XCOM: Enemy unkown

The Game Room
81

The gameplay video led me to another, called “Why Fireaxis Loves XCOM”. One of the things they talked about was the difficulty of the original. Also, in the gameplay video they talked about how the high difficulty level was called “classic”. I don’t remember the original being all that hard, though. It was a long time ago-- I played it on the original Playstation-- but I think I finished it twice, and don’t recall using any crazy cheese exploits.

It was cool hearing the music again.

The gameplay does look good. I like how they kept things like opportunity fire. There’s a bit much chrome, like how there’s cut scenes for launching fighters. That stuff is neat the first couple times-- I thought the base in particular looked good-- but after a while I’ll usually look for a way to shut that stuff off.

Anyway, there are other games I want to play first, so this one goes on the wait for a sale list. Looks like it would play well on the Xbox, actually, and the Xbox could use more strategy titles, IMO. I’ll try showing the gameplay video to my stepson.

82

Yes - Game play was ok but during alien turn or scrolling - shots and movement were that fast you could not see where it came from or stop the screen where you wanted it. I have a few old laptops kicking arounr that were perfect for the game so no biggie - but the steam games run at a nice speed and £8.99 is not that much for the collection.

83

The original wasn’t all that hard - in fact it shipped with a bug that reset the difficulty of all saved games back to the easiest rating on reload so… yeah. Of course, Terror From The Deep had the same bug but the other way around (and its baseline difficulty was already calibrated around the original’s max difficulty level due to all the feedback about the game being too easy… that was before they’d figured out there was a bug obviously). It evens out, I guess :slight_smile:

So that’s one thing.
The other thing is that the two original X-Com games weren’t so much “fiendishly hard” as “mercilessly random”.
Sometimes the RNG just conspired to first put you in a no-win scenario (base attack with only rookies to defend and your item limit is busted so they spawn with garbage equipment, for example) and then proceeded to curb stomp you further, for the evulz mostly. Every damn move you make results in a deadly precise interrupt doing critical damage from deep within the fog of war. Your 90% pointblank shots miss (all of them. And you only needed the one), so the Chrysalis chomps on a first rookie, who turns into one more Chrysalis and chomps on a third. Meanwhile two of your other guys get MC’d and chuck grenades around.
Then the blast bomb barrage from across the map begins.

Of course, the bullshit was even worse in game the second. Half of your weapons don’t even work above water ? Check. Every underwater mission is functionally a night mission ? Oh yes, that goes without saying. Lobstermen terror sites when all you have for equipment are still dartguns and a lone autocannon, also your tank can’t shoot because once again it’s above water ? Ha ha, why not ! Oh and hey, it’s a two-part mission and the ammunition code is busted so you’re likely going to have to go full melee for the second part. Thought you should know these things.

84

Did anyone like intercepter? Its been a while since I played it or Apocalypse. I found intercepter too difficult to control - I didn’t have a joystick to play it - and those type of games never did anything for me - FPS I enjoyed but not flying combat games.

And as for Apocalypse - I remember at the time not enjoying it but for the life of me I cant remember why. What was the game type - Its at home and I will eventually get round to it but After TFTD is complete. (is it like TFTD or intercepter and what about Enforcer?

85

God, I hated that so much. I (ab)used laser weapons heavily in the first game, so having gyro weapons basically be completely useless more than 50% of the time was just … bad.

This was the other thing I hated about TFTD - they abused the crap out of the 2 part mission code, which was pretty kludgy to begin with, and just turned everything into a griiiiind.

86

Well, yeah. TFTD was explicitly intended for someone already familiar with UFO Defense. It was essentially an expansion pack, rather than something to make a standalone entry into, and while a lot of things really were intended to outright add more difficulty (“flying” chrysalids!), others were intended to spur alternate tactics.

The Lobstermen are a good example, they were hugely resistant to projectile fire and standard explosions, but had rather slow movement and were extremely weak to stun and melee damage, which meant that your best weapon against them for much of the game was the standard el-cheapo cattle prod counterpart. The melee-heavy and shoot-&-scoot approaches for dealing with Lobstermen are a whole new ballgame from anything in UFO. Late-game, their vulnerability to the concussion bombs & mind control made those a lot more viable tech choices.

