The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – 268 X4: Foundations by Egosoft – Game Developer Interview

Episode Date: February 19, 2019

X4: Foundations by Egosoft - Game Developer Interview

Hi, I'm Oster's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com and chrisvossgaming.com. We're coming here with, of course, another podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Be sure to subscribe to the show. You can, of course, go to iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, iHeartRadio, geez, all the different places you can ever possibly download a podcast. You can take and go to download the podcast for either show and of course we have our sister shows you can go to the cvpn.com the chris voss podcast network you can see the six or seven different podcasts that we have there as a chain

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twitch.tv forward slash Chris Voss and see all the gaming stuff we're putting up there. And of course, we're always doing different things with different game makers and giving away all sorts of stuff that we have on the YouTube channel. So be sure to check in for that as well. Today, we have a really cool game developer and one of the representatives on board with us.

So it's going to be an interesting interview today. And it is Band Lihon from Egosoft Gaming. So welcome to the show, Band. Thanks for having me. Hello. Thanks for having me. All the way from Germany, too. Correct. So it's 11 a.m. here in America. What time is it there in Germany?

8 p.m. 8 p.m. And I have a lot of wonderful friends in German and in Germany in German in German that are in Germany how does that work out uh this it's a that my family actually came there from there in the late 1800s the Voss family and someday I'm gonna come back and reclaim all the stuff that we left behind do you know which area no I don't I'm not really sure I did see one time that there was some Voss shipyards during the Hitler era there, World War, and I'm like, oh, man, I think we left some money behind. Maybe I have some inheritance I can get from, like, I don't know, some of my ancestors.

That sounds really awful, huh? Why would I want to carry a ship? Anyway, we'll move on. So enough of the jokes there. Let's talk about X4, Egosoft. You guys have been around for a long time. Is that correct? Yeah, that's correct indeed.

The company is actually founded in 1990 already. That's a long, long time ago. I feel always very old when I talk about that. Started on computers like the Commodore Amiga and did games that you certainly never heard of in the US because the first couple of games were only done for the German market. Adventure games, advertisement stuff to make some money. And then in the mid-90s, 1996,

we started with this little space game. We originally also did for the Commodore Amiga, but then brought it over to Windows 95 and the Windows platform when the graphic accelerators came out. And that was really the start of the new Egosoft, if you will, because what is now become the X series. The first game of that series was released in 1999, and that's X Beyond the Frontier. And since then, we basically went all in with that series. We've been working for now more than 20 years, 22 years now on just that series

and making space games and try to really make a simulation game with your universe in which you can do whatever you like, a space universe with trading, building, exploration, battles, and so forth. And you guys have just released x4 foundations it's available on steam is seemingly platform it's on right now steam is not the only platform it's also available on gog uh and there are other platforms that sell keys but yeah mainly it's uh steam is of course the biggest one and this is a beautiful beautiful elegant space odyssey sort of looking uh i don't know how to put it but it's beautiful i'm watching the videos

right now as we're talking uh flying through space uh just really sharp images beautiful feel different uh different ships of course that you can soar through space different uh planets you can go to different uh uh giant ships in space that they don't look like i don't know what you call it the battlestar galactic these giant things lots of lots of intricate work you guys have done and really dreaming up just a beautiful uh space scape if you will uh oh there's aliens too aliens i like aliens thank you it's always good to be friends with aliens just in case, you know, you never want to, you want to, you want to make sure just, you know, if they ever show up, you know, if you don't believe in them,

those are the people that they take up and do weird things to. So it's indeed. Yeah. We've worked on the universe also for, for all of that time. And there's also like, like the, There's also like the base of that universe with the aliens and everything was really laid already with X Beyond the Frontier, which told a little bit of the story of our current day's space technology. It started actually with Apollo 11. You saw the moon landing and this kind of stuff. And then it went on and started telling the future of mankind as we could have imagined it

by discovering jump gates and then an exploration fleet that went into what we call the X universe and first finding it completely uninhabited. And it's a long, long story. I could tell ages, but eventually they find aliens and then started basically trading. Also wars, as always. Long history to it,

