Just requesting some clarification about the ship aspect

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Khaak_Slayer
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Just requesting some clarification about the ship aspect

Post by Khaak_Slayer » Fri, 30. Sep 11, 20:41

Hi there, just got the latest newsletter and had to rush over here to check out the new info. As soon as I read the line "One of the big changes in X Rebirth when compared to the old X games is that you as a player will only be flying a single ship." I just sank a lot inside, even though it goes on to say "WAIT... that's still possible", you didn't actually really go on to elaborate on how it's still possible, or why I shouldn't worry. By the end I still get the impression I will be locked inside one ship.
Most of the fun and adventure for me in the previous games was being able to get into any ship I wanted and control it directly, especially if it was from capturing/salvaging said ships.

I do love the idea of rooms, NPCs, landing on ships, docking with ships and stuff, though. Interiors are what these kinds of space games have needed for years, thank god it's finally happening, even if it isn't the entire ship ;).

If I've misinterpreted something could you please put my mind at ease?
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Galaxy613
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Post by Galaxy613 » Fri, 30. Sep 11, 20:50

Yeah, it's not clear if you'll only be able to VR control drones or will you also be able to VR control other ships. It'll also be interesting to see how far away you can control your drones, like can you go into a different solar system in a drone?

But VR controlling drones is much more than what XBtF had.
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Post by dougeye » Fri, 30. Sep 11, 20:56

Read the info stickies and take what he sais as truth, that will answer all your questions. constantly being pesimistic about every bit of info will lead to thousnads of threads asking the same thing lol
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Khaak_Slayer
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Post by Khaak_Slayer » Fri, 30. Sep 11, 21:01

@Doug. If you'd have read my entire post you'd not have made that reply. It's no crime to ask to have something explained a little better if you're missing something. Surely that's what this section was made for?

@Galaxy. I kind of hope there is limited range on the drones, and that you get increased visual static noise if you venture too far from any of your ship's radio-ranges, eventually losing control entirely. This might make you want to defend your antenna array more than say, your engines, if you're relying on drones for support.
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Post by VincentTH » Fri, 30. Sep 11, 21:10

Khaak_Slayer wrote:@Doug. If you'd have read my entire post you'd not have made that reply. It's no crime to ask to have something explained a little better if you're missing something. Surely that's what this section was made for?

@Galaxy. I kind of hope there is limited range on the drones, and that you get increased visual static noise if you venture too far from any of your ship's radio-ranges, eventually losing control entirely. This might make you want to defend your antenna array more than say, your engines, if you're relying on drones for support.
It says that you have a boarding crew, that means boarding will be possible. If I can board a ship, I guess I can still "fly" it, in the sense that I VR control it,

Ludicer
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Post by Ludicer » Fri, 30. Sep 11, 21:16

Well, I had really bad feelings about the one ship thingy until I read the 'Capital ship control' section at this post: http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=306576

That was one of my main concerns. Obviously, they were a few steps ahead of me :) .

About possible variety concerns; 'The playership - Not just an ordinary ship' section at the same link has somewhat soothed me.

I still have kind of a restriction feeling though. Rebirth seems to offer the best parts of every kind of ship control from the previous series, but still it feels somewhat restricting... Or maybe it's just rebirth pangs! :) [/i]

Scoob
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Post by Scoob » Fri, 30. Sep 11, 21:32

Hi,

Well we know we can VR control drones and that will feel similar to piloting them directly in all but the "oh, I'm dead" sense. Ok, we get no unique cockpits but that was a mod option in TC anyway - a mod option I really liked as it happens, but hey.

We know we can land on a capital ship while it's still under the command of it's captain and obeying his orders - orders which come from us! I like the idea of sitting safely on one of my big ships while it does what it's told.

Now, for smaller ships we might own, say fighers, we don't yet know if we can VR pilot these or not. It may well be that if ships actually have proper crews, so a Fighter will have a Pilot at least, we can only command him, not take-over directly. As a role-play mechanic I don't mind that at all.

