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Xenonauts-2 May 2023 Update!


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Hello everyone - May is now over so it's time for our monthly update to explain the progress we've made.

Early Access Launch Date:
The first thing to mention is we now have a date for our Early Access launch. I don't know exactly when it will be revealed because our marketing partners Hooded Horse are handling the announcement, but we're just focused on getting the game as good as possible for that date (which is really not that far away)!

Please be aware that the Early Access version of the game is going to cut off after about 60-70% of the full campaign. This is still a big chunk of the game - depending on how quickly you play tactical missions, you could easily spend 10-15 hours playing a campaign before you hit that point. Ultimately we had to make a decision between spending our time working on polish and bugfixes that affect the whole game, or fixing various issues (and adding some missing content) that only relate to the final section of the game.

In the end we thought people would prefer to play a 15+ hour chunk of Xenonauts 2 that would hopefully leave them impressed and keen to play the final game, rather than release the entire campaign in a less polished state that they might enjoy less. We will be adding back the removed content during Early Access, once we've had a chance to test it and polish it up to the standards of the rest of the game.

Current Goals:
Our current goal is to make sure the playable parts of the game are as enjoyable as possible. One important goal is to ensure all the research text and art in the playable sections is ready, so I've been working hard on that (along with a number of illustrators). We're also working on lots of bugfixes and usability improvements, and adding little quality-of-life features requested by the community - e.g. you can now rotate soldiers when arranging them inside the dropship on the strategy layer. If there's any time left over, we'll try and add some new maps too.

We're not going to be making any further large changes to the game until after the Early Access launch, as we want to avoid introducing new bugs. It's always important to have the game as stable as possible on launch!

Completed Work:
Now I've discussed our future plans, I'll quickly summarise the work we did last month in the space I have left:

  • We released Closed Beta build V27 onto the Experimental branch, along with four hotfixes that fixed a LOT of bugs. We'll be hotfixing a few more issues this week and then hopefully releasing it on the Steam / GOG main branch.
  • More work on the translation.
  • As mentioned above, quite a lot of work on the research text / research artwork.
  • We did some more work on the new Geoscape icons.
  • We fixed the memory leaks in the game, which were causing performance issues and eventual crashes if you played the game for an extended session. This involved upgrading a copy of our codebase into the most recent version of Unity (as the version we're using is so old it doesn't have the tools required to easily find memory leaks), which is good news - after the Early Access launch, we'll probably upgrade the main project to this new version of Unity too. This should improve performance and compatibility, as well as making the lives of the developers easier.

There's a few more smaller things we worked on that probably aren't worth talking about, as this post is already rather long. That's all I have for this month, so thanks for reading the post and I'll make another post once our release date is announced!

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Let’s hope that the Devs have filled the remaining Gaps (Research, Interrogations & Co.) to that Time as well as that we (Main-Beta-Testers) get this 60% to 70% best tested to get for the Public an stable & bugfixed Start- and Mid-Game.

 

What the other done Parts since V.24 to V.27 belongs, did the Game a big Step forward. And more of that as well as interesting cool already tested Features / Contents will come back.

Edited by Alienkiller
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Good call on releasing the early game finished Chris. Is the make your own unique character that you included in kickstarter still in the game or was it dropped at some point? 

You're getting there (finally ;-)). It's been a long hard slog hasn't it?! I will start to play it soon.

It's a shame I don't live in London anymore otherwise I'd come up to Kings Cross and see if I could lend a hand with anything.

Edited by ooey
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14 hours ago, ooey said:

Good call on releasing the early game finished Chris. Is the make your own unique character that you included in kickstarter still in the game or was it dropped at some point? 

You're getting there (finally ;-)). It's been a long hard slog hasn't it?! I will start to play it soon.

It's a shame I don't live in London anymore otherwise I'd come up to Kings Cross and see if I could lend a hand with anything.

That's alright, I don't live in London any more either - and we always had our offices in East London, so coming to Kings Cross wouldn't have helped much anyway ;)

The various Kickstarter backer soldiers are all in the game now, yeah.

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Quote

Please be aware that the Early Access version of the game is going to cut off after about 60-70% of the full campaign. This is still a big chunk of the game - depending on how quickly you play tactical missions, you could easily spend 10-15 hours playing a campaign before you hit that point.

Hmmm, maybe I'm not understanding this, but is the implication here that the game could be entirely completed in less than 30 hours?

Admittedly I never played the vanilla Xenonauts but instead played with the X-Division mod, but I think I got 100s of hours of gameplay from that.

