The posts in this thread confuse me slightly.
I haven’t played the game but planning to do so in the future. I’ve heard big praise for the game everywhere including this very forum where it ‘won’ GOTY.
But when I read all these posts here it sounds like the game is badly designed with big flaws in the strategic and tactical layer. Deus ex machina bullshit from the AI, bugs that even halt the game, bad balancing etc.
What’s the real, real verdict here?
Quaro
4143
It’s still quite a fun game, especially your first run-through. The flaws are what keeps it from being a game you can play for 200 hours, over and over. The Second Wave patch is a step in the right direction though.
I think you mean your first complete run thru.
I started and failed about 4 times on classic ironman till I was able to complete it on the 5th try. It’s a good game and you’ll get a lot of play hours out of it. Especially if you stick with it till you complete it at least 1x.
ioticus
4145
While I enjoyed my one play through (took me just over 20 hours to beat on Normal), I’m disappointed it lacks the depth and replayability of the original. I have close to 200 solid hours from the original. I agree with all the constructive criticisms above.
Wolff
4146
A 100 of which is doing basically nothing. I too have a lot more hours in the original but if I get a hankering for some xcom I will fire up eu ymmv of course.
ioticus
4147
The only time I felt I was doing “basically nothing” was when I had to find that last alien on a large map, but even that wasn’t so bad. For me the new XCOM is like a fast food meal, good but not very satisfying, whereas the original is like a gourmet meal that I want to keep coming back to.
Regardless of whether you’re actually doing anything (e.g., the new one clearly has a better interface), I don’t “respect” the new game as much as the old.
XCOM is tactical strategy-lite. It’s global strategy game is practically weightless.
It’s still fun on the first pass-through, but the player has no desire to repeat because you see the man behind the curtain in the new XCOM too early: a player knows the depths of the game’s shallow workings after one pass, so there’s nothing to further challenge you.
XCOM is a short story. The original is a full novel. Both can be enjoyable, but they hold your attention for different periods of time.
I wish I hadn’t listened. :P
Sepiche
4150
Just to give a slightly different view:
I’ve played through XCom somewhere in the neighborhood of 6 times now and still love playing it, and the new Second Wave options (damage roulette and Marathon especially) are doing a good job of getting me back into it.
Yeah the game has some flaws, but I think there seems to be so much talk about them because by and large everything else with the game is amazing, and Qt3 being what it is, lots of people only focus on the negative. :)
RichVR
4151
Maybe I’m playing the game wrong. And I am certainly up for instruction in that case. But as far as the turn based tactical part goes, I find it spot on. For me, I can’t see any reason to be upset if you are forced to use squad tactics, cover and careful movement. How else would you do it?
I usually have my team set up so that there is a heavy, a few regulars and a couple of snipers. I treat them the same way that I would in any tactical, squad based game.
Maybe I’m missing some nuance here, but how else would you play this? Rush individuals forward?
Yeah I would certainly prefer less of the three enemies in a group thing. But ultimately, this is how I played Silent Storm and even Laser Squad on the C-64. Cover, mutual firepower. Nobody runs in alone.
What am I missing? Serious question. Is the pace too slow?
I think part of it is that you don’t really have the squad movement option once there is an enemy on the screen. If that one enemy is behind full cover and you have Half cover, you would want to flank normally. In X-com if you move up and around to flank chances are you triggering one to three more groups of enemies just getting in range or position for that shot. On impossible nothing ends a mission quicker than going for a flank shot and missing a 100% hit 80%crit 3 square away shot, after activating two groups of thinmen who run further away on their free move.
No. The old xcom was generally slower.
It’s the fact that the enemy can be camped in an open position that’s easy to trigger, and then get a free run to cover. In other games, I might actually happily try and catch the enemy when they’re out of cover.
Combine that with the high enemy-to-squadie ratio, particularly on classic, and you get a recipe for making every single engagement the same: a game of avoid the jack-in-the-box teams, while taking on visible teams the exact same way everytime: overwhelming fire to overcome their cover. On Classic, add really making sure that you kill every enemy before they get a fire turn.
