My first impressions

My thoughts when first playing Xonotic.

The Good:
- Cool Skyboxes, happy colorful maps, Music, and characters
- Better animations than Nexuiz
- Awesome graphics! And it still runs smooth for a sucky computer like mine that can't run UDK3.
- Better weapon balance than Nexuiz - It takes the creative weapons from Unreal Tournament to the awesome movement abilities like in Quake 3 and combine them.
- Newbie friendly easy and speedy movement controls
- Vehicles!
- Giblets! But controlled classy giblets (Lol! Nexuiz giblets was awesome too, but after a while, you cant see anything because gibs were flying everywhere in your face!)


The Bad:
- Level 23 Campaign has a bug in it. There is no AI for me to face against.
- The movement at times can be a little floaty, and especially if you hit someone with a rocket. Like they fly 100ft in the air compared to Quake Live where they just fly 15ft in the air when hit with a rocket (The physics seems little too light like a feather. The characters needs to be a little heavy to fall faster.).
- Small community (What is this?! A really great high-end free open source game with a great OST, sound, graphics, mixes elements from Quake and Unreal, and everything, but STILL, a small community?! I convinced one of my friends to check it out at least.)
- Everyone always chooses Instagib this, Instagib that. WTH?! WHY!? Why is it so popular? I can't seem to manage to find a pure vanilla [ctf,dm,etc] server with players in it (I only came across one dm vanilla server so far with 3 players in it. That was the most fun I ever had).
- No ACTUAL REAL campaign level. No actual story backround to set the mood. And you know, like actually facing bad guys placed in specific locations in parts of the map and finding the key to go to the next room sort of thing, like in Doom or Quake 1/2.
- No Tutorial level how to use all the weapons proficiently. I had to figure out certain weapon attack combinations on my own, and I am still learning. I had to get help from a fellow Xonotic player to help me out.
- No matchmaking system - possibly one of the reasons why there is a small community. At first, I was getting owned left and right at first (at that ONE vanilla server game). But luckly with my background of Quake Live skills, and determination I manage to get past the torcher of loosing badly. This game IS NOT newbie friendly like it said in your Special Features. I can understand a newbs pain, and they'll probably just give up right away and uninstall the game.
- Vehicles and Turrets are a bit buggy and that flying vehicle is overpowered - because it can rain down hell upon anyone! There is no anti-air vehicle! (based off of my experience when playing a *sigh* modded server ).


Overall, I find this the best twitchy based FPS that is out there (Better than Quake Live, better than Nexuiz, and better than retail Nexuiz), with a little bit of tweaks here and there in the gameplay, I bet it will grow huge in popularity towards the near future (so I don't have to deal with all this instagib servers and actually compete against people who wants to play in a vanilla server.
I just find it a little disappointing how the there is a small community. But that doesn't tick me off as much, compared to EVERYONE just like playing instagib all the time. It is annoying! It is like someone offering you a free vacation at a ski resort, and all you do is only take advantage of watching the tv in your hotel room, nothing else! But overall, its a fun game to play on and off.

For the campaign bug (I think you mean level 21, not 23?), see this: [url]http://dev.xonotic.org/issues/1111[url]. There is a fix in the comments.

Most of your other points have been addressed in forum discussions, maybe others can rehash the ones I omitted.

We don't have enough players for matchmaking, and the stats system is still quite young. I guess you'll need some patience for this (or coding skills, perhaps? ;)

Vehicles are not exactly finished, they still suffer from quite a few bugs, some of them are already fixed in the git repository.

Tutorials will have to wait until weapons are stable. Before 1.0, weapons might change radically between releases. In fact, this is likely to happen in 0.7. Read the blog on the front page for more details.

Yep, we are a small community, but we're a nice community too. Newbies are always welcome to ask for help, we have a lot of friendly experienced players who would be willing to help.

Community is also small'ish as the game hasn't been promoted much at the moment and thats because it still is not near a 1.0 release so things are still being changed a bit. However it is slowly becoming more popular without to much exposure which is good. We also have a pickup channel on IRC which is becoming increasingly popular with quite a lot of people on there.

There's only one instagib server populated, that's pussy delight. But according to the stats it's the most popular server. So you're right, many people prefer instagib. You'll find this for all fast paced FPS (W§W, Nexuiz, Sauerbraten ...) with the exception of QL and QW. I wouldn't say it's like watching TV in a ski resort, more like skiing the blue pistes and not the black. I think you'll have to live with these noobs

There's only one instagib server populated, that's pussy delight. But according to the stats it's the most popular server. So you're right, many people prefer instagib. You'll find this for all fast paced FPS (W§W, Nexuiz, Sauerbraten ...) with the exception of QL and QW. I wouldn't say it's like watching TV in a ski resort, more like skiing the blue pistes and not the black. I think you'll have to live with these noobs

Yeah, I guess so. Just 5 minutes ago, I played a pure DM server, and within 3 minutes I made newbs rage quit. I was too late to stop my "ownage" before they left!
If I have to rate myself how good I am in twitchy based FPS. It would be like a 7.3/10. I'm not as good as those players who somehow memorize the spawns and "hot spots" of maps. But I am fairly good at it, where I can pick up and play sort of thing.

Come to #xonotic.pickup and we can have a match!

Community is also small'ish as the game hasn't been promoted much at the moment

there was never any really promoting even back in the nexuiz times. You should know it better then anyone else.

Compared to nexuiz, Xonotic really hasn't been posted around on that many site's though cortez, also I think nexuiz got a ton of downloads from stormforge?

It's also common knowledge still a lot of Nexuiz player's don't know about Xonotic also. But anyway, I also remember Nexuiz didn't really boom until it hit the 2.1+ stage.

I feel like instagib being popular goes across many games. QL, Sauerbraten, Xonotic, etc.

GOD, I miss this game. I keep telling myself "this is when I'm actually coming back," but I always get busy.