On a side note, are the devs interested in fostering a modding community? X-Division really was so cool and made Xenonauts one of my top 5 favorite games. I imagine it could drastically improve the lifespan an value of the game as well, as is the case for Xcom 2

Edited by JohnSmithTA
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13 hours ago, JohnSmithTA said:

 

Hmmm, maybe I'm not understanding this, but is the implication here that the game could be entirely completed in less than 30 hours?

Admittedly I never played the vanilla Xenonauts but instead played with the X-Division mod, but I think I got 100s of hours of gameplay from that.

On a side note, are the devs interested in fostering a modding community? X-Division really was so cool and made Xenonauts one of my top 5 favorite games. I imagine it could drastically improve the lifespan an value of the game as well, as is the case for Xcom 2

I can't speak for Chris here, but I think the 15+ hour game time mainly comes from Chris's own playstyle. I remember Chris talking about how he was surprised about how many missions and how many in-games days most players ended up accumulating compared to what he and his team intended. From what I understand, Xenonauts was supposed to be 15-20 hour experience per playthrough and was balanced around that, but people ended up doing a lot of extra missions even when mechanics like air striking were added to reduce the tendency to go on every mission possible. The pace the player goes through the missions and geoscape also affects the final time significantly and as the lead of the Xenonauts team I would expect Chris to have a high knowledge of the game that allows him to go through the game at a faster pace (because he knows the maps, tooltips, mechanics, etc already while most players probably will not). 

I do have some experience playing the "open beta" and have tried the game myself. From my personal experience and from watching other people play the game, I would say that Xenonauts 1 and 2 are both around 30 hours ish at a brisk pace but Xenonauts 2 is much more replayable due to being an upgrade in every conceivable way and having much more developed mechanics. Although if you were one of those players that went to every mission, your Xenonauts 2 campaigns might be shorter than Xenonauts 1 because the game adds several extra mechanics that dissuades going on lots of extra missions (notably the sell cost decline where the more you sell an item, the less it is worth and making soldier grow much more slowly as they gain experience than they did in Xenonauts 1). Nothing is preventing you from going on those extra missions mind you, but you get much less reward out of it compared to airstrikes in Xenonauts 2 than you did in Xenonauts 1. 

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17 hours ago, JohnSmithTA said:

 

Hmmm, maybe I'm not understanding this, but is the implication here that the game could be entirely completed in less than 30 hours?

Admittedly I never played the vanilla Xenonauts but instead played with the X-Division mod, but I think I got 100s of hours of gameplay from that.

On a side note, are the devs interested in fostering a modding community? X-Division really was so cool and made Xenonauts one of my top 5 favorite games. I imagine it could drastically improve the lifespan an value of the game as well, as is the case for Xcom 2

Yeah, what Kamehamehayes said is pretty much correct. It's kinda impossible for me to evaluate how long the game is, because I know it inside out and I can burn through the missions extremely quickly. A campaign of Xenonauts 2 will be longer than a campaign of Xenonauts 1, and the Early Access will contain about 60%-70% of the full campaign. I think 10-15 hours is a safe estimation for the length of the game, and I'd rather lowball it than highball it.

But yeah, it's hard to know how long it'll take you. A standard game of X2 (or X1) is nowhere near as long as X-Division or any other Long War style mod, which is by design - most people don't want an experience that's that long, which is why they're best served up as optional mods.

Yes, we're keen to get a modding community going around the game. We'll hopefully be releasing proper mod tools during Early Access, but it's not as simple a process as it was for X1 simply because Unity doesn't expose all the values in text files like our previous game did. So we didn't actually have to do any work in X1 to enable "mod support" :)

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On 6/8/2023 at 4:21 PM, Chris said:

That's alright, I don't live in London any more either - and we always had our offices in East London, so coming to Kings Cross wouldn't have helped much anyway ;)

The various Kickstarter backer soldiers are all in the game now, yeah.

Heh heh. I could have sworn you said your offices were in kings Cross back in the day. I still would have come to east London I guess. Are you based at home now as a distributed office or somewhere nice (i.e. not London!)?

About the length of time a game lasts. Well for me, a single game lasts 100s of hours! I'm meticulous with these sort of games and am careful in everything I do.  I play on Iron Man mind, so any mistake could be costly.

Loved UFO: Enemy unknown back in the day, but Xenonauts trumped it (it only really beat it in atmosphere). Very much looking forward to playing Xen2 if it's anything like Xen.

Edited by ooey
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