Loved the first part. Definitely going to buy this soon. :)

It's on my backlog but I have to finish Everspace One first. "Where we are going, we won't need eyes to see."

Fair enough. I have not bought the game yet and they're not listed on the store. Maybe when they get implemented, I'll buy it.

I think we do not use the word "support" in the same way here ;)

From what I understand, you use it as "does this game run well?" (I will call that technical support). Here I was talking about "am I entitled to commercial and technical support from the distributor?" (I will call that commercial support). The technical issues I can work around, as I have been tinkering with gaming on Linux long before WINE 1.0. But in my opinion a distributor do not deserve as much of my money if they do not provide commercial support for the games I buy from them.

I understand the choice that the devs of Everspace 2 did there, and I kind of approve it. Even if I think they made a big mistake by not doing real multi-platform development from the beginning, a mistake that most probably is the main reason for them having to drop Linux support in the end (and they probably were as unhappy with this decision than I am myself). At least they are promising to work towards improving technical support, and for people like me who care more about commercial support they are proposing refunds. That's already much better than what we can see from many developers/distributors.

I will play the game at some point anyway, because it looks really good (and the first Everspace was nice already). But I will treat it as any other Windows-only game: not buying it unless it is sold for 10 € or less. By dropping commercial support for Linux the devs did not lose a sale from me, they only reduced the money they will be getting out of it.

If on the other hand they had sneakily removed the promised commercial support without being willing to put efforts on good technical support, or without proposing refunds, I would have totally passed on the game. No matter how much I wanted to play it in the first place. I am glad they did not.

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To make things clear I did not pre-order/backed this game, so I have nothing to ask a refund for. But still, I think it was important that they proposed that option so people who did do not feel cheated.

Even in the sense that you are using, the situation here is that "the distributor" cannot provide commercial support because one of the critical sub-components of the game (namely the game engine) in turn does not provide adequate commercial support on Linux. There are arguably no AAA games out there that use UE4's Vulkan renderer (outside of Fortnite on mobile IIRC), simply because it's known to be garbage.

Did Rockfish know this as well when they made their initial promises? Possibly. Perhaps they were lured into it by promises made in turn by Epic, that in fact never materialized. In a sense their hand was forced by their choice of partners.

The only thing they could have done better was assessing the feasibility of providing decent Linux support - because this was clearly not available when they started the journey and I'm sure they were aware of it. They made such promises on what in marketing/sales circles is known as "selling the dream".

Nice release and already saw some gameplay from the release version which looked appealing.
Long Campaign sounds great as well (though not sure how immersive it is). Hoping a few more reviews here turn up now that it is the release version as the early access version reviews might be "outdated" (a few things i read in them didn't sound that good but pretty likely they changed it in the 1.0 release)

((((All I can say: Hold off on a purchase. They need to fix this shit first. Game crashes without fail when trying to buy ships (unless you send the new ship to home base) and random crashes can occur when changing from play area to sublight travel. It's frequent enough to be a right pain in the ass.))))

Never mind...

Had Everspace 1 in my lib since forever and tried it recently 'cause for some reason I really got the urge to dust off my trusty Logitech flight stick and have fun in a nice modern (post 90ys :P) 'pit sim.

... I ended up reinstalling and playing some X-Wing :/

Does ES2 supports joysticks?

Hm. Looks like the Galaxy integration is at fault for the game crapping out. Running the game's exe without Galaxy made all those crashes go away. Oh well.

yea it does, out of the box this time, at least for the hotas it does

I liked the first game.
I hope this one is at least as fun as the first one.
Well, if so, it's always a game worth playing.

We have seen that a couple times, like GOG providing commercial Linux support for the Infinity Engine games (the classic, pre-Enhanced Edition builds), Two Worlds or the FlatOut games, despite the developers providing no technical support. I bought Two Worlds and the 2 FlatOut games only because of this commercial support, even if I knew at the time that I would drop GOG WINE wrapper to build my own instead. (the Infinity Engine games I would have bought anyway)

But these are obviously exceptions, the general rule is what you describe.

I was about to say I played it for about 6 hours so far (in Wine/Linux) and had no crashes whatsoever (not a Galaxy user).

Stop with the stupid joke will ya? Everybody can see that they just misspelled "wary".

Nice! Thanks :)