is xcom that good?

[Pink Gregory]

It's a breath of fresh air in the current industry; but fans of the original don't like it, frankly.

Of course there are exceptions, there's room for both, I love both.

 

[Tallim]

It's a breath of fresh air in the current industry; but fans of the original don't like it, frankly.

Of course there are exceptions, there's room for both, I love both.

I'm a massive fan of the originals and I absolutely LOVE the new one. Sure, there are some questionable design choices but what's most important is it *feels* like Xcom. It's also much nicer to play.

In my opinion this is a game that got streamlining more or less right. Old Xcom games just took a stupid amount of time to do each mission and after a while my patience ran a bit thin when fielding massive squads.

The controls are bit awkward, the cursor doesn't always find the place you want your trooper to go. Also, I miss the possibility to spray an are with plasma fire without seeing any enemies i.e. Destroying walls with quick shots and revealing enemies behind them... And the troopers inventory is a joke. Well, you cannot have it all, when the game is dumbed down for consoles.

It's a nice game, though not a true X-com...

I actually don't think it was dumbed down for consoles. I think the developers made exactly the game they wanted to make by removing the tedium from a lot of the original mechanics and providing more meaningful choices in game.

It is in essence a distilled version of the originals and that's by no means a bad thing.

 

[Kaymish]

i not so sure but i have had plenty of fun with it even had a few operations that have turned into fucks ups and when the lady says if only there was something we overlooked i say no it was just a fuck up col vixen gave her life in vain and ive had operations where only one or 2 troops make it out alive or the whole squad gets wiped out by the survivors of a UFO crash

it is also the most buggy game i have ever played and these are not just annoying bugs like a BoS paladin stealing your plasma rifle these are bugs that freeze up the game or crash it outright and ive got plenty of power it auto sets the graphics to high

but any it is a really good game even if i confused it with the X-com game i actually wanted im not regretting getting it

 

[Hazy]

It's part base-building/research/management and another part turn-based combat.

Every unit can move two times, either a short distance movement, an attack, a special (such as overwatch, which fires upon an enemy that enters your radius -- almost like a Stationary "patrol" from StarCraft,) or they can expend both of their moves and traverse a much larger area.

It streamlined a lot of components of the original XCOM without necessarily dumbing it down (provided you're not on a low-tier difficulty, of course).

Theres a demo on steam. Im downloading it now so I can decide whether to buy it or not.

The demo is terrible. Try it out to get a grasp of the mechanics, but don't base your decision off of that.

 

[perkl]

too random.

Everything else I get, but how is it too random?

I think it's so praised mainly because beggars can't be choosers. There's no choice to XCOM unless you're into consoles which apparently have some options.

I'm sure XCOM is a great game but I can't unplay all the old games I grew up with. Take the tactical fights. It's been done in practically the same way back in 1985 classic Six-gun Shootout. You get behind cover and can stand, kneel or go prone. Depending on where you're getting shot at (characters had hit locations), cover might or might not be in the way. Depending on weapon and cover the shot might or might not penetrate and hit. People had up to three different weapons, ranging from tomahawks to derringers to breechloading rifles, all with different characteristics. Everyone also had different skills in using the things: a guy who was great with pistols could be worthless with rifles. Someone would always carry dynamite, which was used to blast away cover. You'd move or pick a target and weapon to shoot with, or do one of maybe three special actions. The computer would handle the rest.

Now almost 30 years later the best TBS is a game with cover system simpler than what it was back in the day. Taking actions is practically the same. Scenario variety is better in some regards, worse in others. Individual superpowers weren't a thing back in 1985, but have been done way before XCOM. Anyone remember Lords of Chaos or WH40k: Chaos Gate? The lack of innovation is dazzling. XCOM is a very polished, relatively simple game that does nothing new. I guess it's good that people are interested in the genre once again, so it's not all bad.

 

[rbstewart7263]

Awesome the whole alien motif never really struck me but the level of detail does have my interest piqued. I think Ill give it a go next paycheck/job I get. lol

Thanks all of you who did a good job of explaining what the big deal is.

 

[exessmirror]

im enjoying it although i do miss some of the depth of the original.

one thing it managed to keep from the original is the atatchment to your troops. if i loose a trooper i morne him but i dont reload the save. its a rare game where screwing up can be just as good as winning

to be honest that is one of the things they did better, they gave them more of a face.

 

[Product Placement]

One thing that I found great about the original is that when aliens invade your base. Based on how you designed it, the battlemap took the shape of your base. Experienced players took that into consideration and made a defensible layout.

Of course, the original game forced you to build multiple bases, in order to get a good radar/interceptor coverage around the globe. Making sure that every base had enough armaments/fuel for the interceptors, soldiers to defend against possible alien attack and weapons to arm said soldiers was daunting at times. Most people focused on maintaining a single primary base and cheap secondary bases that were essentially nothing more than a radar and hangar. With this in mind, I think it was a right move to let you have only maintain a single base, launch satellites to spread your cover and have it so that you can stage interceptors in different continents. It seems to mirror the tactic most players would have gravitated towards, anyways.

 

[Okulossos]

I personally see a major problem in their choice of engine.

