X Rebirth - Scale and Detail

People are wondering why it took us so long to finish X Rebirth. So I am trying to show you one of the reasons today: Put in one word, that reason is SCALE. Our goal with the design of X Rebirth was to achieve a huge scale and I do not mean the physical size of the universe, which is easy to increase, I am talking about living, breathing futuristic space cities. crawling with life. So I will show today some of the gigantic factory complexes in the X Rebirth universe. A complex like this can be made up from hundreds of buildings, and each building again can be HUGE and you can actually experience them from the inside. Sometimes you fly inside of them with your ship. Sometimes you switch to a remote controlled VR drone and you can fly through even smaller parts. If you like to, you can land on them and walk around inside. And sometimes you can even crawl inside little repair corridors. We really want you to feel small. BUT the coolest thing is, that all of these stations all of these tiny ships flying inside of them, and all of the buildings that the stations are made up from are REAL. Because all of this beauty is part of a real economy. Ships transport wares, stations build goods and even modules of a station hosts actual production parts. If you destroy a ship, some wares don't reach their destination, if you destroy some objects on the surface of a station, some things dont work fully anymore. And if you manage to destroy an entire building of a factory complex, it can have a serious impact on the economy. Stations mine and collect resources. Asteroid fields deplete and new areas of the universe have to be explored and harvested. People live and work on these stations. You can work for them, you can meet them, We really want to make this feel REAL. And I am not talking about pretty graphics here. To me thats one of the key things that define what the X games are all about. Doing something in this universe matters a lot more because it is real. It is a different thing to shoot down some ships in an "action only" game, where somewhere in the back of your mind you still know that the NPCs and ships are just spawned for you. This stuff was placed there by level designer just for you. But IF these ships and people are actually playing a role in a larger universe. A universe that lives and breaths and it even runs far away from where you are looking at it. Then it matters much more. There are a LOT of things that have changed between the earlier X games and X Rebirth. But to me THIS really is at the heart of the whole series and will always make an X game different and i would say special. Everything is possible in this universe and we dont hardcode it one way or the other. That also means every time you play a game, things will be different. So you may wonder: What game is this X Rebirth? Is it an action shooter? It is a trade simulation? Is it a game about building stations? Is it a game about playing free quests or is it a game about a big plot? Well, the answer is that it is all of these things, in the mix you make it to be. We just sell you a universe. A universe with conflicts and war, but also a universe with peaceful trading and building. A universe with fast paced action, but also a universe with slow exploration and discovery. What you do inside of it is up to you.