Leaderboard

I know it's still in Alpha, and I don't know what will be changed, but I hope the overall quality of the textures and animations on the Battlescape is improved. Things are just much less crisp and defined than Xenonauts 1, which I thought looked excellent. Also, the way the edges of foliage interact with fog of war is very unappealing and results in a lot of jagged edges. I understand the need to switch to a new game engine, but I really liked the 2D look, and I think it's going to take a lot of work to achieve the same level of fidelity in 3D (look at an old 2D game like Desperadoes or Robin Hood: Legend of Sherwood compared to 3D games even years later...). I hope there's still a lot to be done, and that it will look great! It would be a shame if the sequel continued to look inferior to the original. Note: I'm not talking about the obvious placeholder art.

The Game is in Beta-Status. There are many many Differences to the Original Xenonauts-Game. After it goes in Early Access-State you will see the Differences, Reworks and big Improvements to the Original Game. The Devs deciced to make a new Version of the Game for many reasons. The Predecessor was nice to play for a short time, but then it get more and more boring. There were no variety in the Basemanagement and on Geoscape. Then the old 2D Stile and the same Groundfight-Maps which get no variety too. Both were the big Mistakes the Devs were become aware very fast. This and the other big Problems Xenonauts 1 involved (esp. the Geoscape-Work, no Upgradeposibility etc.) were the Reasons to give up the Work on Xenonauts 1 and programming Xenonauts 2 asap. In one thing your are right: There is a lot of Work left to do (like the special Improvements and Research- / Development Texts). The Game has included many Differences to the Predecessor in the existing Beta-Versions, which look great. And many more will come. The Predecessor is still in my Steam-Bibo as a nice memory of a 2D Game, but not installed anymore.

Right, pulling the leg here, but make it a SAAB! Non aligned so everyone can complain!

Ironically enough that's exactly the same model as it's always been - if anything the Androns are smaller than they used to be, because that's quite an old screenshot Likely what's different in that screenshot is the sense of scale. In X2 tiles are 3m tall instead of 2.2m like they were in X1, so walls are significantly taller than before and the scale can look off as a result. The walls and props in that screenshot are more like the X1 scale relative to the Andron, so it looks more "normal" height. Unfortunately the Xenonauts themselves look like children because the props are too big. Anyway, it's something we're looking into.

Although I appreciate people's concern, as I said in my original post, the publisher deal is just a marketing deal. I don't have time or expertise to market the game properly and it'd be dumb to release an expensive game without trying to market it properly. The publishers aren't giving us any signficant sums of money (if anything at all) and there's nothing in any of the potential publishing deals that means we lose control over the design of the game, have to change the schedule of the game, be forced onto the Epic store, discontinue Community Edition, etc. We're just going to get a marketing partner to make sure everyone knows that Xenonauts 2 exists and what cool features it has rather than have it immediately fade into obscurity when it launches. Please don't extrapolate too much about what that means for Xenonauts 2 based on your own perceptions of what a publisher is / does, as the reality is that publishers can do very different things depending on what point they get involved in a project and how much money they put in. Generally they have a lot of control over a project but if they come in near the end and aren't putting any money in then they're facing much less risk themselves, and need much less control as a result.