The launch of Xenonauts 2 has been a huge success so far, with over 30,000 people buying the game since Tuesday. It's been an amazing (and exhausting) experience for us here at Goldhawk and we want to offer a genuine thankyou to everyone that has supported us!
With so many people playing the game, we've also been provided with an enormous amount of feedback about the good and bad parts of the current Xenonauts 2 experience. Although we're still sorting through this, I wanted to quickly discuss a few issues that have come up repeatedly and explain how we're planning to address them. They are:
- Bugs & Stability
- Performance & Loading Times
- Timed Missions
- Similarities to Xenonauts 1
- Modding Tools
Bugs & Stability:
Fixing any crashes, hangs and other game-breaking bugs is our highest priority issue. The sheer number of people playing the game means lots of bugs have been found, and we've set everything else aside and are working hard to fix them as quickly as possible.
I think we're making good headway on these stability issues given the small size of our team, but we're not quite there yet. We appreciate your patience while we work through these issues - we've only got two programmers and they need to sleep once in a while!
Performance & Loading Times:
There's been a lot of complaints about the loading times in the game. This is something we were initially planning on optimizing further closer to final launch, but based on community feedback we'll be moving this work forwards,
In the meantime, it may be possible to reduce loading times by installing Xenonauts 2 on the fastest hard drive you have available (as load speeds in our game are governed largely by the hard drive speed).
Also, we suspect there is a memory leak in the game. If you've been playing for a couple of hours and loading times or general performance feels a lot worse than at the start of your play session, please reboot the game and it should return to normal (we will be looking into the memory leak once the crashes are dealt with).
Timed Missions:
Although many people enjoy the new timed missions in Xenonauts 2, there's also a sizable group who very much dislike the concept. We are going to be adding campaign options that allow you to adjust these timers, allowing people who enjoy the missions to tweak the timings to their own preferences and those who dislike them to remove the time pressure entirely (e.g. by increasing them to 99 turns).
Again, this was originally planned for later in development but based on player feedback we have decided to bring it forwards. Of course, we'll also be continuing to balance and improve these missions throughout Early Access - so hopefully far fewer people will want to skip them in the final game anyway!
Similarities to Xenonauts 1:
While many people do already feel like Xenonauts 2 is distinct enough to stand apart from its predecessor, not everyone agrees with this.
While I do understand this view, I think it is important to remember that Xenonauts 2 is not yet finished. There's a lot more improvements and content planned for Early Access, and the game will feel less and less like the original Xenonauts (and more and more superior to it) with every new update.
It's probably also worth pointing out that the original Xenonauts wasn't particularly well received when it first launched into Early Access back in 2013 (thankfully before the days of Steam reviews), but the community feedback and sales revenue allowed us improve the game dramatically - and I'm sure the same will be true for the sequel!
Modding Tools:
Although the entire game isn't editable with a text editor like the first Xenonauts was, we've still designed Xenonauts 2 to support modding and have already done a fair bit of work under the hood to ensure that they will work properly with the game.
However, manually editing the compressed json files used by the game with a text editor is not the most straightforward process. As such, we've been chatting to members of the Xenonauts 1: Community Edition team about the possibility of taking an editing tool we developers created a few years back and building it into a community-led standalone modding tool.
It's therefore possible that modding tools might be arriving much sooner than expected - but we can't make any firm promises here, as we're still just exploring the possibility at this stage!
Development Roadmap
Finally, in addition to the points raised above, you can see what our longer-term plans for Xenonauts 2 are on the Development Roadmap outlined in our previous update!