not the same that the large capital ships use. This doesn’t work with that size. To be honest, I don’t know if the drone mine would fit into the player ship, so we don't even get this problem there are all kind of categories for objects.

It seems that the larger drones, which can not fit into the Albion, can not be remote controlled as well.

[spankahontis]

I think the whole point to the implementation of Drones in the Game is about the lore going in that direction anyway.

I remember playing Terran Conflict and receiving the Griffin Drone Launcher Ship as a reward.
Somewhere in the reward it's explained, that the Griffin was the Commonwealths attempt at changing their strategy against the Kha'ak, due to the Kha'ak's Cluster ships, scout/fighter tactics in battle taking too many lives of their pilots.

Seeing as it's further into the future, I'm thinking that the future of combat is with automated drones.

[Athraku]

I think referring to fighters and other small ships as drones and not having pilots for them devalues them as rewarding targets to kill, when was the last time you killed a fighter drone launched from a trader you where hunting and felt any sort of accomplishment.
It feels more like another easy way to explain not being able to take control of other ships directly.

I want to hear the screams of my enemies before they die.