Um…well, the removal of time units is a huge game-changer by itself, one that has ramifications all the way down to weapon selection (no more distinction between fast and slow weapons, for instance), but just going off the top of my head, removals include:
[ul][li]Multiple bases (base positioning & defense, global squad manipulation and the logistics of such was pretty much the entire thrust of the strategy game)[/li][li]Inventory (which affects things like ammo/consumable supply, or the difference between one- and two- handed weapons, or large and small)[/li][li]Randomized terrain[/li][li]Morale (replaced by a specific “suppression” state & abilities :rolleyes: )[/li][li]Stances[/li][li]Weapon fire modes[/li][li]Location fire with direct fire weapons[/li][li]Stun damage (with its follow-ons like smoke inhalation vs suit filter quality)[/li][li]Dynamic fire & smoke[/li][li]Massive reduction in squad & mission size[/ul][/li]While they’ve added:
[ul][li]Character skill trees[/ul][/li]I won’t even call classes new, since the old stat system essentially defined classes, just in a more organic manner. You won’t be giving the autocannon to some wuss with 30 strength, for instance. It’s hard not to be leery about the game being substantially watered down.

87

At least the way I played the original, I never really used “classes” of soldiers. I had “dudes who go first”: cannon-fodder rookies, and veteran soldiers with good reaction skills. Then there were dudes who held back and sniped from a distance, usually veterans with decent accuracy. And only a few rookies would be strong enough to carry heavy weapons. But veterans improve strength, reactions, and accuracy fairly uniformly. In the mid game, my two “classes” are really just rookie cannon fodder, vs. veterans with heavy plasma and power armor. Late game, when psi came into play, each squad was composed of psi-resistant veterans, and a couple psi troopers of my own. By this time most of the veterans were all-around super soldiers.

88

Interceptor was a piece of shit, even for a guy with a joystick who loves space shooters to bits.

Part of it came from the kludgy flying (even with a joystick it was a pain in the ass not to overshoot your targets - because IIRC there was no “match speed” toggle !) and horribly dated visuals (even by 1998 standards), but really the meat of the problem was the randomness of it all - from the venerable X-Wing & Wing Commander onwards space shooters have always been very dependant on scripted missions, complex scenarios, surprise events and so forth.
*Interceptor *for its part is a seemingly endless stringing together of “hey there are 4 flying saucers over there, quick, go get them ! Got them ? Good. Come back to base.” with little rhyme or reason to it. Maybe it got meatier a long way in, I dunno - I must have played it all of two evenings before dumping it in disgust.

[QUOTE=Mekhazzio]
The Lobstermen are a good example, they were hugely resistant to projectile fire and standard explosions, but had rather slow movement and were extremely weak to stun and melee damage, which meant that your best weapon against them for much of the game was the standard el-cheapo cattle prod counterpart.
[/QUOTE]

Sure. But they got long range, burst fire weaponry that works perfectly fine, are crack shots with them, have a good chunk of hitpoints beneath that armour (enough that running up and stunprodding a couple of times isn’t guaranteed to take one down) and pretty interrupty as well.
Considering how early you can run into the fuckers should the RNG hate you particularly that day, well, good thing soldiers are expendable I guess.

I won’t mourn that myself. It was essentially just mindless busywork (have fun reorganizing everybody’s weapons, ammo and grenades before every mission, wee !) and the space management aspect was only relevant for the rocket launcher guy, everyone else could carry enough mags and 'nades to take over a small country with plenty of room to spare.
I remember there being a wonky weight system built in as well but never much paid attention beyond “the guys with 40+ strength get the heavy weapons”. Beyond that, everybody got a pair of mags for their main weapon, a pair of 'nades, a pair of flares and additional gear based on assigned roles (kits for medics, stunrods for scouts, explosives and moar 'nades for grenadeers, motion detectors for snipers, specialty ammo for heavies). End of inventory fuckery.
The only slight bit of strategy and interest to be found there was that (and the game never fucking told you that !) the TUs required to grab an item from this or that location varied - quickest were shoulders IIRC, belt was average, legs were bad and backpack took forever. Also picking up sleeping aliens or (in Apoc) unhatched brainsucker eggs to disable their waking up, which was gamey and lame in and of itself.

