Love me some Jake Solomon, guy’s got style, and so does his new game: XCOM2!
The game is looking fantastic, sporting a much improved destruction model for buildings and cover, a bunch of new enemy types, and new gameplay mechanics like stealth sequences, and the fact that the aliens are playing towards a win state as well, and it’s your job to stop it!
The graphics have also received a nice update, and soldier customization is even more in depth this time around, both in terms of game mechanics such skills and abilities, gear, etc, and in terms of making them look just like you want them to.
There’s only been glimpses here and there of the game so far, but we finally have actual gameplay now released into the wild, along with a new trailer.
TRAILER:
BEAGLERUSH’s GAMEPLAY VID:
Here he shows off the first mission they got to play (that wasn’t a tutorial) and how the new destruction model can really help turn the tide.
MORE VIDS FROM CHRISTOPHER ODD
Looking so good, AND it's coming out on my b-day! SO I'll be playing this naked, while eating lots of yellow cake with extra butter frosting, and drinking sparkling cider.
That’s a bit of a turn off for me. I have limited time to play games and I find that games that give a lot of customisation, particularly necessary customisation such as skill trees etc, soak up too much of my time with the customising and not enough time for actual playing. I have a few choices, I can either go by gut feel about how to upgrade my characters, I can research the individual abilities properly and make a more informed decision, or I can get on the net and find out the optimum skills for my character and use those.
Gut feel inevitably results in a sub optimum build but it’s fast and gets me playing the quickest. I’m left with a nagging feeling that I could be having more fun if I’d chosen better things for my characters though, particularly when the going gets tough.
Properly researched upgrades takes too much of my time and still results in a sub-optimum build because I’m not that good at this type of decision making and I inevitably don’t research fully even though I intend to.
Doing an internet search feels like cheating and the game may as well have just presented me with the optimum build itself, in which case why bother with customisation?
I actually really liked the level of customisation the first new Xcom had. It was enough to be able to feel like I had an effect on my soldiers attributes without soaking up too much of my time. So, I hope that they aren’t taking it too far. I realise other people might like to micromanage their characters/soldiers to the nth degree, but we are all different and Xcom is one of the few games that I have played and finished and played again.
The technical side of the new game looks great. What they’ve chosen to do with it looks like arse.
I really, really don’t like the idea that we lost the first game by developer fiat, and then XCOM just sat around for 20 years to justify the timeskip. I much prefer my alternate idea, that XCOM2 should have been an alternate timeline where the aliens were sneakier, meaning XCOM was never activated because the aliens arrived pretending to be friendly until they could mind control our leaders. This game would then happen 5 years after their arrival, once XCOM activated itself in response to the aliens’ sinister plan becoming increasingly more apparent to them.
I also don’t like the new aliens. The infiltrator unit in particular looks like crap. I would much rather that they’d done the sensible thing and reintroduced the Thin Man as an infiltrator unit that sometimes begins the game posing as a civilian instead of adding Clayface as an enemy.
So unless they’ve gone back to the drawing board w.r.t. the story since I last saw their plans for the plot, I will not be buying this game until it’s on deep discount with all of its DLC.
You’re entitled to your opinion of course, but I strongly disagree. Unique characters are at the core of a game like this. The game was extremely skimpy on real choices - stats weren’t so terribly important, only two skill choices per class per tier (and often only one) meant that characters were more or less roles, rather than unique individuals. I didn’t think “That’s the guy I trained to be a really stealthy sharpshooter, who has a natural aptitude for spotting danger”, it’s just “Well, I gotta bring my generic sniper”
I want every character I create to actually feel unique, and to bring different skill sets to different missions, so I don’t feel like I’m just bringing the same batch of generic classes each time.
I think you put too much emphasis on min-maxing, in any case. That’s a limitation/requirement you’re placing on yourself. Go with what seems interesting to you - think of the characters as real people and create their story in your head. Don’t stress over min-max details of customization.
