I'm going to speak for myself here, but I would be happy with that... i'm happy for them to scrap teh TU's though.Originally Posted by Zaran
I'm going to speak for myself here, but I would be happy with that... i'm happy for them to scrap teh TU's though.
I watched my Dad play the original back in '94. He even let me hijack one of his saves with their flying 'Borg'-suit equipped soldiers to muck around with. I've played it off and on since, never all the way through (Dosbox just struggles against the machine), just enough to enjoy it.
In comparision to the other XCOM title being released by 2K Marin, this game is definitively more XCOM like in my opinion. Everything that was in the original is there (Secret bases, R&D, Soldiers, Tactical turn-based combat, indentifiable Aliens etc) albeit re-imagined, but it's there nonetheless. And I thank the team there at 2K Firaxis and whatever shenanigans they pulled off to get 2K to greenlight a second title under the license - because the other game simply looks like Bio-schlock:XCOM.
The quibbling and hypotheticals about what is presently known about the game is an exercise in futility. What we have been shown to date may very well be the obligatory tutorial level (or an in-house demo, which they've nicely decided to share with us) after which the real game starts.
Until your actually playing the finished product, your assumptions/criticisms are without merit.
Judge the game for what it is, not for what you want it to be.
Since demos are a pretty rare occurrence, I can't ascribe to that line of thinking. I've made plenty of purchase decisions over speculation, and have saved myself a bit of cash in the process, because my speculation proves correct more often than not. I'm not an ideal consumer who buys first and asks questions later
The change from time units is one I understand - time units are an outdated mechanic and while the old X-Com is still fun, time unit management does turn into a very specialized skill you have to develop in order to play it well, and I oppose any kind of game mechanic that creates a huge performance gap between dumb players who are accustomed to the game's mechanics and smart players who aren't. Good game mechanics give almost as much power to novice players as they do to veterans, and if move-act is the mechanic needed to accomplish that, then I'm all for it.
That said, I'm extremely worried about the scaling down of squad sizes. In the old game, you could deploy up to 14 soldiers (although it was obviously intended for you to deploy ten soldiers and one HWP); 4 men is a massive cut from that - it's less than a third of what used to be available. Typically, an X-Com player would divide his roughly-dozen soldiers into multiple 3-4 man fire-maneuver teams that would sweep different areas of a large map. Not only would each team have enough members to conduct proper fire-maneuver tactics for itself, the whole teams themselves would be able to provide overwatch for each other entirely. If your three man team sweeping the north side of the map got held up by strong enemy presence, your centrally located or southern team could flank the enemy-held objective to address the threat, freeing you up to continue sweeping the map in its entirety. If you screwed around and failed to provide support for all of your 3-4 man teams properly, you would most likely overextend one of your teams, resulting in you getting ambushed and suffering needless casualties. It was a blast because you had micro-level fire-maneuver tactics to deal with within a single team, and also on a more macro level with multiple 3-4 man teams (or an HWP and 1-2 men acting as a team) providing overwatch and flanking support for each other in the bigger picture.
The other problem I have with the 4-man mission is that it implies very small map sizes. Early screenshots showed a battle between an X-Com team and enemy sectoids and mutons, in which the map appeared to consist entirely of a gas station, a diner, and a parking lot. In terms of area represented, while the environment was very rich and interesting, it somehow came across as being rather bite-sized compared to old mission maps. I have a hard time imagining a map generator producing many varied and interesting maps when the size it seems to be working with involves only just enough space for one or two terrain features.
I would love to see the squad size bumped up to a more familiar 12-ish, but even then I would be happy with a compromise of a starting squad size of 6 (at least that allows for two 3-man teams) and an ending squad size of 9-12.
Of course, in the end, even that's not a terribly big deal - there's still Xenonauts, and I'm kidding myself if I think I'm not going to grab both of these titles anyway.
Hi RotGtIE,
Maps - they aren't generated this time. There's over 200 hand-crafted maps of various sizes. The gas station map was "tiny" and in one interview it was said that the large UFOs are still quite large and there are maps to fit them.
Squad Size - there's a long thread on this subject called Multiple Bases? Four Man Teams? and I'll try and give you my summary for it.
- Old XCOM - your soldiers were basically limited to some combination of move/shoot/throw and what teamwork happened was limited in how those actions could be combined.
