X-COM XCOM 2 + War of the Chosen Expansion Thread

[Alienman]

Something "feels" wrong in the balance of power, the tone, how it's all presented. It feels less like "guerilla resistance against bad guys" and more like "let's send spec ops team to overthrow a foreign government". Not a big deal but the vibe could be a hit or miss. I mean at no point in any gameplay videos I felt like the dudes were the underdogs either. They had uber soldiers, good equipment, near perfect communication and supply chain...As said, feels more like spec ops than guerrilla resistance, or more Jagged Alliance (the game) than V (the TV series, original).

Yeah, one thing the game seems to lack is that sense of isolation that a good "behind enemy lines" story needs. Every time you do anything, it's a few minutes of action, then back safe in the womblike belly of your big spaceship with all your friends and fantastic protective technology. I want to have guys stranded out there, OK Zeta team, you're on your own, fuck up as much stuff as you can before you get killed, we'll send a shuttle to pick you up in 2 weeks assuming we can steal one, that kind of thing. More desperation.

As much as possible I plan to dress up my guys with maximum emphasis on "rag-tag", I don't like the idea of them being a cohesive governmental type force either.

That was basically Goldhawks Interactives new game, but they canned it to make Xenonauts 2 instead.

 

[Zombra]

Gah, I don't wanna spoil the intro but all your talk... forces... my... hand & mouse

It's literally the first thing you see when you start a game, it's not a spoiler.

 

[Alienman]

Gah, I don't wanna spoil the intro but all your talk... forces... my... hand & mouse

It's literally the first thing you see when you start a game, it's not a spoiler.

Yeah I know, I guess it's part of the new game feeling for me

Edit:

I'm gonna watch it

 

[Tytus]

I'm gonna watch it

Oh, thank you for that update. I was living under such pressure just wanting to know if you're gonna watch it or not. The suspense was literally killing me.

 

[Alienman]

Good I updated then!

 

[veevoir]

beaglerush will stream since the moment embargo goes down, which is very soon: http://opencritic.com/game/1776/xcom-2


Stream here: http://www.twitch.tv/miss_jamball
Wonder if he has a new counter to the beaglerush maneuver counter by advent.

 

[Raghar]

beaglerush will stream since the moment embargo goes down, which is very soon: http://opencritic.com/game/1776/xcom-2

Actually I kinda wonder why would anyone buy it when he seen it on stream, 4 days sooner already.

I looked at beagle stream and he said "dead as democracy".

 

[Naraya]

http://www.pcgamer.com/xcom-2-review/

94 daaayuuum!
(I know, it's PCGamer, but still...)

I have played the crap of UFO and TFTD back in the days but I have not played nuXCOM. I think I'll bite the bullet on nuXCOM2, however all the DLC stuff makes me cringe.

 

[Morgoth]

Reviews are in, and they like the game:
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/02/01/xcom2-review/
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-02-01-xcom-2-review
http://www.shacknews.com/article/92976/xcom-2-review-mass-extinction-event

 

[Cyberarmy]

Yeah they are really liking it out there, gamespot gave a 9
http://www.gamespot.com/reviews/xcom-2-review/1900-6416347/

So we'll just assume that it's shit?

 

[Disgruntled]

Didnt expect any less with all the previews that have been out. At this point I just want to play myself cause the images of the game and those city maps are becoming bland from overexposure.

 

[Perkel]

I guess someone from dev team could be fan of this manga.

Spoiler

setting up adfly account atm, gonna do that reskin and be rich.

why the fuck this game will be 45gb.

mod tools are 45GB

game alone is much smaller.

 

[Jimmious]

I dont want to read the reviews, but can someone tell us if they say anything of value about the difficulty?

 

[Perkel]

I dont want to read the reviews, but can someone tell us if they say anything of value about the difficulty?

"Game is hard"
"Brutal"
"fair"

 

[Raghar]

It's nice game. Finally. Even with that original flaws in design.

BTW I seen they blew up sides of tower, and only ladder remained. And the ladder kept the top of the tower in the air.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-02-01-xcom-2-review

XCOM 2 review
The wisdom of Solomon.

Punishing and precise, Firaxis has created one of the most demanding - and thrilling - strategy games ever.

In XCOM: Enemy Unknown, I discovered a tell.

Very occasionally, when you go to take a shot with one of your soldiers, you're treated to a little cinematic camerawork. This being an XCOM game, half the time that means watching your rookie shoot through a wall, or point their gun in some impossible direction. But that doesn't matter! If you see that extra bit of camerawork, you know you'll hit your target. You know you'll be doing damage. More than that, you know you've landed the kill as well. In a game of so very many uncertainties, such moments of guaranteed success are to be treasured.

