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[Cheese]

Egosoft just announced The Next Big Thing. X:Rebirth.
RPS article. Egosoft site article. The trailer is in both articles.

The ships look awesome, as does everything else.
There's going to be a conference on April 28th, 1 week from now, which will probably reveal more.

Info;
To be released fourth quarter of 2011.
New ships.
This is set in the X-universe but it sounds like something has greatly changed.
Possibly Freelancer like trade lanes?

From the www.xrebirth.com website.(Just the deepsilver website, don't think it's going to give much new info)

• It gets personal: Character-driven UI and a living and breathing universe
• It gets fast: Fun and fast travel with new transportation systems
• It gets big: The most detailed X universe ever
• Endless room for exploration
• Easy to learn - hard to master
• Gameplay, controls and UI are redesigned from scratch

[Felius]

Second quarter of 2011 release? Ok, it'll be worth buying in the beginning of 2013 after they drop the SecureRom for the game.

Possibly Freelancer like trade lanes?

I certainly hope not. It's an interesting mechanic, but I find it too limiting for a sandbox game like the X series.

I'm looking foward to seeing the game, and how it's gonna be.

[Cheese]

Fourth, not second.

Moar info in the OP. Sounds like there will be some sort of new transportation system. Maybe those trade line looking things were just new gate animations, though. Perhaps they're in-sector travel.

[Aklyon]

Sounds great, but SecureRom? do they really expect that to help anything at all?

[Lightning4]

Could be the transorbital accelerators we saw in X3:TC. They look kinda similar.

Could be a new jump-gate design though.

Looks amazing. Seriously. 2011 was already shaping up to be an amazing year for games before this, now we have this too? What next?

[Sirian]

I played X2 and X3, and as much as i enjoyed it, there were big flaws in my opinion. The first one is the way space is depicted. Each sector is basically a square with 1 to 4 gates (most of the time those gates will be at the cardinal points of the map), with space stations in it. Most of these stations are generic factories from which you can buy and sell the things they produce/consume. Of course, you can naviguate your ship in 3 dimensions, and it seems that you can go in any direction for as long as you want, but 99% of the time, all the points of interest are inside this small square formed by the N-E-S-W gates that link adjacent squares (here is the global map).

Planets are useless (the only interaction with them is travelling for a long time in their direction until you collide with them), stars only affect the ratio of solar power plants, and most of the time the only difference between one sector and another is the skybox and the generic stations/ships inside it.

I really hope that this new game will improve that, ideally i'd like to be able to land on planets and moons, with sectors being realistic stellar systems and stations orbiting planets most of the time. And for once in a game i'd like to have asteroid fields that dont look like a bunch of big rocks in close formation. Real life asteroid fields are rings around a star and asteroids are small and scattered enough that you can't see 2 of them together. In fact 99% of the time you should be able to go through an asteroid field without even seeing one. The asteroid fields that you see in most games should have collapsed long ago from gravity, and the same could be said about the weird gas clouds that some games feature. Real life gas clouds are not dense enough to block close range vision.

Sorry for the rant, i just had this on my chest for some time ^^. And i know that games can't be realistic all the time, but i think that real life space is much more interesting in some ways than video games "space".

[Cheese]

So many games this fall. SotS2, TESV, X:Rebirth.

@Sirian: I think it would be interesting if colonies on planets could be traded with and if they acted as production centres of some sort.

[Sean Mirrsen]

What I'd like is a system similar to Edge of Chaos. EoC suffered from static stellar objects in an otherwise awesome universe, but XR can borrow its concepts a little. Where EoC had continuous star systems connected by a network of L-Points, XR can have "Star systems" as congregations of sectors. You travel to a system via an accelerator gate or what have you, and then use smaller gates to jump around in-system. EoC had no need for special jumpgates (except for travelling between star clusters, orders of magnitude further apart than star systems), and in-system travel was handled with "casual FTL travel" in the form of LDS (think Alcubierre drive), so as XR won't have that "casual FTL", the small gates will fit the theme perfectly. I'd imagine a sufficiently determined player could even fly from sector to sector in-system using nothing but STL drive, and it could provide means to establish actually remote pirate bases that are believably difficult to find.

