X4: Foundationsis the latest entry in the long-running series of space simulation games by Egosoft. Since 1999, theXseries has spearheaded the space sim genre due to its groundbreaking simulation of galactic society, with more simulation detail added in each game asPChardware has grown increasingly capable of supporting Egosoft’s ideas.
Game Rant recently interviewed Bernd Lehahn, Egosoft’s CEO who founded the company 35 years ago. Lehahn spoke about the gaming industry’s changes over the decades, the challenges involved in developing a complex simulation likeX, and the future ofX4after its upcomingKingdom Endexpansion.The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
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Q: Egosoft has thrived independently for 35 years. What would you say has been key to this success?
Lehahn: It’s hard to say. 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. And we did it right. And therefore we are successful,” because occasionally, you just need to be lucky. 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. There are a lot of individual events that have helped us grow this whole thing. The community was a huge part. We were really lucky that when we releasedX: Beyond the Frontierin 1999, we had a very active online community very soon after even though it’s asingle-player game. We had a very active online community that was giving us feedback, and that group enormously helped us develop the game later.
It was always the most exciting product for us. We were always dreaming of this kind of game, but the timing was just not right before. Then, at that time, there were several factors that came together like 3D acceleration and being able to make games for Windows, becauseWindows 95was the first time that Windows was relevant as a platform at all for games. So lots of things came together, and we were fortunately in the right position at the right time. Then you start the series, and then you grow it with the help of the community and the company grows, and the game grows. And we just continued doing that.
Q: How has the gaming industry changed over the decades since Egosoft was founded? Have these changes affected how you approach development?
Lehahn: It’s a very different time. This is a very fast-paced, dynamic industry. There were so many new technologies, like the one I already mentioned, the 3D accelerator cards were a big thing. They were so quickly developing, like when we started withX: Beyond the Frontier, but they were a new thing, there was not even an API for it yet. That was actually one of the triggering factors: Microsoft started with a common API that was even before DirectX. Before that, you would have to develop lots of different individual cards, and there’s a lot of effort going into that.
The industry as a whole has changed. It became more professional. There are so many more jobs nowadays. When we started, it was like a friend of mine was the graphic artist, and he did anything visual, and I was the programmer. And that’s it. That was normal. All of our friends who were in the same industry were in a similar situation. Either you were a programmer, or you were an artist, and that’s it. There was not a lot of differentiation. There were no “game designers.” That’s all the stuff you did on the side. No writers. Nowadays, you have this whole wide spectrum of different jobs and specializations, and of course, all those excitingtechnologies like VR. If you didn’t know, we even made a version ofX Rebirthfor VR.
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Q: The upcoming Kingdom End expansion forX4will be introducing the Boron, the last missing main faction from the series. How will their inclusion affect the game world?
Lehahn: It’s very much anticipated by the community because they were always a last addition to the universe. People know them from the past, and they’ve always been missing them inX4. We knew that, and we were always saying, “Yeah, sorry, it takes us longer.” This is bigger because the Boron are so different. They’re aquatic. They have tentacles, making the creatures themselves more demanding, but also their ships and their stations. We wanted to do that right. There was a lot of different graphic technology, but alsogame engine technologythat we had to do to make this fit in.
The universe now is complete. That’s one important thing that this changes. We also want to relaunch the game now that we have all the base factions of the oldXuniverse connected again. We want to relaunch a bundle where this is altogether as a complete package so that maybe some more people that playedX3,X2,or even earlier games and haven’t really tried outX4can now really get the whole thing together. Of course, it’s also adding new things to the base game. We always release a new free update with every expansion release, so the 6.0 update is also a big deal for us.
Q: Are there any features in the 6.0 base game update that you’re particularly excited about?
Lehahn: Yeah, lots! It has a new core engine, and we call it X TECH 5. 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 entirephysics enginecompletely 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. We’ve also improved the graphics engine. That’s all low-level stuff, but, of course, helps the game in many areas and visuals get better. We have this new rendering technique called parallax occlusion mapping, which is especially important for the Boron ships. 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. So lots of engine changes.
