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OwlFancier posted:It's... a top down 2d shooter. There are so damned few space games that actually include HOTAS/HOSAS. 
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Mar 19, 2023 20:05
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I just let the ai pilot for me in starsector lol
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Mar 19, 2023 20:53
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My tip for starsector is get yourself into an afflictor as soon as possible
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Mar 19, 2023 20:57
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Is there a date for the dlc release yet? The others all came out in April but I doubt that's the case this time.
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Mar 19, 2023 22:50
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Why not? It's already in Beta 6.
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Mar 19, 2023 23:08
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I know they said at some point it'll be later than usual due to the engine changes, there's still a lot of issues that need to get worked out with that. I'm expecting early summer.
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Mar 19, 2023 23:50
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Antigravitas posted:Why not? It's already in Beta 6. beta 7, actually: 6.00 Beta 7 Changelog posted:
also the start screen is showing little news ticker things teasing expansion content, so maybe that means they plan on releasing soon
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Mar 23, 2023 06:13
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It's also Steam Deck Verified now, if you are feeling especially masochistic.
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Mar 23, 2023 08:22
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Antigravitas posted:It's also Steam Deck Verified now, if you are feeling especially masochistic. Yeah, I was wondering why they even did that, haha 
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Mar 23, 2023 08:45
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I could see the tutorial/first couple of hours of a new game, maybe, but I did try to run it on my deck back when I first got it and I don't think it ever managed to actually load the save of my endgame empire and I don't think "make sure all the keyboard input is optional" would fix that.
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Mar 23, 2023 10:29
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Going to need to start a new game of this once the next expansion hits.
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Mar 23, 2023 11:38
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Same, if only because I think most of the mods I used are no longer supported I've won anyway
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Mar 23, 2023 14:16
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Major Isoor posted:Yeah, I was wondering why they even did that, haha It's basically a badge for "this game has proper controller support". I doubt they did much except tidy up controller setup and set good defaults. Poking around the game files it strikes me how extremely "Common Sense" X4's built is. Data files are just layered on top of each other in alphanumerical order, and they are just concatenated files with a .cat file describing (file name, offset, length) tuples, and a second set of files for signatures to verify contents. Audio is .ogg, controller/window stuff is SDL2, videos are h264 in .mkv containers via ffmpeg, save files are gzip compressed xml. The licenses.txt is a who is who of common projects: Luajit, libxml2, zlib, openssl, sdl2, etc. Honestly, it's one of the most boring games from a technical standpoint I've ever seen. No wonder that it has a native Linux version.
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Mar 23, 2023 14:17
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They're a small team who're fully taking advantage of all the excellent opensource implementations of functionality they need, instead of wasting time doing the classic proprietary not invented here syndrome.
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Mar 23, 2023 15:01
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My favorite way to play 3 was always the absolute “wrong” way to play from the average player perspective. I played as a pirate and only used whatever I could steal or whatever meager offerings I could buy from the pirate factions. I also usually kept the Teladi neutral so I could sell stolen ships to them. Oh and I’d usually play “Dead is Dead” too. It was very masochistic but oddly satisfying. I’d never be able to do that kinda challenge in X4 [Edit] oh there was a whole page of posts I missed, topics moved on, whoops! Galaga Galaxian fucked around with this message at 15:30 on Mar 23, 2023 |
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Mar 23, 2023 15:26
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Major Isoor posted:Yeah, I was wondering why they even did that, haha It runs surprisingly well, to be honest. Controller controls are still rough, though.
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Mar 23, 2023 16:15
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TheDeadlyShoe posted:OOS throughout the series has been plagued by outcomes being a lot different than in sector combat. It tends to swing back and forth between 'the player needs to be there for your dudes to win' and 'the player should never actually join a combat because that will make your dudes lose', depending on the game, the patch, and what kinds of ships you are using. Both of those outcomes are not great really. Basically this. I don't know how Starsector does it behind the scenes, but I do know that it still uses a heavily abstracted down model for fleets that you are not fighting. I want to ask, would this aspect of the game be worked on for the upcoming DLC + patch, or have they left it as is and it just "is what it is" ? I put some time into this game , and I WANT to like it, but the fact that the combat just plain "doesn't work" is a dealbreaker for me. I don't find intrinsic fun in setting up factories . I've still done it. I setup a comp substrate factory to make bank off the terran's lack of it, but the station builder is fiddly . I want to use those fat stacks of cash to fund space combat. If the combat is bad, there's not much point for me to do it.
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Mar 23, 2023 18:17
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Sample_text posted:I want to ask, would this aspect of the game be worked on for the upcoming DLC + patch, or have they left it as is and it just "is what it is" ? To your question, a page or so ago someone said they have literally just fixed main gun simulation out of sector, And to your statement, you gotta either rephrase it or be more specific because I don't see what you mean?
