X-Rebirth

[muds_animal_friend]

There's a man who cut off his own face to spite his nose gain immortality. Seems unfair really considering the other Fallen Lords didn't have to do that.

 

[DraQ]

There's a man who cut off his own face to spite his nose gain immortality. Seems unfair really considering the other Fallen Lords didn't have to do that.

Yes, but that's still not *the* reference here.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

you people definitely need to learn italian.
there's an obvious advertising plant on a forum who's yelling at me shouting nonsense and lies in the attempt to save this abortion's reputation.
now he's saying i'm a bad person and liar myself because i "pirated the game and deleted it after 20 minutes like i do for everything i download" (absolutely false, i do thorough examinations for everything i get, but i never got this pile of shit, it's so retarded a video is more than enough to see its countless problems) and that bought games are higher quality than those pirated.

absolute hilarity.

 

[Azazel]

I doubt we've seen such sharp decline in a computer game series since Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, and that's pretty damned impressive.

Thi4f.

Granted, different studio and decade. Egosoft has zero excuse.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/06/24/x-rebirth-interview/

Interview: Egosoft On X Rebirth’s Troubled Development
By Rick Lane on June 24th, 2014 at 7:00 pm.

X Rebirth suffered a disastrous launch. Panned by critics and alienating fans, it was easily the worst received entry in Egosoft’s long-running space series. It was also the most successful, selling more copies than any other X game. In the six months since release, Egosoft has been working to justify its customers’ purchase, fixing bugs, reworking systems, and adding new features. I spoke with Managing Director Bernd Lehahn to find out what exactly went wrong and whether there’s any chance X Rebirth can be rescued.


It’s probably fitting that our chat begins with an apology. “The state of the game at release, it’s something that we feel sorry about,” Lehahn says. “We had a lot of trouble with the development over the years and delayed the release again and again. But, honestly, when we released it, I didn’t think it was, at the time when we released it we didn’t really see that many problems with our tests.”

You only need look at the general critical opinions of Rebirth to see why Lehahn is so keen to make these regrets clear so quickly. “It’s an appalling, broken mess, and I’m not going back,” lamented Craig in his WIT. Meanwhile, those sites that put numbers at the end of their reviews awarded it a measly Metacritical average of 33. For the record, I went a whole two points higher.

It’s important to note Lehahn’s apology refers specifically to the game’s bugs and broken systems, rather than any design decisions. Over the course of an hour’s discussion, he is by turns accepting and defensive regarding whether various parts of Rebirth’s design worked or not. Lehahn’s view of the end product aside, one thing ultimately becomes clear. X Rebirth has been a developmental nightmare for Egosoft from start to finish, one that they still haven’t fully awoken from.

Work on X Rebirth began way back in 2007, before the release of the major X3 expansions Terran Conflict and Albion Prelude. It was originally conceived as an entirely separate game from the X series, with a new setting, different mechanics, and powered by a fresh graphics engine. “But then throughout the development we figured it would have been stupid to just give up the fiction, the background that we developed over so many years,” Lehahn explains. “The storyline, the books written about it, the factions, which gives us a lot of meat to work with. Therefore we let the game play in the same universe. In retrospect that was maybe a mistake.”

Despite sharing the same setting, Egosoft wanted to make it clear that Rebirth diverged from their usual space exploration fare, and was not designed as a sequel to X3. ” I never felt comfortable with calling X Rebirth ‘X4′,” he says. “I’m sure we could have sold more copies if we called it X4, because especially our German marketing wanted to call it X4. Our publisher here in Germany, they were pushing us all the time.” It’s just as well he didn’t. Lehahn believes had he accepted such a name change, the backlash would have been far worse. “Many people expected X4, and it’s not X4. That is definitely in some cases a problem with expectation. But, well, that’s something we have to live with.”

Eventually it was decided that Rebirth would retain a fictional link to the earlier X games, while everything else was rebuilt from the ground up, starting with the technology. Previously, all of Egosoft’s games ran off a single CPU core, and the game Lehahn had in mind was far more technologically demanding. Hence, everything had to be recoded to make use of multi-threading. “You have to design the whole game around the idea of having parallel processes running and doing things in parallel.”