XCOM 2 appears to offer the same thing, visual glitches and all. You'll line up a shot with one of those dreaded 45 per cent chances to hit, and feel immediate relief as the camera pans round your soldier in slow motion. But here, in this game, that isn't actually telling you anything at all. Despite the build up, your shot might go on to hit, kill, or completely miss its target. If it's the latter, it's a punchline that's been more than three years in the making. This, it turns out, is a sequel that truly understands how people played its predecessor. XCOM has finally recognised its biggest problem: us.

This time around, Firaxis wants us to shine: to take risks, to react smartly but also swiftly - and sometimes, to crack terribly under pressure. The very best examples of this can be found in the way that players are encouraged to move. Whereas Enemy Unknown usually had us terrified to do anything other than tiptoe forwards and overwatch (an ability that prompts soldiers to shoot at enemies that appear during the alien's turn), XCOM 2 thinks you should be a little more adventurous than that. For a start, most missions have some kind of timer to worry about. Rescue/retrieve/destroy the objective in a limited number of turns, or risk failing the mission and losing your reward. Harsher still are the missions that ask you to reach an extraction point with your team within that very same time limit, or watch as your soldiers are left behind. Yeah. I know. It's brutal.

Official mod support from launch? That's more like it.

I thought I'd hate this setup, to be honest. The occasional time limit - think bomb disposal missions in Enemy Unknown - doesn't seem so bad, but make them the norm and surely it just feels exhausting? Well, I was wrong. This extra motivation is exactly what the series needed. Combine the added time constraint with a near-infinite pool of map designs (they're procedurally-generated this time around) and you're inevitably going to run into more surprises. You're inevitably going to make more mistakes. And those moments, as you scramble to counter a group of enemies that you weren't quite ready to discover, are when XCOM is at its absolute best.

I'm telling you, after multiple campaigns of Enemy Unknown and Within, it feels such a relief to rely less upon overwatch. At the start of most XCOM 2 missions, this is made possible thanks to concealment, which sees your squad moving around the map temporarily undetected. Stay behind cover and outside of the enemy's reduced line of sight and you can spend your first few turns sneaking closer to an objective. Or you could set up the perfect ambush, thwarting a group of enemies before they even know you're there. That, by the way, is just as satisfying as it sounds.

The idea being that in most missions, the alien forces aren't expecting you to show up in the first place. This sequel is set some 20 years after the events of the previous game, and us humans have well and truly lost the war. The once mighty XCOM have been reduced to little more than freedom fighters in an alien-controlled utopia, which proves a brilliant contrast to Enemy Unknown, in which you started the game with the full support of the world's nations. Here, you begin with nothing, and struggle to build up and support a resistance movement that can eventually, hopefully overthrow its masters.

You manage this, on a tactical front, by moving to and from various objectives on the world map, using your new wicked cool flying alien ship/base of operations. No longer are you limited to reaction, fending off alien attacks, abductions and the fact that India wants to leave the council again. Here you have some control over your targets, as you decide where to spread your influence and which side objectives to pursue. Do you want to fly back to South America to pick up those rookies, or raid an alien convoy in Western Europe? It's your choice, but importantly, you will never be able to do everything. This is XCOM after all; sacrifices have to be made.

Hopefully the multiplayer will see more love this time around.

The base building itself will look familiar, despite taking place in the belly of an alien supply ship, as you clear out a grid of 'alien debris' and fill it full of the sort of useful things you'd expect: power sources, training schools and the like. But, again, XCOM 2 has adapted to its playerbase. With an increased focus on random outcomes, you're encouraged to react to surprise breakthroughs. The foundry, for example, has your engineers experimenting with the research you've completed: producing weapons, armour and ammunition that you can't quite predict. Although the cross-section presentation looks familiar, there isn't a pre-determined build order to follow here, and it's all the better for it.

Everywhere you look, you see the same kind of micro-surgical thinking. The game is always keen to see you moving promptly, acting before it's too late. The aliens are always up to something and there's always a big, red, doomsday-styled counter ticking away at the top of the screen. Why? Many of us, I expect, were guilty of holding off on assaulting the alien base in Enemy Unknown until we'd finished a few extra research projects, or kitted out our squad in just the way we liked. Despite being repeatedly told how urgently the planet required us to complete that mission, we did a bit of grinding first. It was all-out war, but did we really feel the pressure?