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Mar 23, 2023 18:35
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Oscar aint no Slouch posted:To your question, a page or so ago someone said they have literally just fixed main gun simulation out of sector, The combat doesn't work because the differences between in-sector and out of sector are too big. I want to watch my guys fight, but everytime I do they end up getting their asses kicked by forces they were dominating while I was halfway across the galaxy. The AI is terrible at self preservation, or using its boost to escape danger, or fleeing into the path of enemies. Those 2 factor means for me the combat "doesn't work". At least, the large scale fleet combat I'm building all this money for. In a completely unrelated rant , I'm sick to death of quests sending me in sectors camped at the entrance by Xenon. I boost away, turn to engage what follows me and find out my squad has been wiped out because they stood and fought like pillocks instead of following me...... like their fleet assignment says so : "follow". The combat is just bad, ok? EDIT: If all they did was mimic my movements exactly and hover around like those satelite power-ups in shmups, they'd be a million times more useful than what they are now. Sample_text fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Mar 23, 2023 |
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Mar 23, 2023 20:59
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Was having issues finding "Dal Busta" for the terrain quest line, get no indication on where he is. Google doesn't seem to help much either except that sometime in the past he was bugged/dead for certain starts. Any insight would be appreciated.
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Mar 24, 2023 04:28
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TheSpartacus posted:Was having issues finding "Dal Busta" for the terrain quest line, get no indication on where he is. Google doesn't seem to help much either except that sometime in the past he was bugged/dead for certain starts. Any insight would be appreciated. pretty sure you have to do the uhh hatvikah free league questline to get him
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Mar 24, 2023 06:06
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Sample_text posted:The combat doesn't work because the differences between in-sector and out of sector are too big. This is how these games have always been. They're generally far more concerned with building up industry than with being fun space shooters. It's easier to get your ships to do trade routes than to be good combat escorts. I love the X series, jank and all, but unfortunately I don't think you're going to find what you're looking for.
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Mar 24, 2023 07:19
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Tabletops posted:pretty sure you have to do the uhh hatvikah free league questline to get him Yep, finish the Free League stuff and he will be on your Player HQ.
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Mar 24, 2023 08:12
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Dal Busta is basically the Sith Lord of X4 imo
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Mar 24, 2023 10:25
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Ok I get what you mean now . I would say that while yes, the game is bad at being what you want it to be, I think you're treating it as something it isn't , but if you're aware of its limitations it is by no means bad. The game is also not perfect either and there's always room for improvement. On the topic of in-sector vs out-of-sector simulation, the divergence is notable and unfortunate, however you have to consider that once the battle is out of your sight, it's just one out of hundreds that could be getting simulated at that time, along with every other entity doing its thing in every sector. And consider that for every battle that doesn't work in your favor oos that should have, there should be an equal number that did go your way oos that shouldn't have. With the flight ai, I will admit that I too was disappointed when I hired my first wingmen and they died super fast. But then all enemies use that ai as well, so all ships in this game not piloted by you have abysmal survival rates, and conversely any fight you're personally involved in will swing massively in your favor given equal numbers, so any fight you really care about should have you in the midst So I guess what I'm trying to say is the playing field is mostly level, and you're putting too much scrutiny at too small a scale. This is more of an rts you can play from a first person view. Think more Eve online instead of elite dangerous. Winning is mostly decided by who can bring n+1 dudes unless in this case you can also personally tip the scale
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Mar 24, 2023 11:22
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The Kingdom End's soundtrack just came out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiVb4bkJUZs Beautiful stuff. I wonder when the DLC will be released.
