Base game is $12.99 on Fanatical, while supplies last. This is a historical low price.
Well this prompted me to finally get War of the Chosen - holy hell a 62GB download?
I know I sound like a broken record at this point (talk about dating myself BTW), but did they ever fix the stupid “upcoming events queue” bug that occurs when using the Steam Controller? The one that they introduced with the very first DLC and makes the game unplayable (it registers a click on the button as a double click, so the queue opens and immediately closes)? Did they ever patch the PC game to support other controllers?
I just re-installed this, hooked up my Xbox controller, and went through about a half hour of hell trying to make it work before I uninstalled it again. I’m not sure what hoops you have to jump through to make it work correctly, but stuff like this seriously pisses me off from a full price AAA game.
It’s not just the fact that it doesn’t work, there are all kinds of bugs associated with trying to switch between controller and mouse in the in game menu. It’s like there has been zero QA done on this menu at all, as these aren’t obscure problems to find.
With the Chosen expansion on sale for $17 at GMG I finally broke down and purchased it. I loved the first XCOM but something about the 2nd never excited me. I hope that with the expansion I can get into it properly now.
I’m really enjoying the new content. I just wish there was a way to color uniforms. I really got used to knowing where each and every soldier was at a glance.
I see it on sale. I am tempted. I never really dug into XCom or XCom 2 despite theoretically being into it. What specifically does War of the Chosen add? Does it weave into standard XCom2 such that it would be good to by then start a full game for realzy? Or it is really just for folks that played through XCom2 already?
You know, I couldn’t put my finger on it, but this is totally right!
I have kind of trained myself to play at a brisk pace instead of deliberating my turn since I think that ultimately the game is just way more fun if you act like you are in a hurry and working yourself in and out of jams.
With how fast the soldiers get skills and new equipment and how they all look the same it is harder to play that way because I am constantly figuring out who has a med kit or ammo type or run and gun or whatever.
While I can’t rattle off what the differences are because it’s been awhile since I played xcom2 w/o WOTC blended in, but I do recall distinctly feeling that in comparison once WOTC was introduced there was no way I’d play Xcom 2 w/o it.
It adds a lot of stuff that just blends into the campaign. Totally play with it added on from the start. Otherwise you basically have to play the game a second time to experience it.
So far this is my experience as well. I do not remember the original game very well beyond me turning off the timers - which I did again - but it seems that this Chosen stuff is just well-weaved into the campaign and provides more interesting encounters.
finished three of the new missions, stuck on the last one called lazarus project, get to the 4th mission and run into a map where I can’t find a way to retrieve someone w/o triggering 3 pods at the same time, come to think of it, it might actually be 4 at once.
what’s proving to be the problem is the ppl you take on the mission flat out suck, not only is it the wrong classes, the ones you’re given have an absolutely crap set of traits, like ones no one in their right mind would chose in building out a character
anyone else done this one yet?
That’s why Bradford isn’t in charge! Man sucks at character builds!
I found the new missions quite lackluster. I really wanted to play them for the whole story aspect, of how the new xcom formed.
The first series seemed like it was going in the right direction, starting off with bradford being aimless and just hooking up with survivors who turned into an alien killing squad. Then the whole story of xcom2’s origins stop there. The next set of missions have nothing to do with the big story. Shen’s missions are just fetch me some part over and over and over. I stopped in the last set. Its just a bunch of BS with the difficulty and seems largely irrelevant to the big story.
Also these mission sets have serious continuity problems. Why are there psi ops and avatars before they were even invented? Why does bradford keep losing his gear and starting at a rank of squaddie? Why is hanging out with all the faction dudes when they have not met (and the factions still hate each other)?
Its just a mess.
Anyway, on to another question. I started another WoT campaign on commander difficulty. My home continent has the assassin chosen. How the hell can you defeat her? She is like always invisible. She pops in, whacks a dude, and runs off and turns invisible again. She keeps doing that shit over and over. She is also immune to melee, which makes her even more fun to fight on lost levels, where the lost are no threat to her, but are swarming you…
Bit o’ a rant coming up.
