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Xenonauts-2 Early Access Launch Delay!


Chris

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Xenonauts-2 was originally scheduled for launch into Early Access towards the end of this month, but after reviewing our progress and the current state of the game we've decided to push this back by approximately three months (although it could be longer than that) because we simply don't feel the game is ready for Early Access yet.

How does this affect you?

We've taken a number of steps to ensure that this does not affect our community too much. Let's talk about them first:

  • The first group of people affected by this change are the £18 Kickstarter backers who are not part of the Closed Beta and were due to receive their keys when the game launched into Early Access. We'll simply be sending these people their Steam / GOG keys at the end of this month as promised and inviting them to join the extended Closed Beta, so this change should not affect them at all.
  • The second group of people are those who missed the Kickstarter and want to buy the game. We're strongly considering selling the game through Xsolla until the Early Access launch, and anyone that purchases the game on Xsolla will get immediate access to the Closed Beta on Xsolla and then also receive a Steam / GOG key as soon as we hit Early Access.
  • If you're already part of the Closed Beta nothing will change. We'll continue pushing out updates to the beta on Steam and GOG as before.

The reason why we have to do things like this is because (with the exception of one-off events like Kickstarters), Steam will not allow you to sell Steam access to a game until that game is actually on sale on Steam. So we can run the closed beta on Xsolla and then generate Steam keys for all our existing backers as soon as we launch into Early Access, but non-Kickstarter backers can't get access to the Steam / GOG beta until we start selling the game on those services.

Why have we chosen to delay the Early Access launch?

The point of the Closed Beta is to get the game into a state where it is playable and we're not quite there yet. There's a few big expected features that are missing (e.g. the ability to save in the ground combat) and quite a few of the mechanics are so rough that people are instinctively going to have a negative reaction to them (e.g. the unfinished air combat implementation).

This is mostly a problem because of Steam Reviews. We know large sections of the game need more work and we've already got much of that work planned out, we've just not had a chance to do it yet - but if someone picks up the game and writes a bad Steam review on the basis of an air combat implementation that is only 30% finished, that review will stick with us and potentially impact our sales for the entire lifetime of the game ... even if the final air combat system ends up being far better than the one in the first Xenonauts when the game is finished.

We're not under any massive financial pressure to rush our launch so it makes sense for us to spend some extra time adding the missing features and polishing the game up first. It's a shame to miss our deadlines but you only have to check the beta build changelogs to see how fast progress has been in the last three or four months, so it's really just a case of a game this complicated being a LOT of work.

Assuming all goes to plan with Xsolla I'll be posting up an update here and sending out an update to our mailing list / Kickstarter backers when pre-sales become available, so stay tuned!

 

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  • Chris locked and unlocked this topic

Phoenix Point/Snapshot Games (rapidly going downhill) use XSOLLA. It isn't something I'd choose and they do seem to create their fair number of complaints. Just in case you weren't aware and wanted to look into them a bit more if that's important. That said, I have no idea of the overall proportion of complaints: otherwise satisfied geeks (aka we lot).

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  • 4 weeks later...
3 hours ago, Ruggerman said:

The ammunition for the Laser rifle, only produced one reload, so that made the useless, so please can we have that rectifier-ed!!

Thank You

It's a known bug, which only happens under some specific circumstances. See:

(If it happened to me I loaded a savefile from before the laser research again, usually it worked correctly on second try)

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On 4/10/2019 at 2:02 AM, Jaxanine said:

Its looking pretty good so far I must say(I made a account just to say this not much but still)

Thanks for the compliments. I've had quite a few people express similar sentiments over email and through other mediums too, and it's really nice to hear - but mostly because I think the game is still in an extremely rough state and we've got a lot of improvements planned that will make it much better than it current is.

So I figure if some people can find some enjoyment in the game already, we're going to have some happy fans when the game is finished :)

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