Lehahn envisioned a galaxy that was stylistically far busier than what had been explored previously in the X series, inspired by films like the Fifth Element, with vast, bustling stations that were essentially cities floating in space, each visited by hundreds of individual ships. This required an engine capable of rendering a far greater number of objects, and more significantly, a complete rewrite of the game’s AI code. “In the past we could never make space stations which were too complicated in their three-dimensional geometry, because this is always a huge problem to find flight-paths for ships around such stations,” Lehahn observes. “But with X Rebirth we redesigned this entirely. For example, navigation meshes became necessary so that especially small ships can navigate with meshes.”

The massive increase in space-traffic also necessitated a rethinking of how these ships navigated between sectors. And so X Rebirth’s highly controversial “space-highways” were born, linking together the majority of X Rebirth’s points of interest with a sprawling three-dimensional road network. Lehahn planned Rebirth to show both extremes of a lively interstellar civilisation alongside the vast emptiness of space, but admits that in execution Rebirth pushed too far toward the former. “This is definitely also something that we want to rethink a little bit for the future. But overall I still believe that highways are a very good method of focussing and giving missions that you play a faster pace.”

Of all the modification done in X Rebirth, perhaps the most significant revision was to how trading was handled. In the previous X games it was possible to perform trade runs in your own ship, and hop between ships to take manual control. In X Rebirth, players could only control one specific ship, and instead remotely controlled a fleet which performed trades for them. This caused frustration amongst many fans of the series, who felt artificially restricted by the lack of direct control and found that the new trading system required extensive micromanagement.

Lehahn’s explanation for this change is twofold. He claims the limit to one player ship came down to a lack of resources as a consequence of rebuilding so much else in the game. “This project was big enough that way already,” as he puts it. Moreover, he desired the trading in Rebirth to be more realistic, getting rid of what he saw as “cheats” in previous games such as cargo compression technology enabling players to fit more goods in their ships, and time-acceleration which made the game run faster. He wanted players to be more like businessmen than delivery drivers, flying around, picking up offers and discounts from stations rather than making cargo runs themselves. “The only thing that we did is really cut out the very early part, where you start with a small ship, where you trade the goods yourself… if you focus on that part, we can really make it more realistic, and have actual capital ships fly without cheating.”

To me it seems odd to make a game about interstellar spaceships that shoot lasers and fly through space highways more realistic, especially when that added granularity is only going to make an already complicated game even more fiddly. I ask Lehahn if there was any point where it felt like development wasn’t going the way he planned. He responds with an exasperated sigh. “You have this so many times with big projects. So many technical problems on the way. Everything you develop which is on that scale, and new which is really new. You always wish you could simply take an engine and just make a game with it.”

We move on to the topic of the actual release, and why Rebirth was so infested with crippling bugs on launch day. Lehahn confesses the beta testing they did was insufficient for what Rebirth really needed. “We based everything on previous games as far as our Q&A and testing worked, we usually had this – through our website – organised test team called DEFNET which has about 200, 300 people all in all that were testing the game.” As we discuss the ins and outs of these problems, his voice takes on a more sombre tone. “It’s a pity that… It’s always sad if some customers are unhappy and there definitely were some. We want to improve, and it’s definitely sad when the game has bugs when it comes out. That’s the biggest grief, unfortunately.”

I point out this isn’t the first time Egosoft have experienced severe problems with bugs on release either. Very similar issues occurred with X3: Reunion. Lehahn replies that, like Rebirth, X3 was powered by new tech, and at the time they were under pressure to release from their publisher. I ask whether this was the case with Rebirth as well. “I’m not blaming the publishers but yes, of course. You always have. I mean, as I said, the game was in development for seven years, it was a really huge beast for a small company like us.”

The sad truth is Egosoft have now earned themselves a reputation for releasing unfinished games. The only silver lining is they are also known for supporting those games extensively after release. For better or worse, with Rebirth the case is no different. The team spent the immediate period after release smoothing out the game’s bugs, and since then have focussed on more extensive changes and additions to the game, culminating with the X Rebirth 2.0 release in April.

The list of changes is expansive. Several new game starts have been added, each focussing on a different play-style. These are accompanied by unique cockpit windows, a compromise to address the lack of alternative flyable ships. “This is just a very easy method of showing the player the variety and the possibilities of the game,” Lehahn says.