One of the things I wanted in TC and prior games was to be able to rely on the abilities of the ships under my command. I didn't like that when I jumped into ANY ship it's combat effectiveness increased 100 fold, along with it's survivability. If I can command my fighter pilots to fly evasive if targeted/hit and to at least TRY to survive flying within 100 metres of an asteroid while trying to dock I'll be happy.

I suspect that the Drones replace any sort of "fighter" piloting mechanic in the game. I.e. we can command OR VR Fly drones, but we can only command fighters.

The drones I imagine fill the role of the various fighter classes we're used to, as well as the M8 missile boat role. This will let us get into some hopefully FUN combat. Possibly we could VR Pilot a heavy Torpedo drone with a wing of drone fighters and a handful of REAL fighters (with pilots) protecting our expensive asset...there appear to be a lot of options even with "limited" direct piloting abilities.

As ever the information given means we need more information lol.

I am feeling much more positive than I was...actually I'd say I'm definitely excited once more.

Cheers,

Scoob.

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Post by Khaak_Slayer » Fri, 30. Sep 11, 22:05

It just sounds quite reminiscent of Darkstar One to me, obviously with all the cool features that define X as a series as well.

I guess whatever their plan is it'll work well given they know so much about this genre of game. I look forward to seeing these features expanded greatly with mod support.

Thanks for the replies guys.
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Post by Santi » Sat, 1. Oct 11, 05:10

I got the feeling that they *reworked* the ship tree for Rebirth, now the system is more akin to naval forces than air forces. Combat will be more about projecting forces with bigger ships, you can still make a difference personally with drones, and you have a more by stages combat; sabotage,deploy, target and attack.

I love the changes that you have a crew, rooms and so on, creating a more immersive enviroment while still being able to pilot a drone and getting my hands dirty.
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Post by caleb » Sat, 1. Oct 11, 21:49

I think we have to stop looking at the game from a single ship / game start point of view, and look at it from a more advanced game point of view.

We are going to end up with hundreds of ships and stations, flying all over the galaxy, trading, killing, etc. One of the failures in the old X games, is that the interface from whichever ship you flew was very limited to control this.

I think Egosoft is working from the advanced game perspective. If you want to control hundreds of ships and stations, it is much better to look at it as a commander. Commanders will be in a big room somewhere, over-viewing everything, and sending orders to his captains for them to follow. A commander will never, ever, go in the front-lines and risk his life for little gain.

So they are taking that approach and placing the commander (each of us) in the most advanced, modular, ship available, and letting us command the rest of the fleet from there (we do get the bonus of remote control though).

So looking at the game from a commander perspective, what Egosoft is doing is the best way to go, and we will play this game as a commander of multiple ships, drones, stations, etc, and not just a single pilot trying to command capital ships.

Inauxas
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Post by Inauxas » Sat, 1. Oct 11, 22:31

I like the idea of having one upgradable ship. In all space sim games with different ship options I usually use only one ship, albeit the best I could find, all the time and in the X series I would just set my other ships up to do their thing.

Having a ship that you can upgrade, to me, adds a deeper attachment to that ship. Like the upgrades in the other X games, once you max out steering, speed, etc... in an already top of the line fighter you feel more attached to that fighter. I feel this is a good direction while they are keeping the ability to command other ships and drones.

Anyways, it is the first day of the fourth quarter...

:)

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Post by DeepFried » Sun, 2. Oct 11, 00:10

Well I for one am rather worried about this change. Whatever way you cut it this is simply limiting the player to a single ship. A large part of games like the X series or the Elite series is working your way toward that new ship you want to try out....

Getting and piloting new ships is a very important meta game in the space sandbox genre, I know its a big part of why I play X3 and I have a friend who only plays the game for this purpose; for him the entire point is getting a better ship and working toward the "best" ship, he doesnt do any trading or building, no plot missions, and he only takes combat missions to get money to buy ships and weapons.... all to get that new ship he like the look of. What will there be for him in Rebirth?

