X-Rebirth: The story of the failed console game

[Gswine]

What research? Honestly, what research?

Scouring the forums, reading countless threads, dev interviews and online articles dated back to that period, looking up and correlating dates and factoids, etc. I've been in this profession for 8 years now, I'm a games journalist, reviewer and editor for a gaming magazine, I know how to do research.

Still, as I said before, this is mostly speculation, I don't know the whole story, only the devs know that.

Blogger =/= Journalist.

Bloggers can also be journalist and vice versa. Blogging is the platform, nothing more. If he calls himself a journalist, and has an audience for information gathering and delivery of compiled information, then who are you to assume what he is or isnt? Are you not just looking for an excuse to confirm your own personal bias?

It's always good for us, mere mortals, jorno's or bloggers to give links, back up our claims with checkable information and most of all to report facts not link with fantasy, wild speculation or even informed guesses.

If you do then don't expect to call yourself a jorno without getting someones back up (and making it easier for governments to disregard and erode our right and freedoms to free speach).

God that got a bit lofty but I didn't start making claims with the disparate ideas on display here. I don't say anyone's wrong but you've not given me anything over 12 pages that anyone has effectively backed up.

Here this always caused a bit of a chuckle ending in fisty cuffs when posted in the past. X3 reunion was proposed as an x360 port. Also here

There has been nothing ever registered about TNBT that I have seen. I can't say any more on the subject without research but if you are looking for a link to Egosoft and an xbox project why did no one else actually post this?

[fcth]

Yeah, I recall hints that X3 was originally being considered as a 360 launch title, but obviously that never came to fruition.

Personally, I don't care if they were trying to make a console game. The problem with Rebirth is that they made a bad game. It is bad on PC, and it would still be bad on the 360. The game is buggy unfinished and plays poorly with any control scheme. I've tried playing with a 360 controller, and the interface was still clunky and awful.

Had they made a good console game, chance are it would have been a good game on PC as well. Instead they've made a game that is flawed in a whole bunch of ways, most of which seem totally unrelated to which platform they were targeting during the design process.

[Playbahnosh]

I updated the first post with the information gathered here since. Feel free to post more.

[Cakefish]

Y'know they sad the exact same thing about Total War Rome II. Exact same rumours, I repeat, exact same rumours. That it was a future console port in disguise. But the developers of that game have yet to announce anything about a console version, months after release.

Don't jump to conclusions so quickly! Can't people accept that unfortunately a PC game can just simply be poorly designed these days without jumping to ridiculous conclusions? Why do tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists have to always go back to the same old trope of 'poorly designed PC game must mean console port!'. No, it's just a poorly designed PC game, not a console port.[/i]

Err, yea, they had the exact same rumours about Rome2.....


....And CA just announced "Rome2, coming to a Steambox near you soon"

!!!!!!

Steam Machines aren't consoles though? They are open so you can install whatever OS you like, fully upgradable to the most powerful PC hardware and will support mouse and keyboard - the polar opposite of traditional consoles. The only thing they have in common with consoles is the focus of playing in living room rather than at a desk and the focus on a gamepad. More accurate to describe them as living room PCs than traditional consoles.

[chikatilo]

Imho the box also gives it away a little bit

[ external image ]

[ZzZGuy]

Uggg, OP's theory makes perfect since which makes Egosoft CEO a bold face liar.

This makes me want to ask for my money back (pre-order) and never look back. But I still have hope Egosoft will patch up this mutilated corpse (with glitter) into something good. If the fix doesn't come I wish all non management Egosoft employees luck in their new employment.

**** you Egosoft, **** you.

[chikatilo]

Anyone notice the size of the game, exacty fits a dvd, which fits in a kiddy console as far as I know, never touched a console, been playing pc since way before the first pentium processor

[Artificer]

Thank you for updating the OP.

I'm keeping a copy of relevant stuff but I suggest that you also back all of this up.

[Patholos]

http://i.imgur.com/Entxsw6.jpg

Updated Dvd cover

[lordstarwolf]

It really hurts to watch this franchise perish like this. Devs/mods and this site have always been among the most helpful I've ever seen.

This game is a console game. It plays like one, looks like one, FEELS like one. You know it's designed around a 360 controller. There's no amount of patching/modding that will make this a PC game. Honestly it doesn't even look that great, just a bunch of post- processing thrown on top of low res textures. If x3 had enough of a following I'm sure there'd be an ENB series for it. Ala skyrim, fallout, and SWG.