But then, of course, also gameplay. It’s always a big package. We have new AI behaviors. There are new controls for carrier ships like if you have a carrier ship with subordinates, it allows you to control multiple subordinate groups over multiple sectors. So you may really control a large area with just one carrier and its “fleet,” so to speak. There are also lots of little improvements. The change log is literally hundreds of entries long with UI, quality of life things, improvements in performance, and improvements in AI behavior. We also will have a few new ships in it, there’s also actual content in the free update as well – you don’t only get new ships in the expansion.
Q: You mentioned how Kingdom End completes theX4universe in terms of factions. Are there plans to continue expanding the game beyond that point?
Lehahn: Yes, indeed. That’s something that is important to point out. It is the complete base universe, that’s true. But there are still ideas that we want to do withX4, so it’s not the end of the development of the game. We have some solid ideas, but It’s too early to talk about them. It’s not just simply adding more space and more ships and more of the same, that is not what we will do. That’s why it is indeed complete in that sense, but there will be more.
Q: Speaking of factions, do you have a personal favorite faction from theXuniverse? What do you like about them?
Lehahn:Whenever we are moving closer to the release of an expansion, I’m always testing and currently, I’m testing quite a lot. 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. But there are cool ships in every faction. The last expansion – which was not really adding an entire faction –Tides of Avaricewas more focused on piracy, as well as on the mining side with the recycling of wrecks and so on. There were a couple of really cool ships in that one, especially the yacht. A single favorite race? No, I don’t have one, just a lot of special characters, maybe, but also special ships.
Q: TheXseries has been one of the top space sim games in the genre for decades. In your mind, how has the series managed to stand out?
Lehahn: Well, there are many factors. I think the most important one is that we give people the experience of a massively multiplayer game where you have a huge simulated universe with a true economy, where everything really is simulated, like 1000s of ships that actually trade and bring goods from A to B, and stations that actually manufacture everything. So you have that actual economy that normally people only associate with an MMO game, something that runs on a server. But here you have that in a single-player game. And that is quite unique, because it allows you to, on the one hand, have this authenticity to the universe, it’s real. It’s not just a fake economy, it’s not just a couple of prices here and there. But at the same time, because it’s a single-player game, we can still have a relatively fast progression. So you start as a single small guy with a single ship, but then you can progress to the second ship, the third ship, a little fleet, your own stations, your whole economy, within a week, within two weeks, you are already a mogul with your own little empire.
If you would play this in an MMO – there arespace MMOsthat came out after we started withX: Beyond the Frontier– in an MMO, you may never have this fast progression. You have a much, much slower grind, and you will probably never get a huge fleet of ships because if every player can have a huge fleet, what kind of universe would that be? In this game, you actually develop from the small guy to the huge, powerful faction, and have that in combination with a real simulated economy that feels authentic, where everything actually is simulated and develops differently every time. That, to us, is our biggest unique selling point and the thing that defines the whole series.
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Q: On the subject of simulation, theXgames boast an incredibly deep simulation of galactic society. Are there any details people might be surprised that you’ve simulated within the game?
Lehahn:It became more extreme from game to game. The concept was there from the start withX: Beyond the Frontierthat we simulate, as I always call it, “bottom up.” It’s not like we are defining what the player has to see. Normal games are designed that way. Normally, as a game designer, you design how you want things to be. Normally, when the player lands on that station, we want to make sure that he can make a profit with this product. So we make sure the prices are like this. And then you calculate everything from that point on and make sure the universe looks the way you want it to look.
But our game was, from the beginning, a simulation. You are simulating hundreds, if not thousands, of agents that are interacting with each other. We call this “emergent gameplay” because lots of situations grow out of the universe, which often surprises even us. But withX: Beyond the Frontierand the sequels, this depth of the simulation ended earlier because we could never connect it with the actual production of ships or with stations. Whenever we tried that, at some point, we got a negative cycle. For example, if there was a shortage of certain wares in the universe, then the shipyards would at some point not be able to produce anymore, because they would run out of resources. So we had to disconnect the production of ships and stations from the actual economy underneath. WithX4, we have managed to do that.
