Yeah I thought this was poorly implemented. You need to send an aircraft (with at least 1 soldier/vehicle in it) to the cleared site and it will harvest the material as long as it hovers there. But to actually craft a weapon, you need both a specific amount of material harvested and also control a special forge site associated with that one material. Which you may not have even discovered yet.
Clear as mud I have to say and I only got anything produced here way into the lategame. Given how early you get the questline, it’s way beyond your resources to make use of it early on and is an unwelcome distraction at that stage.
That said, all the weapons here have infinite ammo and the grenade launchers and melee weapons were pretty awesome with the right perks. The crossbow was a great backup weapon for my snipers, too.
Did they ever change the thing where what you can aim at on a monster changes based on your timing, as the monster throbs and undulates? That was a dealbreaker for me but if they fixed it, I’ll dive in!
Eh, I profoundly disagree with some of the core concepts of that piece, but that’s neither here nor there. The animation thing has no place in a turn based game one way or the other. I’ve raged about missed shots that happen because the ‘more animated idle anim’ kicked in just as my soldier finally fired and the head moved or whatever.
Yep. It’s what made me realize this whole aiming business was a bad fit. It’s a good gimmick, but really you don’t need it. All you need is the ability to aim anywhere on the battlefield, as many isometric games (including original x-com) have done. You want the game to just shoot to a discrete location in the block when you do that. That’s a feature, not a bug. You do not want to be at the whim of the animation system, just because the developers didn’t want to halt their animations when you aim for aesthetic reasons.
PP says “let’s allow aiming anywhere” as if it’s a new thing. But it isn’t – it was available in OG x-com. The only new thing is doing it in first person view, and allowing to hit any place visually. You really don’t want that – you don’t want small things like movement and model shape to determine what can be hit. The way the old games (xcom, Jagged Alliance) did it was actually better: they simulated/approximated the shot to a location, and that was the kind of abstraction that works best for a turn-based game.
Sure. I’m also okay with the way Firaxis Xcom does it. Which I assume is rolling a die. It’s a board game, let it be a board game.
Turn-based combat is BY DEFINITION a board-game-style abstraction. To mix that up in an unholy combo with real-time monster movement makes absolutely no sense. You’ve already made the decision about the combat being abstracted when you made the game turn-based, ya ding dongs!
See, before this even came out I was up thread concerned about the aiming stuff and how it didn’t look “fun” to me, for one thing it seems like it would slow the gameplay down a bit more than I’d be happy with, and here I’m still seeing people don’t like it.
Well, originally aimed shot was supposed to be only for snipers. But they liked it, and it served as a powerful gimmick to differentiate themselves from x-com2. I can understand why they went with it – it does seem compelling at first. I do like the fact that the bullet is actually calculated. It just shouldn’t be calculated as if it’s a shooter: it should be calculated in an abstract way that doesn’t depend on silly factors that are only aesthetic. And funny enough, that’s what OG x-com (to some degree) and jagged alliance, xenonauts etc have been doing all along.
Sure, it seems compelling… at first! Exactly. You would hope that at some point in the game design process someone would raise their hand (presumably only Julian Gollop was empowered to do this) and say, “Aaaactually… this isn’t working.”
But now you’ve lost your central gimmick and you’re just making “dollar-store Xcom.”
Well, I disagree with most of the points made against it and think it brought a lot of fun to the game. I like that it isn’t abstracted past the breaking point ala new-XCOM nonsense where overwatch shots just blatantly, and frequently, clip through terrain features like they aren’t even there.
This is, in part, the price paid in the switch to high-detailed 3D environments; it’s a lot more difficult to do this sort of sleight of hand without it looking, well… stupid. Don’t get me wrong, I think XCOM was great, but I just don’t want another helping of that particular nonsense.
I also don’t consider the ability of old X-COM to shoot at any arbitrary tile to be equivalent to what PP does. Correctly working out which section of a wall to shoot with the gauss sniper rifle and scoring a hit through it (much less a killer headshot!) is extremely rewarding. It’s not a perfect system, after all what is, but I’d certainly prefer to see this idea iterated and improved than just consigned to the dustbin.
The animation issue is definitely a misstep, but resolvable; in all honesty it really only affects 2 enemies in the game (chirons, tritons) as the others are pretty static. If they froze enemies during the entire aiming/firing/connection window and dumped the ‘extreme’ triton/chiron idle anims it would resolve the issue entirely.
Don’t write off the satisfaction you can feel slowly, and literally, dismantling an enemy. Blowing the arms off those shield dudes never gets old, and hunting for that weakspot is just so, so much more engaging than selecting an arm symbol on a paperdoll flyout.
Regarding the animation issue, I’m pretty sure that they “solved” slowing the time, nearly pausing it, the moment you aim in first person. At first versions of the game there was no time-slowing and it was annoying, but now it feels right to me.
But hey! That’s only my opinion.
I’ve not finished the campaign, always start a new one with self-imposed iron man (honest man) and play a few hours and stop because don’t want to be burned when the game is ready, since the Epic release feels a lot like early access.
But in my opinion they developers are in the right track and maybe, with a few patches, expansions and love it will become a gem.
I did notice the slo-mo but they didn’t go far enough, for me. The issue is more pronounced for non-sniper weapons that fire in a burst but I think it speeds back up when your soldier starts firing. The ‘flinch’ that they do when they’re struck also muddles this issue a bit more in these scenarios.
As for the animation “issue”, sheesh. I have played this game a ton. I have never once had an issue with an animation messing up a shot. Not once. I don’t doubt it could happen, but anyone who has decided not to play because of it – and especially anyone who thinks it somehow compromises the design – is working overtime to manufacture some outrage. As @fox.ferro says, it’s a resolvable issue and as @Grenyes pointed out, it’s been pretty much resolved.
In retrospect, that’s certainly fair. But when it was released, it didn’t feel like early access. It’s just that so much stuff got tidied up and polished and improved and reworked and fixed and…