Well, XCOM 2 knows about all our old tricks. Typical. As a result, if you spend too long avoiding your responsibilities and allow the aliens to complete whatever it is that they're plotting, it's game over. You don't just lose, they win. You're going to need to reload an earlier save, or if you're playing on Ironman mode (and you totally should be!), it's time to start from scratch. Even typing that forces a grimace.

Of course, XCOM 2 looks better than Enemy Unknown and it has more enemies. There are new abilities to unlock, weapons to research, and the thin men are now snake ladies with breasts. Great.

But that stuff is relatively simple. Back of the box stuff. Looks good, but does it really make much of a difference? Moment to moment, the thing that makes this astonishing game truly sing is the way in which it's managed to respond to the bad habits we picked up last time around. Move faster, it urges. Take more risks. Become a more interesting player.

XCOM 2 isn't a reworking of the original game, then - it's a genuine response to it. A response to us. Turns out Firaxis was on overwatch all along.

 

[Alienman]

Hypetrain, but as a stove-away so far after reading:

"For a start, most missions have some kind of timer to worry about. Rescue/retrieve/destroy the objective in a limited number of turns, or risk failing the mission and losing your reward. Harsher still are the missions that ask you to reach an extraction point with your team within that very same time limit, or watch as your soldiers are left behind. Yeah. I know. It's brutal"

Time pressure in most missions, damn.

 

[ArchAngel]

That is good, that is only way to make the game more interesting compared to Xcom 2012 since they didn't implement fatigue or increase the soldier numbers and let you do big battles with dozens of aliens at same time where losing half of your 14 member team is not a big deal.

 

[PhantasmaNL]

Hypetrain, but as a stove-away so far after reading:

"For a start, most missions have some kind of timer to worry about. Rescue/retrieve/destroy the objective in a limited number of turns, or risk failing the mission and losing your reward. Harsher still are the missions that ask you to reach an extraction point with your team within that very same time limit, or watch as your soldiers are left behind. Yeah. I know. It's brutal"

Time pressure in most missions, damn.

And the game fail state is on a timer too apparently (the "doomsday clock")? Preorder stands but hm..

 

[Cyberarmy]

Modz will fix it.


I hope...

 

[Jasede]

Are you... complaining about having a time limit?
Usually you make fun of people complaining about difficulty.

It's probably going to be generous as fuck. Don't forget that reviewers are manbabies that have never touched classic X-Com and think Dark Souls is the hardest game evur!!!1111. Playing anything that used to be standard difficulty in the day is going to be considered 'brutal.'

I'm going to be surprised if the time limit isn't so long that it's basically irrelevant.

 

[ArchAngel]

Are you... complaining about having a time limit?
Usually you make fun of people complaining about difficulty.

It's probably going to be generous as fuck. Don't forget that reviewers are manbabies that have never touched classic X-Com and think Dark Souls is the hardest game evur!!!1111. Playing anything that used to be standard difficulty in the day is going to be considered 'brutal.'

I'm going to be surprised if the time limit isn't so long that it's basically irrelevant.

The one during missions is often not irrelevant, at least on higher difficulties.

 

[orcinator]

Modz will fix it.


I hope...

Well, maybe now that it actually has mod support (probably) someone with less retarded ideas can try fixing it.

Though things like a proper LOS and projectile system will take a lot of work.

 

[cvv]

Are you... complaining about having a time limit?

It's probably going to be generous as fuck. Don't forget that reviewers are manbabies

This. Anyone worrying about the vanilla being difficult in any real sense of the word is seriously deluded.

Why?

BECAUSE IT'S 2015 2016!

 

[Raghar]

Hypetrain, but as a stove-away so far after reading:

"For a start, most missions have some kind of timer to worry about. Rescue/retrieve/destroy the objective in a limited number of turns, or risk failing the mission and losing your reward. Harsher still are the missions that ask you to reach an extraction point with your team within that very same time limit, or watch as your soldiers are left behind. Yeah. I know. It's brutal"

Time pressure in most missions, damn.

And the game fail state is on a timer too apparently (the "doomsday clock")? Preorder stands but hm..

That's quite old news. Few tens pages back I commended on a video where they shown early version and they shown geoscape. And I sugested to look at geoscape really carefully. I didn't want to spoil the doomclock explicitly. There was also some other interesting stuff. But you'd know from current lets play streams of XCOM2. (If you want to be spoiled. But it would be somewhat easier when you know how to handle stuff and what to expect, so I'd avoid live streams until release.)

You are playing terrorists. Do you think police would wait for overwatch traps? Of course there is timer in missions.