I played this heavily over the weekend and last night realized why this game drives me up a wall at times. It does not mean XCOM2 is not a good game but it can be mightily frustrating.
-
Constant interruptions. I cannot seem to scan for even my supplies without being interrupted half a dozen times. It seems that there is always something popping up, from completed rooms to technology to yet another covert mission to yet another emergency mission. Even worse, it almost always deals with something across the world so I spend all my time flying to and from the crisis du jour. Bugger me, I just want to pick up my supplies. I feel like Mr. Incredible: Sometimes I just want it to stay saved! You know?! For a little bit. I feel like the maid. I just cleaned up this mess! Can we keep it clean for, for 10 minutes?!
-
Impossible missions. I understand that the missions are somewhat randomized and this can be a good thing but I hate being presented with missions that are nearly impossible - or outright impossible - to succeed in. I had a “get the crates” mission, in a city so you could not spot them easily where the crates were located on the other side of the map. Even if there were NO enemies the most I could have retrieved were 3 because they were all picked up long before I could have reached them. Now add in multiple squads and some zombies roaming around and that mission was, quite literally, impossible. Or another where I had to storm the train, except there were 2 enemy groups in close proximity on top of a hill and the only approach was via a wide open field. That was a really bad map.
-
The one that really gets my hair up though are the difficulty spikes. I was sailing along okay and now hit a passel of new enemy types. I simply do not have the firepower yet to bring these guys down and they are just chewing through my troops. Enemies that are new can be cool. Enemies, like the Chosen warlock, who can and will spawn enemies from across the map and mind control anyone who gets too close are not that much fun,.
-
Part of the reason my troops are behind is because I got stuck starting in Siberia and the alien bases that came up are in Africa, Western Europe and the Eastern USA. To stop the big project I have to take those bases. To even have that option I have to make contact. To make contact I have to daisy chain my way across the entire world making contact with everyone else. So my only option is to excavate, create a comm node, plug in two engineers into that so I have enough open spots to make enough contacts to get to those spots. So I have had no resources for much else including psionics and equipment upgrades. If I had known what a lousy starting position this was I would have just restarted.
I am finding that WotC adds simply more flavor to the game which is a good thing. The missions can get repetitive after a while and seeing one of the big baddies also on the map adds some much-needed flavor. Having a face to your enemy makes the war much more personal. It also presents another counter and I quite enjoy every mission with the zombies. I had one last night that made me smile. My two operatives were trying to flee an intelligence mission and were being pursued by Advent. The enemy made so much noise that two huge swarms showed up. I fended off the enemy and ran in the face of this new threat. I climbed a ladder to get out of sight and the two swarms converged on the remaining Advent troopers. While my guys ran across rooftops to get to the extraction point, the battle was in full force below as the remaining Advent flamethrower tried to hold off 10 or so zombies. It was a page from the Walking Dead and that kind of game play is a lot of fun.
You can reveal her the same way your guys get revealed; flank where she is. Depending on the map and squad positions that may or may not be reasonable. The camera has a tendency to follow her a bit during invisible moves which can give you a hint.
That said, on Commander difficulty or higher it’s often just best to bail on the first encounter with the Chosen unless they have really convenient weaknesses. Early squad can’t hit reliably enough to compete with guaranteed Chosen damage and it always being a retaliation mission means you often have to rush your squad into bad positions to not lose on civilian count. You can’t lose contact with the region off the first mission so the penalty isn’t that bad that one time; don’t risk units unless you’re sure you can win.
Been awhile since I played the main campaign, so this could be entirely wrong, but doesn’t the assassin get revealed also by explosives?
If you destroy their cover, then they are revealed because of the concealment rules, not because of the explosives, per se.
Cool, must of been I’d seen where she disappeared to and dropped a grenade on her that revealed her again.
I am playing on commander difficulty and I am running into an issue which has cropped up a few times. I am on a lost map, and one of the mission goals is to defeat all enemies. Yet the game spawns infinite amount of lost, so I can never complete this goal. Despite accomplishing the primary objective (whatever that may be), the only way to end the mission is the evac and that always leads to a fail state.
Am I missing something?