Remember X Rebirth? Perhaps you've tried to forget. The latest addition to the long-running (and, until Rebirth, quite good) space epic was one seriously hot mess when it came out in late 2013. But Egosoft kept plugging away at it, fixing bugs and adding content through two major revisions that reportedly improved things considerably, and today the studio announced the release of yet another patch and, more interestingly, talked about its plans for possible future DLC and a brand new X game.
The big giggle in X Rebirth 3.60 is the ability to toggle the flight assist feature on the Albion Skunk, enabling a more realistic (and much more difficult) Newtonian flight model rather than the atmospheric style the game normally uses. It's experimental—so experimental, in fact, that you'll have to bind your own key to the toggle if you want to try it out—but Egosoft wanted to get it in there now so it can collect feedback for possible implementation in future games.
And yes, there will be another X game. "At some point there will be a new game because we want to improve a lot of things that we unfortunately cannot improve using a DLC or update. These are things that would cause massive changes to balancing or completely change the structure of the economy," the studio wrote. "Because of this, we are working exactly as we did in the X3 times: In parallel working on a new project and improvements to the games already released. This won't just include making improvements to X Rebirth and The Teladi Outpost, but maybe also further updates for X3: Terran Conflict or Albion Prelude."
Foremost among those new-game-only features are the ability to fly all ships and to "actively command" from the bridge of a capital ship, as well as "massive changes to the structure of the universe," improved maps, and a brand new UI. Naturally, that's all a long way down the road: In the near-term, Egosoft plans to continue releasing updates and new content for Rebirth, and there may be a full DLC release as well. That will only happen, however, if the studio decides to produce a major amount of new content for the game, including new systems, stations, and ships; new gameplay features will continue to be released as free updates.
A full list of fixes in the X Rebirth 3.60 update is on Steam now.