[Felius]

Sounds great, but SecureRom? do they really expect that to help anything at all?

Correction, I was mistaken. They use Tagés, not SecuRom.

But, yeah, it sucks. On the plus side they generally patch out the DRM after a year or two after the release (or so they did with previous games), which will be when I finally buy and play it.

[Cheese]

This picture looks like it's set in the upper atmosphere of a planet. Seems strange.

[Sirian]

This picture looks like it's set in the upper atmosphere of a planet. Seems strange.

Yea... could be just a skybox though. But let's not lose hope

[Sean Mirrsen]

Well, considering there are stations that are, upon thorough examination, keeping themselves aloft with rather massive thrusters - I'd say that this is indeed the upper atmosphere of a planet. The patch of terrain visible in the lower part of the image also helps that presumption.

The craft in the image focus also seems to be designed with gravity in mind - notice the characteristic "dropship" placement of thrusters.

[Deon]

I played X2 and X3, and as much as i enjoyed it, there were big flaws in my opinion. The first one is the way space is depicted. Each sector is basically a square with 1 to 4 gates (most of the time those gates will be at the cardinal points of the map), with space stations in it. Most of these stations are generic factories from which you can buy and sell the things they produce/consume. Of course, you can naviguate your ship in 3 dimensions, and it seems that you can go in any direction for as long as you want, but 99% of the time, all the points of interest are inside this small square formed by the N-E-S-W gates that link adjacent squares (here is the global map).

Planets are useless (the only interaction with them is travelling for a long time in their direction until you collide with them), stars only affect the ratio of solar power plants, and most of the time the only difference between one sector and another is the skybox and the generic stations/ships inside it.

I really hope that this new game will improve that, ideally i'd like to be able to land on planets and moons, with sectors being realistic stellar systems and stations orbiting planets most of the time. And for once in a game i'd like to have asteroid fields that dont look like a bunch of big rocks in close formation. Real life asteroid fields are rings around a star and asteroids are small and scattered enough that you can't see 2 of them together. In fact 99% of the time you should be able to go through an asteroid field without even seeing one. The asteroid fields that you see in most games should have collapsed long ago from gravity, and the same could be said about the weird gas clouds that some games feature. Real life gas clouds are not dense enough to block close range vision.

Sorry for the rant, i just had this on my chest for some time ^^. And i know that games can't be realistic all the time, but i think that real life space is much more interesting in some ways than video games "space".

I personally think it's not a rant, it's the way I think too.

I doubt they will totally drop the concept, it's a major basis of X series.

Basically for me, if they had Privateer-like space, it would be the best space game ever... For now it's a mediocre space game with great-to-awesome game mechanics.

[Firgof Umbra]

TNBT is not X:Rebirth from what I can see.  They were very specific on when they would reveal TNBT.  They also said early on that TNBT would not be set in the X Universe.

Koch Media will be holding a press conference at FedCon XX in Düsseldorf, Germany on Thursday 28 April 2011 at 15:15, at which the project known as TNBT will be officially unveiled. There will be a brief preview of the game for the media. All of the relevant information given at the event will also be simultaneously released right here at Egosoft.com.

Edit:  It appears my speculation was incorrect.  It is specifically mentioned as TNBT in their newsletter.

OK now that was the official part and you finally know what "TNBT" really will be.

[Cheese]

Q: Why another X game? What happened to the "end of the X trilogy" statement?

A: Well that is still true. At least partially
We worked on the old X games from 1996 until 2007. That was 11 years of development and 11 years mostly filled with adding features.
Adding features is pretty cool, as you have this solid foundation. You never have to start from scratch. We replaced the graphics engine twice, and we made many other big changes to the technology, but we were never at a point where nothing would work. Thats a very luxurious position for a game developer to be in.

BUT (and it's a big but), adding features to an existing game design has limits. Especially when we talk about the actual gameplay design. Adding so many features that were not originally planned for was a bit like building a higher and higher tower. You run into problems. Problems like a user interface that gets more and more complex and that's rarely a good thing.