games with potential die...

[xenogears]

Well, I think we all saw this coming at some point...
Lack of updated content for extended periods of time, lack of posts about future updates, cash grab maneuvers, etc.
But what was it all for?

The base game had so much promise, but fell very short after 2 additional title releases.
I like many others had much hope for this game (series), but we were let down by stupid development choices...
What was the point of even creating Xenominer in the first place is a huge question I have.

I figured the game wouldn't outsell, or beat Starmade on the PC, but it was a space version of MC we had on the Xbox, with a lot more to do than MC.
The original Xenominer game had so much going for it, and the fans were giving quite a bit of ideas and feedback back to the studio, yet we hardly saw any of that, untill...

Downgate Deathmatch, and Xenominer Swarm...

Just what in the hell are these "Spawns"?
Well one is kind of just like a deathmatch game similar to Quake... and the other is basically base defense with mining involved...
Plus they both come with Animated avatars!
Something fans wanted in the base game for a long time, how bout that shiet...!?

I had much desire to continue playing Xenominer, and had no problem buying the other games for some few extra items and starting gear...
But you completely locked out Biomes and extra content!?
Excuse me, but when did EA/Activision get here?
I thought this was an indie game! (minus Dark Reign...).

I am sorry but your decisions have basically just effectively killed your own game, and I wish that wasn't so.

I don't want to sound like I am just completely hating the game, because I really do want it to do well.
I loved the idea of Xenominer, and Downgate and Swarm produced gleams of hope in my eyes, and were quickly crushed by poor decisions.
Just give us the biomes and stuff for free, but make special gear blocks and enemies inaccessible unless we by the other games.
Promote your own games, not destroy them.

I hope you stayed till the end, I love Xenominer, and it's quite fun, but it needs much work, and two separate games really didn't need to be made honestly.
Enjoy your day.

~Ultris07
~Xenogears

[still crosshair]

I quite enjoy xenominer as well, along with the occasional hour on swarm every now and then. From what I remember they wrote several times about xenominer having "bad" coding making it hard to keep adding to it. Swarm was made to give everyone the alien fighting experience they wanted in xenominer but never got. Since after all they said 5 was the most mobs you would see on xenominer. At the time I THINK they said it was cleaner and possibly easier to just make a new game then trying to make xenominer in swarm. Like I said I think they said that, to lazy to go back and look at the posts. Last I know of was the putting of Xenominer on steam greenlight and the possibility of xenominer being redone on unity. They said sales alone were not enough to keep them going on Xbox and PC was kinda the same. But they must of thought steam could solve this since they went on greenlight. From the looks of it downgate was like you describe it, being its downfall thanks to it being in the indie section. Giving us the PVP we did not have in Xenominer. I definitely agree that locking the biomes was a bad move. Hopefully they will come back with some bug fixes and maybe more content updates. Modding the game helps keep it fresh for me.

[xenogears]

I quite enjoy xenominer as well, along with the occasional hour on swarm every now and then. From what I remember they wrote several times about xenominer having "bad" coding making it hard to keep adding to it. Swarm was made to give everyone the alien fighting experience they wanted in xenominer but never got. Since after all they said 5 was the most mobs you would see on xenominer. At the time I THINK they said it was cleaner and possibly easier to just make a new game then trying to make xenominer in swarm. Like I said I think they said that, to lazy to go back and look at the posts. Last I know of was the putting of Xenominer on steam greenlight and the possibility of xenominer being redone on unity. They said sales alone were not enough to keep them going on Xbox and PC was kinda the same. But they must of thought steam could solve this since they went on greenlight. From the looks of it downgate was like you describe it, being its downfall thanks to it being in the indie section. Giving us the PVP we did not have in Xenominer. I definitely agree that locking the biomes was a bad move. Hopefully they will come back with some bug fixes and maybe more content updates. Modding the game helps keep it fresh for me.

Someone still patrols the forums quite like myself I see.
My only question now that you said something about the code of Xenominer being bad, is why didn't they just remake the game first?
It seems kind of unlikely that they would state that the code is bad and make two other games, while not focusing on the main game at hand.

As for Downgate and Swarm, I believe both were the downfall, to be honest.
Not only were they things we wanted to see inside Xenominer itself, there was no reason to separate a fanbase who already have those games, but want them inside one unifying game.
-You wanted block PvP, you had Murder Miners (Downgate for Xenominer)
-You wanted a base defense game, you had a plethora of Tower defense games (Swarm for Xenominer)

While on paper this seemed like an amazing idea, it split the player-base too much, and ultimately fell apart because they just had too many other games working against them.
Sure you can mine and build in Downgate and Swarm, but that's only a portion of what those games were designed for.

If the game is being remade currently, I believe it should be done as a side project, this way they don't have to sink a lot of time and money into it before launch.

Thanks for responding to my comment.
Enjoy your day.

~Ultris07
~Xenogears

[still crosshair]

Yea check often in hopes of some greenlight update or anything from the devs. I actually took a small about of time to see what I could find on the whole new engine thing. I did find that swarm and downgate run on the same or similar engine. However some posts do seem to contradict each other, but there could always be a missing link somewhere.

I pulled this quote from the swarm announcements area, I did remove some fluff so you can go read the whole thing here viewtopic.php?f=29&t=3854

With the new engine we began with Downgate, we've been able to massively upgrade a lot of the great things about both XenoMiner and Downgate, but add in some new twists.

