X-Rebirth: The story of the failed console game

Nomadian · Post by **Nomadian** » Fri, 22. Nov 13, 01:56

Well, we don't know who is directly responsible. It might have been Deep Silver who forced the release, who knows? Bernd may have been saying what he was told to say. The truth is we may never know.

In any case... If I had the authority to fire the person most directly responsible they would have been gone already.

sliznizy · Post by **sliznizy** » Fri, 22. Nov 13, 06:45

To be totally honest, if they gave us back the control of our assets like we have in X3, and expanded the galaxy to atleast half of what it was in X3 (dosnt have to be quite as many systems, as each system in rebirth is sectioned off into zones effectively make systems bigger by default heh). As well as did there optimizations, this would be one hell of a game. Here's hoping that's a possibility. Because truth be told, I love the X series, and I want this to be a great game. But I guess that's just me.

JDCollie · Post by **JDCollie** » Fri, 22. Nov 13, 07:03

sliznizy wrote:To be totally honest, if they gave us back the control of our assets like we have in X3, and expanded the galaxy to atleast half of what it was in X3 (dosnt have to be quite as many systems, as each system in rebirth is sectioned off into zones effectively make systems bigger by default heh). As well as did there optimizations, this would be one hell of a game. Here's hoping that's a possibility. Because truth be told, I love the X series, and I want this to be a great game. But I guess that's just me.

I think we all wanted it to be great, which is why we are all so pissed that it sucks. Personally, I'll be sticking around just to see if Egosoft can fix it. I don't know if they can, but I really want them to.

sms_747 · Post by **sms_747** » Tue, 26. Nov 13, 04:27

[/quote] And it most likely never will

[/quote]

I am designing ^ this ^ game...

I am a 3rd year gameplay student at Staffs Uni and an X veteran.
It is my belief that Egosoft has shot itself in the foot with a nuke here, pissed off everybody who believed in X - (and the sales figures show just how many people that really is) and will probably never recover. It is sad, but part of me was ready for this debacle. Consoles can go die in an ally to be perfectly honest. PC is where REAL games belong, where people want to THINK about what they are doing, to make plans and calculations, to be devious and find loopholes and profitable rackets. Console can never cater to this audience and that is why they will never produce the best quality games. Believe it or not, there are people in the industry - young people like myself and many hundreds of rebellious indie types who condemn the corporate approach, the game-vampire consoles and cheap gameplay; we want to make real games again, and we shall. Just give it a few years and games will improve once more, I promise you.

Flybye · Post by **Flybye** » Sun, 1. Dec 13, 19:24

Argo, thanks for helping me find this topic.

Pharoah · Post by **Pharoah** » Thu, 5. Dec 13, 08:18

Nomadian wrote:Well, we don't know who is directly responsible. It might have been Deep Silver who forced the release, who knows? Bernd may have been saying what he was told to say. The truth is we may never know.

In any case... If I had the authority to fire the person most directly responsible they would have been gone already.

Deep Silver had nothing to do with the release date, Tri Synergy may have, but Deep Silver was hired by Egosoft to produce the physical copies only, and distribute them to Egosofts customers.

Deep Silver is getting alot of flack for this, and all they did was "Printed the vendors fliers"

bit.hauler · Post by **bit.hauler** » Thu, 12. Dec 13, 23:55

wasdie wrote:I've actually got a slight alternate theory to a few things about this game.

Things like walking in the stations, the low variety of NPCs, the tiny interior of the skunk, the looting, and the way the engine handles the HUD makes me really question how many of these things they spent a long time designing. It certainly doesn't feel like 7 years of planning went into that. These things are all a stark contrast to the obviously much better planned out seamless world, star cities, and far more robust capital ships.

What it feels like is that when Star Citizen was announced and became the big player in the space sim genre, Egosoft almost felt like they had to keep up with Star Citizen to stay relevant. Thus this last year they spent time adding in things like station interiors, NPCs, and a way to interact with all of them in some way (personal inventory, crawling through tunnels, etc.). Why is that with all of these years of development there are only 4-5 station interiors and a very tiny amount of modeled and animated NPCs yet the exteriors of the stations, variety of the capital ships and smaller ships, and universe backgrounds are all extremely varied and very well made?

It seems like a lot of the most complained about features in this game are almost afterthoughts tacked on quickly within the past year. There are so many clashing design decisions that litter this entire game. Why did they build an engine that can do a very robust economy with station managment then implement some sort of a loot system and personal trading inventory that completely undermines the entire economy? Why is it that we can buy all of these various ships yet have so little interaction with them? Why does it feel like all of the "immersion" like the interior of the ship, the way you interact with menus on board the ship, and the little things like the NPC boarding cutscenes and turning your head constantly to look at the menu feel so shallow and not well thought out?

