KickStarter Phoenix Point - the new game from X-COM creator Julian Gollop

[SymbolicFrank]

It's a difficult balance to strike. We don't want to be like XCOM, where losing 2 or 3 of your best soldiers can cripple you for the whole campaign. At the same time, we don't want to make soldiers feel like expendable cannon fodder.

Then it's not like X-COM, either. In X-COM, soldiers certainly are expendable cannon fodder. That's what makes it X-COM.

 

[Zombra]

It's a difficult balance to strike. We don't want to be like XCOM, where losing 2 or 3 of your best soldiers can cripple you for the whole campaign. At the same time, we don't want to make soldiers feel like expendable cannon fodder.

I believe that a good way to make losses acceptable is simply to not allow individual soldiers to get overpowered (like they do in XCOM). Make the equipment be more important than the soldier, progression wise

Either that or don't have a steep progression curve in the first place. It's OK not to have giant rats and dragons in the same game.

 

[Alienman]

At the start, you're totally outgunned. Your recruits cannot hit the side of a barn, and the aliens never miss.

But that is not true.

I recently installed open X-COM: Terror from the Deep and played some combat turns (high difficulty) just for the kicks to adjust the graphics settings and kicked some alien butt easily. My aquanauts made some amazing long range shot that killed the aliens on the spot, alien missed quite a lot.
And that playing superficially, not using grenades or making blind spots via grenade explosions.

The fact that you can see on battle the move path of the soldier along with remaining time units on each square makes a whole lot of difference.

A good UI that conveys information in a nice visual, intuitive way makes all the difference.

That is what sequels did wrong.
They think that TUs is a convoluted system where the problem lies in the UI.
UnderRail is a clear example of a success story in that department


On the other hand if you design xcom to be a game to be played also by the soccer mom in her spare time after dropping the kids to practice and she is not familiarized with the fundamental knowledge of a turn based genre because she only played Candy Crush Saga Online until then, you must streamline™ the game.

It's not lucrative to design a deep game nowadays, where the market is saturated and the consumer will hop in no time to the next best thing if you take him out just a little bit from his comfort zone.
Just look at the completion rates of games on Steam.

Not being lucrative, that's where the designer vision comes into play for his game and what takes priority - an ankle deep game but with nice graphics or a deep one for a niche market.

But fret not! Gollop will be the first to achieve mastery with his "master on none" game

Have to tap into that 50% of gamers are female Candy Crush market

 

[SymbolicFrank]

At the start, you're totally outgunned. Your recruits cannot hit the side of a barn, and the aliens never miss.

But that is not true.

I recently installed open X-COM: Terror from the Deep and played some combat turns (high difficulty) just for the kicks to adjust the graphics settings and kicked some alien butt easily. My aquanauts made some amazing long range shot that killed the aliens on the spot, alien missed quite a lot.

Ok, I just checked it out.

I use a somewhat modded OpenXCOM, so it's not precisely the same. (I do have the originals on floppy and steam, but they're a pain to handle and quite buggy.) And I'm far too good at this game to give meaningful kill statistics.

But when I use the medium difficulty (out of 5), the aliens hit more than 3/4th of the time, and my soldiers less than 1/4th. And the aliens use the Big Guns. Although 2 of my recruits survived a hit in the first three missions.

So, yes, sometimes your soldiers make amazing shots, and sometimes the aliens miss, but by and far you are totally outgunned.

If you want to play it safe, simply destroy anything that might make a hiding place.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

It's a difficult balance to strike. We don't want to be like XCOM, where losing 2 or 3 of your best soldiers can cripple you for the whole campaign. At the same time, we don't want to make soldiers feel like expendable cannon fodder.

make them level up, make several levels, not just 6 or 7 like xcom. attachment grows fast when you keep tuning your guys, having skills and perks makes them useful for specific situations. when one of those men dies something unique dies, but the constant leveling up of other soldiers keeps players busy. with enough skills and perks, i'd be fine with them being randomly assigned too if you want to keep things a bit simpler.
and screw balance, the games are fun when they're not balanced. "woohoo! this soldier got this killer skill! i'm going to protect it with the lives of even more rookies!", and here you have a game in a game.

 

[Haba]

Character development in an X-Com game should be a passive process, not an active one. Those are not supposed to be RPGs. The moment you start picking up perks and shit you've made a horrible design decision.

Your focus should be in killing the aliens and getting their equipment and corpses for research. The soldiers should be means to that end. If some of them manage to survive, great job, have a promotion.

If they die, no big loss, plenty of volunteers lined up outside the recruitment booth...

 

[Jimmious]

Cannon Fodder

 

[CryptRat]

War never been so much fun

 

[Galdred]

Character development in an X-Com game should be a passive process, not an active one. Those are not supposed to be RPGs. The moment you start picking up perks and shit you've made a horrible design decision.

Your focus should be in killing the aliens and getting their equipment and corpses for research. The soldiers should be means to that end. If some of them manage to survive, great job, have a promotion.

If they die, no big loss, plenty of volunteers lined up outside the recruitment booth...

Actually, I remember wishing these promotions did something in Cannon Fodder. They didn't make the soldiers any better, did they?
Edit: actually, it appears I was wrong all these years, and promotions did make them better

 

[CryptRat]

Nope, they did nothing. Or rather they made losing a high ranked guy more painful because they existed, but that's all.

