I’m sure it’ll dwarf it in sales, but I think (hope?) there’s room for both. I bought XCOM but couldn’t get more than an hour into the game the three times I tried it, I just found it incredibly boring. I’ve also heard of things like turn limits and reinforcements in XCOM2 that make me have very little interest in it (note: I haven’t followed it closely due to lack of interest, so maybe I’m missing some finer details).
Xenonauts 2, though? It’s certainly not a must-buy for me, but I’m interested at least. Hopefully there’s a niche large enough to support them, as the entire project budget is probably smaller than what Firaxis pisses away on cinematics.
Can you explain? This was my #1 complaint (among many) about NuXcom (and you’re right that it shouldn’t have been called Xcom) and while I didn’t play Xenos as much as I probably should have I didn’t really notice anything wrong with the bullet trajectories. From what I remember every tile with an obstacle had a chance to stop the bullet, in the end it made for a relatively sensible system, a lot like JA2’s.
What other issues did you have with the game (apart from mind control, I think everyone had issues with that, lol)?
I remember getting shot at by an Alien, stood on the second floor of a house by a window that faces North, as I was approaching a the house from the east at something like an 85 degree angle…
I played a little tonight and I was wondering why my best-in-the-world alien fighting organization clothes all of the soldiers in very plain denim jumpsuits like they are factory workers from 1954 USSR?
@Bateu, the engine didn’t handle elevation properly. My ‘sniper’ on a roof would not be able to shoot over a fence (or anything really, even a car tire on the floor would block the shot iirc) at an Alien clearly in ‘line of sight’. I sort of jaw dropped at that, because if the original 1990’s game could do it (and be pretty damn awesome with all that stuff, over 4 levels of elevation) it was pretty immersion breaking to see it in this game. I’m pretty sure i had the latest patched version (i came to the game late with it’s GOG release).
So the shot was treated as if you were on the ground floor? I’ve never run into a situation like that but I’ve played with vanilla maps only and pretty much never went on roofs so I’m not ruling this out. With the Unity they’ll probably move over to proper bullet tracing since it’s a 3d engine anyway but they’ll have to be really careful with bullet origin (rifle or character).
It isn’t like rebooting Xcom was the only right choice in hind sight. Xenonauts doesn’t reach up the heights of the original XCOM not because it was too close instead of forging its own path, but because of the realities of Xenanauts development, imo it shows it was done a super tight budget by a group of devs that were in the range of modders-amateur devs-indie devs. The art was very lacking, for example.
I loved the art tbh, my main problem was the way the geoscape worked there was really only one way to play (which that too plagued the new XCOM), it forced you to expand very quickly across the globe otherwise an UFO attacking on the other side of the planet would make you lose your fundings very quickly and that was the only source of your income.
Yeah. I was on vanilla maps also (i assume) and it was one where you deploy and have a bunch of buildings in the lower ‘left’ of the map and the ufo in middle on the other side of the map to where you start. I made my way in two groups (or ‘fire teams’ as i like to call them) one going downwards towards the buildings and the other sort of covering the rest of the map, until we found the UFO.
Then my sniper goes up some outside stairs of a building and lays down on the roof (cause we are professionals that know what we are doing) to provide covering fire for the main group to assault the UFO. All perfectly do-able in the original game (well ‘kneeling’ rather than lying down!).
Not here, the engine could not handle the shots trajectories properly, so i went to the forums and sure enough the engine could not deal with that situation, so it ruined the game a bit for me. Everything else was fine to good (art, gameplay, base building) but it was just missing all the cards the original still had. The best of the X-com likes, but not as good as i hoped, and that engine issue really didn’t help. I even modded it quite a bit eventually, but that engine issue was still there.
Fingers crossed they don’t have that kind of basic issue in the new one (might be why they are going for a fully 3D based engine this time?).
I don’t see it so much as a problem as a commentary on how much of a political issue it would be deciding where to site bases for the only alien-fighting organization of note on the planet. How did original X-COM handle it? It’s been a long time since I played.
As for me, I’ve been playing through Xenonauts to keep me from buying X-COM or X-COM 2, neither of which I think I want to dive into, since Total War: Warhammer is coming out soon, and I’m already going to have a hard enough time explaining to my wife why I’m spending so much time on games. I’m enjoying the experience. Tactical combat is tense and difficult, albeit not quite as punishing as something like Jagged Alliance, and the management layer has enough meat on it to keep me occupied. I find that whether or not I airstrike a crashed/downed UFO depends strongly on whether I’m hankering for combat, or busy with organizing a squad or waiting for some production to finish.
I’ve been trying out the X-Division mod. So far it’s been pretty nice but I didn’t get very far yet and I just derped up big time during my ironman run - decided to assault a corvette that landed on its own. Unfortunately for me it was loaded with androns and I didn’t have laser rifles yet. Oops.
It spawned stuff close to you, in xenonauts you could make your main base in North America and have the aliens attack all the time in Asia, screwing you up badly.
What are you basing this on? Merely observing the game in action can be deceiving, because the player gets so little information.
XCOM:EU has been completely decompiled for OpenXCOM. If I understand the mission generation correctly, the alien AI is as unaware of XCOM bases as XCOM is of theirs. They have have to scout and detect them first, and their main mission targets for harvests, alien base construction etc. follow a weighted region list.
In the original, in part due the many ways to gain additional funds (selling on the Black Market etc) it was less of a problem (but obviously never good when your largest funding country dropped support), so you could work your way through most set-backs. Original X-com is still just genius and not bettered by any newer versions.
While we’re on the subject - would you recommend any mods for OpenXcom Zak? I’m looking for something that would make the game easier on the eyes, even with the various scaling options the game has it’s still painful to look at (and I mean that literally, I have to squint my eyes to make out anything in tactical view). I found a really nice font mod which makes the text as clear as it can get (I think the guy lifted it from PSX or Amiga version, not sure. Is there anything similar for sprites or terrain?
@ Bateau, ah yes this rings a bell, you have support for high resolutions now, but iirc, there are not without issue. My solution is very old-school i’m afraid (but i swear by it for OpenXcom), i set my desktop resolution to a lower settings before running the game. Let me get my settings i use in the ‘Option’ tab, as i really did not like the default (possibly it was default?) settings.
I use 1280x1024 in windowed mode (so i actually keep my monitor’s native 1920x1200 res).
then i have Geoscape Scale set to 1.5x Original, and the same for Battlescape Scale.
Display Filter is ‘Openxcom*’
Display Options is ‘Letterboxed’
Hope that helps as you really don’t want the large hi-res screens with tiny little icons and details, bad for the eyes all that squinting imho :)