These are all signs that they've had a big change of direction this game was going in the last year or so. We see a very robust engine that is teeming with capabilities that improve on the old X series in every way yet that seems to have been designed and crafted over a few years and then we see all of these shallow gameplay "features" that undermine everything the engine can potentially do and an interface that is focused on being "immersive" instead of use able.

This is the opposite direction a lot of people here were implying. People here seem to be convinced that they originally started off with all of the shallow features that were made for a spinoff series on the Xbox and then they decide to port that to the PC, but that makes no sense as even the shallow features they have are extremely underdeveloped and have no signs that they spent years working on them. I think the exact opposite is true and that the core of the engine behind X Rebirth was designed to do something far more robust than it was and that in the latter half of the development of the game did they shift gears and start working on all of the features to make the game more "accessible" and "immersive" potentially due to the splash that Star Citizen has made on the genre.

This would also fit in why there are Xbox 360 shaders in the files as at one time they were experimenting with getting the engine to work on the 360 yet realized their original goals were just to big for the platform and thus they scrapped development. This happened far before Star Citizen made its appearance.

It seems to me the true story is a combination of this and the OP. Either way there's several truths we do know: 1) rebirth broke the 'X' mold 2) Bernd marketed rebirth as different 3) rebirth is abysmal in all characteristics that make an X-series game, and 4) rebirth has exceptional exterior graphics. There are several ways that rebirth could be salvaged into something avid X followers would be impressed with and very interested to play. However, I doubt any of these ways would take under a year. Egosoft insulted many followers with the mini-games and shallow gameplay elements in rebirth. This does not make a PC game.

Lastly, while an explanation for this unusual monstrosity would be very desired and may regain trust from tenured followers of the series, but they don't owe it to any of their rebirth customers. However, Bernd or someone at Deep Silver owes their rebirth customers a long term plan: what did we buy into? Mini games, a shallow economy, only 5 different limited station interiors? From the sticky on the forum, it's bug fixing in the near future, but there's serious design issues here, a lot of work. This needs to go long term to fix this stuff. There's no doubt they made considerable money off initial sales and likely owe some of that to Deep Silver and venture capital.

Egosoft, how much do you really want your followers to stick this out with you? You have to tell us something. Where are you going with rebirth? Salvage for an X4, or bug fixing and closing your doors, or something else?

Gregorovitch · Post by **Gregorovitch** » Fri, 13. Dec 13, 02:05

AL'42 wrote:
Qapla wrote:This game need to be reworked. And this very ""simple"" imho copy paste X3 terran conflict with Rebirth graphisms + rebirth plot and that would a huuuuuuuuuuuuuuge improvement.
Wouldn’t that be great!!! Ain’t gonna happen though.

Ego can’t make money on it. Niche market. I’d love it, you’d love it, the fan base would love it but it won’t pay the bills. Look at the xbox market, COD, GTA5, hugely popular, hugely accomplished games, big money, AAA quality, there’s no doubting it, my boy plays them, but I’d be bored stupid after a few hours (not so if I were a teenager again I should add). And that’s the rub, we want a complex beautiful space sim that makes us think and plan into the small hours BUT who’s gonna pay for it?

I think the evidence challenges your pessimistic view. Two games that are good examples are Paradox's Crusader Kings 2 and Bethesda's Skyrim.

Paradox have spent years building up a niche fan base around particularly hearts of Iron and Europa Universalis but with Crusader Kings 2 they really hit the zeitgeist with the whole dynastic plotting/backstabbing thing added to the previous recipe of empire building/conquest. The focus on family and characters gave the game a sense of narrative and personal interest that grabbed a *lot* of new people, including a lot of young people looking for something more challenging and interesting than a lot of the triple-A faff had to offer. CK2 is also a cracking good game and extremely well executed which of course helps.

Europa Universalis IV has been a much bigger success than EU3 was, probably because a lot of new people were motivated to climb the learning curve that Paradox games require with CK2 and took to it with ease. There was no dumbing down or compromise necessary to get a wider audience - it was persistence, polishing and experiment that finally found the magic formula with CK2.

Skyrim (and TES2-5 in general) is IMO a very similar gaming experience to the X series. lengthy, complex, involved open world play. Skyrim is a obviously a huge global mega-hit but the game it, Morrowind and Oblivion are really based on, Daggerfall, was not very successful mainly because it was too slow/hard to get going, there was too much "sameness" in procedurally generated towns and dungeons and it was too big and too long and too complicated for most people (X3 anyone?).

