Come on, cut the hyperbole. There is nothing “diametrical” about my disagreement with your characterization of the game’s intended/realized audience. I actually agree with many of your criticisms, but when you start to make broad generalizations about that audience because it doesn’t jibe with your personal version of reality, you have to expect members of that audience to call bullshit.
Or it could be that they blocked modding simply to stop all the achievement abuse (folks are modding the game to get the impossible ironman achievement, without playing on impossible ironman).
I’m just saying, you might consider reserving condemnation until official word comes down… or the second wave DLC goes on sale tomorrow.
Quaro
3644
I doubt the reason was as trivial as ‘achievement abuse’ because anyone could simply download a trainer or generic in-memory cheat program to get those. Or even just save scum the old fashioned way.
My reading suggests they wanted to make it easy to release multiplayer balance patches without requiring full title updates.
They don’t need to release an SDK or documentation or anything. I’d be happy if they just don’t go out out there way to make modding difficult. They don’t need to have a dev working on the map – the community will make one itself – as long as they can find a way into the files.
Alan_Au
3645
rezaf can dislike the game for whatever reason he wants. He claims that it doesn’t appeal to him in the same way that the original did, but I don’t know why he liked the first game. Personally, I find that the new game is a good approximation. No, it isn’t perfect, but it’s better than what we had before, which was NOTHING.
Xcom is indeed better than other similar clones. Some of the main problems with the UFO series (the one that is basically a straight x-com clone ATTEMPT) was that the combat was particularly annoying, the pacing was pretty bad (missions were way too frequent near the end) and the balance was poor (after a certain point every alien has rapid fire, instant kill rocket launchers or a mind control beam that can mind control you with basically on defense from the other side of the map).
Xcom approves on all of those.
Sadly, the geoscape is significantly worse than in x-com which has a significantly worse geoscape than apocalypse.
Not to mention that xcom is even worse than UFO at making the different aspects of gameplay appear connected. As a player, i don’t feel there is any real connection between the geoscape and the tactical battles. I shot a down a ufo? oh i get +10 space bucks at the end of the month and the chance to do the same UFO map for the 200th time. France left the alliance? Oh i get -10 space bucks at the end of the month. I lost a bunch of civilians in a terror missions? -10 space bucks… etc etc
In the previous games i actually felt like i was having some effect on the battle by having strong air defense or doing well on missions. I saw the effect first hand when rising tech level of interceptors led to less ground combat needed. I also felt the sting of organizations being corrupted in apocalypse where not only did i lose access to buying their stuff on the market, they also turned openly hostile. None of this is present in Xcom, leading to an extremely gamey and disconnected feeling.
I feel like Mass Effect 3 all over again where i’ve just killed the alien super mothership and the only result is “Your score has increased by 5 space points.”
The real question is if they will fix some of the critical bugs before releasing this DLC. My guess is no.
ElGuapo
3647
Does anyone else give soldiers distinctive hair styles/colors so they can identify them walking around the base? I think it’s fun to see the pink ponytail soldier running on the treadmill or the black guy with shock blonde hair playing pool.
Does the gym and other areas fill up as you get closer to the 99 soldier limit? Speaking of which, what’s the most amount anyone’s had?
rezaf
3648
For the record, I don’t dislike the game.
And I agree it IS better than the other remake attempts so far.
rezaf
I feel the same way.
In my opinion the original X-COM is a better game than the Firaxis XCOM. But the latter is a good game in its own right.
Savillo
3650
To be fair, the UFO series was a salvage of the unfinished X-Com: Genesis, which was going to be the same concept of slowly reclaiming the Earth from a hostile alien environmental takeover. Unfortunately, as you write, the tactical game was just awful. I put the blame mostly on switching to real-time with pause, though.
I think Enemy Unknown gets the “core” of the connection between the tactical and strategic layers right: It’s really the salvage from UFO missions that bridge these two parts of the game. And I like that Enemy Unknown adds more unique resources only recoverable from tactical missions (Elerium, Alloys, Weapon Fragments, and Corpses).
