The bad is that you are not making a game, you are making several different games incorporated in the same product. Which is fine at a Risk level, but when you get into something which is orders of magnitude more complex to design, balance and implement, few dev shops can afford the resources for that.
Wait, are we still talking about that same game that came on three floppies and ran on a 386?
And about what’s basically a straight remake?
Pardon me, but after 15 years of failed semi-sequels, maybe I’m just a bit disillusioned about anyones brilliant ideas to put square instead of round wheels on his car.
rezaf
See Bloodbowl.
yeah, that went really well…
Seconded.
true, let’s see if they pull it off
rezaf, farfrael,
Unfortunately, there’s no point doing an exact clone of X-Com. It’s already there - you can play X-Com and it’s still on sale.
I just dislike the idea that any and all changes to the original game are worse. Apocalypse gets slaughtered often but I thought it proved you could make a major change to how the combat works (with the psuedo realtime) and still be a proper x-com game. The original is a fine, fine game but that does not mean you can’t change it for the better.
Oh, of course there is a point.
I mean, like I said, new ideas should be implemented, by all means, but there should be a way to disable them. Like in the unofficial JA2 patches, where there’s a way to have the game behave almost as it did before, but where you also have the possibility to make it much harder and/or more complex.
Brilliantly solved, imo.
There are quite a few things that would - I think - be appreciated by anybody.
For example, graphical impovements. My ideal remake would preserve the idea behind the semi-realistic theme of the original game, but allow the game to be played in 1920x1200 or something. And it’d still be 2.5D.
But I would have also love an engine like the Silent Storm one, especially if the physics would’ve been preserved.
Also, lots of interface tweaks could improve upon XComs basic design - for example you needed to re-equip your soldiers manually before each battle, having customizable loadout profiles would be welcome by anybody, I guess. There’s tons of small tweaks like this to be made which don’t change the game balance in any way but make the game more playable.
So saying “remaking the mechanics 1:1 makes no sense” is nonsense, imo.
Btw., I’m not one of the Apoc haters, I vastly preferred the art direction of the original, but in the bottom line, it brought many nice ideas to the table - unfortunately a lot of them ended up not being implemented properly, such as the faction system.
The choice between RT and TB combat was nice, but unfortunately it didn’t really work all that well - it wasn’t unplayable either way, but there were some discrepancies. I agree with the notion over in the XCom thread that pausable real-time is fine, but scratches a different itch than TBS does, and thus I think a proper XCom remake should be TBS.
rezaf
So saying “remaking the mechanics 1:1 makes no sense” is nonsense, imo.
Well, no-one said quite that, but you’re being pretty strident about this. Are you really sure that a good development team couldn’t improve on X-Com with their own changes? What if they, oh I don’t know, made the fighter v UFO combat something other than almost completely worthless? That would be a good change, wouldn’t it?
It’s not that the faction system wasnt implemented properly, problem was most of the stuff around it never made it to the game, and its sad because it all sounds so awesome.
JM: Like I wrote before, I used to be in your boat with this, there are areas where it’s appearently obvious that the game could be improved, no doubt.
But I have been seeing remake after remake that had brilliant ideas on how to improve on XCom’s formula, and in my eyes, neither of those ideas worked out all that well in the end.
MrCoffee: Well, yeah, I was refering to the stuff that didn’t make it into the game, obviously. ;)
rezaf
I don’t see this having much to do with an X-COM game. To me, Apocalypse seem to be a great base for a great Blade Runner/Syndicate-esque game where various corporations and organisations battle for wealth and power in Mega-Primus, but fighting the alien menace almost becomes a secondary feature.
incremental improvements to both gfx and interface would be valuable by themselves IMHO
also agree that some changes can be good (better air interception and auto-resolve sounds great).
My disappointment is in relation to the fact that, so far, all teams have ended up implementing features which actually go against the spirit of the original X-COM (in this specific case artificially limit player access to funds to make the game more challenging) or were broken/not balanced.
So, in principle, yes X-COM can and should be improved upon but in practice nobody has managed to do so since 1994 (arguably, always a question of individual taste)
Anyway, we shall see what they end up doing. Let’s hope they get it right
Can’t they just - as was suggested upthread - adjust the selling price of manufactured equipment so you’d break even at best?
That should also allow for easy modding if you wanted to bring back the laser cannon workshops – just dial up the selling prices in the relevant .txt (or whatever format) file.
I’m pretty sure the consensus opinion is that original X-Com has never been improved upon. There seems to be a large minority that prefer Apocalypse or TFTD but most people (at least the ones that post on the Internet) strongly prefer the first over the sequels or remakes.
I’ve never seen a fan-made “reimagining” of TFTD.
The trouble with the X-Com remakes is that they always seem to be low budget and highly confused. I think a good strategy team with some titles under its belt could easily take X-Com and turn it into a modern masterpiece, without having to do a clone.
If I can’t sell alien corpses to some sick fetishist, it’s not fucking X-COM.
I always thought it was to a kebab shop.
The other problem is that I’m afraid any “for profit” endeavor is kind of doomed: if they make the game we afficianados want (a straight X-Com remake or with reasonable improvements), I’m doubtful there will be a huge market for it. I mean, yes, interface and graphics improvements will make it a lot easier for us to win people over to the cause, I’m just doubtful that there are a lot of those people. So I’m wondering how much money a team of any reasonable size could make at doing it. Which might be a pressure to make more significant changes in the name of accessibility.
Maybe an ex-mod team is in a sweet spot profit-wise… if they’re just looking to make some spending money, not to start-up a successful business, then that might be okay.
(I’m beginning to think the right solution to the X-Com problem is to start a fund to acquire the license and source code to the first game, and then start making graphics upgrades, UI improvements, and bugfixes to the original source… No idea how much it would cost, though.)
Haven’t used this addon for the original game yet, but it apparently adds some functionality to the existing interface and fixes some bugs that exist.
http://ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=User:Seb76
This, in particular, may pique your interest: