GamingShogun interviews Egosoft's Managing Director, Bernd Lehahn, on the past, present, and future of the X-games series (which started with X: Beyond the Frontier). The 'X' series a set of popular, open-world space sim/combat games which give the player unprecedented freedom in playing. The most recent game, X3: Terran Conflict, has just been released to mostly positive reviews.

Q) The original X: Beyond the Frontier is, without question, one of the best space sim/combat games ever made. It had a sense of realism to it due to your character's origins as well as stock equipment. X2: The Threat seemed to take a more stylized approach with campier dialog as well as well as an oddly-named antagonist species. Where did the 'Khaak' come from in terms of name and design?

A) Hehe...unfortunately most of the developers on the team at that time were still non native speakers here from Germany. Nowadays, our team became a lot more international. The name was actually already mentioned in the back fiction of XTENSION (the expansion product of X: Beyond the Frontier) and we wanted to stick to the facts established with the first game. In retrospect, it was not a wise decision ;-) But apart from this naming problem, I would not say that the story of the game was any more stylized than X:BTF. That was never our intention. It just continued the saga and that meant it could not start with earth anymore....

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