- New XCOM - your soldiers are going to get a number of unique actions - some of which are purely teamwork focused (suppression fire for example, or the sniper's Squad Sight). Teamwork is going to be integral to completing the mission.
- Good AI is hard to code - especially since gamers are cunning, devious b@stards. The more abilities and units you add, the better the chance of finding combos that the AI just isn't capable of dealing with
the choices:
A> small squads with high tactical flexibility and a strong AI to play against.
B> larger squads with reduces/simplier choices and a strong AI to play against (Original XCOM is about here)
C> larger squads with high tactical flexibility and an AI that has blindspots and doesn't provide difficulty against certain tactics
D> larger squads with high tactical flexibility and an AI that's just as flexible in it's response to developing situations
I'd like D - but until AI is actually capable of learning and intuitive thinking D's not really an option.
Of A,B or C - I'd really like to try A, since B is available via XCOM (and Xenonauts).
I realize in the realm of the interweb sorcery highway time gets compressed, but that's why we have an info summary sticky. You should probably read that. However, there are a few things you need to take into account and reevaluate your opinion.
Your squad starts at four and can be upgraded to six. Each individual squaddie while not any less squishy than there forerunners has more variety in ability than even the best Classic soldier. Rookies have not only move and shoot, but overwatch and hunker down. Remember that there is an official (totally destroyable) cover system. It's no longer a crap shoot whether or not the alien plasters the crouching squaddie.
There is already more variety in troop specialization and skill beyond the basic, as well as, equipment. The overall teamwork is more present and synergistic than in the original. Special abilities like advanced overwatch, run-and-gun, and suppression can make aliens fear your bullets instead of not caring and blasting anyway.
The A.I. has had a noticeable improvement.
As for the maps, they're not randomly generated, but the number I've heard thrown around is over two hundred. That's a lot of hand crafted maps. There are huge ones too. I don't think that'll be a problem. However, the alien/player starting positions are randomized so it's never exactly the same way twice. Objectives are also randomized in location, too.
Yeah, combat options in the old X-Com were pretty limited, but I think that was more a result of most of the equipment being too cumbersome or ineffective and players as a result wound up filtering out anything they didn't absolutely need so they could squeeze in to their 80 item limit, and that resulted in a lot of "every soldier is a rifleman" X-Com campaigns.
But when a single grenade consumed three quarters of your time units to go from belt to primed and thrown, and rockets don't get a tech upgrade until blaster bombs, and no HWPs are able to burst fire, and proxy grenades don't get upgrades, and there's never a high-explosive upgrade to perform demo duty on UFO hulls and alien alloy walls, and there are no arc-fire weapons analogous to grenade launchers, and explosives tend to destroy valuable loot on the ground, and obtaining ammo for anything other than heavy plasma gets pretty rare pretty fast, then it's no wonder the old game pretty much just boiled down to a bunch of generic riflemen - all the other options just wound up being ineffective or impractical. I think it was more of an issue with equipment balance and game mechanics related to that equipment than anything having to do with squad sizes.
Er, sorry about the threadnomancy in any case. I maintain a strict policy of getting all my news ridiculously late.
No worries. Welcome to the forums, I'm pretty new here myself.
Yeah, there were *some* tactics that you could do in XCOM - like flanking down the side of a building, or using one guy to blow open a specific piece of wall with an aimed shot, so a 2nd guy could take an aimed shot with a plasma cannon and hopefully kill him before he killed someone... but it was limited, or it could take multiple turns to accomplish.
And as you said, Xenonauts looks like a good update on the classic.
But like the new Battlestar Galactica... I really like the look of this reimaging.
After seeing the latest Gamespy interview, I just want the devs to clear up one thing: In Xcom 1994, you had alien ships zipping around the world seemingly at random - but when you got hold of the hyperwave decoder, it showed they weren't random, they were a methodical build up of something the aliens wanted to do - be that an Infiltration, or a Base Mission. Best of all, you could then stop the mission dead in its tracks by shooting down the right ships; will that mechanic be present in Xcom EU? After reading the interview and seeing the previewer being given a 'choice' of two missions, I have my doubts.
bah, really should put this in my sig
the two choices thing that's been in the gaming press is part of the tutorial campaign, that's all the devs have been putting out so far. I'd reserve the doubts until they put something out about the actual campaign's geoscape/strategic layer.
but yeah, we're really really lacking anything about that layer of the game at this point
i'm curious about the interception aspect of the game as there isnt the slighest info about that. sure it has been mentioned and there is even artwork regarding the interception craft but as far as interception mechanics or an interception in progress video is concerned, we are totally in the dark. im optimistic the developers found a novel way to represent that in-game...
