1561

I just want to know if the game has bizarre experiments on animals like the original. Sure to get PETA up in arms.

1562

I hope so, it wouldn’t be a proper alien invasion otherwise.

I wonder if anyone watching how this pre-release demo is turning out will be thinking “that’s why we don’t do demos before release”. Because no matter how smart some of your audience are, they won’t be the ones telling the entire Internet how they just cancelled their pre-order if it doesn’t meet their exact expectations.

Still, most of the flaws sound more like annoyances which will hopefully be ironed out. And no matter how good or otherwise the game turns out to be, we still have Xenonauts on the way.

1563

I found the interface a little sluggish and was very annoyed at how brief it was (why even bother releasing it? I can’t see how something that short would possibly swing someone to buy it) but for the 15 seconds or so that you get to have at least a vague idea of the actual game I was pretty into it.

Seriously though, you’ve really screwed up your demo if one of your biggest proponents in the press feels compelled to do an entire article saying DON’T WORRY FULL GAME IS OKAY GUYS REALLY.

1564

I enjoyed the 2nd mission, but I agree that the m&k controls feel awkward. By the end of the mission, I was using the hotkeys rather than the mouse to select overwatch, etc. , which felt better. Also, the missions seemed to promote “running” a lot, over the cover and move (which the original required).

However, it does seem like the engine is sluggish on my machine, which was surprising as I have a 560ti while only using a 1080p screen. When it started, it defaulted into a 1440x900 window, which I think showed it running in DX9.

1565

I tried the demo and while I understand that this one is far more on rails than the real game I have to wonder how far it goes. I refuse to watch the gameplay videos to avoid spoilers but can anyone who has tell me whether in the full game you also have to choose between several missions and can only do one of them? That felt like an odd decision that I can see also happening in the real game. On a scale from a full old school sandbox to a linear sequence of multiple-choice missions, where does this game fall exactly? Please tell me it’s more of the former…

1566

My impression from the pair of gameplay videos I’ve watched is that your missions will be available until the area is lost (to panic?) They seem to want you to decide which parts of the map you’ll save because you can’t save them all, but you may be able to save more people with judicious mission management. Again, just impressions from someone who never played the original game.

1567

Yeah, I don’t think the demo alone is a great vehicle for selling the game (could be worse). But given what I’ve been reading, it was exciting to play a sliver of the real thing. They’ve really diverged pretty significantly from the original systems, but what they’ve built is pretty slick. I’m down. This will be the only AAA/big publisher title I probably buy all year.

1568

Thanks, I guess that doesn’t sound too terrible. I have no problem with changing things around - I can still play the original if I want to. But doing a heavily scripted on rails demo for what’s supposed to be a sprawling sandbox game is just a huge head scratcher.

1569

I share your concern; however, I also took the demo to be a quasi tutorial and demo. I’ll probably wait for the pre-order crowds’ review on this one, but it looks promising. Hopefully it is not as railed as it feels, and I was a little disappointed that you couldn’t look on the ground and pick up things, but i haven’t followed development enough to really know where the changes are and what replaced them either.

1570

20 minute mission against a fallen UFO (spoilers on terrain, etc. obviously): http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/ns2k61/xcom--enemy-unknown-team-gt-ufo-walkthrough

1571

So using the demo as an example, does that mean that if you choose the China site for the second mission, the US mission remains available until the US is lost? Doesn’t that destroy the whole idea of forcing a choice?

It brings up another question - what happens if the area in which you set your base is lost? Is it game over?

1572

No, no. The way I’ve seen these choices come up (and the choices and missions are all random sandbox-like) is that if you pick one location/mission, then you “auto-fail” the other ones and the panic level rises in those areas.

1573

Can you have multiple teams to do multiple missions at once?

1574

I’m playing the press preview build and can confirm that Mr. BTF is correct - choose China and the US panic level increases.

1575

I wondered this as well. Certainly in the early game stuff we’ve seen it was not an option, but I wouldn’t be surprised if as the game goes on you can research something to allow for this, perhaps? It seems like without it at some point the game would get crazy hard balancing keeping the global panic levels down. But for now, and even if you can’t later, I believe it’s designed to force you into making hard choices, which I can appreicate (from a “this is a board game” point of view, it’s not a simulation nor would anyone be happy if it was!).

1576

I would find it a bit unrealistic if you couldn’t. If you had 12 people or more, then it would make sense that you could field 2 teams of 6 or even more. Certainly transportation shouldn’t be an issue. If you are the “army” trying to defend the world, it would be silly to assume that you can only have such limited resources to field 1 team at a time.

I would much rather the “hard” choices be like: You got 3 hot spots. 1 easy, 1 medium and 1 hard. You may not want to risk the hard one, but will be willing to do the other two. It would not be a matter of you can only do one; You could do all 3, but you just do not want to lose guys on the hard one. Perhaps your best agents are out on medical leave at the time. That is much more realistic and palatable.

1577

The anticiption I held for this comment being your reply is actually why I stressed the difference between a “board game like experience” and a “simulation”. It’s not the latter, so “realisim” isn’t part of the equation. Not that you are wrong - and certainly it’s possible that as the game gets rolling you DO have the ability to send multiple squads to locations simultaneously. But if we never have that option, it’s not a problem for me, at least.

1578

You want to design your own XCOM a week and a half from release. I want a better camera with mouse and keyboard controls.

Note to developers: let’s triage the community hopes and desires here. Mine is much easier!

1579

I already preordered and don’t plan to try to cancel, but whenever this claim is made about a game it sets off huge warning bells for me. This is largely due to it being a pure lie in most cases.

1580

I know, right? Full games are typically much worse than the demos.