It sounds like you had time for a play through with more depth, then, just that you don’t like that aspect of the game.
Yeah, see I’m not really interested in them as characters anymore than I’m interested in a pawn in a game of chess as a character. I enjoy the gameplay for itself and would be quite happy with generic sniper, heavy guy, etc. It won’t stop me from playing it, it’s only a minor annoyance.
Yeah…well…there are always Min/Max people out there but you need not do it to play the game.
I mean, you may “feel” there is a more optimal strategy to build your characters but a game like this is usually tolerant of less optimal builds (unless you are playing Ironman). Not to mention different styles of play (stealth, run-and-gun, etc.).
Which is to say you can still have fun playing a suboptimal strategy. That said if you knowing a better build exists bugs you then yeah…stick with chess (not being snarky…we all like what we like for our own reasons and chess is awesome).
In my experience different players gravitate to different builds that suits their play-style No right or wrong (ignoring a min/max player). Just what works for them and they enjoy playing. This does however require some experimentation which you may not like. For me it is the game’s biggest draw as I explore better ways to do things.
I think I was better off without the internet. I do a search to find out how some perk actually works and then I find that there is some “perfect” build for a character (not talking Xcom here, just in general), then I feel like I should be creating that build. I would have more fun just not knowing.
I’m not actually a fan of chess, it was just an example of how I view my Xcom characters. It would be different if I had four characters from start to finish, I’d care more about them then, but when they die frequently I don’t want to invest time in anything other than making them useful soldiers.
To be clear, I love the game, it’s just that more detailed soldier development is not one of things I’m looking for in the sequel.
Of course, the ORIGINAL game didn’t offer any choices about your characters AT ALL and yet it’s held up as some paragon of greatness by many people.
I don’t think there’s any real need for heavy character customization. It’s not what the game should be about. Certainly, it didn’t make me enoy The Long War any more. It just made it feel tiresome.
Because nothing improves a game like having to keep track of a dozen individually customized units…?
His point was that unlike games that require him to a do a lot of min-max fiddling, he was INTERESTED in doing another playthrough. None of this is a question “there’s not enough hours in the day to do this, ever” and it’s all entirely a question of “Is this a pleasant thing to do with my time that has a net positive effect on my enjoyment.” Not sure how you got any other sort of message out of his post.
Aside from the obvious, the better graphics and cleaner interface, that’s the only thing they did to improve the original game.
It was having a third perk to pick from when leveling up your characters, rather than the 200+ missions and 150+ hours of The Long War that made it tiresome for you?
Yes. The game is simplified enough down that the optimal strategy is pretty obvious and you can become a near-optimal player in about 2 hours of play time. The actual strategy involved in the first game is trivial. So having the ability to make units at least a little unique, rather than just pawns, adds some depth to it. The base game is about as complex and offers as much actual strategy as minesweeper. It can be played very mechanically.
Who’s requiring min/max? That’s a ridiculous thing people put upon themselves. “Oh, the game offers me a choice? Shit. There must be a min/max option of that choice. I must take that min/max option even though I hate it! Argh! I hate choice!” The game is not that hard. In no way will min-maxing be required. You can just pick your characters at random and do fine. There will be templates to choose from, too, I’m sure. Getting irate because they give you an optional system of being able to customize your characters and give it some depth sounds very “I’m angry that people enjoy different things than me!”
Huh. I came to the games much later in life, and lack nostalgiavision. The original game had some great ideas in it, but the interface makes it almost unplayable. Cleaning up the interface in these ways are game-changers:
-Loadouts that persist with characters between missions
-Reduction of action points (I know this is a big debate; I did not find the earlier game’s system of action points actually led to very interesting decisionss, any more than it would have been interesting to add a tip calculator when my team went out for burgers would have been interesting; it was just extra bookkeeping for me)
-The reduction of troops, so that you don’t want a hundred troops or so wandering around.
-The sound quality is of course far far better.