However they implement having a single player ship you are still going to run up against the problem of the experience getting stale. I'll reserve ultimate judgment for when the game actually comes out and I play it, but I have grave doubts. In X3 i'm not happy unless i'm in a new ship every so often.[/i]

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Post by Ludicer » Sun, 2. Oct 11, 01:14

Well I just found what's been bothering me despite all the positive feelings I started to have since yesterday.

Human being wants and desires to have options! that's it!.. Even when they make the same choice everytime they're prestented with similar cases, the EGO thingy is not that soft, and wants to believe that it makes an active choice.

We probably all have similar criteria (despite our variety in priorities) while choosing ships in X games: speed, maneuverability, hull and shield strength, firepower, cargo size, and aesthetic looks. Even if they give us the best ship in all these aspects and the ability to modify it according to our priorities, we won't be happy, as we don't have an option and we didn't choose that ship.

That's why most of some succesfull mods have included hundreds of ships, and they made us happy by doing that, even if a mere 10 - 20 percent of those additions directly affect our gameplay.

*And the new system seems to heavily limit our options and present us merely the option of extensive modification. In their terms: less complicated, yet still complex.*

You can't resist human nature :)

*edit

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Post by Morrigon » Sun, 2. Oct 11, 02:39

I think people are looking at this “only one ship” thing in the wrong way. Maybe it’s because of the way Egosoft is presenting it? If I read the info we have been given up to this point correctly then we will be able to fly any ship in game but Capital Ships the same as we did in TC. The way I look at it is Egosoft wanted to give us a cockpit like we asked for and went as far as to even let us move around our ship! Because they couldn’t spend the amount of time to create this effect for every ship in game, and get it to us in a reasonable amount of time, they chose to limit this to one ship. In realty it will work as always. Jump from one ship to next if we choose to do so and see close to what we saw when we flew in TC. The VR explanation is there only to explain why we don’t have a cockpit in every ship is all.

Think of it like Bernd explained SETA … it was a hack to get around the large distances. Same thing with this VR, it’s a hack until they can work in more time to make more options for how we interact inside of our ships. TC was a work of over 10 years (10 I think) in its final form. It started as one thing and they built on it giving us what we wanted as they went along. We get to start from the beginning again but this time with a company that has all that experience making the last games for us. Will the game be perfect out of the box the first try? I hope not because then we won’t have years and years of new stuff to look forward too.

I don’t really expect to have the game I want when it releases because I know it’s just the very start of what will become a very great game. Egosoft has a great track record with me and unless I wake up one morning and see that Electronic Arts is buying them out I will always expect them to be what they have been before. That’s a game I can play for many many years and in just one saved game alone put over 800 hours into for a messly $40 bucks … In this day and age of PC games …Well to me that’s just wow amazing!

Anyway that’s my 2 cents

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Post by Bill67 » Sun, 2. Oct 11, 03:04

I still dont understand why so many are still unhappy/upset about the 1 ship thing.

Lets look at it from a different perspective. Yes in previous games we could control any ship. But aside from the 3rd person role, you still looked out of the same cockpit/1st person view. So what was it that that was so fantastic that you could fly a boron m3 over an argon m3? The flight characteristics? The firepower? Or the 3rd person view? Because nothing changed in the first person view , they were ALL the same.

Now lets jump classes, an M3 to an M6-7. Again same view for 1st person (well unless had a cockpit mod). So in essence what your doing is changing the firepower/speed/shield ratings of different ships, skipping the 3d look.

So now we have 1 ship. But its an upgradeable one. How do you know that you cant swap out engines for more firepower, or vice versa? So 1 ship CAN be configured to fly like an M3 or an M6, to have the same type of firepower any other ship minus a capitol ship has. If this is possible then the only thing that is lost is the 3rd person view of different ships.

I LOVE the fact that we will now have some freedome of movement inside a ship and if its limited to 1 ship for now, so be it. Since the days of Elite, we have been locked into a cockpit view and for the first time someone has opened that up to be able to move around in a ship and I for 1 am thrilled as hell about it. We now have NPC's instead of Bots so combined with this, for the first time in all these space sims will I truly feel like I AM running an empire and not just commanding a bunch of ships under AI control. They are giving the game personality and I am excited about seeing it.

