KickStarter Xenonauts 2 - now available on Early Access

[Parsimonious cook]

Is this vaporware? Since Nuxcom is dead for Marvel cashgrab and Phoenix Point feels bland, I see this game as the only hope

Its not dead by any means, the last KS update was four days ago.



Backer beta is being regularly updated, the game exists and will be released. Development however is taking long, so dont expect to play this in 2021.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

What else has Marvel decided to ruin this time?

Midnight Sons...

I don't get it, what does that have to do with XCOM?

 

[Alienman]

They made Midnight Sons TB game instead of Xcom 3.

 

[Raghar]

We’re continuing to work on translation support, but that hit a speedbump this month because we had previously been linking items / projects together via their name (e.g. when specifying which item unlocks a Research project). Unfortunately, this system falls apart once the name becomes a value that changes based on language, so we had to rewrite quite a lot of code relating to that too.

In which Goldhawk apparently learns Database Design 101.

Object/ Research project {
I64 ID.
String name.
PixGraphic image.
I32 project type ID.
... data and stuff ...
ini(IN_ORDER).
}

Games are not databases. If they wanted they can simply load into RAM string reference data, and autotranslate it by binary search.

I think it's far better to write it in english, and first have a game that is impossible to translate by a simple text file. Rather it needs to copy source code and create special exe for each language. Than trying to solve 3 months of problems related to translations. There are problems like special UI design for Chinese characters. And well some language words are MUCH longer than English words. Then there is "but when we translate it to PIG, we assumed everyone would use VELOCIRAPTOR meaning" problem when VELOCIRAPTOR can't fit into 5 character max area.

Game which is about shooting aliens, where theirs internal testing wasn't even able to catch simple problem like aliens have problems with landing, the game has significantly larger problem than translation.

 

[Mazisky]

What else has Marvel decided to ruin this time?

Midnight Sons...

I don't get it, what does that have to do with XCOM?

The big team that worked on Xcom EU and Xcom 2 spent the last 4 years developing a Marvel Rpg cash grab. This means no more nuxcom for the next 4 years or ever.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

What else has Marvel decided to ruin this time?

Midnight Sons...

I don't get it, what does that have to do with XCOM?

The big team that worked on Xcom EU and Xcom 2 spent the last 4 years developing a Marvel Rpg cash grab. This means no more nuxcom for the next 4 years or ever.

4 years for card game?
You must be joking.

 

[Iluvcheezcake]

Maybe they worked on something else and it got canned?

 

[AgentFransis]

This means no more nuxcom for the next 4 years or ever.

Oh no.

 

[Darth Canoli]

They made Midnight Sons TB game instead of Xcom 3.

It's probably for the best, maybe they'll let the franchise to rest and a good indie team can take it back to its origins.
40-90 AP, high lethality, training by doing, good ambient, great sound effects, some improvements on the aliens, a renewed and not dumbed down strategic layer, deeper, even.

It's time!

And i'm not foreseeing Xenonauts 2 doing this, if they do everything they did in Xenonauts 1 but slightly better, it'll already be a huge win but it might not even be the case...

 

[Galdred]

What else has Marvel decided to ruin this time?

Midnight Sons...

I don't get it, what does that have to do with XCOM?

The big team that worked on Xcom EU and Xcom 2 spent the last 4 years developing a Marvel Rpg cash grab. This means no more nuxcom for the next 4 years or ever.

4 years for card game?
You must be joking.

I'm not so sure. It really depends on how many extra Marvel characters they manage to sell as DLC before players get tired of it...

 

[Mazisky]

Celebrating for Firaxis Xcom death and claiming for good indie alternatives where those are Phoenix Point or Ufo ET 2 does not make you look smart

It is like celebrating the death of Saddam Hussein while moving to North Korea

 

[Darth Canoli]

Celebrating for Firaxis Xcom death and claiming for good indie alternatives where those are Phoenix Point or Ufo ET 2 does not make you look smart

It is like celebrating the death of Saddam Hussein while moving to North Korea

Well, i'm not playing NuXcom garbage anyway, at some point, a good indie dev is going to tackle the problem, it's just a matter of time, it's bound to happen sooner if the Nu-Firaxis looks for something else to dumb down.

Also, i have no problems with north korea and it looks like nobody has any, since trumpy disappeared, nobody ever heard of them so the problem was probably trumpy to begin with.

We'll never know which one of them has the tinier dick.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Celebrating for Firaxis Xcom death and claiming for good indie alternatives where those are Phoenix Point or Ufo ET 2 does not make you look smart

It is like celebrating the death of Saddam Hussein while moving to North Korea

Why celebrate about something irrelevant?

It's like The Brazilian Slaughter says; plenty of good mods for original X-com available, besides there's other competing tacticools besides PP or Xeno 2.
TROUBLESHOOTERS was good despite story & visuals and Project Haven looks promising.

 

[AgentFransis]

Celebrating for Firaxis Xcom death and claiming for good indie alternatives where those are Phoenix Point or Ufo ET 2 does not make you look smart

It is like celebrating the death of Saddam Hussein while moving to North Korea

Who are you even replying to?

Personally I play OpenXcom mods and don't see my self getting tired of them anytime soon, so I couldn't care less about inferior derivatives.

 

[Mazisky]

Celebrating for Firaxis Xcom death and claiming for good indie alternatives where those are Phoenix Point or Ufo ET 2 does not make you look smart

It is like celebrating the death of Saddam Hussein while moving to North Korea

Well, i'm not playing NuXcom garbage anyway, at some point, a good indie dev is going to tackle the problem, it's just a matter of time, it's bound to happen sooner if the Nu-Firaxis looks for something else to dumb down.