I don't think there's any coming back from this. I called it out months before release, that it's gonna be like the Silent Hunter 5 shitstorm that killed off that franchise. Same thing. I'll point to a reply I made in January on these forums:

PostPosted: Mon, 21. Jan 13, 19:18 Post subject: Reply with quote Edit/Delete this post Print
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)

[Playbahnosh]

It's always good for us, mere mortals, jorno's or bloggers to give links, back up our claims with checkable information and most of all to report facts not link with fantasy, wild speculation or even informed guesses.

First of all, this is not an official publication or wikipedia. This is a community forum. Also, this is not an official review or article, just a forum post. I'm not required to do anything.

I don"t call myself a journalist because I present wild theories, but because I've been in the industry for more than 8 years, with countless published review, articles, interviews and news stories behind me. I don't have to explain myself to you. (Here, if you speak Hungarian go read them: www.playdome.hu)

I had some free time and I thought it would be interesting to look into this theory, and I did, and then I presented my findings here. Like I said numerous times already, these are mostly speculations, that literally means there is no evidence to support them.

However, since then some technically inclined forum dwellers dug into the game files and uncovered some pretty damning evidence, go to my first post, I updated it, along with many more findings presented in this thread an in the forums.

There has been nothing ever registered about TNBT that I have seen. I can't say any more on the subject without research but if you are looking for a link to Egosoft and an xbox project why did no one else actually post this?

Now, you are obviously just trolling without ever looking into the subject yourself. Just do a quick forum search (right there on the sidebar--->) and see how many times "console port" or "xbox" pops up. I'm not the first, nor the last to connect the dots. There are many people besides me, who totally separately came to the same exact conclusion I did. Hell, there are many of them posting in this very thread. Then there is this guy, who had the same exact train of thought I did, totally separate from me. You have to be either blind or ignorant to say there is absolutely no merit to this theory...

[Diamondback]

If anyone is posting here without reading the first post and the recent update, id really recommend it.
So far it seems to be the best collection of individual observations that would suggest x-rebirth was originally designed(or at some point in its development) for consoles.

Im still really confused though, as ive heard a lot of people mention that the game requires 64bit windows. (which im told is a PC only feature)

Most of all id just like to hear what actually happened from the dev's.

[Pimpace]

ughh... Shocked Dude...

"Xbox" tags in game files is enough proof for me. I have a small programming skill at few language.

It's sad Dude. Even if this game works for more ten thousands, another more ten thousands who have critical problems. My opinion, that nowadays game software development is a huuuuge b_itching for money $$$. So sad.

What is most make me angry that they "collect" our money with this crap THEN from now on they do the "beta-testing" which is very unfair.

[Artificer]

Not really worth fighting with fanboys, Play. They'll just drag you down to their level and beat you over the head with fanaticism.

Most of us reading this recognize exactly what you did and acknowledge it as probably being fairly close to the truth.

I do some freelance journalism myself and I've had people argue that I was presenting no valid proof when I'd filled the article with links that probably topped my word count by 100x, all of cold hard facts proving my point. I was challenging what they wanted to be true and so they tried to knock me down and put me on their crackpot level.

This is no different, so pay no attention to Mr. Gswine - he just doesn't want to be wrong.

Edit: Links, not lengths. Durrr.

[Artificer]

Im still really confused though, as ive heard a lot of people mention that the game requires 64bit windows. (which im told is a PC only feature)

Not at all, it's a 32-bit .exe. Now, it has some custom hacking to use more RAM (the primary feature of 64-bit architecture) but you have to keep in mind two things:

First, since porting it they've clearly tacked on a lot of extra effects to make it look like a PC game, which is where a significant amount of RAM is going.

Second, unlike a PC which has to run the OS and whatever else in the background (including Steam while you run the game) an X-Box, or any console, is a dedicated gaming machine. It generally requires less memory to run a game than does a PC because it's not running anything else in the background, it's 100% (or close to) dedicated to running your game.

Do a quick ctrl-alt-del and check out just how much memory your browser is leaching out of your system right now (in the Processes tab)

[Artificer]

Back to the main point, I'd like to highlight the following post on the Steam forums:

EGO_zav [developer] 16 Nov @ 9:12pm
Originally posted by Hoeslayer:
Can we get an actual admission this game was truely designed for consoles and therefore underpar?

