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Jagged Alliance 3 from Haemimont Games

Infinitron

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They took our home, our dream, our president! It's time to take it all back!

In Jagged Alliance 3, you hire a team of unique mercenaries to rescue the president of Grand Chien, who was kidnapped by a paramilitary force known as "The Legion".

Engage in intense battles and spend your action points wisely in strategic, turn-based combat. Use the environment and the strength of your mercenaries to gain an advantage over your enemies. Loot and customize an arsenal of weaponry and get the most out of your special perks to win the battle against "The Legion".

Jagged Alliance 3 is coming to PC.
 
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how is Jagged Alliance -Back in Action? I have only played Jagged Alliance 1 and 2 and loved them, but just noticed JA-BiA is on sale for $1.99..looks like it is a Real time w/ pause, watching a few minutes of it, does not look terrible, anybody play it?
 

Mary Sue Leigh

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Do not get Back in Action, it's incredibly bad and not even worth 1.99
It's real time and you always see where all the enemies are, even I think that's insultingly easy.
And it doesn't look good but eh.. That's the least of its problems.
 

mondblut

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BiA was okay for what its worth, but Jagged Alliance 2 it is not.

JA3 trailer has JA Flashback vibes, which was also okay for what its worth, but Jagged Alliance 2 it was not.

No offensive humor of the nineties = no JA2.
 

Morpheus Kitami

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This doesn't look too bad, but it isn't really wowing me. It is Jagged Alliance, so wowing was never really an option.

It does make me wonder, why haven't they done what a lot of other strategy games of yesteryear have done and made new expansions for the original game? As it is the game is seemingly unassailable, except for having a map everyone has completed 100 times, and most of the fan mods feel lacking.
 

Papill0n

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Dec 11, 2021
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It does make me wonder, why haven't they done what a lot of other strategy games of yesteryear have done and made new expansions for the original game? As it is the game is seemingly unassailable, except for having a map everyone has completed 100 times, and most of the fan mods feel lacking.

Business reasons: Ja2 came out when all things were moving to 3d, and to consoles, subsequently. No money was to be made with expansions of Ja2 (Ja2.5 was not well received either btw.) The IP changed hands of bankrupt companies, which probably didn't help either.

Technical reasons: Ja2 works a lot because of (among many other things) its high quality characters and the voice acting of 150 something voiced characters. If you change the story, setting or other aspect typcially altered in an expansion of sorts, you look at either creating your content in line with the existing heap of speech or you look at rerecording that heap of speech. Both is rather bad, your highness.
 

manhole

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There are a lot of similarities to JA2
  • Old AP (TU) system
  • No explicit cover (partial/full) ala modern Xcom. Instead you choose a stance (stand, crouch, prone)
  • No explicit hit % displayed
  • Extensive inventory/item management (upgrades, looting, etc)
I think they're taking a decent amount of risk by using these "old systems" and moving away from the Firaxis design. I'd argue the worst thing about this trailer is they're not leaning hard enough into modern stuff like better animations.
 

gurugeorge

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Strap Yourselves In
There are a lot of similarities to JA2
  • Old AP (TU) system
  • No explicit cover (partial/full) ala modern Xcom. Instead you choose a stance (stand, crouch, prone)
  • No explicit hit % displayed
  • Extensive inventory/item management (upgrades, looting, etc)
I think they're taking a decent amount of risk by using these "old systems" and moving away from the Firaxis design. I'd argue the worst thing about this trailer is they're not leaning hard enough into modern stuff like better animations.

Yeah the character models and animations are lamentable.
 

udm

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Make the Codex Great Again!
IDK men, when I play JA2 early game, I find myself backtracking the hell away from enemy forces all the time, relying on Interrupts and LOS to gain an advantage over the enemy. Even late-game with everyone equipped with Steyr AUG and FN-FAL, I try to keep a distance. Only indoors do I engage in such close quarters, like in the trailer.

Speaking of Interrupts, does this even use that system? Seems to use directional overwatch instead, but it might be a premature assumption.

EDIT: Re-watching the trailer multiple times, it does look like it could be a decent game. But JA3? I have serious doubts after playing Haemimont's more recent games (as in, games released within the last 10 years).
 

Ibbz

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Biggest issue I find with that trailer (which is still significantly better than the first) is that it looks like all the shooting is occuring about 5 metres away from each other - and there is still an unmistakeable console feel to it, but we shall see.
 

Papill0n

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Biggest issue I find with that trailer (which is still significantly better than the first) is that it looks like all the shooting is occuring about 5 metres away from each other - and there is still an unmistakeable console feel to it, but we shall see.

Yes. The combat at spitting distance is a major gripe I have with (almost) all of JA reboots, clones etc. I blame it on 3d among other things.
 

udm

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Yes. The combat at spitting distance is a major gripe I have with (almost) all of JA reboots, clones etc. I blame it on 3d among other things.
Definitely goes beyond just being 3d. The devs of Project Haven are using one of the Unreal engines and have shown no fear of backing down on long-range engagements. It comes down to whether or not you know what you're doing in designing a game.
 

Beowulf

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That's why I have higher hopes for Project Haven being decent spiritual successor to RPG tactics games of good old days (TM) than any new remake attempt. Even nuXcom is pretty old by today standards and it was a big downgrade over original X-Coms.

