The first balance pass is now complete, so interceptors and their equipment are now balanced to inflict and receive the appropriate amount of damage when fighting different tiers of UFOs. Air Combat RebalanceĬhris has mostly been busy with the air combat for the past couple of weeks. This system was a surprising amount of work but we’re in the process of ironing out the final few kinks with it right now. I’m unsure if we’ll persist with these control system changes, but we’ve implemented key rebinding functionality so people can switch them back if they don’t like our changes (plus it’s something we’d have needed to implement before anyway). We’ve also been experimenting with some changes to the control system.
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#Xenonauts 2 devlog free#
The standard targeting method where the game only shows a fire crosshair over things you actually want to shoot at is the best method of targeting in most instances, and if you do want to use free fire mode then it’s much easier to simply hold Ctrl as you can then cancel it by letting go of Ctrl (having to press Esc is much more clunky). Free fire mode allows you to target anything, so it’s very fiddly and it’s easy to accidentally click a nearby object such as the ground tile that the target is standing on rather than the target themselves – we saw a lot of people doing this in the demo. This change to free fire mode is probably the biggest usability change we’ve made. Clicking the button no longer activates “sticky” free fire mode (which can only be cancelled by pressing Esc) unless it’s a specialist item like a grenade or a medikit. The most important change is that these are now a “stance” – clicking a button to set a fire mode as active just means that fire mode will be used when you hover over an alien, or when you activate free fire mode by holding Ctrl. We’ve also updated the “ability buttons” that appear above the UI during tactical combat and allow you to select the different weapon fire modes and reload / throw grenades, etc. This just ensures the player doesn’t accidentally forget about their soldiers, and I think in practice there won’t be many situations where it’s annoying (although you can just Ctrl+click the End Turn button to instantly end the turn if you want). not marked as done, and have not spent any TU) and automatically select them if there are. Additionally, clicking the End Turn button will now check whether there are any “forgotten” soldiers (i.e. If you click it and all your soldiers are now marked as finished, the turn Ends. There is now a “done” button you can click to select a soldier as finished for the turn, and it will automatically select the next soldier that is not finished. The first of these is the “soldier finished” system that exists in classic X-Com and was added to Xenonauts by the Community Edition. Many of these things are small things – the fire path better shows when weapons are being fired beyond range the camera briefly focuses on newly-sighted aliens bleeding wounds are more clearly displayed, etc – but we’ve added a number of larger new systems too. We have therefore implemented a number of systems that make things easier for players.
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Reading the feedback from players and seeing what streamers struggled with when they played the game gave us a good opportunity to try and improve the controls and accessibility, as a lot of the pre-release feedback we get tends to be from experienced X-Com / Xenonauts players who already know how things work…
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The reaction to the demo was generally good, but we also saw a lot of people who bounced off the game because they just didn’t understand what was going on and how the controls worked. This month we’ve been focussing on your feedback from the Steam Demo, so let’s dive into that a bit… As we gear up to release version 18 of the closed beta next week, we thought we’d let you know what we’ve been working on for that.