Tags: Goldhawk Interactive; Xenonauts
Xenonauts, the indie X-COM spiritual successor that has gathered a lot of praise already, has today gone the way of Kickstarter. The stated goal is only $50,000, and the project has 32 days left to reach it, so I hope it succeeds. In any case, the developers assure us, the game will get released -- but you can help it arrive quicker as well as make it better:
Xenonauts has been in development for almost three years already, and has been available for pre-order for the last 18 months (please see the FAQ if you have already pre-ordered the game). We are planning to release the game this year. Why are we doing a Kickstarter?
The answer is simple - we want to make Xenonauts as good as it can be! We have raised enough money through our existing pre-order system to finish the game, but there are a lot of cool little touches that we want to implement but we simply don't have the resources to justify spending our time on. This is a shame - it's always the little touches that make a game memorable!
Xenonauts is also an incredibly complex game and contains vast amounts of content. We only have three full-time team members (the project lead, one artist and one coder) and they don't even live in the same country, instead working together in a virtual office. Everyone else on the team works with us part-time, around other jobs - the ones that pay the bills. This causes a lot of delays, bottlenecks, miscommunication and stress.
Despite the difficulties, we are nearing completion of the game using this model. However, getting the key team members together full time and in the same place would allow us to respond to bugs and issues more quickly, and finish the game faster and to a higher standard (and with less damage to our collective sanity).
The key message is this: if the Kickstarter fails, Xenonauts will still be released and will be a good game. If the Kickstarter succeeds, the game will be better and finished more quickly because of it.
Also, to celebrate the event, RockPaperShotgun has penned a preview praising the game:
I knew exactly what I was doing, what I needed to do next and exactly where I was. Hell, I even put alien corpses in my soldiers’ backpacks just to check that I still could. Xenonauts is X-COM, and while it has made some noise about being its own game there’s simply no question that this is the purists’ take on the old Gollop classic, while 2K’s XCOM as an experiment based around some of X-COM’s major organs.
This might sound like caution, and I suppose it’s true that I would ideally like to be surprised as well as indulged by Xenonauts, but it’s also praise. Heartfelt praise. The single greatest compliment that I believe I could pay to Xenoanuts is that it takes the vast majority of X-COM and recreates it in a more modern interface in such a way that I was barely even conscious that the interface had changed at all.
[...] It does feel like a cop-out to lean on the ‘hooray, it’s so much like X-COM!’ angle when writing about Xenonauts, but that is, after all, its raison d’etre. Before Firaxis’ game was announced, the possibility of ever seeing an X-CMlike as high-polish and faithful seemed to be practically zilch. As it is, they do seem to me like two very different games, ones that can sit comfortably alongside each other rather than battling for old strategy gamers’ attentions.
At the Kickstarter page, you can even download the demo to try the game out if for some reason if you still haven't.