Unlike in XM, where we can only handle about 5 venators (and that poorly) the new re-worked engine can support upwards of 50 active mobs, often all coming for you at the same time. We have six different hostile mobs in place for release, all with special weaknesses and strengths to keep you guessing.

All in all we believe this is our best game yet, and it definitely points towards the future vision we have for our XM universe games.

Something interesting to see though is that when they announced downgate they said it used the same engine as xenominer. So perhaps they all run the basic engine with modifications made for each game. They made downgate to help support the studio, diversify their portfolio, and with the hopes of bring more devs on full time. You can read the whole post here viewtopic.php?f=23&t=3178
In all I had high hopes for a merge of the 3 titles on PC at least. Where you load up Xenominer and choose between downgate,swarm, or classic xenominer. A few alterations and xenominer itself could grasp the basic concepts downgate and swarm had. I say basic because the other games go into more detail. Thanks for making conversation .

[QWERQY]

yes I know I'm a little late. bbbuuuuuuuut i agree on almost every point made in here. if you look back at some of my older posts (shield your eyes from the grammar and spelling) you will see i was quite hyped for Swarm. it was every thing i liked about xenominer AND every other thing i thought would be cool additions. so naturally i bought the game as soon as i could, and played it more than id like to admit. though the updates were far and few between, every time it seemed the forums had hope of being brought back to life everybody just died, and don't get me started on down gate (poor down gate survived about as long as a miner with no oxygen left.) all in all Xenominer and Xenominer Swarm are both great games with so much potential it hurts, and the community isn't THAT dead. but it seems that the devs either left the game, are working secretly on something big, or they're plotting to take over xenos.

oh and i scour the forums every few days

love-QWERQY
(shield your eyes from the spelling and grammar!!!)

[xenogears]

Yea check often in hopes of some greenlight update or anything from the devs. I actually took a small about of time to see what I could find on the whole new engine thing. I did find that swarm and downgate run on the same or similar engine. However some posts do seem to contradict each other, but there could always be a missing link somewhere.

I pulled this quote from the swarm announcements area, I did remove some fluff so you can go read the whole thing here viewtopic.php?f=29&t=3854

With the new engine we began with Downgate, we've been able to massively upgrade a lot of the great things about both XenoMiner and Downgate, but add in some new twists.

Unlike in XM, where we can only handle about 5 venators (and that poorly) the new re-worked engine can support upwards of 50 active mobs, often all coming for you at the same time. We have six different hostile mobs in place for release, all with special weaknesses and strengths to keep you guessing.

All in all we believe this is our best game yet, and it definitely points towards the future vision we have for our XM universe games.

Something interesting to see though is that when they announced downgate they said it used the same engine as xenominer. So perhaps they all run the basic engine with modifications made for each game. They made downgate to help support the studio, diversify their portfolio, and with the hopes of bring more devs on full time. You can read the whole post here viewtopic.php?f=23&t=3178
In all I had high hopes for a merge of the 3 titles on PC at least. Where you load up Xenominer and choose between downgate,swarm, or classic xenominer. A few alterations and xenominer itself could grasp the basic concepts downgate and swarm had. I say basic because the other games go into more detail. Thanks for making conversation .

yes I know I'm a little late. bbbuuuuuuuut i agree on almost every point made in here. if you look back at some of my older posts (shield your eyes from the grammar and spelling) you will see i was quite hyped for Swarm. it was every thing i liked about xenominer AND every other thing i thought would be cool additions. so naturally i bought the game as soon as i could, and played it more than id like to admit. though the updates were far and few between, every time it seemed the forums had hope of being brought back to life everybody just died, and don't get me started on down gate (poor down gate survived about as long as a miner with no oxygen left.) all in all Xenominer and Xenominer Swarm are both great games with so much potential it hurts, and the community isn't THAT dead. but it seems that the devs either left the game, are working secretly on something big, or they're plotting to take over xenos.

oh and i scour the forums every few days

love-QWERQY
(shield your eyes from the spelling and grammar!!!)

Thanks for the replies, and I still have hopes that this game will get picked up again one day.

My issue is that Gristmill tried to make games that already existed and are more popular.
Which wasn't good for them.
I can understand trying to diversify their portfolio, but they did not do anything unique with Downgate or Swarm to make them worth getting honestly.
Not saying that they aren't great games, but nothing really set them apart from the base game Xenominer. <- Probably the biggest issue

When people heard of Downgate being announced they thought it was going to be different than Xenominer.
And while yes, you can PvP in the game, that doesn't really make it different from Xenominer.
You can still mine and build up a base, etc., but honestly, that felt more like an expansion to me...

Swarm was kind of the same way, only with base defense instead of PvP murder fests.
It's basically a tower defense game with base building added to it.
You can still do all the same stuff in Swarm that you can in Xenominer, except now you go get resources and farm aliens.

Again not saying that these are bad ideas, it's just separately they fall apart, because they're exact copies of the main game, with different features.
And when trying to compete with games like Total Miner, Murder Miners, Minecraft, etc., they instead ruined their chance by splitting the game.
All 3 games have great potential unified, but divided they fall, and that's why I hope a proper redux of this game, with Downgate and Swarm as preinstalled features comes out in the future.

Also F' Microsoft... No indies anymore

Thanks for reading and, Enjoy your day.

~Ultris07
~Xenogears