I haven't seen these allegations, but I've read the investment information on fig and talked it over with some finance and investment folks and the long and short of it was crowd fund if you want but stay away from the investment opportunity. Basically, best case, you break even in 5 years maybe even make some money in a decade or so. Worst case, fig folds before Psychonauts 2 ships and you get nothing and you have no recourse. Most likely, you never break even and shareholder lawsuits against fig bleed them dry over the course of the years.

No serious investor would consider this opportunity, the return is pitiful, and the risks are very high.

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Doublefine peaked with Psychonauts and Brutal Legends. Game play has never been their strong suit and with Tim's new friends, I can't see them pulling off a story with more punch than an after school special.

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I always wished I could get UFO:AI stable on my tablet.

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I play a bunch in beta and it was pretty decent overall, hard but usually fair. Biggest problem I had was dealing with obstacles in the line of fire, they were still tweaking it up until release but I wouldn't count on any shots fire near cover to work and I wouldn't assume that because you can't fire past cover at an enemy that they are likewise blocked.

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Risk of Rain was still weak on Linux last I played. The game really needs to be play was a gamepad and controller support under Linux is bit of a crapshoot for that title.

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How much of the game is sitting behind DLC paywalls?

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Quoting: melkemindIn the free software community, we tend to place more value on people who actually work to earn their money. Software development doesn't stop when the last line of code is written. Those in favor of paid mods say that they will produce higher quality mods. That may or may not happen. We all know, for example, there is some very good community-supported software out there that rivals any paid software. Like anything, paid mods have their advantages and disadvantages. It's up to the consumers to decide if the good outweighs the bad.

That seems to be changing these days. I got dog piled pretty hard on r/linux_gaming for suggesting that distributing FOSS as gratis and charging for support is better model than selling licenses.

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Quoting: edqeYeah, unfortunately the UI is still quite bad. It has always been in X games. Well, once you get to usen them they are relatively quick and painless.
I wonder if there is enoughcore fans to keep Egosoft running despite it's not big company in any mean (~20 people). It wouldn't be huge surprise if ES tries to make X series accessible for wider amount of people.

Can't happen until they get someone to shore up the UI side of things. Almost all the reviews from non-X players hammer X:R hard for its UI.

Quoting: edqeThey made their games (X:AP and X Rebirth) playable with gamepads but X Rebirth (maybe even X:TC and X:AP) is way too CPU intensive to be designed for console.

Yeah ... no, X:R was, at some point in its development, a cross platform title, way too much was built for gamepads instead of KB+M. Auto-rolling, circular menus, crappy KB mapping options, all signs that Egosoft was planning for this to be a gamepad focused release. As far as I know the drugs required to get a company high enough to think a PC only title would best be optimized for gamepads are only legal in Amsterdam.

Quoting: edqeWell, the ships are way too slow to get anything useful done without SETA. Of course it can be done but would like to see someone actually playing X without SETA :)

Afterburners and jumpdrives. Only part of X3:TC that really needs SETA after you have those is waiting for big freighter to maneuver their fat asses into position.

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Quoting: edqeYou should be able to switch it off in Settings.

I didn't notice a switch for that, but I wasn't looking too hard.

Quoting: edqeTo me X series felt quite stagnant and not going forward anymore. The games are not easy for new players and I'm sure it shows in sales as well. In 90's times were a bit different because gamers had used to play games like that. Nowadays we have very simple games with tons of hand holding. "The Order: 1886" as one of extreme example.

Egosoft's core fan base is not made up of folks that like simple games, I know that the game was released to retail shelves, but the X brand isn't associated with simple games and X:R isn't particularly simple if only due to the inane UI, [Return]-1-5 to enable long range scan, then [Return]-1-1-1-1 to switch to station scan, because mapping cycling to [ and ] would have been so hard. I mean it takes effort to achieve a UI as needlessly complex as Dwarf Fortress's, but Egosoft pulled it off. Seriously, I have a cockpit loaded with screens and button and all of them do nothing.

Quoting: edqeEgosoft is now re-implementing their rendering engine with OpenGL/(Vulkan in future?) which gives me hope that X series is not going to be publish for consoles. I hope X Rebirth and especially X games after that will get more complex and versatile - like Star Citizen. X series is CPU heavy which of course keeps it away from consoles as well.

That X:R was clearly designed for consoles doesn't precisely help its case.

Quoting: edqeI think SETA has always felt cheating and I'm not sure if it has been explained in lore very well. The older X games has been design around SETA and getting rid of that required some big changes to game mechanism too. I understand lots of players like SETA and would like to see coming back.

Time acceleration or jump cuts exist in almost all space and flight sims aside from the more hardcore and most arcady titles. X3 had stuff to do in the down time, you could set a course and then manage your fleet, X:R's ship is like a car, if you want to pay attention to anything but the space ahead, you need to take your foot of the gas.

Quoting: edqeOuch, mini games. I hope they are placeholders and will be replaced with some more complex (in good way) and deep mechanism.

I doubt it, it has been a year and a half already and if that's still a placeholder, like the first-person station sections, and the crafting section, etc. I feel bad for anyone that paid full price.

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Quoting: edqeWhat do you think makes "X3" insanely deep compared to X Rebirth?

Well...

Quoting: edqeWhat X Rebirth is still lacking is better fleet commands etc.

That'd be the first problem, in earlier X games I managed a fleet, I could command ship X to go to Y and do Z where all 3 of those where rather unlimited and applied equally to my ship and the ships in my fleet. I X:Rebirth my squadron just kind of float behind me. I think some of them got destroyed, but I can't really say, I never got notified, and it's not like any of my ships could keep in formation anyways so they were worthless for combat.
Also, they gave the universe an up, that my ship insists on trying to orient itself against, even in combat. I'm assuming that new players were getting twisted around, but that's a "baby's first space game" feature and I don't think anyone is picking up an X title without having some experience with space sims.
Raising your rep in older games was best done by setting up trade relations with a faction, now you kill unarmed ships sitting in traffic for rep, it's a bit horrifying as to what that implies.

Quoting: edqebut I trust Egosoft will add them eventually. X Rebirth feels to me like X:BtF - a release for a new engine and game mechanisms upcoming X games and based on.

It does kind of feel like they threw away a decade worth of improvements.

Quoting: edqeI personally think it is a big improvement to old titles. They get rid of SETA which was broken by design and without mods X3 is very painful experience. Do you play X3 stock version which has no community mods integrated (by Egosoft) or added by you?

I never really had a problem with SETA, this new system of highways is probably better, but the highway travel sequences are a big annoyance as the autopilot is still pretty miserable about dealing with navigation in close proximity to other ships. I always used the community mod pack from Egosoft, and I would for X:R as well, but many of the more talented modders don't seem to be interested in X:R so improving the game via mods is progressing slowly.

Quoting: edqeSpaceship interiors is a bit odd and feels like a placeholder for upcoming releases. It is good feature have in the engine and possible to mod out for now.

My favorite bit was when I made first contact with a civilization and the first thing I did was crawl through their air ducts and steal all their shit. Then I had a conversation with someone who hadn't heard a peep about the PMC about how the PMC's recent use of Xenon tech was a bad idea. Also, the flat line mini game sucks pretty bad.

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