1681

Yeah I agree with what you wrote TurinTur. My comment was in direct response to the previous post:

So in this context I assume that Savillo was dividing the original game into 3 parts: Tactical Combat, Base Management, and Geoscape (the globe bit where you place bases and intercept ufos).

So I agree that Base Management is an essential part of the game. But specifically I think the spinning globe/interception part of the original XCOM was weak and needed to be changed in the sequel.

Tony

1682

Three moves ahead all about xcom with the designer this week.

1683

The spinning globe was what connected those two pieces though and kept them from being non connected “base minigame” and “random fighting levels.”

I do think the geoscape in apocalypse was an improvement though…

1684

You’re not alone! I liked a lot of Apoc’s Megalopolis view: Fully destructible with repercussions with the owning corporations for your careless saucer fighting, needing to actually watch the UFOs for where they drop off aliens, contending with escorts, buying property, dealing with that Cult of Sirius, the way supply and demand for equipment was implemented…

Yeah, Apoc had a lot of interesting decisions to make in Mega-Primus. Too bad that some of the Gollops’ ideas were never implemented, though.

1685

I’m getting less and less excited about this as 22 minutes in it’s really just Jake defending his design choices so far. Sigh. Do these guys just want a prettier pixel for pixel remake of XCOM then? Do we really need TWO Xenonauts?

1686

Apoc geoscape just felt more… real. Instead of having the radar view, you actually saw what was happening.

Seeing a fleet of the big advanced gunships face off against a mothership, and the resulting godzilla alien, with lasers flying everywhere destroying half the city, was just truly impressive.

It might be heresy, but i did prefer apocalypse to enemy unknown. It would have been nice if they had included all of the spying minigames and stuff they had to cut, but even without, it had a lot of cool things in it.

1687

I don’t know. I think a number of the questions were fair.

I am now particularly concerned, given the seemingly nervous response to the direct questions about game bugs (e.g. some of the game’s difficulty with walls, thinking that soldiers on the second floor are actually on the roof). There has been a lot of smoke in these areas (including critical things regarding line of sight, shooting through walls, etc.), and I am really beginning to worry that there is a pretty bad fire that is being covered up or reasoned away by people who really want the game so badly that they are willing to waive these issues away.

I am not - I really do not want to buy a game where for the first six months (before the patches, maybe, get it right), I have soldiers occasionally getting shot through walls.

So I’d frankly like a really honest and straightforward answer whether these problems exist in the version of the game that will be sold to me. Not, “Oh, that’s probably a preview issue that has been fixed.”

Not a non-answer from the likes of Rock Paper Shotgun of “Yeah, you just saw that, trust us, the game is awesome.” Just a straight up answer as to whether all of these things have been fixed (and fixed well) in the final version of the game.

1688

That breaks a golden rule of game design. Don’t include destructible terrain and then punish players for destroying terrain. We want to blow shit up!

1689

I can’t speak for them, but I can speak for myself.

I don’t want a prettier pixel for pixel remake of Xcom. I want something better, something improved, something with even more features.

Look here
A<------------B----------->C

Let’s say B is the original Xcom. I wanted C, take the original and go to a specific direction. If isn’t possible, then I wanted B, the same but prettier.
But they didn’t go in the C direction, nor stayed in B. I fear they went to A, pretty much the opposite direction I wanted.

I’m tired of people thinking that if you don’t like the new Xcom, it’s because you are a “fundamentalist”, an old school gamer traditionalist, like the crazy people of NMA, that fear change and turns an eye blind to new styles and directions of gaming and just wanted the same game with new graphics. In other words, someone whose opinion can be disregarded.

I could even play a real time with pause version of XCom, or a WEGO Xcom.

1690

Heh. Sure we do! But as Murbella wrote, it added a sense of realism, though, I would characterize it as bringing the environments to life. Choices without consequences aren’t really choices, after all.

1691

Those are pretty standard questions from Bruce. As he said 3ma is a show a lot about design I typically enjoy his very specific questions that aren’t just softballs to guests. I haven’t finished listening though. I for one don’t want an original with updated graphics. I was fairly pleased with the Deus x reboot and hope this will tickle my fancy in the same way.

1692

Actually, the UFO games were like this and while I didn’t try the first two, the third one (I forget the name - afterlight?) was actually super fun and I completed it almost twice. Very cool.

1693

My dream would be a SPM (Smart pause mode) Xcom. But it’s maybe a foolish dream: SPM makes the tactical battles detailed and with a very fine-grained control but the pace can fall to a crawl, so in a game where you are supposed to play several dozens of tactical battles, it can double the number of hours needed to play a normal campaign.

I will add to my previous post:

Even if the game isn’t what I wanted, I still will give it a fair chance. My tastes in gaming are broad. It surely will be a good, fun game for itself.

1694

I have a question. Why do Geryk and Chick sound so similar? Are they from the same town or something?

1695

I couldn’t ever get into the UFO series. I tried Aftermath and really didn’t like it on any level. It has what you’re calling SPM, TurinTur, and it’s really annoying and destroys the pacing of tactical battles.

Apocalypse has a real-time with pause option, though. And Laser Squad Nemesis (from the Gollops) uses a “we go” system.

1696

I don’t know. I actually don’t think they sound that alike. Bruce has a much more nasal and slightly higher pitched voice. Tom’s voice has a more rounded sound (as if he is trying to sound more radiolike).

1697

Yeah, I’m pretty much in the same boat.
And it’s not only X-Com.

Back in the day, there were all these brilliant games, held back by the limited computing power a 486 with 4 MB of ram could provide.
I would occasionally look at a game and drool about what games in twenty years would look like.
Games like X-Com, Ultima 7, Daggerfall, Master of Magic, Master of Orion, Darklands and so on.
Little did I know that, twenty years later, these classics would remain unmatched by any game released subsequently, with all titles even trying to play in the same ballpark falling way, WAY short on features compared to the original title, let alone actually adding new stuff.

I reserve my final judgement, but from what I’ve seen, Firaxis’ X-Com seems to fail at replicating the original game spectacularly.
To their credit, at least they add some stuff to try and compensate for things they axed - for example the soldier abilities (or “skill trees”).
Still, for the most part, they - as Turin put it - go into the A direction.
They simplify the game (the designerspeech for this is a word I’ve come to loathe, “steamline”) almost beyond recognition to try and “capture the essence” of the original, only with less actual options and less things to do.

The new X-Com can still be a fun and worthwile game, mind you, but I’m pretty sure that there’ll be quite a few occasions where I’ll find myself wishing for a feature to be in a 2012 game that was actually implemented and working in a 1995 game. To me, that’s a shame.

rezaf

1698

Obviously I haven’t played the new X-Com, but I think there is definitely room for streamlining the old game without completely losing the essence of what made the game so great.

1699

That’s X-COM: Apocalypse. I’m with some of the earlier posters: I really liked that game, maybe even more than the original X-COM. The real time with genrous autopause solved lots of the pacing problems from the original game.

1700

Sometimes TMA can feel a bit hostile if the guest doesn’t read the tone right, but in this case, Jake didn’t take the questions as criticism and it wasn’t a problem. He just talked through his thought process and about his general attraction to more discreet choices, etc. Good stuff.

None of the bugs they mentioned sounded like that big of a deal even if they weren’t fixed