with books, with games, with everything. So is this technically the fourth installment in the game? Or is there more? with everything. So is this technically the fourth installment in the game or is I think is there more? Yeah it's the fourth big game we always just bump up the number when we have something really big and it's not just it's a over technology jump because it's it's a completely new engine completely new technical platform but it's also every time we. But it's also, every time we do that, it's also new gameplay. But at the core of it is always this idea that you have a universe in which you can

do basically everything. We give you a universe and you decide how you play inside of it. There's very different players for a typical X game. Some want to trade mainly. Some want to fight battles mainly. So that kind of core value, that's always the same. That remains true for all X games. But since X Beyond the Frontier, we always added new features

on top of the last game. So with that very first game, you were already able to trade. But for example, X2 The Threat, which came out in 2003, was then the first game to also really allow you to fly all kinds of ships. So with that game, you were able to also go and not just, you know, small fighters with a couple of weapons, but actually also fly personally large capital ships with turrets. And in X2, you could actually map them to multiple monitors, little windows and control larger fleets. You could personally go into those ships, but you could also control them with menus by giving them commands.

So you have fleet management as well as personal flight. Then also already a game called Extension, which was in between those games. Like I said, there were more than just those four base games. Already introduced running your own stations. So you can also build space stations, which are also factories. So they produce wares. So that's something for the traders

that don't just want to make money with trading, but want to build stuff. So the game really encompasses lots of different gameplay elements. And that's also true for X4. X4 really continues this tradition. We kind of have all of the gameplay elements. And that's also true for X4. X4 really continues this tradition. We kind of have all of the gameplay elements of the past and add more on top of it. So at the first moment, you could say there's an overwhelming amount of features, but what we try with, especially now

with X4, is to really try to make them available in a very intuitive way so that you don't get scared by too many complicated menus because that's a little bit the risk that we run with a game that has so many features is that when you get in and you look at menus and you see wow what's that you know like too many complicated options and none of two this is a beautiful elegant game if you guys want to check out the game you can check it out on Steam, of course. You can also see a lot of videos on YouTube. And it's just beautiful. Can I run this in 4K?

Absolutely, yeah. Wow. The images are super sharp. I love the colorization. The thoughtful design that you guys put in this, you guys could be making sci-fi videos or movies with this on Hollywood because these are just beautiful designs. This looks like something that

some sort of Hollywood guy would dream up. Who's the guy I'm thinking is the big producer who produced Aliens and a lot of different movies? Aliens will come by Ridley Scott. I don't know.

This is something Ridley Scott might come up with if you don't mind me making that reference. It's just really elegant. I'm just really impressed with it. Games really have to be visually appealing to me. We recently wrote a review on Anthem and one of the problems with Anthem is

they did it in some sort of grayish grayscale to where everything blends into everything. It becomes kind of... Sometimes you have a hard time even seeing enemies. But this is really visually appealing what you guys have done with X4.

One of my favorite games is uh destiny 2 by bungee and the one thing i've always loved is the artwork that goes into it in spite of some of the issues that i've had with with bungee in our community there of course there i think everyone gaming community has issues with the developer from you know they don't like this they don't like that but at least they love the game is the artwork and and the detailing you guys have in here the ships is pretty amazing and you can build your ship I guess right correct yeah with building is an important part of edit even later as I said you could build stations but building ships is also like building stations now a little bit modular.

Station building is completely modular. I don't know if you maybe also have seen that in one of the videos. You actually have now a three-dimensional map, which also allows you basically creating stations from modules. So you design them really by putting together 3D parts, which stand for certain functionality. For example, as I said, many are factories actually producing wares. So you have those production modules and you put them together with storages

that store the products and the resources they need. And then you connect them with a dock for the ships to land and so forth. So you're building the stations really on a modular level. And with ships, it's similar, but you're not designing the ship yourself. I mean, we do not want people to make Lego ships that then also look like Lego. We design ships, but you put elements on top of them. For example, on capital ships, you can decide what kind of turrets you put where or what engines you mount on a ship or what shield generators to use.

