Senteliks

Godot is fairly decent alternative on surface I don't see a reason why X2 wouldn't be able to continue there. (yeah, yeah, porting things to another engine and all that but godot has advantage, which is it's C# based and robust) In fact unity owns much to the fact being much older and having very little competition at the time. So it established itself on top of the food chain and now it's hands the most streamlined and convient platform to build games (yes it's engine it's very abstracted) Unreal is really overkil forl Indie titles like X2 and Clausewitz is build for different purposes.

Well I work as DevOps/SRE/SA (depends on organization really, recently even as backend developer primarily developing Platform Engineering platform for team of developers, so they can use it without dealing with Ops part, hence I have strong background in Software Engineering with Go, Java and Python background (wrote plenty of tools and worked on various micro-services based projects) and also have solid foundation with C#, because with how many ecosystem I have encountered and worked with - yeah, not experience with game dev I know. But I absolutely suck at everything Frontend, UX/UI related. Not that I am stranger to it, but they are my weaker side. And also when it comes to design, I might be good at planning and executing architecture of an entire or part of a product ecosystem and business logic but things like maps/level design and etc, a big no. So, what I am trying to say backend I can do but if bulk of development is around implementing intuitive interface, yeah that's another story. As for Asset Bundler's limitation, personal opinion and in regards to investment and engineering effort, as far as things as integration, adaptability, unity plugin's approach wins, consequences are minimal. And you can even make money of it by charging on Unity store, if you chose due to shareability options As for standalone tool, there is much more complexity involved there at each stage of operations we would want to achieve, particularly when it comes to handling formats and loading to Unity assets and etc, it's a lot more complexity (like even possibility of having to automate some process in Unity editor itself, which sort of is contradicting) and effort with really the benefit being flexibility (plus the class-platform being another thing to consider). Not to mention, for me personally anyways, it's easier to learn to us Unity as platform and write plugin in C#, it's not really an obstacle just takes a bit time than the secondary tool from ground up, just my two coins. Edit: Assuming this actually comes to life, given the Unity drama going on. And just to be clear my understanding Unity is very basic, going back to days when I just play around with mini project, when it was still Unity 4, so yeah very much useless by now

Yeah escape plan ... they spent 3 years for building a framework for their future games including X2 which was in development since 2015 (8 years), atop of Unity. ... The alternative is just to drop the project and any future project.

I just feel that this is a big lackster. Yeah sure, you get on off chance a single suprise, but majority of enemies are going to be composed of the single "race" and early game especially suffers from it. It's not problem on first play through, or maybe even second, but as you go it's just a routine. You know what to expect, element of "surprise" is gone and just loses it's momentum. I know that there could be concern of the balance, but X2 also follows in footsteps of X1 research linear progression and tech advancement. That balance concern can be countered with trying to make research and gear progression "branched" and more varied. It's something XNT overhaul did for X1 (incorporated a lot of mini mods like Dynamic UFO) and built popular foundation that X-Division continued to carry on. But the core foundation of this overhauls, was that element of not feeling linearity. Even minimalistic overhaul mods, that didn't try to overhaul every aspects but extend vanilla, went head on after making UFO spawns more dynamic, and research/tech progression more verbose and varied. I just think X2 would miss a huge opportunity to take advantage of it's new clean slate that is not held back by technical reasons and have this mechanics in place natively, rather than lean heavily on mods to introduce it.

I don't know. Shields are useful at beginning especially with soldiers that simply have terrible stats. The most terrible soldier paired with a shield, laser gun and Warden armor, can roll over most tier1/2 aliens. So the whole argument, I don't like shields, because you get hit all the time and lose them is funny. And even in mid game they have their uses. You can position heavy, glass canon hitters behind the meat fodder soldiers (shield) and do some heavy mayhem, or it's just a free bail card for some crazy maneuver that you can pull, especially when capturing aliens. The shields are not the problem, it's what you think they should be. Buff them too much, and then what's the point of going without shield? Having monster soldier(s) that can carry them in off back doing god what, without suffering TU penalties for instance. A bit OP? And to come up with countering that, other things would need to be re-adjusted, why should that be the case? I am under one those that think shields are decent and good trade off as they are now. Not long now, there will be mods that change that, but overall vanilla should not go through such phases and needs to keep neutrality.

I think that Mars in current state is not worth what it costs. It's usability worns off very quickly, and it's just cheaper to throw on field Privates, since they are so much easier and affordable to replace, than the Mars, getting splinter like a can by any enemy that does heavy kinetic damage. It just doesn't scale well, even before you hit mid game. So, far I used just for specific cases, when support makes most sense but that's very rare- and to be frank only reason I did took it on a field several times, it's because one square

You are right though, the 'unrealistic' was harsh way to put it. I understand where it came from - back then this was vote of community sticking through out for X2 I wasn't one of them, even though I was through x1 EA up to point of "where we head next". Can't help but think of all the ways this could've been taken advantage of from "fun" point of view. As design goes, I get that choices had to be made. But most of what I have in mind goes beyond what Atlas was suppose to be and I guess that's where you had to draw the line. Though, there are some possibilities that base system definitely could be expanded on, and I look forward to it, thanks Chris for taking time to reply and really glad to see you guys successfully launching to EA.

This was very likely covered and probably even brought up and explained at one point or another, so I apologise upfront. It's been very long since I followed development closely and I couldn't find it, hence I ask here. Is Atlas base concept, scrapped up for good? It won't change anything for me but I did find that approach interesting, versus X1 all, familiar covert bases approach. Will it come back or be introduced in some form? Edit: ah, never mind I found it But I gotta say that this poll seems to be be diehard multiple bases players and unrealistic because I was hoping for more of Atlas approach to strategic layer in X2, shame. Based on response afterwards, I can see that I am not alone thinking this but it's too late to change it I guess.