In a desperate attempt at breaking into the mass market Bethesda released a very average and forgettable action/RPG spin-off called Redguard which was less successful than Daggerfall (and lot less respected). With that failure they went back to the basic principles of Daggerfall and came up with their masterpiece Morrowind.

A lot of people (I confess I'm a bit guilty of this sometimes) complain bitterly that Skyrim is nothing like as good as Morrowind, it's been dumbed down, console friendly etc etc blah blah. Truth is there's very little in it and most of this criticism is rose tinted nostalgia. Yes, some aspects of Morrowind have been slightly streamlined in oblivion and Skyrim, magic and enchantment for example, but others have been significantly expanded, notably crafting and the combat system (in Morrowind combat was basically just stats based, "to hit" rolls etc, player skill marginal)

For me these games are clear evidence that you do not achieve success by dumbing down your game - you do it by persevering and honing it until you hit that magic formula: depth and breadth of game play, compelling narrative, beautifully designed and functional interface. When people know that's what their getting, they will take the time to learn how to play your game no matter how complex it is, and they will do so in droves.

Akeela · Post by **Akeela** » Fri, 13. Dec 13, 02:37

Hey! Don't forget Battlespire! That was another Bethesda attempt at changing their formula. It even had multiplayer.

The fact that most people don't even remember it, is a good testament to how "well" it did.

Philbie · Post by **Philbie** » Fri, 13. Dec 13, 02:50

Edit: Whoops I put my comment in wrong thread... Ignore..

rpek32 · Post by **rpek32** » Fri, 13. Dec 13, 03:45

Console UI so... console. Same thing if car manufacturers install on their cars handlebar from bicycle instead of steering wheel

jacare · Post by **jacare** » Wed, 25. Dec 13, 21:09

"The truth is out there"

Kanaric1 · Post by **Kanaric1** » Fri, 27. Dec 13, 05:10

rpek32 wrote:Console UI so... console. Same thing if car manufacturers install on their cars handlebar from bicycle instead of steering wheel

excellent analogy.

but it's already been proven by looking in the game files. no need to use logic anymore since people deny that since we have hard facts at this point.

Kanaric1 · Post by **Kanaric1** » Fri, 27. Dec 13, 05:11

Raider480 wrote:It's a little more than that though. Minecraft, at least in the incipient doubtful phase, had quite low production costs. XR has been being developed for years by a bigger team and with a clearly more demanding technical infrastructure. Anything can indeed make gross profits, but the net gain is what matters for a corporation especially (like Egosoft or indeed now Mojang).

Minecraft hasn't passed CoD..... evidence please.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_be ... franchises

It's like middle in the list and keep in mind this is a game that costs pennies not $60. I could be "i'm bored" pay $5 download minecraft, play for a day, never touch it again.

Also this isn't a niche market if Eve Online and Star Citizen are making millions of dollars. Star Citizen has an unprecedented crowdfunding campaign, nothing else comes close. Everyone I know who likes those genre of space games likes the non-rebirth X games and the major wall to everyone over enjoyment was always the ****** "**** you PC gamers we're making a console game, oh nvm" interface. It was never the gameplay, everyone enjoyed that. Instead of giving people the interface they wanted they made it an even larger hurdle to enjoyment in this game, aside from the insurmountable other problems.

People are throwing the word niche around like they don't know what it means.

X2 had a 72 meta rating

Yeah when people were throwing around the "these games always get bad reviews" nonsense i was laughing because I bought X2 because of it's good reviews. Fanboys always find illogical arguments though.

I find it ironic here that people are touting Elite: Dangerous when Elite 4 was a devlopment hell vaporware game and every one of David Bradbins games after the first elite (Frontier and Frontier: First Encounters i'm talking about specifically) were extremely buggy. However they were innovative for the physics and entertaining simply for the sheer size of the universe, every other gameplay aspect was BEHIND it's rivals in the genre. I don't trust Elite: Dangerous at all. I remember reading his site in 2002 about Elite 4. It's the Duke Nukem Forever of space sims.

edit: Wait.... after reading a few pages there are people DENYING this console port shit? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

terryrayc wrote:
zanetsu wrote:PC games allow you to name your game saves
No most do. There are a lot that do not.

Yes, Final Fantasy 7 and Alpha Protocol (2 console ports) come immediately to mind.

Still waiting on my refund.

stubbs69 · Post by **stubbs69** » Fri, 27. Dec 13, 05:51

AL'42 wrote:
shinai24 wrote:Best review so far...
http://youtu.be/LxUx96-6-dw
Says it all. Not even good enough for consoles….