It is the main reason for the inside alien ship problems as well as almost all the other bugs.

What I find most disheartening about it is that the choice of engine limits what they can do with this game in the future. I would like to see them making a map editor and release that in a following expansion or something similar. That way they could draw use of the community who could ad maps to the mission pools. However I do see that being difficult to pull off with the unreal 3 engine.

I don't think that the engine has much to do with that, since the engine itself is just there to render what you see and not really for the gameplay or design - and even if, you can configure the engine quite well (I actually played around a bit with the UDK and it is extremely easy to configure stuff without any prior knowledge). I am expecting at least that much from a AAA title. It is just poor programming and design and there is no real excuse for that. In the last mission the game even crashed on me after an extremely long loading screen in the mission before that.
The game is broken beyond believe and seeing that the quality assurance team make up over 2/3 of the complete staff that is just sad. They should be fired to make some space for programmers and designers, since they obviously don't know how to do their job.

This is extremely sad, because I love the rest of the game so much, that I am willing to overlook flaws that would otherwise keep me from playing the game. The thing is, I know the flaws are there because the game was rushed and because the programmers had to take a lot of shortcuts. When not looking at the ending of the story-mode (which is as generic as it gets) this could just have been the one game this year that just had it all for me. But as it stands it is a really good game overshadowed by poor implementation and execution. Even though it will still be a lot better that the other XCOM coming soon, I am going back to UFO: Enemy Unknown...

 

[SomebodyNowhere]

I really want to play this game, but I just don't have the money for another game at the moment especially when I still have games from the steam summer sale that I have not unpacked yet.

I'll probably pick this up at some point down the line off steam and play it and regret not doing so sooner, but that's an issue I'll let future me deal with.

 

[Okulossos]

While you are partially right the UDK still needs a lot of tweaking in order make it this. The UDK will affect the gameplay. You know the rag dolls that flies across the screen. I am going to go out on a limb here that making the rag dolls interact properly with a grid system is a bit of a challenge. Its the grid that is the main problem here. Lvl design becomes a much bigger issue as well with this grid.

Yes, the UDK contains gameplay mechanics and a lot of physics - but the UDK is for one not the unreal engine, it just helps for some sort of games. A game of AAA Status will need some kind of framework, but it can be expected to go far beyond the UDK, so I highly doubt that they actually used it.
The Grid might be a problem, but there are easy ways out of this. For one you have some kind of physics, but they are not very deep, so once something is dead there is no more ragdolling (that is what they did). Then you could make the Grid switchable. That is not hard to accomplish and it won't effect gameplay if only used for certain animations. I figured that they used it on some places. This would help with the physics.
But the physics are not the problem here. They work correctly. It is flaws like the ceiling in the larger UFOs which could simply have been removed completely. ... or the erroneous recognition of the proper level, which could have been fixed by doing it just like they did it in the original: simply force-bind the possible grid to the level which was chosen and the problem would have been solved.
Then there are some flaws like when using mindfray, that you character looses will instead of the enemy, or like the sometimes broken aiming mechanics which don't resolve properly due to too many variables, or problems with the direction someone is standing when firing a weapon which is actually going into the opposite direction. There are flaws that should have shown up in betatesting and that would have just needed some more polish and time to get rid of.

All of those are not big flaws going back to big problems with the engine or the grid. This is all going back to problematic design and an unpolished game. Most of those could probably be fixes by changing or adding a few lines of code here and there. That is nothing major.
If one of my software projects would be released like that I could pack my bags and leave, but I have a whole lot more time to fix my stuff. No, the main problem here is not a technical one. It is not like they couldn't have done it any better, or that some framework is too complex to function properly. The flaws in this game go back to a flawed time-management and a flawed resource-planning, both of which lead us directly to the publisher who is directly responsible for breaking this game and making me sad!

 

[Okulossos]

I may not have been precise enough. It is not the engine in it self, but the choice of engine for the project.

The engine does not care what it displays.

The ragdolls are a buggy problem. If you continuously reload the game the a downed soldier will jump slowly across the floor due the the ragdolls being in effect. With enough reloads you can slide the soldier across the map. To go physics are not the problem is quite simply not true. The destructible environment and the grid is making for tons of bug where you can take cover inside objects. The engine is a problem here.

I have not encountered any of those problems. Those are, in fact partially engine-based flaws which can be resolved by a good code, but that takes a lot of testing and time which the team did not have.

Now you are right it. ALOT of the problems comes down to downright ineptitude of the development team. I am just saying that the choice of the UDK engine is not the best for this particular game. It is not meant to be on a grid with destructible environment

the UDK is NOT the engine, it is the "unreal development kit" it contains the engine plus framework and configuration (and a great documentation) to modify into you own game. This game did - to my knowledge - not use that framework, it used the engine and build on top of that. So no, the engine has nothing to do with the flaws I mentioned. An engine, in it's basic function, is just there to display stuff. It's for rendering the frames. This does affect the gameplay a lot, since things like sleeptime in and of themselves dictate the speed of the game which in turn dictates possible movement etc... But the engine does not care much how the game is build up and how the frames are to be displayed.