I honor the original game, but I never made it through an entire campaign, it was just too annoyingly clunky. The reboot is, next to Starcraft, the campaign I’ve played through the most times of any game. I love it.
We don’t all have the time or inclination do a lot of gaming. If I can devote a couple of hours a week to it, I would prefer for those hours to be doing the things I like (getting out and murdering some aliens) and not doing the things I see as being a “chore”. I happened to enjoy XCom a lot, despite it being “simplified enough … that the optimal strategy is pretty obvious and you can become a near-optimal player in about 2 hours of play time.” Maybe that is why I liked it?
Heh. I just realized that after I wrote this post, I went to create a Google spreadsheet for loot in the new Pathfinder game I’m playing, and spent 10 minutes learning the SUMIF command so that I could create a running total of how much loot each character had received as well as what we were selling.
The third perk option that resulted in a bunch of guys being mostly the same but not really because it wasn’t really a meaningful choice but more of a busywork decision 9/10? It made character levelling and management tedious, yes. This is independent of other factions.
Did you read what the OP wrote? He admits this is an emotional effect, but that doesn’t stop it from ruining the game for him. You have emotional reactions to games too.
It was a much more meaningful choice than in the vanilla game, certainly.
How many extra dozens of hours would you say you spent on the game doing the busywork of selecting from three options instead of two? I would assume reading all three options required at least a half hour every time.
Totalbiscuit put out a 1 hour overview of the game that looks amazing.
Aside from my main complaint, the simplicity of the one-move-one-shot mechanic, they seem to have improved every aspect of the game. Well, it’s disappointing that class leveling only allows to choose between two abiliities, but at least they seem to be more unique and interesting and less mandatory than xcom 2012. Or at least I hope that’s the case.
Designing the game around being on the offensive improves the mechanics in a lot of ways. The geoscape looks a lot more interesting. There’s an in-game reason why you’d only have one base. The fact that you’re on the attack in missions makes the whole gameplay make more sense - you don’t get the same “discover aliens, they get a free turn” giant flaw the first game has. The stealth system is interesting but probably not that tactically interesting trying to model stealth in a turn based game. But between the stealth element, and the fact that reinforcements can get dropped in your rear, the game will be much less mechanical. In XCOM 2012, you pretty much attacked every map in the exact same way - here you may actually have to move in different directions, take different approaches, make real tactical choices.
The cosmetic customization looks pretty sweet. It’s nice that they let you design characters and then import them into your game as a separate mechanism. I like the weapon modification system, making the weapons unique rather than having to choose things like scopes as one of your item slots.
Then just more. More maps, more alien types, more types of missions.
The sequel looks better than I had any hopes of it being. And that’s not even counting the modding support, which could potentially make it one of the greatest games of all time. If the modding is flexible enough, people could add the detailed character skill/ability trees I crave, or re-create the xcom 1994 systems within the polished interface of the new game, or countless other ideas.
I’m actually kinda talking myself into not buying it (yet), because I spent more on games around Christmas than anticipated, and I’m in the middle of a xenonauts campaign and I meant to finish up my long war campaign from long ago and I know both will go out the window, and I’ve always been patient waiting for discounts on single player games, but temptation will probably get me.
Quite looking forward to this one. I loved XCOM, but found the Long War a bit too fiddly to get into. I have high hopes for this one, and the mod support sounds like this has the potential for incredible expandability. I’m quite pleased they seem to have fixed the enemies get a free turn on reveal mechanic, which was kinda BS.
Looking at the action points vs. simplified movement + action system discussion here, I am very much in favor of the latter. I think a lot of gamer-types tend to confuse complexity with depth. Action point systems often seem like they allow more flexibility and greater depth, but more often than not there are only a few really optimal choices and a whole bunch of ways to make stupid mistakes. For example, you move your guy just far enough to still have enough APs to attack, but whoops, you forgot you need to spend an AP to turn to face the enemy. That’s not an interesting choice, that’s you having to spend your time doing arithmetic instead of thinking about tactics.