So, yeah. Much micro about nothing.

Stances, cover system, same difference more or less.

That still exists, only it’s in the form of character abilities rather than item properties.
In practice there’s little difference between “that gun can fire three rounds at reduced accuracy” and “that guy can toggle firing thrice in one turn at reduced accuracy with certain types of guns” ; or “you can use more TUs to fire that gun more accurately” and “this guy can toggle aimed fire”. Besides the fact that your rookies won’t be able to do either - but then again your rookies wouldn’t do any of that to begin with, they were merely there to scout ahead of your “real” shooty squad and carry primed 'nades in case of doors & monster cupboards :slight_smile:

Whut ? Wazzat ? You could location fire in X-Com ?!

Yeah, that’s a big change admittedly - the 6 guy limit and the increased attention you’re evidently meant to give each individual soldier (customizing their bodies & armour colours, XP trees, etc…) feels more Jagged Alliance-y or Silent Storm-y than *X-Com-y. *It certainly will cut down on rookie wave-centric strategies ! I know my guys were all named things like “Sniper 1”, “Heavy 3”, “MCtrained Grunt 1” and so forth. No point getting overly attached to heavy plasma fodder :smiley:

The mission size I can take or leave - fricking endless cargo liner missions I’d rather not slog through again. Can’t say that the videos I’ve seen so far offer much hints there though - all I’ve seen are one skirmish (seemed small indeed, but then the IGN guys died super fast, maybe the mission was meant to go on longer ?) and one smallish crash site (early game ? Medium scouts weren’t much to write home about either)

89

Ugh, yes. I hated the inventory system, and deliberately took as little stuff as possible on each mission to avoid having to play with this stuff. And pretty much as soon as I could, I stopped loading myself with ‘heavy’ weapons because it just wasn’t worth keeping track of.

Oh. So stances means standing/crouching? Yeah, I’m not going to miss that either - auto crouch in cover for the win.

Yeah. It was selectively useful for destroying walls and fences. It was also stupid and illogical because there was no way that you should be able to destroy a wall of even a barn by shooting it a couple of times with a rifle, or even a laser rifle. Not going to miss this, as it never made any sense.

This is the one thing that does bother me a bit - I never played the super disposable squad member game, but I still feel the loss of squad size. I was really hoping for 8 (since that was my usual deployment in the first game - 8 and a tank) but I’m prepared to grudgingly settle for six, though it feels too small for me just from a flavor perspective. On the other hand, I’m looking forward to having some real variety in my soldiers, because frankly, for most of the original game, my squad was made up of “a bunch of guys with laser rifles, and whatever secondary junk like medkits or stunrods happened to end up in their inventory”. The system didn’t even support the CONCEPT of a sniper, since there weren’t, to my knowledge, any “long range, high TU cost, but highly accurate” weapons. If there were, I never used them because they weren’t good.

I agree. I don’t know that we’ve necessarily seen the extend of the mission scope here, and there is DEFINITELY an upwards limit on how much is good, and TFTD, at least, routinely went well over that limit for me.

Most of all though, I think there’s a lot of “They changed it, now it sucks” going on here.

90

I also observe that there is definitely a “paniced” state in the new game, which seems to me to indicate that there’s some kind of morale system in place, contrary to what Mekhazzio had said. Suppression has a completely different function to fulfill from morale, and honestly, I’m not even sure how you could say that it “replaces” it. Morale is consequences of things not going your way, and causes you to lose control of your soldiers, while suppression is a deliberate action on the part of certain weapon users to ‘pin down’ enemy units and decrease their ability to shoot you.

Doesn’t really seem related.

91

Location fire appears to still be in effect in Enemy Unknown for explosive weapons that would logically cause environment destruction. In the demo, both grenades and rockets were free-target, with the blast sphere outlined so you could place your shot.

And good lord that rocket launcher did some damage.

92

Yup. I had just assumed that Mekhazzio had meant “guns” when he said “direct fire weapons” (as opposed to “non-lobbed weapons” or something.)