Further alterations include the addition of difficulty levels, and an extended generic mission-system which includes chains of missions more in-line with those seen in X3. The map system has been altered, and a 3D radar has been added to the cockpit which Lehahn is particularly proud of. He also more reluctantly reintroduced a form of autopilot into the game, letting the player select a destination while your AI copilot takes the controls “Autopilot is of course believable,” he comments in reference to Rebirth’s more “realistic” approach. Lastly, flying through highways has also undergone a redesign. Instead of essentially flying through a nine-lane grid system, you’re actually navigating traffic freely.

These changes are all welcome, and Lehahn claims feedback from the community has been very positive, but do they make Rebirth worth playing? On a personal note, these alterations don’t affect the clunky script and grating voice acting, which were the main reasons I bounced off Rebirth. They also don’t fundamentally alter the kind of game X Rebirth is, and they never will. While Lehahn might be willing to make certain compromises for the community, overall he is committed to the design concept behind Rebirth.

That said, 2.0 still isn’t the end. Further changes are on the way, such as the ability to look around your cockpit while flying. At the same time, Egosoft are looking toward new game possibilities. “Whether these are at some point called X4 or X Rebirth 2 or whatever, I cannot talk about now,” Lehahn says. “We are making experiments, we are trying out certain things. Depending on the outcome of those experiments, we will decide how our next product will look and how it will be called.”

 

[bonescraper]

They're wasting even more of ther time and money patching this piece of shit.

 

[Azazel]

Egosoft has managed to stay afloat because they were the only developer making games in this genre for nearly fifteen years. With the resurgence of the space sim and resulting quality that is currently on the horizon, they have no chance to survive and should make their time.

 

[Konjad]

They're wasting even more of ther time and money patching this piece of shit.

Well, they will be able to copy-paste these improvements in their next game, as I doubt they will make a new engine again, therefore it's not a lost cause. It's kind of like with SCS Software. They make American Truck Simulator, but at the same time add all the new stuff in Euro Truck Simulator 2, because why not if it's exactly the same game except for textures and meshes? It costs almost nothing, gives a good reputation and possibly convinces more people to buy the game.

 

[Bradylama]

How do you design a fully rendered cockpit with an NPC copilot, but not implement the feature to look around in it?

 

[DraQ]

X Rebirth suffered a disastrous launch. Panned by critics and alienating fans, it was easily the worst received entry in Egosoft’s long-running space series. It was also the most successful, selling more copies than any other X game.

Next game in the series will be the first game in history to sell a negative number of copies.

Somehow.

 

[Turjan]

Well, they will be able to copy-paste these improvements in their next game, as I doubt they will make a new engine again, therefore it's not a lost cause.

As the article indicated, in principle it's similar to what happened with X3: Reunion. The game was also buggy and not feature-complete, although it was still playable, unlike this here. So Egosoft fixed everything and released X3: Terran Conflict, basically as a second attempt to deliver a proper game. X3: AP on the other hand was more of a DLC/cash grab on the way to X: Rebirth.

 

[Raapys]

From my understanding, those two 'expansions' were for the most part developed by modders with the aid of Egosoft?

 

[Infinitron]

OK, which one of you is this?! http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/06/24/x-rebirth-interview/#comment-1606419

 

[DraQ]

OK, which one of you is this?! http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/06/24/x-rebirth-interview/#comment-1606419

 

[Zewp]

Stop, for just a brief moment, and really take stock of the fact that you just wrote an incredibly creepy work of fiction in which you fantasize about a man losing both his family and his testicles just because he happened to work on a subpar, lackluster video game that you don’t like.

Seriously, though, get some goddamn perspective.

 

[DraQ]

Stop, for just a brief moment, and really take stock of the fact that you just wrote an incredibly creepy work of fiction in which you fantasize about a man losing both his family and his testicles just because he happened to work on a subpar, lackluster video game that you don’t like.

Seriously, though, get some goddamn perspective.

Somebody has already lost his, it seems.

 

[Perkel]

Bernd still lying piece of shit i see.

