still crosshair wrote: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 Gristmill wrote: 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

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QWERQY wrote: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