I wouldn't necessary blame this radical shrinking of engagement ranges to the usage of 3d engines, but rather to the fact that developers want all the action to be happening on one screen, without the need to force user to scroll or change his viewpoint.
Of course - conolitis and the laziness in designing control schemes for both k+m and gamepads
 
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Kerghnox

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Jun 22, 2020
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Surprisingly looks fairly decent, might be worth obtaining for free. I'm concerned about the possibility of unlimited ammo and obviously merc personality in this clown world.
 

agris

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Biggest issue I find with that trailer (which is still significantly better than the first) is that it looks like all the shooting is occuring about 5 metres away from each other - and there is still an unmistakeable console feel to it, but we shall see.

Yes. The combat at spitting distance is a major gripe I have with (almost) all of JA reboots, clones etc. I blame it on 3d among other things.

Given the other old-school sensibilities, one could hope the represented frequency of close quarters combat is more a function of needing to film a trailer vs what is representative in-game.

I know I know, fabulously…
 

Alienman

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https://www.pcgamer.com/jagged-alli...pectre-of-xcom-by-never-telling-you-the-odds/

Jagged Alliance 3 wants to escape the spectre of XCOM by never telling you the odds​


It's hard to overstate just how important Firaxis's XCOM reboot was for PC gaming. In the years since its release, the turn-based strategy and tactics genres have experienced a renaissance, and most of the games that followed owe a debt to Firaxis's mix of classic tactical depth and more modern, streamlined conveniences.

But what if you're trying to make the successor to a different turn-based classic? Then, it seems, XCOM's legacy can be a hindrance instead.

"We found that, no matter what we did, everyone played just like they played all the other games like XCOM," says Brad Logston, senior producer for Jagged Alliance 3. "We weren't playing it like Jagged Alliance. We didn't even know how to fix it. We were doing things like tweaking AI, tweaking weapon damage ranges, all these different things. Nothing was really working."

The solution may seem small, but it's had an oversized effect on how the game plays. "One of our combat systems designers proposed: 'you know, this may be crazy—and people are gonna kill us—but what if we just remove chance-to-hit and see how that works.'" It's a standard part of every turn-based tactics: go for a shot, and the game will tell you how likely you are to hit your foe. It's such an ingrained part of the genre that it's almost a meme. Every XCOM player has a story about the 99% chance shot that missed.

"Once we did, everything shifted. Before, if someone had a 75% chance shot, they wouldn't take it. They'd hold back, and the AI would have to react to that—it had to know that the player was only going to move up when they could get the kill shot. Once we removed chance-to-hit … they're experimenting. It also meant we could make the AI more fluid. They could try things, they could be a little sloppy during play."

Some of my favourite turn-based games of this new era are ones that give the player an overabundance of information—games like Into the Breach or Invisible, Inc., that reveal not just chance-to-hit, but fully telegraph the enemy's response as well. But here, Haemimont Games have discovered something that gets to the essence of what made the early Jagged Alliance's mix of turn-based combat, 4X strategy and RPG-lite management so good. These are not games about responding perfectly to the situation. These are games about messy, chaotic combat simulation, where unexpected things happen that force you to react.

"It's not just chance-to-hit," says Logston. "Even things like weapon jam chance, or grenade fumble chance. I've had situations where I've been on the second story of a building, fumbled a grenade, and blown up the floor beneath me. All the mercs fell down one floor, took fall damage and were stunned for a turn. But those are the things that happen in Jag sometimes—it just goes that way."

The Jagged Alliance series has reemerged a few times in the last couple of decades, but never in a way that did justice to the spirit and depth of the first two games. But here, it feels like Haemimont wants to get it right. Its African setting features extreme weather effects that will change the combat simulation—in the jungle, during heavy rain, visibility is lowered, but so too is sound, giving your mercs an opportunity to be exploited.

Its roster of 40 mercs are all fully voiced, with personalities that may clash against each other. And, in the spirit of the original games, they're hired diegetically—this time through an early 2000s version of the internet. The strategy layer is also classic Jagged Alliance: a dynamic map that tracks and simulates both the missions you deploy your mercs on, and the enemy force's attempts to retake what was once theirs; where intel you find in missions can provide hints at where and when to go to discover sidequests and opportunities.

But the real sign of Haemimont's commitment is that one seemingly small decision to upend the conventions that XCOM laid down. It would have been easy to make another XCOM-alike. They're pretty popular, after all. But it wouldn't have been Jagged Alliance.

"It's really hard to explain to people who haven't seen where we've gotten to, but where we had it before, it was just XCOM," says Logston. "There was nothing unique about it. And we were like, 'well, are we just cloning what someone else has already done?' That's not what we're trying to do. There are already games out there that have done that. That doesn't make us special. It made a lot more sense for us to find how to bring that Jagged Alliance experience back."

Perhaps the bigger question then, is whether people want a departure from the systems that have come to define the genre. Is there a place for Jagged Alliance in this turn-based renaissance? As someone who loved the borderline chaos of those early games, I really hope there is.

Big wtf right here.

How will you tell if you guys improve if you can't actually see his chances improving? And I assume stealth is totally out the door, since you can't plan around actually hitting someone - quietly. I like RNG, since it makes things unpredictable, but this RNG is just way too retarded.
 
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Roguey

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Big wtf right here.

How will you tell if you guys improve if you can't actually see his chances improving? And I assume stealth is totally out the door, since you can't plan around actually hitting someone - quietly. I like RNG, since it makes things unpredictable, but this RNG is just way too retarded.
JA and JA2 didn't show your hit chances either. They put it in to be ~modern~ and then realized the JA way worked better.
 

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