Game was at some point X360 game. Because game had horrible single threaded engine (where they say in interview that is multithreaded lolololol) and even on my fucking i5 game often dipped to 20-15 in some places they probably couldn't move past MS QA. So they had shitty broken piece of shit action arcade game without platform. So they renamed it to rebirth and ported it to PC

There is ton of x360 code in game files that prove point above.

What is best though is that Bernd doesn't acknowledge critique that game is worse is several ways compared to earlier games and he is in his own litte world where he want to end X universe for some reason.
Game sold best of all Xes but no one will now give a shit about XR2.

 

[trym88]

Game sold best of all Xes but no one will now give a shit about XR2.

I'm not sure about that. The tolerance of the average gamer is pretty high nowadays. Egosoft can just make a new game again, hype it like shit again, make promises that everything will be fine this time and all the stupid fucks who bought Rebirth will buy it again. It's just so easy to hose the crowd.

 

[Ulminati]

when you're watching still screenshots, the game look slike it could be really fun. Then you see if in action and your hopes and dreams are crushed all over again.

Oh well. At least I'll always have Kerbal Space Program

 

[Perkel]

Game sold best of all Xes but no one will now give a shit about XR2.

I'm not sure about that. The tolerance of the average gamer is pretty high nowadays. Egosoft can just make a new game again, hype it like shit again, make promises that everything will be fine this time and all the stupid fucks who bought Rebirth will buy it again. It's just so easy to hose the crowd.

I am sure of this. Most of people i know who played X2-3 preordered game and up until release and few days after release we thought THIS IS FUCKING IT. Sure performance was horrible but it is X3 ! xxxhs of gameplay !

Then we learned you can't buy small ships, UI is shit, controlls are shit, economy doesn't work, no hardpoints on any ship only like 7 weapons and few missle types. horrible trading and so much more than that.

What is most troublesome is that most of X3 modders don't give a fuck about XR, because they don't want to polish turd. There are few of them that did some modding but most important people bailed out or are waiting for proper 2.0 with fixed features which won't come because Berndt says it is how game is designed and there is nothing wrong with this design.

Most of those people will buy X4 if this will be X4 and they won't preorder it. They will wait first for some sucker buying it and review it. This is how much respect is left.

 

[Perkel]

X REBORN

People i hereby announce there is light on horizon. I am currently playing new 2.5 beta patch and:


- They fixed massively performance. I am talking about 30-100% better framerate depending in which sector you are in. I got like 20 FPS in Five ways now i have 40-50fps. And most of the time i have locked 50FPS on my rig (i5 +7970) playing 1080p 4xMSAA on ultra. Graphic options actually work now so if you set medium or low your performance will improve a lot.

- They fixed progression by introducing Small and Medium ships to buy. You can buy plethora of small fighters, few medium miners, few medium traders. No longer game is all about capital ships. No longer you will need to salvage scraps for first real money or do 1000x shitty generic missions to get first cap trader. I started from Free Mode scenario (without any bonus ships) and i grinded my way to first 500k then i bought Grigorum, with few more k i bought small fighter to protect Grigorum. Which leads us to:

- They added Fleet command. Mind you it's not really anything amazing. It is just hierarchy like structure where you add ships to other ships. So i can assign few small fighter for my Grigorum and Grigorum works as lead for them. You can now essentially create squads. Still there are no advanced commands so this is still barebones. Adding proper commands shouldn't be problem now

- They scraped most of old UI radial bullshit for most functions. Instead of it there is now X3 style sidebar and what is most important UI is now super slick and fast ! I believe it is still WIP as there is still radial menu when you talk with NPCs. UI also doesn't stuter anymore. It isn't yet perfect as it still uses old screens for different things but speed alone changes a lot things.

Among other things: Freelook in cockpit, 3rd person camera, new generic mission types (played a few non combat ones and seems ok , like for example taxi dude to his ship) and finally you can see factions fighting each other. Especially albion and PMC.

Full changelog:

Spoiler

Version 2.50 Beta 6 (185928)

Note: Translations for texts that are new in 2.50 are not yet included in this build..

• New Feature: New side-bar based main menu.

• New Feature: External camera view.

• New Feature: Free look in cockpit.

• New Feature: New shipyards for small and medium sized ships.

• Added Drone Hunt generic mission.

• Added Protection Detail generic mission.