Maybe they're keeping it back as an E3 reveal.
I didn't like the original interception mini-game. It wasn't fun, but I didn't hate it either. Any improvement or changes they make will likely be icing. If they come up with something really innovative, even better.
I wouldn't resort to complete generalities. There will be many maps. But that doesn't really mean much. I seriously doubt that the 5 arctic missions (as an example) will get played that much, nor the jungle or desert ones. What they REALLY need to do is to make a larger number of the more common maps.. like the farmland theme from the original, there should be tons of those. Because if you keep hitting "the more common" themed maps, then its irrelevant if the entire game has a bajillion maps, you are only pulling from a pool of like 10, making it very repetitive.
Good point.
I have a question about the sound, i realize it not the most important thing (everybody else seems to be more bothered with gameplay comparisons between the original and the remake).
Are sound effects and background musics going to be the same as the original (after some "modernizing")? Or is it going to have a complete new and different score?
(I still remember the world map music, it irritated me a lot, but i loved it at the same time)
"Taking cues from the first X-COM's soundtrack and alien sound design, the audio team at Firaxis Games is creating something current yet true to the original." - as stated in a Game Informer article(The Unsettling Music Of XCOM: Enemy Unknown)I have a question about the sound, i realize it not the most important thing (everybody else seems to be more bothered with gameplay comparisons between the original and the remake).
Are sound effects and background musics going to be the same as the original (after some "modernizing")? Or is it going to have a complete new and different score?
(I still remember the world map music, it irritated me a lot, but i loved it at the same time)
If the game is multilanguage, the voices will be too?
Or it will be only in the English language, with accents of different nationality?
Thanks, i missed that article!
depends on how much time/money they have put aside for localisation... I would have suspected they'd go with translated text, except there are exchanges between the base personnel that explain R&D and things... so they might go whole hog and do full voice localisation. Unless they go with translated subtitles... *shrug*
Tbh no idea, I've not heard or seen anything mentioned about it.
If Spoony's on board then I will defiantly pick this game up.
I don't think anyone from 2k checks in on the forums anymore since 2k Elizabeth left.
Both 2K David and 2K Greg checked in a few hours ago. And other employees have popped in in the last few days.
I don't know how often Firaxis folks might check in as I don't know their forum names, if any.
They've also hired a new community manager, but she isn't on the forum just yet. I'm sure you'll see her around quite soon.
The thing to understand is that, pre-release, there isn't much for them to respond to. Sure, they might ask for questions, but for the most part they are just going to listen. Fans make requests every single day and ask questions that simply can't be answered. Forums are just modern versions of fan clubs, IMHO. There isn't any obligation for the professionals to interact with us.
I agree with pretty much everything you said. Still, it inspired me to make another thread aimed toward making any communication to 2k more possIble.Both 2K David and 2K Greg checked in a few hours ago. And other employees have popped in in the last few days.
I don't know how often Firaxis folks might check in as I don't know their forum names, if any.
They've also hired a new community manager, but she isn't on the forum just yet. I'm sure you'll see her around quite soon.
The thing to understand is that, pre-release, there isn't much for them to respond to. Sure, they might ask for questions, but for the most part they are just going to listen. Fans make requests every single day and ask questions that simply can't be answered. Forums are just modern versions of fan clubs, IMHO. There isn't any obligation for the professionals to interact with us.
The way I personally played the original was sending 8 guys out. I'd work in two groups of 4. Each group with a scanner and heavy weapons guy with 3 guys pieing rooms, leap frogging to cover. So I'm a bit disappointed at first blush about only having 4 to 6 guys, but I realise it is all relative to the game play experience. I'm keeping an open mind.
Yea, at first I was disappointed too KC23.. But with everything I have been reading, the amount of time and customization you can put into every soldier is on another level (obviously). I really think the way they have gone will really get people attached to their soldiers, without forcing a re-load if you lose them. The more I think about it, the more I really think 6 characters is the maximum I can handle in terms of putting time into customizing them, and then having them be blown away in the next mission.
