There is no better way to experience XCOM than with the massive amount of new content added in XCOM: Enemy Within. Fans will experience an additional three to four playthroughs on average before encountering all of the new material included in XCOM: Enemy Within, providing nearly limitless replayability.
Unless they’ve made some serious changes to the core (creep along every bloody map) gameplay, I think they’re going seriously OTT with the marketing spiel.
Enemy within as a name and the trailer make me believe we’ll see a competing human faction. I think it would be cool to see some human vs human or human vs human vs alien battles.
Also, while this isn’t the literal meaning, I like the implication that 3-4 = limitless.
rezaf
4485
Guess you didn’t read the smallprint?
There is no better way to experience XCOM than with the massive amount of new content added in XCOM: Enemy Within. Fans will experience an additional three to four playthroughs on average before encountering all of the new material included in XCOM: Enemy Within, providing nearly limitless replayability*.
Edit: It’s obviously just a quick snark, but they marketing lost all credibility when they promised no map would typically be seen twice in a single playthrough and I saw some maps more than three times in mine.
I still cannot fathom why they didn’t bombard us with map-pack DLCs. Maybe even with distinct visual style.
“Get the Japan DLC with new maps in with distinct 3D objects for missions taking place in that territory.”
Swap Japan for China, Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy, Spain, Russia, Australia. South Africa, … you get the point.
Each pack contains 24 maps including 4 unique concil missions for the area which will appear randomly in every game and a seperate, distinct voice set for soldiers of that nationality. Also, some unique skins. $9.99.
rezaf
Sometimes I wish I could forget everything about a game just so I could re-experience it.
jpinard
4488
Me too. Not just the story, but the mechanics as well. The game is much more fun before the recognize the lamo spawn points.
I don’t want to do the final ship mission again. I hated that mission. They can’t just drop in new aliens. The whole thing needs to be booted and replaced with a good final mission.
I will always remember the first time I beat X-Com (the original). Half of my elite squad got wiped out in the first mission on the surface. BLASTER BOMBS EVERYWHERE. The survivors got caught in a brutal base assault in the second mission. It came down to my two most senior squaddies; the last survivors, both slowly bleeding out with no medkits left. At that point, it was a race to find the brain before they died. Got it.
Scotten
4491
Enemy Within? Wasn’t that a Rush Song?
Quaro
4493
randomizes the upgrade trees
Now THAT sounds awesome. I might even start with that for my first game. I’d love to add some randomness into the research trees too, at least adding variance to costs and times, so that optimal paths vary each game.
Any changes to cover itself? I hate how it’s always at flat bonus. It seemed silly that on impossible, heavy cover takes you from 120% hit to 80% hit – ie, is effectively worthless. So the best strategy is to ignore cover all together and maximize firepower and getting out of line of sight. Which means keeping all your troops in a tiny box and crawling across the map. The only time you use cover is to hunker in heavy cover.
Malaak
4494
According to an interview video I can’t be arsed to find right now, there’ll be a second wave option apparently suggested by Sid Meier himself to vary the amount of cover based on the angle the shot is coming from.
Nesrie
4495
So is he expansion just a replay thing, or is their additional story… more game as well as more stuff?
It’s a replay thing. It adds stuff to the existing game.
Personally, I don’t want more story.
Nesrie
4498
Because if they added all of this stuff and advanced the narrative you would refuse to play?
Because the scripted story aspects of the game are the part that hurts replayability the most. The Temple ship is of course the worst offender, but the scripted Council missions aren’t great the second time you play either. Strategy games like XCom work best when there are no scripted story elements.
That the Slingshot expansion was almost exclusively about story was why it was so poorly received.
Gus is 100% right. The expansion needs to enhance replayability with more un-scripted/random things that can (or may not) happen. Any time you have to watch the cut scene for when you first research laser weapons, for example, is bad. Each time you face off against an enemy you rarely see on a map you have never played on is good, for example. I would love some mode where you can turn the story beats off entirely, and the temple ship could become a random event (that could even happen multiple times)! The council missions don’t bother me, as they are randomized and generated, but more variety of them would be welcome.
Nesrie
4501
When i said narrative, it’s not like i was asking for a bunch of cut-scenes. I liked the story, as simple as it was. A little addition to that, of what is coming, i would have prefered than some sort of RTS expansion for a game that’s not really RTS. At least RTS games have MP with those random maps.
What narrative? Aliens are taking over the planet, go stop them.
