In the cluster of battle, the targeting system is there to point the way: it's a tiny, red-yellow arrow and tended to be swallowed by the colour scheme of the glowing yellow planet dominating the scene, but I found a way around that. The fight is big and messy, and a little disorienting. It's a neat way of showing you if your precious missile cargo arrived.Ī second wave arrives, this time mobile and armed, and I'm told by a stilted voice actor that the station needs protection, so not everything about this has been refreshed: the acting and dialogue are still dire. A click and missiles are launched, the inset monitor shows me their progress. There's an extraordinary amount of detail. As it strikes the drone, I can make out the shards ricocheting off, flying into space. A squeeze of the trigger and I can tell that Rebirth's combat is going to feel satisfying: a metallic scree flies out from the mounted cannon, sounding like nails in a blender. They are basically target drones and hang motionless and unthreateningly in the air.
But I did shoot things, and order others to shoot things. It's a real shame I never had the opportunity to go deep and plan things on a large scale, because that's where X shines. Imagine if Bohemia took that approach, and remodelled the Arma interaction system? That's the sort of wholesale reworking we're dealing with. One thing we tell press and fans asking about X Rebirth is 'complex is good, complicated controls are not,' and that 'you won’t need a PhD in space game menus to play X Rebirth.' The goal is to have X Rebirth be as deep as fans have come to expect, but accessible to all gamers." "X Rebirth’s game management system is much more streamlined.
#X REBIRTH CONTROLS SERIES#
Even before 2005, when we were working on X3 Reunion, we realized that this development model had made the game inherently complicated and extremely difficult for new players to grasp if they had not played the X series from the very beginning. Everything from trading info and galaxy mapping is handled that way, and while I won't need it in the demo, a look shows it has plenty of nested menus.Įgosoft's Director Bernd Lehahn explained to me what they were aiming for with this system: "In many ways, the X games that have come before X Rebirth represented the layering upon layering of new features - many, if not most, of which were never part of the game’s original design. The other info is hidden, and in a nod to the modeled interiors of the ships and stations, bringing it up means your character swivels in his chair and pulls up a monitor. There's info of the immediate target set into a monitor on the dash, and everything else on screen is positional. I can move in every direction (but not roll Q and E on the keyboard do that), and select weapons, ship states, and drone activities without having to burrow into a nest of menus. I'm holding a joypad and flying without any of the odd contortions that I associate with the series. Rebirth's simplification is, in part, achieved by immersion: I'm in a cockpit with a limited view of space (previously you were basically a floating head, with an uninterrupted view). There's no time to get comfortable, but that wasn't much a problem because Rebirth is surprisingly accessible. The demo is set-up as three fights beside a large station and an asteroid field, and scales from a fight against two inert ships, to taking part in a station defence with multiple ships, and then a final battle against a large ship. I can't say I got a true understanding of what it's like to play Rebirth, but I still managed to explore a little, and discovered that there's a lot you can do in an open-world in ten minutes.Īt least they're a repeatable ten minutes. The demo that was sent to me was the Gamescom floor demo, and it wasn't set up for the sort of game X is.
On the evidence of the previous games, I'd need about a week to get myself settled comfortably in the cockpit of Egosoft's vast space sim, and I was never going to get that. There was always going to be a catch when I finally got my hands on X Rebirth.
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