 

[CryptRat]

Wait they did make them better?

 

[Jimmious]

CryptRat is ready to set up his old Amiga

 

[Grotesque]

https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/Rank

 

[Galdred]

Wait they did make them better?

From Wikipedia:

The games are split into several missions, which are usually sub-divided into phases. Dead soldiers are replaced by new ones at the start of each phase. Each soldier that survives a mission is promoted and receives a small increase in the rate of fire, accuracy, and range.

That said, being written on wikipedia does not make it true.

 

[Grotesque]

X-COM on console. Cringy as fuck watching that poor soul navigate the game's menus.

I am beginning to really believe developers simplify their games especially to be easier to navigate the UI with a console controller.

 

[Grotesque]

In the end, this vehicle will be or not in the game?

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Wait they did make them better?

If I remember correctly higher ranking soldiers were better when left into AI supervision when you split the squad.

 

[PanteraNera]

In the end, this vehicle will be or not in the game?

Very likely not, JohnAtanasov (Snapshot Dev) does not know about the vehicle at all when he was asked in 2018.

Also this was not made for PP as it seems:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/9NDXN

Maybe UnstableVoltage can say something about this?

 

[Mustawd]

Soldiers got better over time, yeh. But it was random or it appeared to be so IIRC.

 

[Grotesque]

In the end, this vehicle will be or not in the game?

Very likely not, JohnAtanasov (Snapshot Dev) does not know about the vehicle at all when he was asked in 2018.

Also this was not made for PP as it seems:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/9NDXN

Maybe UnstableVoltage can say something about this?

Ok.

Now seriously, how many things have to be quietly changed for the Fig campaign to be considered a "bait and switch" ?

 

[Mustawd]

127 things. Just my personal number.

 

[Grotesque]

127 things. Just my personal number.

now please proceed in describing each and every one of them.


Also,

Taskforce Xeno is a mod adding a new civic and flavor for species that fought off an alien invasion in their pre-ftl era, reverse-engineered their tech and reached for the stars in a bid for revenge!

 

[Alienman]

That is a lot of things.

 

[PanteraNera]

Now seriously, how many things have to be quietly changed for the Fig campaign to be considered a "bait and switch" ?

Get a lawyer

Seriously, it's my main gripe with PP.

- talking about "from the maker of the original X-COM" and "spiritual successor of X-Com" without saying in detail what that means (it's like Black Isle Studios would form again to do a "true spiritual successor to Fallout 1". What you didn't expected it to be Fallout 4+, silly you ).
- changing the tone of one of the three main factions, New Jerchio, in the Fig they were looking post apocalyptic, scavenger-style. Now they are Ultramarines
- while not confirmed as they have not released new images of Synderion and Discipline's of Anu I think it is a safe bet that they change the tone for them as well (just think about the Anu rider I posted on page 79)
- also "you rule the sky" and in 2018 it is still NOT decided if there will be aerial interception.
- tech-monsters I posted earlier on page 79, got cut (personally a big lose to me, I was hoping for something like this: Virus)
- the concept of the Armadillo (New Jerchio APC) looked completely different from what we got now
- also what I think is/was another big bait for some was the introduction cut-scenes for the boss-monsters in the Fig Video, as they stated later that they do not have the funds for extensive cut-scenes, a lot of people actually took cut-scenes for granted because of the Fig Video
- I would say they mostly changed the visual tone of the game, I thought that the prototype looked grim/going more for a "realistic" look, the last footage we seen is XCOM 2 style
- I think they should have stated that they intend to make a commercial successful game and not a niche game but that is my personal opinion, probably they try to do something inbetween, but I have the feeling that they lean more and more towards XCOM 2
- also they should have stated that they intend to do a "AAA-game" at least visually, as most people would have understood beforehand that they will waste a lot of money into graphics (doing all the reworks they are doing)
- also on Fig the game starts in 2057 and now it starts in 2047
- most if not all aliens that were shown on Fig have changed, crabman, crabqueen, drone

there is probably more

Like I said earlier, I think it is very disrespectful to change so much, without communicating it with the people that gave there money in the first place. I like indie's/developers that threat their Baker's as they would threat their publisher. That they fail to do at least an interesting monthly dev-blog is beyond me.

 

[SymbolicFrank]

So, do they need yummy graphics? That's certainly one of the most important goals. It has to look great, and the other half of the budget has to be spend on marketing. (This is capitalism 101.)

Then again, many people still play X-COM (UFO) and TFTD. Which look ancient and have extremely bad and limited animations. (No, that is not how someone walks!) So, why do they play it, and does Julian want them to buy his new game?

If it looks great, but has gameplay equal to or worse than nuXCOM, I won't buy it. I haven't bought or played any of the Firaxis games. They're a different genre, not worth my time.


It's all about the fallacy of "race to the bottom": we want everyone to buy it, so it should be as general (nondescript) as possible. Just average the current bestsellers that come closest.

And, interestingly and fortunately enough, most of that crap fails to sell. Simply because it's indistinguishable from all the others, but has a far smaller marketing budget than the Big Names. (This is still capitalism 101.)


If you want to score, make it Epic. Demand the best. If someone can play it for just an hour, you failed. And yes, it's probably quite flawed and unbalanced. But it will sell to all those people who want that kind of game. Or make sure you have the largest marketing budget.

Anyway.