Sonmi said:
Small nitpick, but if I'm not mistaken, it's impossible to keep missing over and over again in the new XCOM as long as your shots have a respectable accuracy due to the game manipulating the odds in your favour by invisibly upping your chances to hit for every consecutive missed shot/dead squaddie.
IDK, I've only really played UFO: Enemy Unknown and X-COM: EU.
Regardless, both of them are kind of annoying in these regards. A 'diceless' system would have been better. Once again, I fail to see why computer games use these systems. Yeah,I get it ... D&D exists ... but then again tactical videogames shouldn't play like tabletop roleplaying games. Not only that, there's infinitely better examples of how to handle 'randomness' in the board gaming scene that would not only make the game more tactical and better reward ingenuity and planning, but also open up entirely new dimensions of tailoring how soldiers perform in the game to your liking.
Then you wouldn't need any invisible hand nonsense.
When I play X-COM: EU I get the sneaking suspicion that the only reason why I do so is because it's harder to set up a solo game of Gloomhaven when there is an active campaign already being run.
It's kind of weirdly depressing to me that video games have
all of these opportunities and then just ignore them in favour of a weird take on dice rolling and nudging some numbers around. I get they might be worried about suspense being curtailed if they ixnay a lot of its randomness, but I feel like the gamer rage memes X-COM has produced should be a giant neon sign that maybe videogames should be more than virtual dice.
Let me give you an example... instead of just moving some points on your aim up or down, and rolling according to that ... what if instead of dice you had a deck of 'cards' that the game uses and lets you tailpr. This deck only has one certifiable miss card and one critical hit card ... and you have a series of modifier cards in between that influence damage.
This deck only usually gets reshuffled once that critical fail or critical hit card gets drawn.
So over the battle your soldier has been performing below average with below average card draws ... but in the back of your mind, you might think to yourself; "Well, some of those bad draws are out of the soldier's deck, so maybe that soldier can be more aggressive?"
Weapons have locked range + cover to damage increments.
Now depending on your class and your abilities, you can remove certain cards to improve draw consistency, or replace them temporarily, or create new status effect cards, or 'shuffle' additional critical hit cards that are one use non-reshuffles, and one battle only, once that ability has been conjured.
How about an ability allowing you to 'reset' your deck and give you some added perks along the way if you've been drawing exceedingly well and knowing it's downhill from there ... giving up on a higher chance of drawing a native reshuffling critical hit card juxtaposed by that increased chance of a critical failure or poor future draws... so it's like your soldier has 're-centered' and caught their second wind for an action point?
Or maybe if you're a gambler and things are going badly you can't take that action, there might be an ability that lets you shoot multiple times but places detrimental status effects into your deck like gun jams for the rest of the battle that you might draw representing the increased wear and tear on your experimental equipment.
Better than rolling dice, right?
Better roleplaying mechanics of altering and customizing your soldiers, right?
These soldiers would be unique additions to your outfit and you could endlessly experiment with various builds to your heart's content.
If you have a soldier you just want to have a baseline level of success with, throw in (to a limit) additional 0 status modifier cards. If you want an erratic psionic that suffers ridiculous highs and lows as they blast people with their mind, reduce their 'deck size' by taking them out (to a limit) ... increasing their 'liability' factor in battle, but truly capable of soaring heights of routine damage infliction. So on and so forth.
You could even insert negative effect status cards in your deck in order to access better cards and play around with predictability and risk management that way. Certain equipment might also complement well with unique card effects thrown in... so if you wanted a laser specialist, lasers might have a 'burn' flag... and you could purchase two 'burn' cards for a gun jam card that when drawn add +1 damage ontop of the next numerical modifier card you draw?
So you might draw a burn card, then string together drawing a 'Morale' card, that might add +2 resistance against fear for the round, a gun jam card, and draw a native critical hit damage modifier card that doubles damage and bonus effects and reshuffle all your cards into a fresh deck...
So you get double native gun damage modified by range and cover, +2 burn damage, +4 resistance vs. Fear, but you need to spend an action point reloading your gun?
So effectively a soldier that rallies when bringing out the pain with their weapon of choice? Maybe they hate the xeno scum because they were 6 days from rotation from a war zone until they decided to invade and they were drafted to fight, so they occasionally drain their laser's batteries into an enemy out of anger... who knows?
You could even have dialogue attached to such combinations that you have created ... give it some flavour to represent such quirks that the player has quietly cultivated in their warriors as they go on through their careers and face such alien terrors... dare I say you might even get attached to them and beyond simply because you lucked out on their initial stats and class--but rather because you had handcrafted them to be this way by exposing them to threats and through the familiarity of the arms and training you've given them.
Imagine that... and not much more difficult than the weird randomness of voice packs to characters ...
And that naturalistically emerges through this level of customization... These little, fun, character specific mini-narratives you could create that are reflected in gameplay?
Imagine having this freeform means to customize your soldier's possible combos, their likelihood of emerging, and being able to on the fly calculate in your headspace when they might emerge?
That would be an interesting RPG mechanic... Using 'randomness' as to inform consistency of soldier total performance, not treating it as merely random ... and you still have the critical miss card in there to provide that 'suspense' of possibly fucking up entirely.
Imagine if enemies could be created this way? And imagine if all enemies possibly had random tweaks to their 'decks' that would help sell the idea of a chaotic frenzy against a
truly unknowable and unpredictable enemy? Not just modifications to a few of their stats, their equipment, and their health...?
But apparently virtual dice chucking plus nudging numbers about on a stat card instead ... Much combat, such tactical ... 10 out of 10 <.<
I really don't understand video games wanting to emulate the Ameritrashiest of all possible systems. There is no reason for it. The benefit of videogames is they can be beyond it, and easily so. What exactly do videogame developers do with all those years it takes to release a game? And to be fair... I like tabletop roleplaying games. I'm in a current Roleplaying is Magic 3E group... I don't mind rolling dice. But I would hate it if all I did was roll dice...
