1881

Yeah, I’m not sure how I feel about this part yet.

I can learn to accept dealing with the cards I’m dealt, but the original (and most other strategy games) offer so much choice mid-game in crafting your strategy that I’ll going to reserve opinion until I’ve played it on whether or not the customization options make up for this.

1882

This is actually untrue - you can equip your characters with any gear you like that you’ve researched, manufactured, and have on hand. Each character has a main weapon, a pistol slot, an armor slot, and a “item” slot you can use to give the a med pak, grenade, stun gun, or whatever.

1883

What choices did X-Com offer exactly? Your troops stats went up as they got kills. End of story. The only thing you could change about them was their name. There’s lots of arguments to be made, but XCom offers a lot more in the way of personalizing your units.

It doesn’t force you to do anything. Just like you argue you didn’t have to take a full load of troops, you don’t have to take a sniper on a mission if you don’t want to. You have a full stable of soldiers and it’s always your call who goes on the mission.

Yes, each class has some limitations on what weapon types it can choose from, but before each mission you can choose what weapons and armor each soldier gets from within that type. Trust me, 100 missions into X-Com it got very tiresome to make sure everyone was properly loaded out before each mission… the abstractions they’ve done to the inventory system achieve the same results without all the micromanagement.

Okay once again… there’s a lot of arguments to be made for the new XCom, for and against, but there’s really no comparison between the two as far as options to customize your troops goes.

The current class system is really just an extension of what everyone did in X-Com anyway… if I hired a new soldier and he had a high strength, he’s a heavy. If I hire a new soldier and he has amazing accuracy, he’s a sniper. There was no choice there, and there was no choice in how those soldiers progress.

1884

Injuries are going to determine squad composition as much as any choices you could have made anyway.

1885

For what it’s worth, the review was played, written, and edited in full well before any exclusivity talk.

1886

This seems at odds with your chart. Per your chart its almost better than the original across the board, which i think it true if they meet the rest of their goals, and deliver a solid product.

1887

I’m confused about something. There IS a day/night cycle right? Which means there are day and night missions like in the original.

1888

Since the design choices are such a hot topic of discussion here, this is worth a read: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-10-05-the-re-making-of-xcom

Three-and-a-half years ago, Jake Solomon called a meeting of the XCOM remake design leads. Something wasn’t right, and it had been nagging him for ages.

Firaxis, the Baltimore-based developer best-known for making Civilization under Sid Meier’s steady hand, had been working on XCOM for a year. Much had been done. Jake was nervous because he knew what he was about to ask his colleagues to do.

Jake didn’t like XCOM’s combat. Combat 2.0, as it was then called, was very similar to the combat in the original game. For him it was too similar. Its turn-based action had time units and large squads, just like the original, and cover was nowhere near as important as it is now. But layered on top were unit abilities and other new features. It was a straight up remake of the original with a sprinkle of modern day mechanics, and it wasn’t working.

“We were overburdening this old combat system with all these new things we wanted to do,” Jake tells me in the lobby, not far from the room they call the Fish Bowl. “It was a mistake design wise.”

…

EDIT: Credit where credit is due. TurinTur posted it first. That’s what I get for only reading the last page before posting. :)

Wendelius

1889

Yeah, I kind of shouted to the computer when I read that :P

(of course, who knows how exactly was the design of the combat they were doing)

1890

I was referring to the fact that there were no roles to begin with. The classes and skill trees is one of the changes I see in the most positive light, though. It could have been implemented exactly like this without changing anything else, so it’s more like an additional feature, though.

It remains to be seen how much choice you really have in this regard, but yeah, this COULD be right. But Jake in the TMA podcast really sounded like the purpose of the system was really to dictate players what classes to use.

I stand partially corrected on the loadout issue, but beyond that - I don’t have to “trust you” on that one, I know it was mighty tedious to reequip your soldiers over and over again. But it’s a really simple to adress issue that actually was solved in Apoc and in UFO:ET, for example.
Further simplification of the inventory was unneccessary.
Also, good for you that a campaign should now only take 30 maps, I guess.

