X-COM Firaxis - XCOM: Enemy Unknown + Enemy Within Expansion

[poocolator]

They collapsed uring missions AND during fighting in the city map so you could lose a lot of your fighters (both men and vehicles)... I like Apocalypse. First two are better, but Apocalypse is a good game too IMO. When compared to the crap we get today, it's golden.

Practically everything was destructible. There's a youtube vid out there of a few of those high-explosive timed bombs taking out the foundation of one of those slum buildings, bringing the entire thing down, all 4 or 5 floors of it. On the cityscape, you could target enemy structures to destroy them so as to tie up the corporation's (or cult of sirius' for that matter) funds in rebuilding them. It was a pretty remarkable game for its time, but a huge change for X-COM vets.

Edit: found the vid mentioned.

 

[sser]

Silent Storm furthered the technology but nobody ever picked up the engine which was flirting with perfection, IMO (the Silent Storm games have their flaws elsewhere, though). Tactical options were abound thanks to the ability to literally destroy everything. I remember sometimes stray grenades would set off chain reactions, blowing up oxygen or fuel tanks and other things, and the next thing you know there were enemies falling out of the second and third stories, plunging to their deaths in the basement. It's a shame no company seems interested in pushing that technology further when it fits the genre so well.

 

[Trash]

One of the easiest ways to deal with big downed ufos was to fire one of those guided missiles through the front door and up or down the elevator shaft into the fuel tanks or weapons. Not much left after that. Blew my mind at the time.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Yep, you could have immense amounts of fun with the guided minibombs in Enemy Unknown. For example blowing a hole in the UFO just above the command deck and having your jumpsuit team members drop on the alien officers commando style avoiding all the grunts on the lower decks. 10/10 game, take a bow.

 

[Occasionally Fatal]

http://penny-arcade.com/report/edit...f-a-tutorial-and-balancing-strategy-with-cine

I asked what was lost during all that iteration. What did they leave behind that hurt? “If there was one thing from the original I know some fans of the game will miss, it’s alien base invasion. Which, because of some of the changes we had to make during the strategy layer, it just didn’t fit. We had a prototype of it and it didn’t fit, it wasn’t fun, but the concept of it was very hard for us to let go. It was very important to a lot of the fans of the original.”

Le sigh.

 

[Morgoth]

“In 2012, you can’t just release this sort of very deep, complex game if you want as many people to play it as possible,” DeAngelis said.

Thanks for confirming this. I just canceled my Pre-Order.

Now it's up to the hivemind to determine whether XCOM will be a worthy game.

 

[Jasede]

It's nice to receive confirmation to festering suspicions. I don't know why we even hope.

 

[EG]

It's nice to receive confirmation to festering suspicions. I don't know why we even hope.

Man is not a learning animal.

 

[spectre]

Depends on what you hope for. If you hope for a proper good remake... yeah that was fucking delusional.

 

[SuicideBunny]

as far as proper remakes go, there's still xenonauts...

this might still be somewhat enjoyable in multiplayer.

 

[Morgoth]

Multiplayer?

Fuck off.

 

[Gozma]

Damn I have never been on this side of Codex enthusiasm kill before.

I guess there's a whole rest of the internet to be enthusiastic about AA+ developed games on, and only one Codex

 

[Infinitron]

I so hope this bombs on the consoles, so that all of their dumbing down turns out to have been a waste of effort

 

[betamin]

Go play Dark Souls, it's the better tactical game.

 

[Outlander]

I so hope this bombs on the consoles, so that all of their dumbing down turns out to have been a waste of effort

What do you think they'll say?

"Damn it, it was too hardcore!! We should have made it more stupid accessible!!"

 

[EG]

What do you think they'll say?

"Damn it, it was too hardcore!! We should have made it more stupid accessible!!"

Breaker of dreams.

 

[Brayko]

Well since Civ 5 was OK at best, I fail to see how some hair-brained tactical game streamlined for consoles is gonna pull out the bunny. NEXT!

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

That quote was a bit worrying, but since he was talking about tutorials I'll gloss over it. It'll be fine, everything's going to be ok. Firaxis wouldn't beat me again.

 

[SuicideBunny]

I so hope this bombs on the consoles, so that all of their dumbing down turns out to have been a waste of effort

if it bombs, it will be because of consoletard/consoletard journalist complaints about too high difficulty, tb instead of rt and it not being a popamole shooter.

 

[Infinitron]

I so hope this bombs on the consoles, so that all of their dumbing down turns out to have been a waste of effort

if it bombs, it will be because of consoletard/consoletard journalist complaints about too high difficulty, tb instead of rt and it not being a popamole shooter.

Precisely. So either Firaxis will decide to stick to their core competency from then onwards - PC-exclusive strategy games - or they'll make a popamole console shooter as a sequel to a game that bombed on the consoles. Which is more likely?

 

[SuicideBunny]

Which is more likely?

after civ 5 and the x-com crash you hope for?
that they'll decide it's not worth it and start making shitty casual browser games using unity instead...

anyhoo, to me this still looks like a nice beer+pretzel puzzle tactics game. just have to look at it more along the lines of massive assault: incubation rather than anything remotely x-com.

 

[Dead Guy]

“In 2012, you can’t just release this sort of very deep, complex game if you want as many people to play it as possible,”

If you were to sit one of these guys down that love video games in front of the original XCOM? An 18 year-old kid. Ask him to learn and play that game. He wouldn’t be able to figure it out very quickly. Maybe after a few hours, and understanding all the movement systems

It's fascinating how he can collectively insult everyone under the age of 18 and expect no backlash at all. Perhaps the targeted demographic doesn't care all that much about having their intelligence mocked like that.

They should feel insulted though. Alternatively, if people under 18 are really too stupid to learn game mechanics by observing the game as they play it, maybe they should learn to pay the fuck attention.

Also, this game looks like it'll be shit. The solution for everything is cover and special abilities. Fuck 4 soldiers and fuck small maps. Shove your action camera up your asses.

 

[spectre]

Yeah, well Dead Guy, welcome to the new shit, when people can't be arsed to play a tutorial to learn the game. Much less read *gasp* the fucking manual.

Though I wouldn't say that XCOM is easy to learn. Geoscape controls are fine and intuitive, but the battlescape interface can be confusing if you're trying to figure it out on your own (mostly because it was the pre-tooltip era).
Some of the stuff wasn't intuitive (like, you have to prime the grenade before you throw it) for a first time player, and the game itself was pretty brutal, which further made the learning curve steeper.
You may laugh at this now, but when you are a 10 year old...
On the other hand, that 10 (give or take) year old me *could* muster the patience to learn the game with no manual.

 

[Gozma]

It did take me something like hours to grasp most of what was going on in the original X-Com demo when I first played it - there was no manual, just some file I downloaded off some BBS. And in the end I played X-Com for years without knowing the really important mechanics like the reaction system because it wasn't in the manual or even the hint book. I think they are underestimating how fun it is to bang away at a game with a totally unfamiliar system learning how it works (this is maybe half the appeal of Minecraft, which sold absurdly well) but is an effective skippable tutorial actually a bad thing somehow? It's like the Thief tutorial level vs. Liberty Island in Deus Ex. I can't say one is right and one is wrong.

Edit: You know I said that because Thief is a canonically good game on the Codex but actually I just watched someone do the tutorial on Youtube to refresh my memory and I remember finding it boring as shit and part of the reason I don't like Thief so maybe that wasn't the best example.

 

[Infinitron]

Gozma Yes, the Thief tutorial was a bit cheesy, but in its defense, they were basically inventing a new genre.