Let me give you a quick tour around what X Rebirth is and is not.

Why X Rebirth instead of X4

After more than 10 years of developing the X games by adding features to an existing concept, we wanted to make a fresh start.
All the games of the old X series after X:Beyond the Frontier, were developed by taking the prequel and adding features on top. This had a lot of advantages for us as developers. Most importantly it allowed us to work very closely with the community. We could listen to your wishes and feedback on the last game and incorporate much of that into the next game.

However it also had a big drawback: It made the game more and more complicated and harder to get into for those who were not already part of the community from the start.



Complex=good, Complicated=bad

Let me get this straight right at the start. X Rebirth is not less complex or dumber than any of the X games of the past.
But to make a game intuitive and easy to learn, you have to design it from scratch. Adding features to a game that was not designed for these features at the start, is never perfect.

What hardware will be required to play X Rebirth?

We can not yet answer what the minimum hardware requirements will be, but this will be announced before the release of the game.

A Changed Universe

The X universe was always defined by gates. Gates that were (almost?) the only technology that allowed its inhabitants to bridge interstellar distances.

The gates were built by a very advanced ancient civilisation a long long time ago. They were later used by the different populations that developed in the X universe and they relied on them for trading and for their everyday life.

A while after the events told in X3:Terran Conflict however, the gates suddenly ceased to work. Why? That's still unknown. This shutdown however had dramatic political and economical consequences. Millions of people were isolated far away from their former home and many systems suddenly lacked the supplies of food or other resources they needed for everyday life.

At the start of X Rebirth, these events are again a thing of the past, but they have formed a changed and new universe.


CPU performance

One of the biggest steps in developing an entire new engine was to design a true multithread-capable engine. X Rebirth will make full use of latest generation CPUs by spreading the work in many parallel running threads.

What engine and API do we use?

X Rebirth will run on DX9 API as long as all the features that we need from the API are possible with it. That does not mean we may not at some point also support DX11, but for now we do not see a need. Our engine is quite different from all the big established names, because it is designed specifically for a space game. We had a look at engines like Unreal or the CryEngine, but because we wanted to have cutting edge space graphics, an area very different from what these engines are specialized in, we had to develop our own engine.

Will X Rebirth support modding?

We definitely aim to support modding again. Since this is an entirely new engine, we can not provide any documentation and API support before the game comes out, but we hope to provide this soon after the release.


How is scripting going to be supported?

The new engine supports a scripting system very similar to the MD language used in Terran Conflict. It will be strongly modified for the new engine, but if you understand MD already, chances are that you will find it relatively easy to write missions for the new game. XML based languages are also used in many other areas of designing a game with the new Rebirth engine.

Size Matters

Well that at least was one of the tongue-in-cheek marketing slogans for the second of the X games "X-Tension". And as much as you can doubt the truth of this sentence in other areas, it is definitely true when it comes to space games.

Space must be BIG. Really big. But with a larger and larger universe also come longer traveling times, unless you use "hacks" like the SETA time acceleration or allow the player to freely "jump". Both of these hacks (or tricks) however come with big downsides.

So for X Rebirth our solution to this is a system of interconnected highways. Highways allow you to travel fast to reach all popular areas of the universe, yet they can be left anywhere in the middle to allow endless exploration.

Realistic Proportions

Thanks to the highway system we can finally have realistic proportions What was known as sectors in the old universe, was always supposed to be entire solar systems. Thats what it said in the stories of the game and in the books which went into great depth to explain the history of these gates.

In reality however, these sectors were only a few dozen to hundred kilometers in diameter. Not really the size a solar system should have.

Local Highways

All highways were built by only one corporation: Jonferson Space Dynamics Division, a corporation that has closely cooperated with Earth in the past and used their knowledge to bring new acceleration technologies into the X universe.

Local highways accelerate all ships by a very high multiplier (different from place to place though) and bring ships with the same destination much closer together. You can leave a local highway at any time and explore the areas between zones. Although a highway boosts your speed permanently as long as you are inside it, you can still influence your speed by skillful steering. This makes it fun to travel as fast as possible, but also possible to intercept other ships or even attack them in the middle of a highway.

Super Highways and Gates

Super highways are even faster than local highways and bridge interplanetary distances. Again you can influence your speed and interact with other ships but you can not leave a super highway in the middle.

Gates still exist, but right now.... they do not work. However, there are signs that this may soon change!