So inX4, all the ships that the factions in the game produce, all the ships that you as a player produce, and all the stations where they are being built from resources, all of that is actually connected to the underlying economy which is essentially a pyramid that stands on mining at the bottom where you have mining ships and gas collectors and so on. Then it is refined through factories like a large network of different stations up to the top where you have ship production and station building. Of course, in the end, the ultimate consumer in this big wheel of an economy is war. Conflicts where stuff is destroyed. It also is very much connected with the behavior of factions and how they wage war against each other and build up conflicts over time. That is connected with the economy. It’s a really big, deep thing, and it grew more complex from game to game.
You were asking about something that might surprise your readers. I think one thing that is worth mentioning is the fact that we are oftentimes really surprised by what comes out. Sometimes we get save games back from customers, and then we say, “Wow, look at what this guy made!” And we show it around the office. And we see totally different, totally changed universes.
Players can really do anything. Even if you take the player completely out of the equation, the game is not predictable. Sometimes even the behavior of factions against each other or working with each other can lead to very different universes down the road. If you just run the simulation for a couple of weeks, the game can change in very different directions. That’s the way we test our game ourselves, oftentimes just repeatedly trying it out and looking at what’s happening and predicting what’s going to happen. We can never be sure exactly what’s going to happen.
Q: What are some of the biggest challenges that you come across when developing a game likeX4?
Lehahn: The biggest challenge for us was developing this whole new engine technology that we are using now forX4. It was a long struggle betweenX3: Albion Preludewhich came out in 2011 and through toX: Rebirthand onwards toX4. We were working for more than 10 years on a completely new engine, and now we are updating it again with X TECH 5 but there were so many technical hurdles with it. It was all about making more things possible. More performance, better rendering, better graphics.
The ability to run around on stations and ships was a huge deal for us. Of course,X3was cool in itself, but you always had just “ship, ship, ship,” just teleporting yourself from one ship to another or to a station, but you never had the experience of having a body and walking around. The ability to stand up in your cockpit, climb down a ladder, go to the next ship, go to a station, walk around, talk to people, see other pilots, hire them, see them walking to their ship, and interact with them one to one; it’s very intuitive. That’s something that every player that plays the game immediately understands, but it was technically a very, very big step for us and required so much stuff that we just couldn’t do before. Rendering the characters, and the multithreadingissues on modern PCs, was very demanding, and it took us a long time to get to this point.
The experience of being on foot makes it more believable. It’s not about any individual activity. It’s not so important that you may talk to this guy or whatever. You could argue that it’s the same as interacting with a menu and getting the products from a trader. It’s about the authenticity of having a ship with an actual cockpit, being able to climb into the storage room and walk through it. It gives the ship life and makes it real whereas otherwise, it’s just a little box that you see from the outside.
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Q: Earlier you mentioned the community regarding theXseries. It also has a prolific modding scene. How has this community helped shape the series' development?
Lehahn: We were very lucky that this happened withX: Beyond the Frontierduring a time when online communities for games were not such a big thing yet. It grew and grew in the beginning very much with our forum, at that time having hundreds of thousands of people. Even now, it still has a lot of accounts. But now it is more of a wider range. We have social media, we have Reddit, and we have Steam forums, so the community is spread out over multiple places, but the Egosoft forums are still a dear part of our economy even today.
Sometimes we even collect ideas, weask for feedback. Even if we don’t ask, we oftentimes just get feedback by just reading, asking ourselves “What do people like? What do they not like?” You cannot always listen exactly to what people say. If you do that, then you have no plan, because people contradict each other as well. If you have 1000s of fans, then you have very different types of people where some want the game to go in this direction, and some want the game to go in the opposite direction. So what we do oftentimes is try to find a good compromise that works for as many people as possible. We want to provide you with a universe that works for everybody in the best case. And of course, sometimes we have to make compromises. More often than not, it’s the best possible game that we can make, and listening to the community is a big part of it.
Q:X4has had several expansions and a huge number of changes through updates. What have been some of the biggest improvements you’ve seen since the game was released?