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Mar 24, 2023 15:14
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Oscar aint no Slouch posted:
Some of this is self-inflicted because I've mostly been fighting Xenon. The thing is, I started Terran Cadet and the game's story has been pretty adamant about shoving them down my throat. Yaki plot means fighting through xenon. The Hatikva plot got sidelined by the fact that the entire top of the map was overrun by Xenon. My trading in Getsu Fune / The Void got side-lined by the sector getting overrun by ..... you guessed it. Xenon. Motherfuckers are EVERYWHERE. The specific gripe I have is ..... from what I noticed. Xenon are really designed in a really cheap /unfun way. Their AI is still dumb as a post. but their ships are designed to be basically long range flying gun turrets. They fly with flight assist disabled, slowly in a direction, while they're facing you and peppering you with bullets. If you get close to them, they burn the remainder of their shields to zip away. That's it . So , the developers knew their AI was dogshit, so they programed enemies that bypass this entirely . It's especially evident in those giant K destroyers. They're dumb as a sack of bricks. I have an AI mod installed, and I don't know if that's causing it, but they're always engaging travel drive trying to charge me..... poorly. They miss, end up in a terrible position every single time...... but it doesn't matter. Because unlike my lovely-rear end destroyers who have front facing guns that need to be aimed.....they don't. Because yet again, the developer knew their AI was dogshit and so designed enemies that can offload high damage on you from any direction (except their top, I guess? ) . THIS is why I'm so frustrated. These lovely AI motherfuckers keep swarming me everywhere I go and on any activity I try to do. I can swat down THOUSANDS of them but it doesn't matter because their economy cheats too. The rest of the factions can't put up much of a fight either. I've seen one of those giant Terran battlecruiser things get obliterated by a single Xenon destroyer because lel turrets. They're not fun to fight. They don't dogfight, they just plink away at me from long range. My AI buddies suck at dealing with them. The NPC factions suck at dealing with them. Maybe I got unlucky and the Xenon rolled a natural 20 so I "lost" this campaign. Maybe I traded too little and mined too much so I starved out the NPC factions. EDIT: Is there a mod that disables them outright? Or just makes them passive? Sample_text fucked around with this message at 17:05 on Mar 24, 2023 |
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Mar 24, 2023 16:51
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Antigravitas posted:Dal Busta is basically the Sith Lord of X4 imo He’s the space Kissinger to the player’s space Nixon.
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Mar 24, 2023 17:08
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The reason Destroyers kinda get whomped by Xenon K is that Xenon Ks are bigger, better, and stronger. Xenon K is an XL-sized warship with a much stronger hull and XL-class shield generators and lots of firepower. Destroyers are L-sized warships with L-class shield generators. The only advantages of destroyers are hangar bays, better turning and the long-ranged forward guns. Carriers are also XL-sized warships that can stand up to Xenon K on Hull/Shields, but they generally lack the firepower to actually win a duel with one. Only the Raptor can actually fight a K, statistically, but its poor shields mean it'll get banged up doing it. Though I'm not really familiar with the newer uber ships though so I can't speak as to them. The most fun I've had in combat in X4 was mounting an attack on a Xenon sector with a couple destroyers, a few corvettes, and a carrier stuffed full of cheap interceptors and cheap bombers. Xenon ships kept streaming in through the local gate and everything got very chaotic, very quickly. I was piloting fighters and M-classes and had to keep teleporting around to shore up against clusters of Xenon while the destroyers pounded the station. Huzzah for escape teleport, tho...haha.
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Mar 24, 2023 17:19
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Yeah xenon ships aren't just designed well, they're literally just better statted than anything equivalent the other factions can field. They punch above their weight quite consistently. Because the game is largely a matter of economics expressed via war, you are kind of expected to throw large numbers at the problem. You can outrange xenon ships yourself if you use the weapon mod system to boost your guns range, which you want to do on at least one personal destroyer I think so that you can slap them from out of range and besiege stations early on. But otherwise yes capital ships aren't very engaging to fight (or fly) because they just sit there shooting at each other for the most part. The vanilla game also doesn't really have interesting weaponry, which is why I would always run VRO which expands the variety of weapons at least and adds greater variation in projectile range and velocity as well as different weapons usable by the different factions. Ultimately though yes X just isn't a super good space combat game, it's an economics game where your character exists in-universe basically, so you can do most of the stuff yourself but you're generally expected to be focusing on sheer weight of numbers to win fights.
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Mar 24, 2023 18:02
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So there's a few concepts in this game that you have to grasp in order to make it do what you want. The whole universe is basically just a total war economy. Resources never truly run out either so wealth generation is only limited by how fast it gets extracted, now the xenon are ultimately the sink. If ships never blow up, all the factions would reach their pop caps and the shipyards would stop producing, stop buying, all the gears stop turning because everyone has what they need and want for nothing. On the other end, if too many ships are getting killed, there's no one to mine, no one to haul, no one to defend. So the economy ends up starving and the shipyards end up trickling out ships now and then. The game is designed in such a way where all the factions mine and haul just enough to get by, because that leaves room for the player to exploit and make money. So if you hire a bunch of miners to go mine for a faction, you're going to boost production, and their ship generation will outpace destruction and they'll dominate whoever they're fighting. This ties in to the whole Dal Busta conversation nicely too because you can do evil poo poo like make friends with everyone, build and mine and haul for them, making more ships that in the end just blow each other up instantly after undocking from your private shipyard that sells to both parties. Late-game you can make your economy self-sustaining, basically the rts phase where you've surpassed the need for money because there's nothing you really want to buy because you're only limited by how fast you can mine and build for yourself. When it comes to fighting Xenon, the main thing that makes them deadly is their L turrets. Those are on their capitals, and on their station defenses. The thing is, they're outranged by L plasma turrets, and the terran capital main guns. If you get yourself a Syn destroyer with L argon/paranid plasmas, you've got the best ship in the game imo, you can put 8 L turrets that can all fire forward at the same time while you shoot the main guns at your target. If you're having trouble in Hatikvah, that's because that system gets overrun by the Xenon literally next door. You're gonna want to save up a bit, and put a sizeable perma gatecamp there to stabilize the place. Probably at least 4 destroyers minimum, but more is better because once you get critical mass you'll kill everything before you take losses. That also trains your pilots so you can just put your rookies there for a first assignment. Here's what I've got going on there in my old save  
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Mar 24, 2023 18:18
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i've yet to have a campaign where the xenon did much of anything, even against the split. wonder why. Even with some of the mods that buff xenon aggression and stuff.