93

Whelp, I pre-orderd it.

It’s been a good year for gamers, IMO.

94

I won’t disagree on the pre-mission loadout being terrible. It was in desperate need of pre-set configurations, and the item limit made base defense occasionally too interesting (loads of ammo but barely any weapons to fire it!) but throwing the baby out with the bathwater isn’t the way to go.

The logistics layer that limited ammo and imposed weight/space/time concerns was a worthwhile addition, especially when it came to casualties and multi-part missions. Having someone stranded running low on ammo and needing to start scavenging made for some tense occasions, and I liked the occasional Hollywood-ish scenarios of having a dude toss a rifle down the hall for his friend that ran dry, or desperately trying to use a dropped alien grenade without really knowing how the fuse works :smiley:

Plus, it meant that consumable use was a strategic-level decision as much as a tactical one, instead of this canned “single use per mission”. You want to use 5 blaster bombs on that building? Go ahead, and enjoy the huge elerium and workshop cost that comes with the demolitions spree.

It’s not a time-units level of gameplay, but when you keep tossing out lots of not-huge things, it adds up.

The old one had stances AND cover, though admittedly Jagged Alliance 2 did both better. As for the other, I thought removing obstacles and making new doorways with gunfire was a staple tactic. It was nearly the only reason to even bother with heavy sonics in TFTD; their stats kinda sucked otherwise, but they were capable of shooting holes even in alien materials.

But yeah, I’ll admit there is some “they changed it, now it sucks” going on. It’s disappointing to see shiny new games come out with a smaller feature list than the decades-old games they’re trying to mimic. The latest example: this new Carrier Command, with gameplay straight out of 1990. It’s like we’re starting from nothing, all over again.

95

Oh yeah, OK. I thought you meant locational as in “aim for the head” :smack:. If there’s really no improvising entry points or creatively reshaping the battlespace with heavy explosives, that indeed sucks mightily. And is kinda unforgivable after Silent Storm showed just how far (and how fun) it could go. Sniper tower, heavy cover up top ? Fuck it, machine gun the supports - he’ll pop down :slight_smile:

As for the scarcity aspect, I agree it was a factor early on, but once you started using alien weapons you were pretty much getting ammo and grenades by *using *your ammo and grenades.
I think Jagged Alliance did that one better, due to both the sharply limited inventory space and having to go long stretches without coming back to base for resupply, stretches that may or may not involve heavy fighting depending on patrols. As a result, you (or at least I) were more than a bit stingy with the full auto, particularly with guns that use uncommon ammo.
Also dud grenades were the best :stuck_out_tongue:

[QUOTE=Airk]
The system didn’t even support the CONCEPT of a sniper, since there weren’t, to my knowledge, any “long range, high TU cost, but highly accurate” weapons. If there were, I never used them because they weren’t good.
[/QUOTE]

There was, sort of - weapons had different base accuracy, so it sometimes made sense to give a good shot (or a shit shot) a weapon with lower damage if it means he can accurately shoot across the map with it. And weapons each had different base TUs to fire also. The problem was that it didn’t tell you all that when and where it mattered - you had to fish that info from the UFOpaedia between missions :/. 1994 UI limitations I guess.
For example, in X-Com 1 the starter rifles are a lot more accurate than their laser replacements and punchy enough to handle sectoids at least, so I used to give laser rifles to the up front, autofire all day erryday contingent while the snipers hanging back on top of the Skyranger kept their old stuff until Heavy Lasers.

96

Steam pre-loading has started.

97

Heh, it actually -did- have locational damage, although you couldn’t control it directly outside of general positioning of units. Another thing removed by the new one :frowning:

98

Steam is telling me the game unlocks in approximately 12 hours. For about half the country, it won’t even be October 8 anymore!

99

Firaxis is about three miles away from my office, and I’ve heard that they’re doing a launch party at the local Gamestop tonight at midnight, with a lot of the developers on hand to sign copies of the game.

I’m not particularly excited about it, but a lot of my coworkers are planning on taking tomorrow off to play it.

100

Is the game being released early? I have a friend who said it’s going to be out today.