X Rebirth emerges with details and trailer
X Rebirth has emerged after what fans are calling “a very long time”. The successor to X3 (the most recent chapter being the wonderfully complex Albion Prelude) has gotten a trailer and some details:
“After seven years in development, people are naturally wondering why X Rebirth took so much time,” says Egosoft’s Studio Head Bernd Lehahn. “The reason for this is the sheer scope of our project. We not only want our universe to be huge, we want it to be huge and teeming with life. To me, the success of the Star Citizen funding shows that many people are waiting for our kind of game. A single factory compound in X Rebirth may consist of hundreds of buildings, some of which are so large that ships measuring kilometers in length can dock inside them. The player can even disembark in order to explore the station and meet its inhabitants.”
I’m going to break one of our own style guidelines, and post two videos below. First the trailer:
They’ve called it a “teaser”, and yet I now more about the game watching it than I do most launch trailers of other games. There’s some nice shots of the sights of the X3 (literal) universe, and an overview of the new setting, whereby you’ll command a single, upgradeable battleship (gone is the ability to purchase multiple ships in Rebirth, but you’ll be able to deploy and remotely control drones, so it will probably amount to the same thing), using a (presumably) vastly improved interface.
But really, you need to watch this second video, where Egosoft’s Managing Director Bernd Lehahn talks about the game systems. Even if you’re not interested in what he has to say, the footage from the game actually looks better than the trailer. Which is to say it looks stunning (click on the header image above too). I am very much looking forward to this.
The game gets released for our Windows-based cousins in November, and as for the Mac version, Bernd tells me “we will work on it and try our best”. That might be the best news I’ve heard all day (and to put that into context, today I was told I saved £37.49 on my grocery shopping).