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Mar 24, 2023 18:27
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Tabletops posted:i've yet to have a campaign where the xenon did much of anything, even against the split. wonder why. It's their mining ships that get shot down everywhere.
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Mar 24, 2023 18:37
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Oscar aint no Slouch posted:So there's a few concepts in this game that you have to grasp in order to make it do what you want. Thank you for your detailed explanation. I realized I never mentioned where I actually got stuck in the campaign . I got past Hatikva. I now have a full base in Tharka's Cascade. The Syn with those Paranid plasma turrets funnily enough ended up exactly the thing I was using as my flagship. The whole reason I even started this dumb Xenon war to begin with was my defense installation in Hatikva got smashed up by one of those I battlecruisers. I figured some internal AI clock "leveled up"" the Xenon, so I better start beating their base down or more of those things will show up. One thing let to another and now I ended up owning Tharka. The other reason I did this was because those patriarch Split guys got absolutely OBLITERATED, like down to their shipyard and wharf getting attacked . I read online they're the only ones who sell railguns, and I really wanted railguns to mount on my ships so I felt like I "had" to step in and intervene or I would miss out on the entire playthrough . The reason I got so mad was I figured that if I start chunking through their solar power plants and kill those S miners, it would slow them down. It did not. I ended up in a long slog that took me an entire day to clear, where I probably killed around 5 or 6 of those I battlecruisers (I was right, the Xenon "leveled up" and started sending them in droves) . Even now those things still come through, because I guess all the xenon on the entire map are interconnected? And they share resources with each other. So all the mining they do off screen from the lost sectors the NPC's fail to defend ends up transformed into more battleships for me to burn through. Meanwhile, the Void is a forgone conclusion. Xenon have like 2 of those I ships in there and I cannot be asked to care enough to give a poo poo. Also, I read here some people tried to board a Terran battlecruiser? I never thought to try that since I thought it would instantly tank my 20 reputation if I attack an entire fleet. I might have to try that as well when I work up the patience to play again.
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Mar 24, 2023 18:40
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I find the split consistently get wrecked by the xenon because their sectors are very spread out, riddled with pockets of xenon territory, and all their resources are near the xenon as well. So they almost always seem to collapse immediately. Not helped by the fact that the argon also are hostile with them, so the western split get absolutely bodied from the xenon and the argon and the eastern split have basically no defence of their own because they're a client state of the western split. As far as I know the different xenon pockets are not interconnected and can not share resources. I think they are all under the same "command" so to speak but the resources actually need to get to the shipyard to produce ships, but all the xenon home sectors have massive resource fields in them so they can harvest indefinitely on their home turf and they require no processing steps, it's all done in the shipyard, minerals and energy go in, ships come out. So they can't be strategically disrupted unless they send all their miners out and get them blown up, which they sometimes do rather than mining their own sectors, but they absolutely have the ability to produce ships just using their local resource fields. What you might be experiencing is that tharka's cascade is not, if i recall, the last sector on that spur. There is at least one other xenon sector deeper west from that sector. If the xenon keep coming that means you haven't eliminated all their shipyards or resourcing operations in that cluster. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Mar 24, 2023 |
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Mar 24, 2023 18:47
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drat it can’t wait for Kingdom’s End to waste time on this stupid game again. I was one DLC behind so bought it on the spring sale but I’m not starting a new game now.
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Mar 24, 2023 23:46
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The xenon simultaneously have a local population cap for each sector or cluster defense, as well as a global cap. So if you wipe out all xenon from your corner of the galaxy, their fleets will get larger everywhere else
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Mar 25, 2023 02:06
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William Bear posted:The Kingdom End's soundtrack just came out. This is some good stuff, and makes me realize this style was what I missed most from the X3 OST.
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Mar 25, 2023 03:07
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William Bear posted:The Kingdom End's soundtrack just came out. This is some good stuff, and makes me realize this style was what I missed most from the X3 OST.
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Mar 25, 2023 03:07
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Follow up post: Why are so many of the weapons in this game hot garbage?
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Mar 25, 2023 19:31
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