I participated in a closed beta test of one game, the dev sent the keys to activate the game on Steam. After the test and before the actual release they were revoked. I see this as a completely legit practice, they gave it for free and took it away later. There's no way for Steam to know if the key was paid for or just given away, maybe for a limited time so I don't see why this should be explicitly disabled for all developers. Of course, if it was a paid key that's been revoked just like this it's unacceptable but it's the first such case and it must be settled with Steam support and legal means. After all, that's not the only way the dev could scam the customers, they can ban them in-game using Steam IDs or remove the game for everybody (push empty depots or such). It's not possible to prevent this reliably.

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I remember how I got into the first game. I actually loved the soundtrack and the game was on sale so I bought it just for that beautiful music. Imagine how surprised I was when I found there's also a cool game included! For those who're new to the franchise, it's a PvE type of the game. Even in multiplayer you're playing in coop against the AI. The unique feature here is that the AI doesn't follow your rules and does all sorts of weird shit to beat you. The more planets you get, the harder it becomes. It can spawn waves of ships onto your planets, it can run a suicidal attack through several of your systems to get to your home, in this second game it even can open an exogalactic wormhole on a planet that has no hostile neighbors and hit you in the back.

You can't do all that but you can do something else: think, plan and outsmart the enemy. The AI doesn't have any initiative, it only responds to your actions. But you have to do something to win so you basically battle with yourself, although very indirectly. You should also build stationary turrets, minefields, shields and other structures to defend the planets and safely push forward.

The game has a lot of content, hundreds of ship types, many factions and ancient weapons to capture, repair and use. It's not yet polished as the first installation, that's for sure, but it's already playable and very fun. I admit, I'd lost some faith in them when I saw the early iterations. It was so... mobile-like. Very bright, everything was huge like made for touchscreens (it still is, a bit, but you can scale the UI in options). The first game had very dense UI, this had a too sparse one. Fortunately, the team stopped midway and decided to redo the game almost from scratch so it's still AI War and not something else completely. I can tell they succeeded for sure. It's great when the team has a vision and commitment, they don't stop even when it looks like a shipwreck for an outsider.

They also added some stats to the ships and structures, like albedo, that affects some other stats (there are ships that hit the ships with higher albedo better than others, it affects cloaking and so on). I don't see, however, how that might affect the strategic aspect because I always end up with a giant blob of all available ships steamrolling the enemy (or getting killed gradually), no way I'd plan on who attacks what considering all these parameters. I guess that's ok though. If different ships behave and look different, that's enough for them to be fun. The starships is another story, they have low caps and very specialized. They can and should be moved strategically.

The first game is full of hotkeys, this one is not (yet), like there's no context menu or filters on the galaxy map. I'm pretty sure it's all planned as one of the goals was "not dumbing the game down". One of the most handy is L that splits the selection in half, you can easily send half (or 1/4 if you press it again) of your units to one place and the rest somewhere else and both parts would be equal in power. There also was Shift+L in AIWC that selected 1/3 of the current selection, but it's not here yet. I wish such a key were available in other RTS'es.

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Quoting: KelsI tried to play X3: Reunion, and it was utterly unplayable due to a rolling bug that set my ship spinning unless I actively held it in place. It was reported to the devs by a number of people, but to the best of my knowledge never fixed.

Hopefully they're a little more responsive with this one.

That's probably your mouse being detected as a gamepad. Had such issues in some games with A4Tech mice. There's a common solution: delete the appropriate "joystick" device file in /dev/input either manually or via udev rule script. Like this: https://manerosss.wordpress.com/2016/05/31/fix-mouse-detected-as-joystick/ [External Link]

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That's more like it.

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Two WEEKS? That's insane! That probably means they already have the game completed and just release the episodes one by one so it feels like series. [LiS 1 had 2 months between episodes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Is_Strange). Same for BtS [External Link].

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Looks really interesting, although a bit frightening — it has so many mechanics to digest. I never got into the X universe, tried X3 but it was pretty complicated and I didn't feel that typical AAA push from one goal to another. I know the game is deep but I just didn't know what to do and why. Hope this one won't forget about newcomers.

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Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: rkfgLiS2 also has Denuvo so it's unlikely to work well if at all. Captain Spirit launches fine but crashes after a minute or so, it also has Denuvo and UE4.

As for the game itself, I'll wait until episode 2 comes out to decide whether to be happy about the port or not. For now it looks like something I don't like a single bit and it's very sad.

Eh? None of that has anything to do with Feral though.

Yeah, I was referring to this:

Quoting: ageres

Quoting: GoldpawI'm currently running Walking Dead perfectly there, and aren't these games built on more or less the same engine?

TWD is on its own engine, LIS2 is on UE4.

These games won't run on Proton most likely.

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LiS2 also has Denuvo so it's unlikely to work well if at all. Captain Spirit launches fine but crashes after a minute or so, it also has Denuvo and UE4.

As for the game itself, I'll wait until episode 2 comes out to decide whether to be happy about the port or not. For now it looks like something I don't like a single bit and it's very sad.

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: rkfgThe game has just been updated, could that be the bugfix? Eike, can you test it?

I don't know how, I's not like the game is having save slots. And I wouldn't want to play through whole episode two again at the moment. Sorry.

If you completed the game, there's collector's mode. It allows to play any episode and even choose a starting scene. The only difference is that your choices aren't recorded but we don't need that.

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The game has just been updated, could that be the bugfix? Eike, can you test it?

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