Take the run-and-gun ability of the assault class. It’s a great concept: run in and apply overwhelming firepower, with the risk of exposure. Half the time, the exposure against your current alien group isn’t the problem. It’s the three guys standing in the open right behind them that get a free run to cover. So on classic, you end up using it in very rare occasions where you’re relatively confident that there will be no triggers.
As Dusty says, the game actually punishes you for trying to do any sort of flanking or tactic other than slug-out with the one visible group.
Spam
4154
Too claustrophobic. Remember how noone liked the ship missions in TFTD? The entire game feels like that. Every so often is fine as long as you get to snipe a floater from the roof of a barn three screens away sometimes too. Also, I don’t think it’s possible to offer the same range of tactical options without fully custom loadouts, flares, and the rest. Considering the limitations it’s quite good, but most definitely not xcom.
habibi
4155
I believe that any modern remake of an old beloved classic will never live up to the expectations of the fans, simply because we all grew up, have less time and patience and lack the wild imagination of a kid. XCom is a fine game as it is now, but in the hands of fans of the original who have some sort of wishful hope of rekindling the old flame and experience, it’s bound to fail.
The prevailing sentiment seems to be it’s a great game for one playthrough but it suffers beyond that. The strategic game isn’t as varied as the original and the use of fixed maps instead of randomized ones is a bit limiting too.
ioticus
4157
Well, I’m 43 now and beat the original X-COM less than a year ago (actually completed it 3 times on normal, experienced, and hard, something NO other game has compelled me to do), and I still think it is superior to the remake in terms of depth and re-playability. Not saying XCOM is a bad game, just think it’s not as good as the original.
Pogo
4158
That changes absolutely nothing.
I disagree, Pogo. Suppose you give groups of aliens patrol paths. Depending on your soldiers’ timing, they could encounter zero, one, or many groups of patroling aliens simultaneously, and they could encounter them from different directions. For example, say some mutons patrol the border of a a crash site counterclockwise. Your squad might never meet them, but then again your supposedly safe snipers hanging out in the rear might find themselves ambushed from behind during a firefight when the patrol pattern ran into your force.
rezaf
4160
If anything, that’d make the game even more punishingly difficult (especially under classic), which is not what it needs. Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s a more or less easy remedy for this weakness in the game.
A big part of the problem are the relatively cramped “tube” levels.
Another part is the fact you - usually - no longer have expendable troops with you.
Yet another is the accuraccy of the aliens - even on normal, it’s higher across the board than it was in X-Com (except Floaters, IIRC), and it can even be boosted.
And the stats of your own troops are more normalized, which means noone with horrible aim (you’d have fired those or used them as suicide scouts in the original), but also noone with exceptional stats that can save your butt. I guess there’s the sniper, but there are some caveeats.
Plus, the “cover shooter” nature of combat means not just you, but also the aliens will tend to camp out somewhere in good cover, reducing your chance to hit.
Finally, we’ve discussed it above, armor now reduces the chance to hit further.
This all makes it almost the only viable strategy to single out (a group of) aliens and snipe them off in a single turn, if at all possible.
Even this is quite risky - you cannot catch them “off guard”, due to their free move after you discover them. And you’d better not maneuver around too much, lest you activate some other group of aliens. Better be careful not to hit a wall or something, too - this can lead to the same thing.
In ideal circumstances (and you have to play in a way that makes those come to pass almost constantly), you can use special abilities to get the job done, but god forbid the situation turns less than ideal … say your prayers.
Bottom line, while I was quite fond (with some reservations) of the combat simplification (or steamlining, if you want) in principle, I think it mostly failed to achieve the goal of making combat more fast paced and fluid.
Even with the smaller maps, it takes a long time crawling forward inch by inch to try and avoid unfavorable conditions, which is almost the only way to play.
It’d be cool if they could somehow address this, but I don’t really see how that would be possible.
And their patching/bug-fixing and DLC-producing speed is not exactly lightning-paced.
rezaf
