Having had an interesting games development conversation of my own with Bruce (face-to-face no less!) I can tell you that while he often does without the social pleasantries that most people are used to, I wouldn’t classify him as being rude or inappropriate. In fact, I wish everyone were as direct. Often times, “being pleasant” gets in the way of what’s actually important. I for one appreciate that Bruce never lets up off the gas pedal.
Oh… well, hi there Bruce! :)
X_kot
1782
Some good discussion in this thread (catching up to sixty pages worth has been tough)! Speaking as someone who only first played X-COM a year ago and could not get very far with it, I am heartened by some of the design decisions being made. For example, I found it a distasteful and necessary tactic to use rookie agents as suicide agents to scout or clear rooms. It was fun in Lemmings, but c’mon, the gameyness felt so off-putting. Speaking of which, removing base invasions seems appropriate given how prevalent first-turn base renovations became to minimize their danger. Thanks for taking out all that busy work, Firaxis!
I just listened to the whole interview, waiting for the controversial part, and never really heard it. I thought both you and Jake were pretty candid…
Returning to the “didn’t the original X-Com have cover” issue, I’d say it didn’t in the same way. That is, you’d stack guys up around doors and leave them in ambush positions wherever it made sense, but because there was no “peering around” cover, taking cover was much more of a hunkering down move.
And conversely, when you did recon and especially attacking - but also some of your “posting pickets” type stuff - you’d be doing that “out in the open” even if you tried to finish your turn in a less vulnerable position.
WRT what Rezaf said about not enough terrain destructability gameplay footage seems to show a fair amount. And while it might be a bit of a waste of ordinance, rockets and grenades do seem to still be a “remove this wall” tool. The developer stance - that having precision wall-plinking led to balance and undesirable-player-approach issues seems pretty plausible to me.
I can’t believe i’m seeing people against full destruction of terrain. Go play apocalypse!
Near the end of the game, most of my troops are using heavy energy weapons, but you’d be a fool to equip your base defenders with them as you will end up doing more damage to your base than the enemy!
Take a ufo mission to contain an infiltration to a (high tech) car factory? Better watch your fire because if you hit a fuel tank… BOOOM
It also led to fun situations where if your scanners showed movement inside a small room, instead of trying to enter it in some stupid, artificial situation, you could just line up outside like a firing squad and blow the shack away.
This doesn’t mean you can just run out in the open though as that is a good way to die even with destroyable cover. Not to mention the people funding you don’t exactly like you blowing away their property so they dock your pay.
I’m not against destructibility in any sense, for starters.
And I’m somewhat bummed about the lack of free-targeting “shoot your laser cannon at that section of wall” destructability, which is actually what’s lacking (not destructability as such, which as far as I know is still pretty general.)
I just see the logic in regretfully restricting targeted demolition to grenades and rockets (which you can’t go crazy with) because otherwise players habitually resorted to a methodical demolition routine that bulldozed the tactical geography (rather than the players being obliged to work around it for the most part, with the destruction being impressive but mostly happenstance.)
I say this as someone who really destroyed the crap out of maps in X-Com 1. Maybe I just got a lifetime’s worth of unnecessarily conservative map annihilation out of my system in the 1990s.
Nesrie
1787
I think it is unfortunate that certain tactics were removed entirely. The demo didn’t show me any civilians of any kind to save, but that was one of the reason I didn’t flatter everything in the original X-Com… was trying to save people.
In case it wasn’t clear on the gamespy video, Jake & Garth were playing their saved game for Dan. Dan was referring to seeing that map in his game. Two different play throughs by two different people.
Terror missions (missions where you save civilians, just like the original) are in the game
Nesrie
1790
That’s good to hear. My point is though, there are other ways to discourage destroy everything on the map style of play without removing the ability entirely.
To discourage blaster-bomb-scale flattening sure, but if you watch the scale of the gameplay in the new game I can easily see how “laser-rifle wall plinking” ala X-Com 1 would very probably be a very powerful and default standard operating procedure for a lot of players, which wouldn’t really create that much of a risk for killing people. (It’d slow down the map obviously if there’s a turn limit, as IIRC there are in some missions. And it’s possible to just penalize the player for destruction, although that seems a bit goofy in a lot of contexts. Obviously one could then start asking questions about the logic of like 50 guys with small arms fighting an interplanetary war for survival.)
From what’s said in that recent video where DeAngelis plays through a mission, pinpoint ground-fire was a pet feature for - him? or someone, and it just wasn’t working. The actual reason could also have been something like “it made the AI look way less smart,” which they probably wouldn’t be eager to admit.
Yeah I think that got lost in various edits of that paragraph. In case it wasn’t already obvious to people, we know for sure now that you’re highly likely to see a few of the same maps on a second playthrough (with different aliens and any other random stuff they have in there). I don’t think Jake wanted to spell that out, but there it is.
