Just remake UFO: Defense with modern graphics

[somewhatgiggly]

I completely disagree with squad size. 6 is ideal and anything above 8 is travesty. Even in my openxcom games 99% of missions I do is with 6 men. I can't care about soldiers if I have 14 of them in my mission.

On the topic - modded openxcom is better than anything can be done with shitty polygon vomit we are getting nowadays. Gief me my beautiful 2d handmade pixels and go away with your 3d shit, thank you

6 to 8 men is what I lose on most base assaults. NuXcom is atrocious - 8 men isn't even most real life squads; 9, 10-12 would had been perfectly reasonable.

It's a global war, not a frat pub crawl. I can't care for them beyond trying to keep as many of them alive to apply as much firepower as I can to the Xenos.

 

[gogis]

8 men isn't even most real life squads

I don't care about "real life squad" in completely fictitious scenario. It's not an argument. In psychology anything above 7 is when you stop caring about individual unit. If I want to play something where everything is chaff, I will just launch up some RTS

 

[Storyfag]

I completely disagree with squad size. 6 is ideal and anything above 8 is travesty. Even in my openxcom games 99% of missions I do is with 6 men. I can't care about soldiers if I have 14 of them in my mission.

The entire *point* is to not care about soldiers. Aliens *should* be mowing down elite commando squads until you reverse engineer enough of their tech.

 

[Alex]

I really don't see what would be the point of changing the original game's graphics. They are still pretty good, I would say.

 

[gurugeorge]

Wasn't that the first thing Firaxis did, an an exact copy of UFO in 3-d? There are even a few glimpses of the gameplay floating around as parts of videos Firaxis made later IIRC.

I suspect the problem they found was that it was too complex and fiddly, as gameplay, for mass market consoletard appeal. IOW, it would be fine for a PC only game, but after sounding out criticisms the Firaxis boss asked whatsisname to go back to the drawing board, and he came up with the nuXCOM formula, which is rather more board-game-like (and which, to be sure, is decent enough in its own right, just not the familiar and generally superior AP-type gameplay).

Basically, they needed simplified gameplay to cope with the laughably-misnamed console "controllers."

 

[ArchAngel]

I think the fundamental issue is that UFO Defense has its issues. Granted, many of them were solved in mods for Open X-COM.

However, I think there are a few things stopping people from doing a 1:1 UFO Defense remake:

1. Making it accessible to casuals. Its what nuXCOM did with great effect, they made a pretty accessible game. However, this often leads to dumbing down the game for the casual as well.
2. The brutal difficulty. OG UFO was a brutal game. It was made with an early 1990s "Your ass will not be pardoned" mindset, which is part of its greatness. However, modern games would complain like little girls if playing the OG. I think one of my most fond X-COM experiences was getting blaster-bombed and losing half my squad in my first Terror Mission. Its very much a "Losing is fun" kind of game.
3. Wrong design mindset. Because it changed from the classic Gollopian simulationism to a more arcadey and tabletopey gameplay, something was lost.

2. Both Xcom 1 and Xcom 2 are harder on hardest difficulty than OG UFO. Once you learn the tricks in UFO it is not hard but in Xcom 1 and Xcom 2 there are no real tricks to RNG. All you learn to do it manage it somehow and hope for the best

 

[RobotSquirrel]

Xcom 1 and Xcom 2 there are no real tricks to RNG.

that's not exactly true, the strategy with Xcom 1 at least was to try and get to the point where you had all the guaranteed hit abilities than just chain in the zone and close combat as much as possible in a single turn. The hard part of Xcom 1 is actually the early game because you are forced into RNG, but grenades are still 100% chance to hit. In fact the only part of the game that you can't avoid RNG is the airbattles which I think even in Vanilla were the hardest part about it, if you lost the air game you were pretty screwed. The mitigation is to build lots of the consumable items to make the air game easier but its not exactly an I win button in the same way In The Zone and Close Combat are. And keep in mind that the EU experience was very inferior to the EW experience. EW did a lot to try and level out the playing field a bit so it was at least challenging. Vanilla EU is a very easy game if you spec your troops right.

The holy trinity seemed to be, Scouts to run overwatch, Snipers to In the Zone and Assaults to Close Combat. A Gunner could be useful for taking out mechs and suppression but the games are pretty easy vanilla its easy enough to just go it with the 3.