I’d be surprised if Egosoft survive this shitstorm.

after reading the OP and listening to that just made day, time for a rethink on rebirth. made me laugh .

dubnium · Post by **dubnium** » Fri, 27. Dec 13, 07:32

Kanaric1 wrote:
terryrayc wrote:
zanetsu wrote:PC games allow you to name your game saves
No most do. There are a lot that do not.
Yes, Final Fantasy 7 and Alpha Protocol (2 console ports) come immediately to mind.

afaik no game in the x series allowed you to name your saves. don't get me wrong, it's obvious that x:r is consoleshit, but not because you can't name your saves.

lordmuck · Post by **lordmuck** » Fri, 27. Dec 13, 13:31

I have not read all the comments here and I am only posting with regards to the subject line.

I am very upset with gaming companies that take a decent game and start to make them for consoles.

Any game that was first released on P.C's were EPIC as hell, then came along these little kids and auto-aiming joy pad nonsense with the IQ level of 1 and totally dumbing down our PC games.

In this sense I have felt very disappointed with Egosoft for making this release a port from a console. This is what has totally broken the game, from our old functions that we loved so much from the previous X-games, totally stripping the core functionality and also decent controls, mapping, menus, micro managing, FULL customization of ships, weapon load-outs I guess this is all too much for a console kiddy to handle and also for a console to handle I do know that this is NOT X4, having said this, they should have not used the letter X in this title.

I do hope that Egosoft will listen to their old members here and bring back the never ending fun and creativity we once had in our previous experience in the X-series and never look at the console market again. We need PC only releases for certain games to meet the criteria of an EPIC game, as you are limited a hell of a lot when it comes to creating a console friendly game.

tuareg · Post by **tuareg** » Fri, 27. Dec 13, 15:50

lordmuck wrote:I have not read all the comments here and I am only posting with regards to the subject line.

I am very upset with gaming companies that take a decent game and start to make them for consoles.

Any game that was first released on P.C's were EPIC as hell, then came along these little kids and auto-aiming joy pad nonsense with the IQ level of 1 and totally dumbing down our PC games.

In this sense I have felt very disappointed with Egosoft for making this release a port from a console. This is what has totally broken the game, from our old functions that we loved so much from the previous X-games, totally stripping the core functionality and also decent controls, mapping, menus, micro managing, FULL customization of ships, weapon load-outs I guess this is all too much for a console kiddy to handle and also for a console to handle I do know that this is NOT X4, having said this, they should have not used the letter X in this title.

I do hope that Egosoft will listen to their old members here and bring back the never ending fun and creativity we once had in our previous experience in the X-series and never look at the console market again. We need PC only releases for certain games to meet the criteria of an EPIC game, as you are limited a hell of a lot when it comes to creating a console friendly game.

im sure they put the X into the title and all the X content into the game after they failed to release it on console... not many I can think
split and teladi with one-one models, Xenon as name /they dont look like any xenon except the imported L /, put a few jumpgate... hmm. cant think of anything else resemble to any X games. well it is in space, but thats it

vukica · Post by **vukica** » Fri, 27. Dec 13, 16:34

tuareg wrote:im sure they put the X into the title and all the X content into the game after they failed to release it on console... not many I can think
split and teladi with one-one models, Xenon as name /they dont look like any xenon except the imported L /, put a few jumpgate... hmm. cant think of anything else resemble to any X games. well it is in space, but thats it

the design of split gangrene ship...

ffs, wth would anyone name a ship "gangrene"?!

gangrene?! i can only imagine the creative minds behind it...

and.... that's it.

not really an X game.
also, graphics are kinda worse than x3. it doesn't look better to me. except ice asteroids.

tuareg · Post by **tuareg** » Fri, 27. Dec 13, 17:46

vukica wrote:
tuareg wrote:im sure they put the X into the title and all the X content into the game after they failed to release it on console... not many I can think
split and teladi with one-one models, Xenon as name /they dont look like any xenon except the imported L /, put a few jumpgate... hmm. cant think of anything else resemble to any X games. well it is in space, but thats it
the design of split gangrene ship...

ffs, wth would anyone name a ship "gangrene"?!

gangrene?! i can only imagine the creative minds behind it...

and.... that's it.

not really an X game.
also, graphics are kinda worse than x3. it doesn't look better to me. except ice asteroids.

I don't know it either, it's quite perv: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangrene

anyway, well seen its just a late import as well. even the turret hardpoints are from X3

egosoft.com

egosoft.com

X-Rebirth: The story of the failed console game