Lehahn: The new physics engine is certainly the biggest one we are focusing on because I was always annoyed by problems with the physics engine, like when you have bugs where ships get stuck in an asteroid or fly into a station and get stuck somewhere in geometry. That is something that this new physics engine really addresses because it knows about the solidity of an object. You don’t just have walls, you have a solid object and that makes a big difference in physics. Anything that helps performance is always great. I love to run the game myself with very high frame rates and that’s a constant struggle because the game is not just bound by the GPU.
When people think aboutgame performance, they tend to just focus on the GPU, but since we are also simulating an entire universe, and the physics for the surrounding universe, and have to path and plan for thousands of ships and agents, that all requireS a lot of CPU time. So that is something we are constantly trying to optimize and make better while at the same time, with every expansion, the universe gets bigger.
In terms of gameplay features, there’s just so much that was added, if you ask me personally, I always enjoy everything in the early gameplay most because that’s the part that I repeat and repeat and repeat. I want to start from scratch. Every year at the latest, I throw away all my saved games and start from scratch again. We have a lot of fans that want to continue growing a huge empire and they have a save game that they’ve been running for four years and are already billionaires, have lots of ships, but they continue that.
For me, I find it more exciting to start over again. I also focus more on the early gameplay features where you want to have cool missions. That’s an important part for me as well: the generic missions. Not just the cool plots that expansions bring, but these little missions that you find here and there. Sometimes illegal ones, something with piracy, stuff that you can do early on in the game. I find that very important. I think we came a long way with that.
Q: Do you have any “dream features” that you would love to see in theXseries?
Lehahn: The dreams that will for a long time remain dreams are some of our running jokes. We have stuff that the community is always asking about half seriously likelanding on planets, or running around in stations and playing a shooter. These are possible things, but it is just so big and a different area and different gameplay that we really never seriously considered that. Otherwise, there’s an endless fountain of new and cool things that we can add to the game. And we always do. That’s what we do every year with every new update.
Sometimes it’s little things like hacking the station and stealing stuff. I like criminal activities early on in the game, and that’s what the last expansionTides of Avaricefocused on. We have more of this stuff where you go in a space suit, and you fly into a station and you may weld something, or you can open lock boxes and you have little riddles that you solve in your spacesuit. I like that very much because it shows you the huge dimension differences.
There are some moments in the game where you are in that little spacesuit flying around in a little corridor in an asteroid, and then you land with that tiny spacesuit – which shows you the human body – in an S ship that’s already easily the size of a small airplane. And then you take that ship and land with it on an M ship, which is already like a huge jumbo jet or bigger. And then you take that M ship and land with that on a carrier, and you say “Wow!” And then you fly past the shipyard, and you say “Wow!” That’s what we want to get across: size. That space is big.
Q: What do you see in theXseries' future? Do you have any hopes or ambitions further down the road for the series?
Lehahn: Yes, lots! One of the things that I can talk about – most of the stuff we don’t know for sure if it’s going to happen or, if it’s going to happen, we don’t talk about yet – but one of the things that I am sure we are going to release in the not too distant future is some form ofonline gameplay: the Ventures. The “multiverse” as we call it, is basically your ability to send ships from your game into other player games and join a team together with multiple players and play Ventures. You join a season, you get tasks, and some of those tasks are missions that you play in your own game.
You will have visitor ships from other players in your universe, and sometimes you have to hunt them down. Maybe sometimes it’s just about economic things, where you have to send stuff. Sometimes you have to play Ventures, which means you have to prepare ships with certain things and send them into other universes. And in combination, this progresses a little story. This is not so much different from the normal missions you play in the game, but you are playing now with other real players, and you’re able to communicate with them and you form a little team. So that whole social aspect that is missing from the single-player game thatXnormally is will be added and that’s pretty cool.
As I said before, we have some serious advantages overmass massive multiplayer online games, because they couldn’t have that fast progression. But we also had one downside, and it’s that you are not playing with your friends, and that’s what we are adding with this. I think this will be the best of both worlds. You have the core single-player game that can progress very fast, and you have your own universe, but at the same time, you have the multiverse where you can play with other people. So that’s a big, big thing that we are working towards. It will just be a beta at the start because we don’t know exactly how it will have to change over the year. There will be more changes necessary, but we hope we will have a beta not long after the release ofKingdom End.
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