• Added Diplomatic Aid mission chain.

• Added respawning of specialists with increasing hire fees.

• Added incoming remotely ordered wares to item trader menu.

• Added auto-refuel setting.

• Added small ship traders.

• Added primary shields to large ships which did not already have them.

• Added "civil war" behaviour between Pluatrch and Heart of Albion in Albion.

• Added ability to replace destroyed CVs so that station construction can can continue.

• Added ability to assign ships to other ships of same size or to any large ship.

• Added event monitor display to drone control mode.

• Added target elements for player-owned small ships.

• Added crash report option with privacy settings.

• Improved event monitor with "picture-in-picture" mode.

• Improved hacking gameplay.

• Improved engine animation and effects.

• Improved ship AI behaviour in numerous situations.

• Improved generation of mission enemies.

• Improved "Assign new superior" command.

• Improved ability menu to show when a drone is unavailable.

• Improved mission target indicator to point always to the closest mission target.

• Improved trade offers menu (shopping list is included in ship cargo).

• Improved docking behaviour of drones.

• Improved build tree menu user experience.

• Improved several mission briefings.

• Improved Open Comm Link menu in legacy main menu.

• Improved rendering of distant objects to reduce flickering slightly.

• Improved remote controlled player drones flying back to the player ship.

• Improved Mission Bar so it no longer obstructs menus.

• Fixed player ship cover faction not being reset from Xenon after plot.

• Fixed several plot and other mission issues.

• Fixed player ship slowing down when a menu is opened in a highway.

• Fixed left mouse clicks not closing ability/interact menus in some cases.

• Fixed double clicks on current target not always opening interact menu.

• Fixed stuck scroll-bar when returning to a previous menu.

• Fixed various other issues with UI and targeting behaviour.

• Fixed dialog or legacy main menu sometimes not showing buttons as selected.

• Fixed pressing ESC/DEL on loading screen returning to startmenu after loading is done.

• Fixed targets being lost with mouse-controls in certain cases (e.g. when mission targets update).

• Fixed upgrade resources being counted twice for building.

• Fixed upgrade level rounding issues resulting in incorrect upgrade counts.

• Fixed an issue with station expansions not completing out-of-sector.

• Fixed multiple ship dealers per platform.

• Fixed escort ships disappearing after loading a savegame.

• Fixed a pathing issue for ships flying to stations.

• Fixed an issue with gas collectors not collecting.

• Fixed production module animations being stuck after having been out-of-sector.

• Fixed several problems with drone docking.

• Fixed problems with transport drones not picking up containers.

• Fixed drones failing to get a new commander if theirs is destroyed.

• Fixed ability to comm from a remote control drone using the "C" shortcut.

• Fixed stuck shift keys when alt-tabbing or changing window focus.

• Fixed inconsistent upgrade counts between encyclopedia and ship dealer.

• Fixed player ship selectable in Assign to Commander conversation.

• Fixed drones not being able to return to their home base.

• Fixed managers pestering the player for money.

• Fixed stuck trade offers and refunded money to all participants.

• Fixed excessively bright lights on certain objects.

• Fixed problem involving disappearing wares.

• Fixed input actions and states mapped to axis on joystick 3-8 not working.

• Fixed several mining bugs (resource gathering, movement, searching...).

• Fixed cases of player drones getting lost when you enter a highway.

• Fixed police not detecting illegal cargo in player inventory in many cases.

• Fixed station building not proceeding correctly when not in the player zone.

• Fixed refuel budget menu assuming that the trader has no money.

• Fixed unidentified station modules having a name in the map.

• Fixed minor button selection bugs in menus.

• Fixed automatically changing selection in map menu.

• Fixed initial button selection in menus not being highlighted.

• Fixed mode options being available in the player ship's back room.

• Fixed shields not protecting surface elements on several ships in Omicron Lyrae.

• Fixed mining drones not picking up asteroids in some cases.

• Fixed rare cases of hotkey buttons not working.

• Fixed occasional freeze when opening the options menu.

• Fixed ships getting stuck waiting for drones.

• Fixed some ships not shooting at large objects.

• Fixed certain invisible ship/station components being selectable as target.

• Fixed several of the most common causes of crashes.

• Various optimisations resulting in performance improvements.