It might be worth leaving some time between playthroughs if anyone thinks he might get angry at seeing the same maps.
Nesrie
1793
Well there is a difference between making a logical decision to exclude that entire tactic entirely and simply not being able to pull it off correctly. The logic argument doesn’t make sense. You don’t see SWAT teams jumping through windows if they have some lunatic threatening to shoot anyone who comes in to the house. Sometimes they’ll just take down the wall. There are other tactics to be had than walk from cover to cover and try and find a good shot a clearly seen enemy.
I won’t blame them for a technical limitation, but it’s disappointing that there is so much streamlining going on from geo map down to how you actually shoot a gun. I certainly don’t think X-Com original was perfect, but there is something to be said for allowing different kinds of strategies to succeed. 4-6 soldiers, limited destruction, choose your own adventure missions… there were different play styles the original could accommodate, some a lot easier than others, that this one simply won’t allow you to do. It would be unfortunate if everyone winds up playing the exact same way because well there is only one way to do it.
Mr_Zero
1794
Nesrie, you can take down walls. Grenades and rockets.
What did you think about what Solomon said in regards to this point? It went something like, “strategy games work because they don’t allow players to impose their strategy every time. You’ve got to respond to circumstances and play the hand you’re dealt.”
The “wider logic” approach sort of falls down if you start thinking about the existential struggle for humanity’s survival being put on a quasi-self-financing shoestring outfit with 6-man (or in the original, still squad-or-two-based) microteams doing micromissions. Which is fine because I have little mental curtains I draw in front of awkward things like that.
Now, just in terms of the internal logic of the tactical combat there’s a problem in that your gun is blowing holes in the wall but when you suddenly want another hole in the wall you can’t just do on purpose what you accidentally did 2 seconds ago - that’s the point at which (aside from the wider decision not to allow methodical demolition) that it kinds of sucks.
But having the ability to ground target explosive weapons draws the sting that would be there if you just couldn’t blow up wallls. It makes it a bit like early X-Com where you couldn’t blow walls with your guns.
Re the wider streamlining? I dunno, the game mechanics seem a bit “chunkier” and less fungible than X-Com 1’s, but that’s kind of feels logical to me in a value neutral way. To riff off of another discussion on Lum’s forum it’s sort of the “Euro boardgame” approach. I don’t think it looks less nuanced.
Hugin
1796
They did spell it out, to any reasonable degree. He said there’s a little over 80 maps in the game and a player will go through about 30 maps in a given playthrough. I personally think complaining about that is silly (as is complaining you can’t destroy enough of the environment), but then again I disliked a lot of things about the original X-Com so changes and streamlining don’t bug me.
Unless your bank declines the credit card payment because GMG is blocked for some reason. Um. Ok. I shall try a devious alternate strategy, then, of putting some money into my Paypal account and doing it that way.
Nesrie
1798
Well grenades and rockets are fun, but part of the enjoyment i received from upgrading to alien weaponry was suddenly you were destroying walls around you, which was not always a good thing. It kind of sucked to accidentally take down a wall and expose your man or a civilian to a nearby alien you didn’t know was there for example.
I do think a strategy game that has only one somewhat narrow way to play has lost part of it’s appeal as a strategy game. Civ allows you to reach the end a variety of ways. Crusader Kings also allows you to expand and strengthen yourself in a variety of ways. I don’t know… why couldn’t they have made ammo expensive to being wasting on walls. It just seems like… “you’re doing it wrong” so we removed the option seems, i don’t. I am probably not articulating my view very well, so I apologize for that. If someone wants to blow the map to hell, wast their ammo, possibly kill their civilians, destroy their ability to acquire alien artifacts… make that choice hard one but don’t remove it entirely. The goal of a game is to have fun. Strategy gamers find a lot of ways to challenge ourselves.
Part of me wonders is some of this has to do the the PvP part of the game… but they could have had it in single and removed it from PvP
Re the wider streamlining? I dunno, the game mechanics seem a bit “chunkier” and less fungible than X-Com 1’s, but that’s kind of feels logical to me in a value neutral way. To riff off of another discussion on Lum’s forum it’s sort of the “Euro boardgame” approach. I don’t think it looks less nuanced.
Well I will certainly say the game needed to be more forgiving to be a commercial success. X-Com was damn hard and long. I don’t have a problem with that, that many would. Streamlining was necessary on some level… but how much strategy did they take out doing it. If it’s just a tactical map now and some fluff around that… mmm, maybe too much.
I think in the past 18 months this has changed. The number of permadeath games on the market that are doing well is higher than it has been since the 90’s…maybe hardcore is finally back. Maybe.
Probably pointless, but we can hope.