Underpar because of consoles? What do you mean? Because the graphics are so simple to make it run on consoles? Our graphics are unfortunately quite demanding causing quite a few complaints by people about the framerate which we try to address.

We are bringing quite a lot of polygons onto the screen in some space cities. It is just different if you design a station to be pretty from 50km away as well as from 1 meter away than if you design a shooter with fixed levels.

To answer your question: X Rebirth like you see it now is not designed to run on consoles, but we would love to bring it to next gen consoles in the future. If we do this remains to be seen. We did invest a lot of thought into making a complex game playable with a controller and we have experimented with the last gen consoles with different X games (had X3 running on Xbox and XBox 360 in fact).

[Diamondback]

Im still really confused though, as ive heard a lot of people mention that the game requires 64bit windows. (which im told is a PC only feature)

Not at all, it's a 32-bit .exe. Now, it has some custom hacking to use more RAM (the primary feature of 64-bit architecture) but you have to keep in mind two things:

First, since porting it they've clearly tacked on a lot of extra effects to make it look like a PC game, which is where a significant amount of RAM is going.

Second, unlike a PC which has to run the OS and whatever else in the background (including Steam while you run the game) an X-Box, or any console, is a dedicated gaming machine. It generally requires less memory to run a game than does a PC because it's not running anything else in the background, it's 100% (or close to) dedicated to running your game.

Do a quick ctrl-alt-del and check out just how much memory your browser is leaching out of your system right now (in the Processes tab)

Thanks for the clarification, it was very helpful.

[Gswine]

It's always good for us, mere mortals, jorno's or bloggers to give links, back up our claims with checkable information and most of all to report facts not link with fantasy, wild speculation or even informed guesses.

First of all, this is not an official publication or wikipedia. This is a community forum. Also, this is not an official review or article, just a forum post. I'm not required to do anything.

I don"t call myself a journalist because I present wild theories, but because I've been in the industry for more than 8 years, with countless published review, articles, interviews and news stories behind me. I don't have to explain myself to you. (Here, if you speak Hungarian go read them: www.playdome.hu)

I had some free time and I thought it would be interesting to look into this theory, and I did, and then I presented my findings here. Like I said numerous times already, these are mostly speculations, that literally means there is no evidence to support them.

However, since then some technically inclined forum dwellers dug into the game files and uncovered some pretty damning evidence, go to my first post, I updated it, along with many more findings presented in this thread an in the forums.

There has been nothing ever registered about TNBT that I have seen. I can't say any more on the subject without research but if you are looking for a link to Egosoft and an xbox project why did no one else actually post this?

Now, you are obviously just trolling without ever looking into the subject yourself. Just do a quick forum search (right there on the sidebar--->) and see how many times "console port" or "xbox" pops up. I'm not the first, nor the last to connect the dots. There are many people besides me, who totally separately came to the same exact conclusion I did. Hell, there are many of them posting in this very thread. Then there is this guy, who had the same exact train of thought I did, totally separate from me. You have to be either blind or ignorant to say there is absolutely no merit to this theory...

This last part hurts the most. I have not seen any evidence of egosoft registering TNBT or Xrebirth as an Xbox title. I did link two pages with info of egosoft's x3 reunion.

Hell they were still provided to you for debate. You call me a troll because putting egosoft, xrebirth, and console/xbox will get you many hits on a web search. Well sir, I can only suggest that a language barrier is at work and you take a moment to consider what I meant.

Many people saying egosoft made an Xbox port does not make it so and unoffical forum thread or not your 8 years of experience should be enough to temper your anger and provide a considered responce.

I passed comment on the whole of the jorno/blogger aspect and did not single you out. Though I am unimpressed.

You may continue to pm me if that is your wish but do not derail your own thread through arrogance.

[BGrey]

I think he called you a troll because he specifically said this was speculation and you are demanding proof as if he is submitting this for publication in a scientific journal. You are quite welcome to believe what you will, though I wonder how you would explain the state of the game given its 7 years of development if this is not the case.

[reanor]

I am actually enjoying this game playing on Xbox 360 controller on my big xcreen TV. I finally love X series . All the X games before ended up being a bore for me because of no controller support and space battles felt and ran like crap. You can't control other ships as well as in previous X games, but for what it is XR feels and plays great after a few tweaks with graphics. It is still buggy though.