So you configure them on that level. But also visually, you have the ability to put paint mods on them. So you also change the design of the ships a little bit. We try to make a lot of customization options and design options so players can actually be creative in the universe as well. That is awesome. Now I can get in, looks like ship battles where I can fight battles with ships and stuff like that? Yeah, of course. Battles are of course one of the more obvious things people want to do in a space game and

that's where we more or less came from. The action aspect where you sit in your cockpit and you are fighting first smaller missions, one ship against another and later when you have more ships yourself and you are also then controlling entire fleets of ships, you can also go into full-on wars and do that more on a strategic, almost strategic control of battles. So can I play with my friends or is this solo player? Traditionally, the X-Series is a single-player game only.

That's the one distinguishing thing between us and games like Star Citizen, for example. Well, I don't have any friends anyway. I game too much as it is. But actually, we now in December have released for the very first time for us a little online mode. But it's not what you would expect with the term online mode, where you can actually play directly with your friends. That's not yet and also not for the near future planned. But instead, you are able to send your ships into other people's universe.

So when you have NPC ships, ships that other NPCs in your universe fly for you, like the fleets that I mentioned, those are crewed by men working for you. And so when you are a little bit more advanced in the game and playing it for a longer time, you could have dozens, later hundreds of people working for you. And those people with their ships, you can send on special missions into the online universe, basically like a parallel universe to yours. And they can bring back rewards.

And you will then see ships of visitors in your universe, and they will see your ships in their universe. So that also incentivizes people to actually design their ships a little bit more. Like if you put a paint mod on your ship, if you put certain weapons on them, they will see your ships like that. And that's like a more indirect way of interacting with other players. Wow. I'm going to show the video here.

I'm not sure if this will come out. We'll try and put the iPad up to the camera. People can kind of get an idea of just the beauty, the elegance of the game. It doesn't capture the sharpness here because of course we're just using a webcam but really, really is spectacularly beautiful and looks like a great adventure sort of area. Is that a Death Star I just saw? You can see here you can build a game, you've got a blue... There was for a moment the map on screen, which is that 3D map that I was just talking about, that allows you to navigate the entire universe.

Here you see how the player can move the cockpits. That's one of the new things in X4, that you are not just... Basically, when you go from one ship to another, you are no longer doing that instantly, but actually like you would think. You actually stand up in a cockpit. You can walk around in your ship. You climb down a ladder. If the ship is parked on another platform, you can actually climb out of your ship, walk over to another ship, enter it. So everything is really like you would imagine.

A purse has this personal level. In the past, we were not able to do that because that's a really huge development effort. You can imagine all of the character animation and the character part is actually a large development effort. And it was much easier in the beginning to just basically teleport from one ship to another or warp yourself over, if you like. So this is a big big step forward that we did with x4 foundations it's beautiful and of course the video that it was just showing off for ipad with reflections everything don't do it justice but everything is super sharp super beautiful uh this is an environment where i could just go get lost

for hours wandering around looking at stuff um and just seeing the the the texture and design detail of it uh is something that i really like uh what else can i do with the game can i land on any of the planets can i go shoot aliens with the gun or is it just spaceships you it's funny that the very first thing you said can i land on planets that's like a running joke in our company, because that's something that fans are asking for, like, yeah, almost the 20 years that the game is out. I mean, as I said, we were developing it for more than 20 years, but the first game came out in 1999, so exactly 20 years ago. Of course we show those beautiful planets and you are always in space, you are trading, you are fighting, you are playing missions, you're exploring, mining, all of those things. But landing on planets was never possible and fans always asked,

ah, when can we land on planets? But yeah, that's... They always want everything. It's true. And we are trying to give them everything. That's the crux. We really do. We are really also working together with fans, always listening, trying to find out what is how important

because literally we can go on forever developing this game. True, yeah. Any moment when we release a game, we already have a long list, hundreds of features that we could continue working on. And that's actually what we do. So we are constantly just filtering what's easier, what's worth more for the player,

what gives you more value, what adds more to the game. Certainly landing on planets would be cool, but yet also really, really hard to do. And then you have to really, I mean, value, what adds more to the game. Certainly landing on planets would be cool but yeah it's also really really hard to do and then you have to really, I mean to make it true to that universe it would also have to be huge. I mean the planet cannot be like then you know unrealistically small. We want to have everything realistic in sizes so that is not so easy to do and combine with the rest of the gameplay. It would be possible, it's just awfully hard.