Xcom 2 has similar strategies but its a bit more complex with WOTC because at least there it is entirely random as to when the chosen show up and what map they show up on but you're still going for those chained combos that guarantee hits. The vanilla Xcom 2 wasn't great and I found it too easy as well.

I think a better comparison is Long War EW vs OG UFO. They are both comparable experiences in terms of difficulty and complexity but I think UFO is still the better of the two experiences because of the base building and inventory management being much superior.

 

[ArchAngel]

Xcom 1 and Xcom 2 there are no real tricks to RNG.

that's not exactly true, the strategy with Xcom 1 at least was to try and get to the point where you had all the guaranteed hit abilities than just chain in the zone and close combat as much as possible in a single turn. The hard part of Xcom 1 is actually the early game because you are forced into RNG, but grenades are still 100% chance to hit. In fact the only part of the game that you can't avoid RNG is the airbattles which I think even in Vanilla were the hardest part about it, if you lost the air game you were pretty screwed. The mitigation is to build lots of the consumable items to make the air game easier but its not exactly an I win button in the same way In The Zone and Close Combat are. And keep in mind that the EU experience was very inferior to the EW experience. EW did a lot to try and level out the playing field a bit so it was at least challenging. Vanilla EU is a very easy game if you spec your troops right.

The holy trinity seemed to be, Scouts to run overwatch, Snipers to In the Zone and Assaults to Close Combat. A Gunner could be useful for taking out mechs and suppression but the games are pretty easy vanilla its easy enough to just go it with the 3.

Xcom 2 has similar strategies but its a bit more complex with WOTC because at least there it is entirely random as to when the chosen show up and what map they show up on but you're still going for those chained combos that guarantee hits. The vanilla Xcom 2 wasn't great and I found it too easy as well.

I think a better comparison is Long War EW vs OG UFO. They are both comparable experiences in terms of difficulty and complexity but I think UFO is still the better of the two experiences because of the base building and inventory management being much superior.

I have not played either for a long while now. Xcom 1 had you break sight and abuse stupid AI that would exit cover so you can crit them. It still was not 100% chance to hit so this is why I said you could not control RNG. Other tactic was to retreat backwards and put everyone into overwatch. AI would follow and you got free attacks with it. All attacks still RNG but they were "free".

I Xcom 2 you had timers so these tactics didn't always work (breaking sight did but you didn't have time to abuse it too often). So people would take a couple of Grenade launcher guys and blow up all aliens while moving towards exit. In LW2 it was better balanced as timers were more generous and grenades nerfed.

 

[Jaedar]

2. The brutal difficulty. OG UFO was a brutal game. It was made with an early 1990s "Your ass will not be pardoned" mindset, which is part of its greatness. However, modern games would complain like little girls if playing the OG. I think one of my most fond X-COM experiences was getting blaster-bombed and losing half my squad in my first Terror Mission. Its very much a "Losing is fun" kind of game.

The funny thing is that at the time it was complained that the game was too easy (there was a bug that lowered the difficulty to the second lowest after the first month, regardless of what you set it to). This is the reason that they made TFTD way harder, it was what fans at the time demanded.

It was really hard to lose a campaign in UFO, but losing half your soldiers could happen in an instant.

But yeah, UFO needs no remake, we have openXcom.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

soldiers must be cannon fodder and must be in great supply. xcom with its limited number of deployable soldiers (and sometimes gamechanging skills) transformed a tactical game into a puzzle with perchentage-tied fail states, because most of the times once you lost a soldier you lost a team, and if you lost a team you lost a game. idiotic. i want to be penalized because *i* screwed up, not because dice are loaded. very little is more satisfying than throwing wave after wave of grenadeers against the alien enemy, realizing some missions later than some of those survived and did rather well, and finally change their equipment into something worthy and expensive. *they* earned it, and now you're trusting them. you've not been forced to rely on them in the first place because reasons.

 

[Spectacle]

What I'd really like to see is UFO remade with modern physics and procedural map generation. Think how much fun it would be if every UFO crash was fully simulated, destroying buildings and tearing up the terrain to create a unique map for every recovery mission.

 

[Tweed]

Modern Graphics.

 

[Darkozric]

Modern Graphics.

Damn, imagine UFO with this shit and bobble head soldiers. The stuff of nightmares!