Also, i have no problems with north korea and it looks like nobody has any, since trumpy disappeared, nobody ever heard of them so the problem was probably trumpy to begin with.

We'll never know which one of them has the tinier dick.

You say it's a matter of time but 10 years have passed since the first NuXcom and the only better game that ever came out was a mod for Nuxcom itself.

So I don't know how you get this confidence about any other dev doing better

 

[ArchAngel]

Celebrating for Firaxis Xcom death and claiming for good indie alternatives where those are Phoenix Point or Ufo ET 2 does not make you look smart

It is like celebrating the death of Saddam Hussein while moving to North Korea

Well, i'm not playing NuXcom garbage anyway, at some point, a good indie dev is going to tackle the problem, it's just a matter of time, it's bound to happen sooner if the Nu-Firaxis looks for something else to dumb down.

Also, i have no problems with north korea and it looks like nobody has any, since trumpy disappeared, nobody ever heard of them so the problem was probably trumpy to begin with.

We'll never know which one of them has the tinier dick.

You say it's a matter of time but 10 years have passed since the first NuXcom and the only better game that ever came out was a mod for Nuxcom itself.Phoenix Point.

So I don't know how you get this confidence about any other dev doing better

Fixed it for you.

 

[ValeVelKal]

Phantom Doctrine was pretty great if you don't abuse the "magic disappearance of corpses" technique.

Then of course, Phoenix Point

 

[Darth Canoli]

You say it's a matter of time but 10 years have passed since the first NuXcom and the only better game that ever came out was a mod for Nuxcom itself.

So I don't know how you get this confidence about any other dev doing better

It's risky for an indie dev to make an good back-to-the-basics UFO game and even more if you want to imrpove (i mean really improve) the basic formula as there is a shitload of Nu-Xcom shit flooding the market.

When the Shit-Tsunami calms down, it might happen.

The sooner Nu-Firaxis and friends start looking elsewhere, the better for the genre.

 

[Mazisky]

You say it's a matter of time but 10 years have passed since the first NuXcom and the only better game that ever came out was a mod for Nuxcom itself.

So I don't know how you get this confidence about any other dev doing better

It's risky for an indie dev to make an good back-to-the-basics UFO game and even more if you want to imrpove (i mean really improve) the basic formula as there is a shitload of Nu-Xcom shit flooding the market.

When the Shit-Tsunami calms down, it might happen.

The sooner Nu-Firaxis and friends start looking elsewhere, the better for the genre.

If they make some Xcom-like by following the codex design rules they would sell 3 copies and go bankrupt after release.

No indie dev would commercially suicide only to make some random codex nerd happy.

What Codex consider good is unappealing to most of the people out there

 

[Darth Canoli]

Xenonauts sold quite well, a better game would sell twice that number, add some PR and you have a gold mine on your hands.

Of course, it'd work better if you could fill the void the nu-garbage will leave by exploiting greener pastures, Firaxis could go into doing candy crush or my e-farm clones for mobiles, it'd be a win for everyone.

 

[geno]

By the way they have released a new build today and I want to remark this

Early Game Structure (Cleaner Base): we've changed the structure of the early game a bit. The idea is that you're fighting the mysterious Cleaners at the start of the game, and you have to do a bit of research (or wait a couple of months) to begin the war against the aliens.

• Various Cleaner missions are now spawned on the Geoscape in the early parts of the game and the player must gain intelligence from them to discover the location of the Cleaner base - and once destroyed, the Cleaner missions stop. You get 15% intelligence for each mission you complete, plus 25% from the Cleaner Autopsy and 50% from the Cleaner Interrogation. Right now all the Cleaner missions are just standard deathmatch missions but we'll be adding more variants in the next build (unlike when you're fighting the aliens, the Cleaners have numerical superiority and can call in reinforcements etc, allowing some different mission objectives).
  • This means you'll be doing between 3 and 8 extra Cleaner-related mission per campaign, including the Cleaner Base assault itself.
• Your starting funding is significantly reduced. It is increased back to "normal" levels after you destroy the Cleaner Base.
• The start of the alien invasion has been delayed a couple of months, and the starting interceptor must be researched. There's UFOs flying around on the map in the first couple of months that can be shot down after the interceptor is researched, but they're not causing relations damage.

Because the Cleaners are spread across the planet and have numerical superiority over the Xenonauts, this allows us to have mission objectives that don't make sense when you are fighting the aliens. For example, wave survival maps, VIP escort / assassination missions, extraction missions, objective capture, etc. Some of these should arrive in V22 and make the early game a bit more varied and exciting!

 

[Stavrophore]

magic disappearance of corpses

That happens only if you played on diff below hard.

 

[ValeVelKal]

magic disappearance of corpses

That happens only if you played on diff below hard.

Yeah, sadly I start this kind of games with the middle difficulty but (try to) Ironman them slef-imporved. I did not know that PD had to be played in the hardest difficulty directly

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Phantom Doctrine was pretty great if you don't abuse the "magic disappearance of corpses" technique.

Then of course, Phoenix Point

Really? Didn't see it's combat as being too great especially when the best way of handling the game was to judo chop everybody. Even in combat.

 

[ValeVelKal]

Phantom Doctrine was pretty great if you don't abuse the "magic disappearance of corpses" technique.

Then of course, Phoenix Point

Really? Didn't see it's combat as being too great especially when the best way of handling the game was to judo chop everybody. Even in combat.

I never tried the melee judo chop, maybe that’s why.

Tactical phase is certainly inferior to XCOM2 (XCOM1 was terrible due to the “spawn” system of the enemy, without mod anyway) but I really like the whole strategic layer, the fact that you can prepare missions with observators/snipers, the various objectives, the whole scenarios action,…