You might have ended up with some disappointment over that. I mean, No Man's Sky tried pulling that off and a lot of people were disappointed in the whole experience. By now, they actually came back pretty good now with updates. A recent update a couple of months ago, and I think people now like it a lot more than originally. There are lots of games that

did that, and I respect a lot. As I said, Star Citizen is, of course, another cool game in this genre where we are looking at and they do some things really cool. It's just we are in that situation where we try so many things. And you can compare X with some other games or X4 now with other games.

And there's always more. I mean, there's always this crazy amount of features. Of course, it is impossible to do everything better than any competitor. You know, that's like our character animations. They look great and we are really proud of them. But if you compare that with Star Citizen, then yeah, then they have hundreds of millions for just that feature. Sometimes, some of these studios charge a lot of money for these different things. Then they have DLCs and they have loot.

The newest thing is charging for loot and all that sort of stuff, loot chests. There's different ways to finance it. From what I can see, it's a beautiful game. I didn't get a chance to play it this morning, but it looks like just an elegant game, one that I would like, because I love space things. No Man's Sky was, of course, a disappointment for me when it first launched. It has improved a little bit, but, you know,

one of the things they promised the multiplayer, and I think you can do multiplayer on it now, but the ship has sailed. And it was a pretty boring game. And the detail that I can see that you guys have here where you can blueprint, where you can mine, where you can trade, it's just an elegantly beautiful game from the look of it. That's what really appeals to me when I see stuff, especially stuff that I haven't really seen before,

and I go, wow, that's a really cool way to design that. That's very appealing to me as a gamer. And, of course, flying through space is always cool because I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up. So there's some of that too as well. Anything else we need to know about the game and what you guys have got going on with it? I just wanted to get back, if you don't mind, to No Man's Sky because you mentioned that people were not happy with it at launch.

But I respect a lot that they actually continued developing it and that's something that we also hear from our fans it's it's it's hard if you try to put so much into every game and it's always this this these high goals and the aspiration that that you that you have I think that's something that we share with No Man's Sky. I also think when the game was announced and promoted, people have these dreams of what you can do. And they showed planets and they showed, in their case, the creatures on the planet and everything. And then people start dreaming. And when the game comes out, it's sometimes impossible to live

up to all of those expectations. But what they did is they supported the game after release and they really did and i was surprised and they haven't asked for any money or updates i'm not even sure how they're staying in business at this point but they haven't asked for any money for the updates or dlcs or anything like that and yeah they have built out the game so i would agree with you there i know that the i think the ceo CEO of Sony came out and said, you know, one of the biggest challenges, they were a small indie sort of group and they really needed a PR agent

to kind of maybe be the one who was promising as much stuff as their CEO did when he was running around and saying, oh yeah, it's going to have this, it's going to have that. And she had a PR agent that was there going. Yeah, but I feel very sympathetic for them because we are very often in a very similar situation. We learned over the years because we are a little longer in that industry now than they are that not to be very careful with promises.

But it is, you know, you aren't sitting in the same boat like your fans. They come and they want features and you think oh wow these features are cool and we want to work on them and then sometimes yeah you have to release a product you know you you don't want to continue working forever and then so you have to yeah you have to come down to the bottom at some point you gotta ship it you gotta ship it and raise some more money to build another improvement in reality, the reality, yeah. So sticking to it and making updates, and I think that tells something about this company in particular as well.

Well, that's awesome. And it's great that you guys have been a game maker for this long. I guess the future is you guys are going to keep building on this game? Yes, absolutely. I mean, by now, as I said said it's 20 years just in that series and and the whole company developed around it we are now all experts in just that game and what it's just negative but yeah we we all we consider the company consists all of game of space. That's how we define ourselves. When we hire people, the first question is always,

how do you like space games? How do you like science fiction in general? So this is what we are. That's our team. I think it's awesome. And it's a beautiful, elegant, visually appealing game. And I imagine a lot of fun. I mean, I'm looking at the cockpit so you can fly around. I'm looking at some of the fights,

the space fights between the different ships and stuff. That looks like awesome. There's like ships doing barrel rolls and stuff and trying to avoid being shot and stuff. This is probably the fun version of what sort of game I'm going to have, and, of course, we'll be reviewing it on the gaming podcast. But this visually just looks like a really interesting game and a lot

of fun and a lot of detail and stuff that I can take and do where I can build it out and do what I want to. So I think it's going to be a great game. I guess you guys have liked the launch so far. It was great. I mean, I'm always comparing the launch with the predecessor game, X Rebirth.

