Just seen the controller video and looks fantastic! So glad they have people looking like people and not the Mr Potato Heads they were in X3 (my BIGGEST gripe) and walking off your ship onto the station and even around it is a dream come true, very Firefly-like

Day 1 buy for me!

No MP though I'll wait for it to go on sale probably.

So they WILL be at this years Gamescom after all. The question is, who will attract bigger crowd. SC or XR?

Lehahn and Roberts should just host a combined, all-night spacecon session with reveals, trailers, gameplay, Oculus Rift demos,... Which should be live-streamed.

I don't quite like the "walking around" bit. It'll be cool the first few times, maybe, but then later on, I just want to conduct my business and go.

Also, I wonder if they've done away with SETA? And has anyone seen any sector map or universe map or autopilot use? I like the idea of "scale" with one station, but I wonder if that station comprises the entire "sector" or can you go from station to station like in X3TC/AP?

At first I was also put off by no-MP, but my son and I are playing "side-by-side" and he has his version of Argon space and I have my own, but we still help each other out with info on what to buy where and such.

I need a good SP game, can't wait to get my grubby mitts on this one. I was looking at my steam library trying to figure out what I was in the mood for. Wish this was out now.

Day one buy for me too, looks great!

I believe I'd read that SETA is gone, replaced by the interstellar highway things (sort of like Freelancer). This is a Good Thing in my book. This is for travel though, so I'm not sure what happens for the people who use SETA just to advance time so their business things go faster. I think that's a little silly, but the whole 'build a massive industrial venture' never really appealed to me in the earlier X games. I like to do everything myself in my own ship (carry my own trade, fight my own fights, explore on my own, etc). Having a home factory complex or something is okay, but managing a bunch of facilities and AI employees as an end of its own just seems like work.

In the videos, you can see the highways in the background, and there are a few brief first person clips showing travelling via them (you can see the individual 'lanes'), but no real clue about how everything connects up. This was my biggest gripe about the previous games. It was just a bunch of totally separate 'rooms' randomly strewn with stations.

Anyways, in general, those videos are massively impressive. I'm stoked.

Jaw dropping stuff. Hats off to them, and a day one purchase.

Seriously?

I just use SETA for travel. ie, when going from one station to docking on another station. Turn on autopilot, SETA, done. While the huge complexes in X Rebirth is cool, I'd only want to fly over it manually a few times then it becomes "familiar territory" and I would like the option to "fast forward" the travel from point A to point B of that complex.

As for the business, it's really quite simple when you get it set up. I have 3 traders now with MK3 software so they do their own thing. The profit-over-time is lower than when I was babysitting and giving orders, but now I can concentrate more on what I am doing and they are making (less) money on the background. Still need to start making my own complexes, but having all these money-makers running in the background means that I can go do combat missions and be confident that if I needed repairs, I'll have the money for it. Or if I come across a good ship for sale or maybe if I want to upgrade a ship, I can also buy it and kit it out.

I did initially want manual docking but then thought that when this is set so far into the future that by then anything that can be automated would be and I guess with docking being potentially fatal it would be top of the list

Quite the contrary here. I prefer to be a pilot, not the aircraft. Unfortunately in most flight/space sims, the pilot is just a 3d model in the external views. I loved to be able to get out of the helicopter in TKOH, and that's one of the reason I look forward into Star Citizen and now into X:R.

Yeah exactly, this is one reason I cannot get on with Eve Online. I want to be IN my ship not THE ship and be able to look out the cockpit.

^Sigh, why can't flight sims be like that? Is a couple of rooms on the carrier/airbase to walk around, too much to ask for?

I wasn't really referring to the ship but rather walking around inside the space stations. They can't realistically model the size/scale of such stations otherwise you'd be walking for a good few minutes before you get to any store. While it may be more "realistic," I just can't "waste" that much time in a game. That is why most open-world sandbox games have "instant travel" to a pre-discovered destination.

As far as walking around and ogling the ship, that's fine, and it'll be a nice change to be able to actually walk around/under the ship and will give a sense of scale... but again, I'd probably ogle only a few times then it's back to business of trading and blowing stuff up.

Mass Effect bothered me just the opposite way. You walk around the ship, talk to people, but you never got to fly it or get into fights with it. All you could do was move the ship icon around on the map. Might as well have been a building.

Mass Effect was an action-RPG. it was never meant to be a space sim.

I know, but it could have been so good if they had added that instead of the mining. No reason a game couldn't do it all.

For me, the biggest immersion breaker in the X-series was the lack of a Newtonian flight model for the players craft. The lack of inertia and poor dogfight AI kept me from ever feeling engaged in the combat. The flight, the plot, the dang autopilot all just feel a bit off to me.

The space games that have good feeling flight models for me are the Independence War games, Evochron, and Starshatter, largely because they have Newtonian physics and allow for interesting drift maneuvers.

So, Rebirth looks like it has great potential, if only they make it feel cohesive.

Isn't there a mod for that?

The X series is not perfect (no game is) but it's established with a huge universe that only gets expanded upon. It's tried and true and only improves. Plus mods.