3901

I think he’s an idiot.

Even as an intentionally provocative exercise, it utterly fails because it completely fails to understand anything about what makes X-COM work as a game and also completely fails to understand anything about what makes a free to play game work.

3902

This is actually what I meant to say. :)

3903

OK, glad to see we’re all pretty much in agreement here that this is a horrible idea.

3904

Er, sort of. The “best” f2p games are the ones converted from regular retail games, which is to say they weren’t developed with monetization as a core mechanic. This includes titles like Team Fortress 2 and Lord of the Rings Online. They have the huge advantage that the initial development costs were largely offset by retail sales, and gameplay is largely insulated from the monetization part, which is mostly just cosmetic.

So there are problems with making XCOM into a f2p game. For one thing, it’s narrative-driven, which means multiple playthroughs. That also means there’s really no persistence across playthroughs. As a result, one-time consumables are a bad deal, and people won’t buy them, so offering them for sale just seems petty. If they were going to sell anything, it would have to persist across playthroughs, at which point you might as well just make it traditional DLC, which is exactly what they did.

3905

Heh, that’s cheating a bit, though.

Lol, yeah. One time consumables have no place in a game like this.
Imagine … say some kind of one-use buff for your fighters or something.
Wouldn’t that be pretty silly? :p

rezaf

3906

I’ve skipped this thread so I’m sorry to drag the Xenonauts guy back up again. I abandoned it when I read this:

  1. UI: Somewhat tied into the above, the UI is great. Really slick and easy to use, presenting the information you need and looking great at the same time. This impressed me a lot, I never found myself fighting the interface. The camera perhaps, but that’s a bit different. It might be this is something you notice more when you’ve been developing games for a bit, but it really stood out for me.
    I don’t think his development experience had the effect he thinks it does. That’s more fuel for the theory that developers aren’t always able to tell what makes a good interface, or that they get used to it after a while.
3907

Hopeful news from the 2k forums:

UPDATE 11/12/2012
The enemy teleporting issue fix is currently in test for the next patch. Date is TBD.

I shelved the game after suffering two instances of chryssalids teleporting in the middle of my squad and making short work of my high-level guys. Since I only play Classic Ironman, I decided the aggravation just wasn’t worth it. I’m still suspicious of the bug and I wonder if the enemies’ position is tracked at all or if they just spawn and relocate as needed under the veil of the fog of war.

3908

I managed to reproduce the error in a save. I’ve abandoned my earlier theory and now maintain that the teleporters are alien patrols gone awry. If the affected group doesn’t teleport, it activates with a special ‘we’re moving in’ animation.

That would mean that the position of the patrol inside the fog is not supposed to be granular; it patrols by jumping between locations inside the fog. That might be considered cheating, but on the other hand, the only way to tell the difference between invisible moving and invisible jumping would be by reloading, so only cheaters get cheated. :-) (It also means there are more patrols on Normal than I thought.)

That leaves the question why they implemented it like this in the first place. Just to save a few CPU cycles on the larger maps, perhaps?

3909

I’m pretty sure that’s how it works Nezz, the alien groups are teleported from point to point, and due to some issue, the game sometimes incorrectly teleports them to a point occupied by your soldiers. Or something.

I don’t really care that much either way, but yeah, good question.
Games like Silent Storm can really showcase how annoying overly long enemy (and neutral) turns can be, but in the days of glorious multi-core CPUs, it’s really odd that they implemented this cheap mechanic like we had only 286’s. Possibly just cutting corners - they don’t NEED to track actual positions in this game design, so why bother?

rezaf

3910

I suspected it would be mostly smoke and mirrors because it also fits the whole abstracted/boardgamey feel. It actually reminded me of how hidden movement is tracked in my old Avalon Hill’s Starship Troopers game. Has anyone managed to kill an unseen enemy by throwing a grenade/rocket into the fog of war? Maybe there aren’t any until you see them. Schrödinger aliens!

What about the strategic layer – has it been determined whether alien activity around the globe is completely random/on rails, or is there any hint of “intelligence” to it?

3911

Come to think of it, movement must be harder for the AI than it appears. The maps have many chokepoints, and alien groups can be composed of different species. So we’re faced with aliens with disparate movement points trying to shuffle through tight spaces while maintaining unit cohesion. That would have been quite a bit of development ressources spent on something nobody ever sees.

3912

I had a soldier in a small room, entered from the south and went north, then with his second movement went east to stand by a door. Had another soldier explore around the corner outside that room, she ‘found’ aliens, one of which appeared inside the room. The soldier inside the room might not have been looking that way. So it would seem to me at least some of the time the aliens don’t move as three aliens but spawn from a spot.

3913

You could see patrolling enemies with the Sniper scanner or while ghosted though, so in theory it isn’t completely hidden.

3914

Heh, if this game was by Bioware, you’d activate a group of aliens, one would stop in a doorway, the other would get stuck behind it, and you’d only discover there were actually three of them five minutes later when the one with a pathing failure returned from its epic circumnavigation of the map.

3915

I’ve had wayward missles kill/hit unseen enemies more than a few times.

3916

Same. This is easy to test with a reload strategy: reveal aliens through movement (e.g., circle around a wall). Reload to the beginning of the turn and then missile where you know they are. You’ll hit 'em.

3917

Actually, no. You can see them when they’ve finished their move, but if they move during their turn, they disappear and reappear somewhere else, even if they were in sight of your scanner or invisible guy.

Most aliens don’t patrol though, and just stand around doing nothing, especially on Normal, where the number of patrolling groups is pretty small.

3918

The aliens are there, they just don’t actually move but are instead being teleported from place to place instead of moving from A to B manually.
Oddly enough, occasionally they will do the latter - I’d presume the engine is somehow trying to make a guess whether or not the player will be able to see the aliens during their turn and based on that decides whether to move or teleport.
I’d also presume the engine “clears” gathering points when you have moved there - I’ve never seen aliens teleported to an area of the map where my guys had visited earlier. And here is where I’d suspect the teleporting bug has it’s root cause - a teleportation goal is not cleared out properly when it needs to be, and thus the teleportation code figures it’s fine to just beam the aliens to that “unoccupied” spot. Might be something as simple as the clearout happening one turn too late.

It’s cool that they confirmed this behavior as a bug and appearently will be fixing it with the next patch - I was afraid it could actually be intentional somehow.

rezaf

3919

Well as I suggested in a previous post, the teleporting seems to be intentional; what’s not intentional is that you should be aware of it.

While in its current form this manipulation may have a minimal impact on the player’s experience, it might affect mods and general expandability of the game system. I wonder if careful placement of spawning points was one of the issues that prevented map randomization.

By contrast, UFO:Extraterrestrials was a mediocre game at best, but the underlying system was pure: no scripting or hardcoded violations of its own rules. This allowed Bman to release his famous mod that expanded the game on every level and beyond all expectations.

3920

Oh, yeah, I was referring to the “aliens teleport on top of you” issue, not the teleporting in general.

How big an impact this can have on modding remains to be seen.
Heck, if there’ll even be room for meaningful mods remains to be seen.

They stated modding was “not a priority”, and it shows.

Here’s hoping they’ll release some kind of modding resources eventually anyway - as they FINALLY did with Civ5 now, but I understand they want to release some DLC stuff of their own first.
I don’t begrudge them of their additional income, but I think Bethesda have proven that you can release modding tools AND earn money with your own content released afterwards. Not everyone can produce commercial-quality assets, be it models or levels or whatever.
Even Civ4, a pinnacle of moddability, didn’t have THAT many truly high quality mods.

Ah well, we’ll see I guess.

rezaf