X3: Reunion E3 2005 Impressions

Egosoft was showing off some of the gorgeous spaceships of X3: Reunion at the Microsoft booth at E3. However, there's still not much gameplay of this open-ended space combat/trading/exploration game to show at this point.

Greg Kingston, the game's PR manager, walked us through the new features, which we've covered before. X3 will feature a very strong story, unlike its predecessors, and it's designed not only to entertain you, but also to slowly teach you how to play the game. The idea is that by the time that you're finished with the campaign, you'll know everything you need to know about going out and doing your own thing. This means that you can build a gigantic commercial empire in a fully dynamic economy, or you can be a pirate or a mercenary or an explorer pushing the boundaries of space.

Though combat isn't a major focus here (unless you want it to be), the game has plenty of new beam weapons, projectile weapons, and missiles to play with. More importantly, the artificial intelligence is a lot smarter, and it knows how to employ and take advantage of them.

The economy, as we noted earlier, is fully dynamic, and you'll actually start out with the galactic economy incomplete. It'll be up to you and the computer characters to flesh out the economy, and the computer will react to your moves. So if you're very successful in one area, it may try to come after you in different ways. The design team has heard a lot from fans, so they've designed much larger (and expensive) space stations so you can make sure that your economy doesn't grind to a halt every time a station runs out of room.

The graphics are certainly beautiful, and Egosoft is aiming at a 2.4GHz CPU and a DirectX 9-compliant card. Of course, it will run on lower-end systems, but you'll need to have a video card with some kind of shader capability to run the game. That, or you can buy the Xbox version. The graphics in the Xbox game will be pared down a bit from the PC, and some of the content will also get scaled down, but it'll essentially be the same game. X3 should ship sometime in September.