In your mind, how has the series managed to stand out? Q: The X series has been one of the top space sim games in the genre for decades. A single favorite race? No, I don't have one, just a lot of special characters, maybe, but also special ships. There were a couple of really cool ships in that one, especially the yacht. The last expansion - which was not really adding an entire faction - Tides of Avarice was more focused on piracy, as well as on the mining side with the recycling of wrecks and so on. But there are cool ships in every faction. And of course, at this point, it's the Boron that I like the most because they have the latest and coolest ships in the game. Lehahn: Whenever we are moving closer to the release of an expansion, I'm always testing and currently, I'm testing quite a lot. Q: Speaking of factions, do you have a personal favorite faction from the X universe? What do you like about them? That also gets us further with the lighting of the whole engine, which allows us to have more contrasted light situations, so we can have stronger lights and stronger sunlight, with more realistic and better shadows and reflections indoors especially. We have this new rendering technique called parallax occlusion mapping, which is especially important for the Boron ships. That's all low-level stuff, but, of course, helps the game in many areas and visuals get better. It's quite unusual for gaming in such a late phase to work on the lower level of the engine and change things so massively, and we are changing the entire physics engine completely to a different one, which allows us lots of improvements in certain areas of the game with collision detection and also affecting the performance quite a bit. Lehahn: Yeah, lots! It has a new core engine, and we call it X TECH 5. Q: Are there any features in the 6.0 base game update that you're particularly excited about? We always release a new free update with every expansion release, so the 6.0 update is also a big deal for us. Of course, it's also adding new things to the base game. We want to relaunch a bundle where this is altogether as a complete package so that maybe some more people that played X3, X2, or even earlier games and haven't really tried out X4 can now really get the whole thing together. We also want to relaunch the game now that we have all the base factions of the old X universe connected again. That's one important thing that this changes. There was a lot of different graphic technology, but also game engine technology that we had to do in order to make this fit in. They have tentacles, making the creatures themselves more demanding, but also their ships and their stations. We knew that, and we were always saying, "Yeah, sorry, it takes us longer." This is bigger because the Boron are so different. People know them from the past, and they've always been missing them in X4. Lehahn: It's very much anticipated by the community because they were always a last addition to the universe. I appreciated it because of how hard it is to get into this market. When X: Beyond the Frontier happened, it was the first time we had success with a game and also an international success, because it was also the first time that we launched anything outside of Germany. It was essentially two guys and one or two employees over the years. We had to do advertisement games to make a living, basically, so this was a different company. They were usually adventure games, and we struggled with financing them. Before X, we had a couple of very small, very niche games that were not successful at all and were just released in Germany. I think one thing that helped me grow the company and the product was the fact that by 1999, we were already almost 10 years old. We had a very active online community that was giving us feedback, and that group enormously helped us develop the game later. We were really lucky that when we released X: Beyond the Frontier in 1999, we had a very active online community very soon after even though it's a single-player game. There are a lot of individual events that have helped us grow this whole thing. We certainly had a couple of those moments like getting onto Steam at the right moment, having the game out at the right time and in the right place. And therefore we are successful," because occasionally, you just need to be lucky. There were definitely many times when we were just lucky, so I don't think it is fair to just say, "Wow, there's this one thing. What would you say has been key to this success? Q: Egosoft has thrived independently for 35 years. RELATED: Rumor: Starfield Direct Showcase is Happening Soon
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