That’s incorrect. Well, it might have been the case for you, of course, but I played differently. My main focus was always on APs - soldiers ought to be able to do a lot of stuff per turn (something I won’t be able to empathize at all in the new game, with the fixed number of actions). Basically I’d pick my soldiers based on speed alone, and then balance their loadout accordingly. I usually had no “heavies” except at the very beginning of a game, because in the end, everyone ended up carrying heavy plasma for quite a while, only in the endgame did some folks get equipped with Blaster Launchers and others with PSI instead.
Nor did I have Snipers or dedicated Medics. The “heavies” would carry some medpacks and grenades because they could do so and still move far enough. Folks with good accuracy would get to make the most difficult shots, but I didn’t particularly think of them as snipers. I’d merely try to shuffle at least one guy into my “squads” that knew how to shoot accurately.

Note that the “Heavy Plasma = King of the Battlefield” issue is one of the reasons I think the classes might actually be beneficial to the game, though this, too, could have been adressed by merely tweaking the available weaponry.

I’m not opposing change! I’m merely a bit discouraged by the fact that in XCOM, change almost always seem to imply: you can now do less things with less freedom, facing less diverse scenarios. That’s all.

rezaf

1891

The fallacy there is assuming that everyone used a guy with high strength as a heavy. If I wanted a trooper, he was getting a rifle. Or a scout, a pistol. And if I was looking for a sniper and was otherwise happy with my team, he was going to be fired.

There’s a definite difference between being told “here, this is what you have and how you have to use it,” and “here, this is what you have, use it as you will.”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still looking forward to the game. I’m just reserving judgement on this aspect until I’ve played it.

1892

Yes, but the maps are correlated with when a mission appears (there are specific daytime maps and specific night time maps since none are random). You can’t do the old trick of having your skyranger hang out waiting for the sunrise.

1893

It was also addressed in a fan-made patch that introduced a ton of other handy stuff: http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2218181

1894

Hmmm, reminds me of a cross between Shadow Watch and Silent Storm combat mechanics.

1895

The GI review is up.

Unfortunately, for me…

As much as I appreciate XCOM’s outstanding balance and tight design, the game could benefit from more variety across the board, and not just because I saw maps repeat (albeit with different spawn locations) more often than I’d like.

:/

1896

Next they should make a game where you are trying to run a Private Military company.

Mostly they would just need to change the economy system, base to a more above ground model, model textures, weapon textures (no lasers). Keep combat mostly the same with overwatch and suppression. Keep randomly-made, expendable Mercs, expand the unit size to up to 8 upgradeable to 12. Make a bunch of mission types like Executive Protection, Search & Destroy, Recovery, Search and Rescue and more. Mission, Mercs, etc will be based on reputation. Your weapon and equipment will based on reputation as well provided my a quartermaster (engineer).

Lots of ideas, but basically nearly a straight mercenary squad based game based on Xcom’s formula rather than JA/JA2s system of Mercs with only one country of operations.

1897

Well, if someone makes a Xcom game adding the Silent Storm physics/destruction I won’t reject it! :P

1898

You realize making this into a bigger deal than it might be is going to exacerbate the situation when you finally get to play it and see that first map a second time, even though this time the aliens are different, the patrol routes and spawns are different, and this time it’s being used for a Terror Mission, right? I’m bummed about no random maps, too, but I’m certainly not going to let it affect my enjoyment of the game.

I’m sure I’ll have plenty of things to complain about once I’ve put a few hours into it, though. :)

EDIT - I also recognize I’ve known about the lack of random maps since the beginning of the summer or so, so I’ve had maybe more time than you to get used the notion. I was right there with ya! But I’ve since sort of come around on the idea, having seen how the game plays on the static maps, and especially after reading about how the random maps they tried out just didn’t work at all. I’d rather an elegant solution, if not the ideal one.

1899

Preload is on.

1900

For example, not having more free hours in the day to play it.

Though I am certainly open to hearing more on handcrafted maps. We haven’t met our quota on this page just yet.