But yeah, Enemy Unknown has a whole lot less to do in the Geoscape, and it takes very little from the improvements made with Apocalypse. I think the biggest problem with the Geoscape, though, is that the danger actually scales down as you progress, which is the inverse of the original games.
Launching satellites takes those countries out of the abduction mission mix, which results in a late-game scenario where you have nothing to do but go on a single Council mission, one (and occasionally two) UFO missions, and sometimes a terror mission each month. And these are always sequential, so you don’t have to choose between three options where only one is possible anymore.
You have Dr. Shen telling you that the aliens are ramping up the invasion when you see your first Supply Barge mission; however, it never feels that way. You’ll never be put in a situation where you have to deal with multiple UFO incursions at once, which was pretty damn common late in the game in UFO Defense. Once you reach the end game in Enemy Unknown, it really feels like the pressure is off. That’s the biggest failing of its Geoscape.
Grrr just lost a fucking support colonel in a classic ironman game to a bug where another support (non medic spec so only 1 medpack) revived him successfully and then he was dead at the start of the next turn anyway.
Pod
3652
There’s something I really hate about XCOM – the fact that they used exactly the same name but without the hyphen.
Savillo and Murbella are saying “enemy unknown” and I don’t know if they mean UFO: Enemy Unknown (as it’s more properly known) or XCOM: Enemy Unknown.
Why didn’t they call it XCOM: ENEMY DEFENSE ?! Or XCOM: something else.
Savillo
3653
Sorry, my American is showing, heh. The original is X-Com: UFO Defense in the states, so to differentiate between the old and the new, I’m just using the subtitles. Rest assured that any references to Enemy Unknown by me are of the Firaxis reboot.
rezaf
3654
Well, you’ve obviously been playing the wrong way. That is, you kinda understood the core mechanics better than the designers themselves and thus managed to maneuver yourself into a position in which you no longer felt any pressure.
I’m obviously somewhat dumber than you, at least it took me quite some time until I realized just how important satellites are in this game. Thus, I launched too little too late, and the endgame had me constantly biting my nails - and I’d have probably lost if it were not for the fact that only two nations can drop out any given month in Normal difficulty. In the month before I undertook the final mission, I got two Sat Nexuses (?) operational and managed to put everyone just below red again, but this was reversed in the final month by a chain of bad luck, and I’d probably have lost if I hadn’t taken down the Temple Ship there and then.
Still, yeah, the geoscape now feels like a mixture from drawing a chance card in Monopoly and playing something in Magic the Gathering.
A huge UFO has appeared in x. If you have an untapped Firestorm interceptor in that region, tap the Firestorm and draw a UFO ground mission card.
If you have no untapped Firestorm, draw three terror cards.
rezaf
The aliens are way too passive on the geoscape, in general. Aliens, at worst, kill a satellite. You never get attacked at bases.
In the original X-Com (which, for ages, had the difficulty bug reverting everyone to Beginner after the first battle) I never had a base attack. My recollection from a schoolmate who did was that he basically “drew” one by allowing the aliens to do well in the strategic layer. I think I saw a screenshot of a base defence in CGW or wherever, and that was about it. I dunno if my (pretty lengthy) games were exceptional that way or if people are thinking of post-difficulty-patch games or TFTD or what.
That isn’t to say I don’t wish they were in.
JoshV
3657
Odd, I distinctly remember getting attacked a few times. Satellite bases especially, but I also remember a harrowing incident where I was attacked while my skyranger was out, and had to defend the base with rookies and some outdated tanks.
meeper
3658
I’m pretty sure that they work exactly the opposite of that. When you’re doing really well on the strategic layer the AI steps in and says “hey, you’re doing a little too well… here’s a base attack to deal with!”
Yeah, I had a TFTD game end when the aliens started sending neverending waves of base assaults, one after the other. I must have been doing too well.
meeper
3660
I think I read the reasoning for that here.