I don't know if you know X Rebirth. That was a little bit outside the number system, as you may notice. I didn't list actually the games in between. I talked shortly about X2. X2, the threat, came out in 2003, just quickly. Then there was X3 reunion in 2005, X3 Terran conflict in 2007, and X3 Albion prelude in 2010, I believe. And then we had X Rebirth, no number, in 2013. And now X4 Foundations, which just came out two months ago. And the thing is, X Rebirth was a major new start for us because we wanted, after doing the X series with the number bumps for such a long time, we wanted to also be able to step back and simplify the game to a degree

and also cut away some features. And that's not something you can do if you sell a game and call it X4 after you had X3, right? You mean people have expectations. They want all of those features plus more. And so with X Rebirth, we wanted to step back and simplify the user interface and also cut away a couple of features like for example the ability to fly all ships. X Rebirth had only one ship. You had this very special ship but it was a single one only and that made of course the development also easier.

But now does concentrate on certain aspects a lot more and also develop new technology. So X Rebirth was a major milestone for us. But then the VX fans, our fans were not so happy with it, because it cut away features like, I mean, it was what we were selling. But that's, that's, that's tough that a tough sell if you if you suddenly have a successor in a way and then um suddenly it has it has some key features uh cut away from from the game so it's really cool in here too the detail on them is really nice it's really there's there's a lot of detail you guys put into building the characters uh and and uh it really just it's characters. It's fun to look at and go, oh, wow, what is that?

And then OrcX for Foundations is basically bringing these things together. That's now the game where we can say it has all of those features from before, but it also has the user interface that allows you to control those things easier.

And especially important, it shouldn't scare somebody new interface that allows you to control those things easier. And especially important, it shouldn't scare somebody new like you away from the game. It's relatively easy to develop a game for that core audience of fans that already know your games for a long time. They are not scared by complicated user interfaces. But you want to get somebody new into the game, then you have to make it easy to get into, right? You want to play the game, start it,

and not have to read a lot of manuals or a lot of complicated menus. And that was the goal with X4, that we achieved that. And I think that's what we managed. That's awesome. I mean, intuitiveness is a big thing. We review a lot of products of the last uh 10 years on the chris voss show and one of the things we always evaluate a product whether it's a game or a service or or a physical product you know like an ipad or an iphone or whatever you know we're viewing this week um intuitiveness is is a really

uh common goal that you want to have for consumers to take and do, because if they don't get your product, if they don't get some of the features and benefits of it, if it's hard for them to interact with it, it's going to alienate them, and they you can overcomplicate things and people come and they just go, I don't want to go to college to learn to play this game. I'm here to have fun, man. I'm just here to have fun. Yeah, that's true. I mean, that's a constant struggle when you make a game that has so many features. You add a new feature, you add a new feature,

and every time you should ask yourself, how are players able to learn this feature. I think it's acceptable if a game needs some tutorials, needs some manual in a late stage when you reach a feature which is not mandatory to play. That's the case with X4. But when you start the game, when you start it for the first time, you should be able to fly a ship, you should be able to just sit down, grab your controller and fly off. And that must be true no matter how you play the game, which also makes things for us harder because you can play the game with mouse and keyboard or you can play with a joystick or hotas system which is also not really standardized on pc so there are lots of different hotas systems and in that case the

players oftentimes have to have to configure their controller first or with the gamepad of course gamepad controls are also fully supported and that's that that was really important that at least for the very first hours of playing, exploring, a couple of fights, you do not really have to read a manual. how effective is this solution of mining versus another solution, then, yeah, then there are tutorials, then there are manuals, and also lots of other fans on the internet to discuss with who make great videos about all of those things. But, yeah. Yeah, and that's a great way to build a relationship too because, you know, you start out wanting to have fun.