Honestly if this would have been an X4 with upgraded AI and maybe bigger universe I would have bought but not followed so closely, but now that I have seen what it may offer, I am checking daily to see if any new tidbits have been released and chomping at the bit to play.

To me it still has enough to offer any player who wants their dogfighting fixes to keep them happy while introducing more things to attract others. Like I said before, if we can configure our ship to fly/fight different ways, what exactly have you lost by having 1 ship?

bill2505
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Post by bill2505 » Sun, 2. Oct 11, 03:10

why we are unhappy.imagine in oblivion you couldnt change weapon or armor just upgrade it.would this be good. this is one of the worst features for me. the good in t3 was that by choosing your ship you could chose your style of play

DeepFried
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Post by DeepFried » Sun, 2. Oct 11, 03:15

Morrigon wrote:I think people are looking at this “only one ship” thing in the wrong way. Maybe it’s because of the way Egosoft is presenting it? If I read the info we have been given up to this point correctly then we will be able to fly any ship in game ...
Then I think you are going to be disapointed. The way I read it is that you will directly pilot 1 ship only and you will be able to VR control drones. and thats it. You will be able to own and command other ships but not directly pilot them.

myabe you're happy with one ship plus drones, but I for one am very disapointed.

@Bill67

Its really not the same, one ship, no matter how configurable, cannot match up to owning dozens or hundreds of individual ships and being able to jump into any one of them and start flying it. For me at least the adventure in a space trading/sandbox game is in getting new ships, your comment about the different ships really just being the same exept with different properties just smacks of appologetics. Its about the fantasy and the immersion of getting a "different" ship, even if that is ultimately mostly in your mind its still important.

Bill67
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Post by Bill67 » Sun, 2. Oct 11, 03:22

bill2505 wrote:why we are unhappy.imagine in oblivion you couldnt change weapon or armor just upgrade it.would this be good. this is one of the worst features for me. the good in t3 was that by choosing your ship you could chose your style of play
Actually in Oblivion, you are 1 character, you have the choice to use ranged attacks/melee or magic. Your not stuck with using 1 weapon and I dont believe XR is stuck with 1 weapon. I dont think its an apt analogy for this situation. Its not 1 shipped thats locked to 1 setup but possibly to be modular upgradeable/interchangeable.

Your playstyle can still be achieved by altering the way the ship loadouts are done. Fast vs firepower vs defensive ability. Now what limits this can be achieved , we will have to wait and see but I think too many hear 1 ship and jump the gun too much.

Bill67
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Post by Bill67 » Sun, 2. Oct 11, 03:34

DeepFried wrote: @Bill67

Its really not the same, one ship, no matter how configurable, cannot match up to owning dozens or hundreds of individual ships and being able to jump into any one of them and start flying it. For me at least the adventure in a space trading/sandbox game is in getting new ships, your comment about the different ships really just being the same exept with different properties just smacks of appologetics. Its about the fantasy and the immersion of getting a "different" ship, even if that is ultimately mostly in your mind its still important.
You might be right but I for one can understand the limitations of what they are doing. And honestly if you have 1 ship with a personality and you were able to fly others, would you truly be happy to fly something that only has a cockpit view and no crewmembers just because you can? Or would you clamor for every ship to have interiors?

I am sure as time rolls on and if they can make some money, their will be more than 1 ship but I am also sure it takes time and money to design the inside of ships and they can only do so much with what they have.

From an immersion standpoint I think this is a great way to go. I just think some may need to wait and see.

bill2505
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Post by bill2505 » Sun, 2. Oct 11, 03:44

Bill67 so you are going to have a super ship that you can transform it to everything.this is not only unrealistic but very cheap way to go for the lack of many ships.if i wanted something like this i would play tranformers or something.

bill67 you say that you like walking inside ships thing.tell me what is going to give you in terms of game play.nothing

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