I think they actually did an awesome job balancing the need for multiple soldiers while making each one truly detailed and unique.
First of all, Time Units.
It´s a matter of taste, pure and simple. I seem to remember Jagged Alliance 2 had the option of using TUs or using Start/Stop - players choice. Maybe you should consider it as well, since you´re kind of dependant on some of your old fans enjoying the game. The problem with old people is that they don´t want change
Secondly: If an organization suddenly appears that is dealing with the alien threat, wouldn´t the Russians think this was the Americans getting their hands on alien tech, and wouldn´t the Chinese think the same? What about bringing in more factions, like in XCOM: Apocalypse? That way you´d have to deal not only with aliens, but with humans as well. Maybe you could raid their offices and steal their research, or have to move quick to get your hands on that downed ship first. Just some thoughts from an old fan, with no fear of change
BR
Dunno if i count as old people with my 30 years of being alive.First of all, Time Units.
It´s a matter of taste, pure and simple. I seem to remember Jagged Alliance 2 had the option of using TUs or using Start/Stop - players choice. Maybe you should consider it as well, since you´re kind of dependant on some of your old fans enjoying the game. The problem with old people is that they don´t want change
Secondly: If an organization suddenly appears that is dealing with the alien threat, wouldn´t the Russians think this was the Americans getting their hands on alien tech, and wouldn´t the Chinese think the same? What about bringing in more factions, like in XCOM: Apocalypse? That way you´d have to deal not only with aliens, but with humans as well. Maybe you could raid their offices and steal their research, or have to move quick to get your hands on that downed ship first. Just some thoughts from an old fan, with no fear of change
BR
But i do like the removal of TU, with having 2 actions its basicly the same.
In original X-Com you either move and shoot or just shoot twice or 3 times.
Dont get many soldiers that can actually shoot 4 times.
So i dont think im going to miss them TU's.
Squad size:
4 does seems like low amount of soldiers, rather would have seen a starting of 6 ending with 8/9.
Original X-com i used to fill up every space on my skyranger with soldiers and took me 10 mins to set up the perimeter.
No aliens been shot on yet, now after i grown older i now got 3 squads of 3 soldiers each mission.
2 squads for the flanking and 1 for the heads on assault.
My understanding is that the maps are smaller overal in this new Xcom, so i think a squad of 6 works pretty well.
Im just not happy about the non-random generated maps, same why i dont like diablo 3 as much as its not as random in maps as Diablo 2 was. Hope the 200 maps are giving enough variations to keep playing the game and not giving me the feeling of, aaaaaw this map again
Time will tell ofc
Just like to say thanks for the feedback, great to know that you care enough to keep your fans in mind and informed. YOU RULE!!
TU's and Move/Action are basically identical to each other, what that they have done is balanced the abilities so that essentially they use the exact same amount of tu's therefore there's no need have tu's in. Do you really need this:First of all, Time Units.
It´s a matter of taste, pure and simple. I seem to remember Jagged Alliance 2 had the option of using TUs or using Start/Stop - players choice. Maybe you should consider it as well, since you´re kind of dependant on some of your old fans enjoying the game. The problem with old people is that they don´t want change
BR
Move: 1 TU, Attack: 1 TU, Reload 1TU, Grenade 1TU... etc. No of course not.
P.S a pause/play mechanic is different to TU's in that, you press play and wait for the time actions take to peform whilst watching, where as with tu's you spend the points and watch the animation. Basically it's exactly the same system, it's just the way it's done that's different. So they gave the players the choice between quasi-real time combat, and static turn based combat, but without any other differences. (i haven't played jagged alliance, so forgive me if this isn't entirely accurate to your example)
With move action from this game displaying tu's would be pointless.
Maps have been reported as varying in size quite substantially.
My understanding is that the maps are smaller overal in this new Xcom, so i think a squad of 6 works pretty well.
Im just not happy about the non-random generated maps, same why i dont like diablo 3 as much as its not as random in maps as Diablo 2 was. Hope the 200 maps are giving enough variations to keep playing the game and not giving me the feeling of, aaaaaw this map again
Time will tell ofc
You might run into the same maps during repeat playthroughs, or god forbid the first time. But the enemies location and type is supposed to be different each time, random, so at least that is something.
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