And with a lot of games that I fall in love with, I got into them because they're real intuitive and you know i'm not albert einstein i know that surprises many in my audience uh but uh uh you know you you just want to kind of have fun you just you you know if i you know you work all day you want to come home and you want to goof off and so uh being able to have fun and then a lot of times you get you get sucked in once you build a relationship with the game on a fun aspect of of like oh well there's some raids i can go and there's some dungeons and and i if i get the right guns i can go beat the raid and i

get the right skill level i can go you know do the dungeons and get my armor and my guns and you know and you know all the different complications go into this and so yeah you want to have fun and there are parts of the game where sometimes you don't want to get into the complicated stuff and you just want to go hey I just want to go shoot some stuff and blow it up it's also a question of how sandbox the game really is also something we've experimented with from from episode to episode to episode. On the one hand, like our role models of games, there are these kind of different branches. Do you know Elite, the original Elite from the 80s that was the predecessor of a game that's called now Dangerous by David Brame,

that was like the grandfather of space simulation games in a sandbox way. The universe trading, that's what we do as well. But then there is this other branch of Chris Roberts of action space opera games with a lot of storytelling. He made these games that are really like a movie. You play mostly, you get clear instructions of what to do. And what we try and sometimes succeed more and sometimes don't succeed so well is combining those two things. On the one hand, you have that sandbox universe, you can do whatever you want, you can trade,

build, fight and all of those things right from the start. But at the sandbox universe, you can do whatever you want, you can trade, build, fight, and all of those things right from the start. But at the same time, you also have plot missions, you also have a story to follow. And then we try to leave it to the player how fast he progresses in such a plot. And in X4, we went very far to the sandbox side for now. At the moment, it is a very open universe. It has a plot with some key elements in it where you find a certain special mission

and that brings you to a special Boron. It's an underwater race pilot who you free. And then he helps you find a certain station which uh we call the headquarter which which unlocks a couple of gameplay features that you otherwise cannot get like teleportation from ship to ship for example but this is still it's something you can finish in a couple of hours and that that is the core story it's relatively short um and we want to build up on that we want to tell stories in this universe. And of course, there are some players that want more of that, because that's like this. It's

also a way to guide the player through the game. It's always the answer to what am I supposed to do? Because there's always two types of customers, two types of players, those that don't need that, that don't want that even because they want to set their own goals. And those people are completely happy in our universe because that's what the game is all about. But we also want people that want storytelling and want to have a guide, a red line that guides them through the game. So yeah, this is really the art to combine those two things

and make both of those types of players happy inside the same game. Cinematically, I've been watching the videos here as we talk. Cinematically, it's just elegant. It's really beautiful. It feels like I'm watching a space movie from Ridley Scott or something. And I just find it incredibly appealing from what it has. It looks like it's got great reviews. A lot of people are watching the videos and stuff.

Are you guys seeing much action on Twitch these days? We have our own Twitch stream channel that we used like... Go subscribe to it here. It was... Search for it, folks. Look for

EgoSoft on Twitch.tv. It's just that we haven't really got the time to make many updates recently. The same like with our YouTube channel. We have those social media channels ourselves, but we just since the release, we are so busy with patches and

updates that we haven't really found much time to make any updates but then we have guys like you and lots of great youtubers and twitch streamers especially shortly after the release we saw some really cool videos and actually watch people playing our game while we were fixing the bugs and learning from them. That's a cool way of working. Well, I'll tell you what, I'm going to be playing this probably shortly after we get off this presentation. So if you're on today, it's, let's see, February 19th,

you'll probably see me testing out the game and I'll just broadcast it live as we play with it and learn our way through it. But I'll definitely be playing with it on stream and on stream and Steam for that matter. And we'll of course go ahead and share it with our Discord audience and everything else.

Anything more you want to share with us before we go? There's so much. As I said, it's a game for very different types of people. Trading is this aspect that I always put in the foreground because of the realism of the universe. It's the fact that it's not just, as we call it, top-down. It is not designed around the player. It's a bottom-up universe in which there are really thousands of entities like stations and ships, and stations produce wares.

