Donkeyfumbler

Really nice review from PC Gamer - guess they liked it http://www.pcgamer.com/review/xenonauts-review/

Just a warning to everyone (especially Chris!) that the Xenonauts.com website appears to have been hacked by someone calling themselves azm.exe and now has some arabic voice recording and stuff about Islam (yes really - not joking). Hopefully it's not trying to push out any malware at the same time, especially as of course xenonauts.com is whitelisted in my script blocker, but you may want to avoid even checking it out, just in case.

Chris, thank you SO much adding this in

Thanks Chris.

Hi Chris, A long while ago I started a thread about having the ability to press shift and then left click so you could move and it would over-ride any TUs you had reserved for shooting without having to constantly fiddle with the slider. http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/1297-Shift-click-to-override-Reserved-APs You said it would be added to the list of stuff that would be in the beta, and I have been avidly waiting for it ever since but I can't see it anywhere in the beta candidate Is it still on the list of things to do, and, if so, do you have an ETA? Thanks.

Thanks Chris. I note the ability to now shoot and override reserved time units, but are you still planning on having the ability to move and override reserved time units (by pressing shift and then clicking on where to move) in the beta as you have indicated in the past? I find my irritation at having to move the slider if I want to do it is so irrationally high, it prevents me from carrying on with the game (blame my OCD).

zzz - please don't stop producing these maps. I'm waiting for beta before I start playing the game again but I can guarantee that I'll be downloading the maps then and I'm sure they'll be plenty of demand once the games is properly released.

I really think that we need a little bit of story included in the game, even if it is just text over still images. There needs to be some kind of scene setting at the beginning of the game, and then occasional updates throughout the course (to accompany big research milestones) followed by a conclusion at the end of the game (rather than just 'You Won'). Obviously it's never going to match XCom EU, but just being dropped straight into the Geoscape to position your first base with no explanation or background is very jarring, in my opinion anyway. I feel I need some kind of setting and back story to feel involved with the whole thing.

I really hope you (and others) carry on developing additional maps and tilesets for the game. One of my biggest disappointments with the XCom:EU game (which overall I'm really enjoying) is the lack of variety and randomness in the maps, so the more of that we can have in Xenonauts, the better, not just in terms of gameplay, but also to be able to sell Xenonauts to XCom:EU players.

Very true, and that's what I meant when I said that one of the negative impacts of piracy is that publishers may decide not to publish on the platform at all, it's just that piracy doesn't raise the price of the games that they do decide to release.

True - if you were rotating your squad members it was a real pain in the bum.

While I don't agree with much of what myxa is arguing (and doing so not terribly well tbh), having worked in book publishing, which isn't a million miles away from the games industry, I can safely say that publishers do not divide money spent on development and the rest by prospective numbers of purchasers to reach a retail price for their game - they charge what they think people will pay for their product whilst considering what other publishers are charging for theirs. They aren't suddenly going to drop their prices by 50% if suddenly twice as many people buy the game than they were hoping - they're going to sit back and watch the cash roll in. Games on PC sell in much smaller quantities than games on console, so therefore, by your logic, they should be much more expensive than console games, right? I don't really have to point out that the reverse is true, even factoring in licencing costs to the console manufacturers. Piracy may be immoral, eventually counter-productive (as publishers stop developing for the platform) and have many other negative impacts but raising the price of games certainly isn't one of them.

Very nice review Chris - it sums up not only what I've been thinking, but what a lot of other people have found about the game. I totally agree about the DLC they've announced. My heart sank when I read about it as what the game needs is expanding the existing stuff - more and bigger maps, more localisation of the troops and their voices, different mission types rather than some three mission mini-campaign which would fit more into a Call of Duty or Gears of War type title than a turn-based strategy game like XCOM. I'm liking it at the moment, but if they don't provide decent support to sort out the bugs and obvious game play deficiencies and open up mod support, then my likelihood of buying another Firaxis title will plummet.

Some AAA titles may be slightly more expensive on launch than before (though you can almost always shop around for a decent deal on pre-orders - £22 on XCOM for instance) but they fall faster and further in price on the PC than on any console. That can't be purely explained by the lack of the need to pay Sony/MS/Nintendo a percentage of each game. I'm afraid that your idea that 'nothing' stops a pirate from pirating a game is what is 'laughable' - something stopped Chris from pirating games and something stops plenty of other people too. Something I've heard and read repeated on numerous occasions is that 'something' was lower prices, better digital availability and a desire to support companies and developers that they liked and respected and which they felt respected them as customers.

Thanks for the link - at least I know now what everyone is going on about. Tricky subject as always. I tend to agree with what Chris said in the article for the most part. I'm more interested in what effect piracy has for legitimate customers (like me ). In the past, piracy has been seen as the reason for the decline in PC gaming versus consoles and as an excuse/reason for companies not to release PC versions of some games, which obviously negatively impacts those of us who might have bought those games. It also lead companies like Ubisoft to come up with ever more draconian DRM systems which were obviously far more of an inconvenience for legitimate customers than for pirates (and the reason I stopped buying their games for several years). However, the general consensus appears to be now that there is a significant enough market on the PC, regardless of piracy, to make it worth releasing games on the format and that DRM has no real impact on piracy rates. It could be argued that the failure of DRM to stop piracy, and the popularity of the PC, has now led to a strategy that actually benefits me as a legitimate consumer - namely that developers are making their product more attractive to their customers and attempting to develop more of a relationship with them, as well as, of course, dropping prices. In the long term then, piracy has potentially had a positive impact for all of us as consumers by forcing companies and developers to produce better products and I'm fairly sure that, without it, we'd still be paying far more for the average game (in all senses of the word "average").