The Structure of the Universe: Zones, Sectors and Clusters

Shortly after the events of X3:Terran Conflict, the X universe began to change. Thanks to the invention of space highways, massive changes suddenly became possible. Much bigger settlements became possible and a lot of the formerly planet bound economy could now be moved into space too.

Where our old universe was a simple arrangement of cubic sectors, we now have a hierarchy of really stellar proportions allowing a more realistic and varied universe than before.

It starts with what we call zones. This can be anything from a city in space or a group of factories to a unique asteroid field or any other interesting location. Zones are either at the end of local highways or alongside a local highway. Most of the time a group of zones, sometimes hundreds of kilometers apart form a sector. Sectors are then connected with superhighways and form a cluster (e.g a solar system).

The playership - Not just an ordinary ship

One of the big changes in X Rebirth when compared to the old X games is that you as a player will only be flying a single ship. But before you get upset and complain about the lack of freedom to steer other ships, WAIT... that's still possible. Its just packaged in a different way... So please be patient for a moment and read on. Wink

Like in X:Beyond the Frontier, where the player was also bound to a single ship called the Xperimental shuttle, X Rebirth will place you in another very special ship: The Pride of Albion, or as it is more recently known: The Albion Skunk.

Rooms and NPCs

This one ship, however, is not just another ship like those you know from our past games. For starters, it has several rooms that you can see and use, it has a crew of NPCs who work for you, their captain, and who you can meet face to face.

The Co-Pilot

Some of these NPCs can be hired and exchanged, others you meet by destiny (or as we refer to it: The plot). The best example of that latter kind will be your co-pilot. She will be your interface to the ship and helps you control many of the more complex aspects of the game.

The story of the ship

It has a long history and that history is far from over.
You can influence what this ship is and how it develops.

Expanding the ship

It is a fast and maneuverable ship and can be expanded. Weapons systems, engines, shields, but most importantly: Drones.

Drones - You fly them or you command them

Drones are a very big new area of the game and are used in many different ways by YOU the player.



Drone remote control - The VR HUD

First of all there is the possibility to remotely control a drone. This is basically exactly like switching personally into another ship. You can fly drones in a 1st person perspective and it looks as if you are inside the drone. You do this, however, using a Virtual Reality environment in your ship. While your co-pilot takes over the control of your ship, goggles come down from the ceiling and you dive into the remote control of the drone.

The cool thing about this, is that with drones we have even more design freedom than with ships. They can be very small, for example, and are generally very specialized for a particular job. The whole gameplay experience can be a lot more varied than with normal ships, which always have to contain a lot more features.

This is also one of several gameplay changes that allow us to get the player deeper into station and ship environments and help you play with the elements at the surface of ships and stations. A drone can sometimes reach into vents and corridors that are so small that even your ship cant fit inside.

Last but not least, another nice side effect is that you won't die if you are shot down inside a drone. All that happens is that you lose a vehicle - one of many that can be launched from your ship.

Passive functions of a drone

Drones can also help you in a fully automatic mode. They have an AI and can work autonomously if you launch them. This can give you assistance for especially hard jobs.

Abilities

If you want to have some control over what a drone should be doing for you but dont want to switch to remote control with your VR goggles, you can give them commands using a quickly-accessible compass menu. Tell a fighter drone to take out that one turret on the left while you personally take care of the shield generator on the right...

Capital ship control

Where the drones are your preferred vehicles for specialized tasks inside and near the surface of a station, capital ships are your vehicle of choice for all the many "big" tasks. From transportation of goods, collecting of resources like ore, gas or plasma up to large carriers and destroyers. They all exist in X Rebirth and you can of course own and operate many of them[edit:So maybe like temporary?]!

You can in fact even land on these beasts and get out of your playership to meet NPCs while watching the large ship move around in space FROM the deck of the ship!

You won't be sitting in the cockpit and steer such a capital ship from the first person perspective anymore simply because that is boring. Steering huge and slowly-turning ships manually just doesnt make sense. It would force us to make them turn and move unrealistically quick and even then they would be impossible to maneuver near our huge and complex shaped stations.

Instead the steering is done by NPCs who work for you but closely follow your orders. You can control capital ships who work for you in many new ways.