Known Issues

Please do not report things that are listed in the documentation as known issues.

• Demand for certain high-end products such as drones or missiles has not been re-balanced yet. • Transport drones sometimes take time to reach target (workaround: just wait).

• Autopilot flight over surface of large objects can be erratic (workaround: disable autopilot).

• Using Alt-Tab during fullscreen video playback will cause video/sound to get out of sync (workaround: press Esc to skip video).

Among other things from earlier patches they fixed annoying highway minigame (by removing it), added proper hotkey system for every UI (which now works as dream with new UI speed), added few new cap ships and missile types, bugfixed a lot game, added X64 exe.


OK facts are done. Impressions now:

Game with 2.5beta patch feels like a proper X game now. Sure there are still problems and some QoL problems, balancing issues but overall main theme of X game is in. I spend whole day playing XReborn and so far game is enjoyable. I slowly work my ass off from 0 as in X3.

With a bit of modding (like removing or downgrading boarding) and some balancing game will be really good.
Currently i fly with my small fleet of medium sized traders coupled with 10 fighters and i am a happy man.
From this point on game can only get better.

STRONG WORD OF ADVICE. Wait week or two for proper official 2.5. Beta is so far buggy.


New UI in action:




For comparison old UI with its microlag problem




And for fun X3 menu

 

[Thane Solus]

just let it die, they never made good games to begin with, they had great concepts, but i dont think there is one game designer at this company. That UI! Wow! Not even EVE which non gamers call it spread sheet online, doesnt have a such a bad UI functionality.



In the end if you enjoy the game, good for you, there is nothing bad about that.

 

[Thane Solus]

I doubt we've seen such sharp decline in a computer game series since Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, and that's pretty damned impressive.

that game was awesome, i played it in 2001, and while at first i was like everybody, wth is this? i played in real time and it was a fun game with multiple endings and some decent mechanics, but it wasn't a true fallout and everybody from NMA went crazy.

if you take it as a different game in the fallout universe it works, its like 100 times better than Fallout 3 anyway and i finished that POS, beside getting scared in some caves with zombies which i loved, not even mods didnt boost that garbage for me...

 

[Raapys]

Nice, looks like they're finally getting somewhere. I'll give it another try in a year or so.

 

[Perkel]

just let it die, they never made good games to begin with, they had great concepts, but i dont think there is one game designer at this company. That UI! Wow! Not even EVE which non gamers call it spread sheet online, doesnt have a such a bad UI functionality.



In the end if you enjoy the game, good for you, there is nothing bad about that.

As i said they fixed major problems and game is now good (not the best yet). This is coming from dude who wrote all that hate earlier.

that game was awesome, i played it in 2001, and while at first i was like everybody, wth is this? i played in real time and it was a fun game with multiple endings and some decent mechanics, but it wasn't a true fallout and everybody from NMA went crazy.

if you take it as a different game in the fallout universe it works, its like 100 times better than Fallout 3 anyway and i finished that POS, beside getting scared in some caves with zombies which i loved, not even mods didnt boost that garbage for me...

FT:BoS has the best combat after JA2. It's true that it wasn't proper fallout but it was amazing game (and still is)

 

[Perkel]

Nice, looks like they're finally getting somewhere. I'll give it another try in a year or so.

You should. Game definitely feels different to that abomination pre 2.5beta.
I mean it feels now like X game instead of piece of shit. Most of problems with pre 2.5 game came from lack of SM ships. So to get your cap ship you had to:

- grind shitty 20k missions (which means ~200missions for 4mln rahanas without money for actual trading or crew)
- look for completely unbalanced containers in space (few mln in less than hour)
- board ships, which completely nullified any point in trading as you could sell ships for many mln
- scavange stations for some low loot

So player had to use most of those broken systems because there wasn't any other way to get your money.

Now with SM ships you can say goodbye to all of that. I did like 15 missions (mostly taxi stuff) and i got my first medium trader and now i mostly trade stuff and properly build empire as in old X games instead of doing stupid shit.
Game is just one or two big patches away from being really awesome game and not just good as X3.

And what is more important now you can really make a proper war with swarm of fighters around cap ships instead of 3-4 cap ships without any smaller ships fighting awkwardly.