Ships bring them from one station to another. So even without the player, there's really a lot to just watch. Also on that economic level you can actually see sometimes like there's a freighter bringing bringing some goods from a to b and if it is blown up if some somebody even another npc blows it up then maybe the prices for the wear that he's now not delivering uh uh will go up and so the market develops based on that realistic universe and it's not designed around the player. You can,

but you can change and that allows you also as a player then to change the universe very dramatically. So if I go blow stuff up, I can increase prices for everybody? Yeah, absolutely. You can, you can start,

of course, more the more powerful. Working on some sort of alien material? The more powerful you get, the longer you play, the more assets you have, the more ships you have, the more stations you have. And in that role, you can then also really play a bigger role on the whole universe level.

There are people... We have seen save games now already with X4, which is only out for like how many how many days we have now february 19th so it's it's like uh what 30 60 yeah a little bit more than than 70 days now but we already saw safe games with 500 plus hours uh in one game so it's a single player game so people are playing this really day in day out for for months and investing so much time in in a single universe instance and and and yes these people can change the whole universe and including the economy the supply and demand demand chain everything wow i'm gonna I'm gonna go become a

Like a Warren Buffett. I mean the market everything and then and then Cause damage so I can raise my stock and everything I'm gonna become the corporate raider of space No, it sounds like fun people love this sort of stuff like I have a lot of friends, and in fact, some of my relatives, they love the game Ark because they can go in and they can build stuff and they can create stuff and they have a huge trading sort of thing. People love this stuff. Minecraft was the same way where you can build stuff. People like making stuff and having a game that makes it

so they can make their own stuff they can design it they can personalize it because that's when that's when you i think you really feel a connection relationship with the game is when you can personalize it it becomes yours and uh a lot of games do that i remember when they first launched years ago vanilla destiny and it was just well vanilla destiny um and now of course uh several iterations of All Raider, you can do some customization to your thing. And people like this. And like I say,

just from looking at the game, I didn't get a chance to play it this morning, but I'm actively looking at playing it soon. In fact, I might just end it sooner so I can go play it. It looks really awesome. Just a beautiful elegant-looking game. And so I would imagine it plays as nicely as some of the work you guys have put into it. Thank you. Yeah. I hope

you will enjoy it too. I hope so. So give us the website so people can look it up and check out some more about what you guys do and how you do it. We have lots of different ones. x4foundations.com should work. The main website that everything links to is egosoft.com. That's our company. And there are also the other X Games there. But yeah, since Egosoft is all about the X Games,

you cannot go wrong with just going to egosoft.com. You got to love it. All right, guys. Well, thanks for tuning in. We certainly appreciate you guys coming into the show show be sure to tell the show about your friends neighbors relatives dogs cats get them listen to the show get them sharing the show be sure to subscribe to the chrisfossshow.com or you can go to chrisfossgaming.com and of course you can find the podcast on itunes google play spotify just about anywhere in the whole

universe of podcasts and of course if you go to the chris foss podcast network you see all of the universe of the podcast that we have there and you can tune into whatever you want be sure to check us out on youtube.com for just chris foss and twitch.tv forward slash chris foss and like i say you'll probably see me playing this over the next few days and toying with it. And if I really fall in love with it, you may see more of it because I'm kind of bored with one of my favorite games right now. So you may be seeing.

And I haven't actually liked some of the new games that are out. We just wrote a scathing review on Anthem, and that's my opinion, so I don't want to throw you in on my opinion. But I like Apex Legends, I think it is. That's okay, but I'm just not into these... Battle Royale shooters. Yeah, yeah, because once you die, you're done. So I like games like yours where I can build something.

In fact, that was one of the problems I had with Division, the Division. A lot of people were like, my friends were always like going on the Division. They, you know, build a whole inventory, and then someone would take it away from them, and then they have nothing. And I'm like, that doesn't sound like any fun. I'm building stuff, but I want it to be mine. It might stay as mine.

That was the whole beauty of kind of what, that was the whole beauty of the Destiny sort of magic or what was supposed to be the destiny magic it's really didn't fulfill itself but it was supposed to be that you would have this character that would just go through all the eons of the game but whatever it's game I get it and plus you know they had to put it in 1080p in 4k now so it's a beautiful game I love to see what this looks like in 4K too. Jesus, just the videos at 1080p look awesome. Anyway, thanks to my honours for tuning in.

We'll see you next time. Thank you.