Stations and large ships - New fight tactics

Capital ships as well as space stations are now a lot more detailed. These details, however, are not limited to improved and animated visuals. They are there for gameplay reasons. A single capital ship can have hundreds of objects on its surface. Things like turrets and shield generators which can of course be scanned, manipulated or simply destroyed individually, but also bigger objects like jumpdrive generators, engines and much more.

Surface interactions

But it's not just useful for fighting. On the contrary: The biggest changes are on the building, trading and designing of your own stations and ships.
Stations as well as ships are no longer things that you build or use as one large object. They are systems that are developed and improved.

Capital ship physics

If you have read above about you flying over the surface of a capital ship to take out turrets or other surface elements, as we call them, you may have wondered: 'Hey but what if the ship is moving or turning while I try this?'

Here is another of these big gameplay changes we had to do: When flying closer to large ships, your ship (or the drone you are remote controlling), will gradually be drawn into the influence of that ship. The closer you are to its surface, the more the ship will "drag you with it".

This allows you to actually land on or in ships while they are moving. Even in the middle of a fight between two capital ships you can fly over the surface of one and watch the scenario of the battle like a passenger with the beautiful space background turning around you, while the capital ships move and turn.



Talking to people - NPCs working for you

I have already mentioned the NPCs who help you operate your ships (all of them). This is another of these BIG things for us.

We want to make the game easier to understand by controlling many of the complex things you can do in an X game through conversations.

Instead of dry and hard-to-interpret text menus, you will be talking to people. You will give them commands and they willl tell you about their progress - all in the form of conversations.

Examples

Some examples of NPCs working for you:

* Managers onboard your factories run the economy side. They buy and sell wares, but will only do what you allow them to do.
* Captain of a ship: He or she is the person on the bridge who steers the ship according to your commands. You can tell them what you want them to do in very fine detail, or you give them more freedom or assign them to work for a station manager.
* Your Co-Pilot: She was already mentioned above and she is the most important of all NPCs in this game. You will learn more about her soon.
* Boarding crew: Just one example of crew members working for you.


Building modular stations

With X Rebirth, we wanted to add a whole new level of depth and complexity to building of space stations.


Build platforms - Decide on a category

The first step in building a station is similar to what one would do in our previous games. You hire a large ship. This ship, however, does not contain the whole factory in a single large module anymore. Far from it.

This ship is a so-called 'builder platform'. It hosts a large amount of welder ships and works as a hub during the process of constructing your station.

When you buy a builder platform, you decide on the category of station you want to build. After you have decided on the place to start the new building, you can then land on the platform and discuss what station from that group you want to start building.


You can already see what resources are needed to build the modules of this station and estimations on how expensive this will be, but you don`t just "buy" a station anymore. You really build it.

The build process - Supplying and missions

Every module of a station is built by welder ships. Transporters bring the needed resources for building and only once the resources are there, can the welding begin. You can see how your new station is created literally wall by wall.

At every step of the way you can (together with the NPC who operates this for you) decide whether you want to bring resources yourself or if you simply put up an offer to buy the resources from other traders.
While the station is being built, you sometimes receive special missions to progress the building process. Once the first module is finished for example, you can search for the best manager to run the new station for you, pick him up and personally bring him to your new station.

Build stages - Decide on a strategy

Now we just talked about building a first module so far. And that is actually the biggest new feature - Modularity!
Stations can be built in different orders according to your plans. Do you want to focus on the production and build a chain of modules that support each other, where one produces the resources for the next?
Or do you plan your station more like a huge warehouse and focus on big storage capacities?

Then there is always the question of how much effort to put into the protection and the military capabilities of your station.
Each module you build is an important strategic decision.

Expansions - Going into detail

On top of that modules can also be expanded.
The surface elements that we described in the ships and stations section, all play an important role for your own stations as well.
Invest in turrets, equip the surface of your station with shield generators and add more capabilities to your station by building more things on the surface of your station.

Building ships

In much the same way as you build a station you can also build your own capital ships. You can control every little detail of a new construction if you like, but of course you can also make your life easier and leave many decisions to the NPCs working for you.

We provide the universe, and you decide how you want to play it.

I thought this was an x-Men Destiny sequel. I'm pleasantly surprised.

Can't wait to play it.

It almost sounds like a non-mmo version of EVE online...I can get behind that.

I tried to play X3: Terran Conflict once. After failing to understand the tutorial, I realized that that game was probably a little over my head for now, so I uninstalled it. Maybe I'll do another go-round at some point, since it seems like something I'd like.