X-COM 2

[Hotfoot]

Rock Paper Shotgun

[youtube][/youtube]

So, the article and the video reveal a few things. First off, this isn't following the structure of the original series, which is probably for the best. I know people have their opinions on which of the old XCOM games was the best, but frankly, I don't think that matters. The previous game was not those games, but it managed to appeal to both veteran fans of the series and new players, and so I think they've got a winning formula here. There's room for improvement, but hopefully that's what we'll see in this sequel.

First off, I really like the way they reset the game to baseline here. It's always difficult in games like this to find reasons to take away all the upgrades from the previous games, and maintaining the dynamic of XCOM struggling for funding and gear in a world where they single-handedly defeated the alien invasion is, well, just a bit silly, unless you have each nation funding their own XCOM style initiative and you're competing for funding (which, admittedly, would be a pretty cool multiplayer mode concept). In this case, they choose to go with the idea that regardless of how successful you were in the first XCOM, events occurred that resulted in the aliens eventually succeeding by way of offering supertech to humanity, while keeping the strings attached quiet to keep the populace nice and sedate. Your operation is now mobile and you are now, in many ways, the invaders.

Similar to XCOM's expansion, human soldiers augmented by alien tech are among the enemies you will be fighting, putting you at further disadvantages since it looks like the starting tech is roughly on par with where the previous game began, perhaps slightly enhanced.

Enemy Unknown and Enemy Within were fantastic games. They had notable flaws, but they have remained solid, fun, largely without major flaws. Firaxis, noting the success of mods like the Long War, indicate that they will be improving mod support for the next game.

ETA: November 2015

Between this and the next major update to Beyond Earth, Firaxis has some solid stuff coming, which is good since I heard Starships was pretty lackluster.

[Josh]

Capture drone: cool.

Guerrilla X-Com: very cool.

Katana dude: heh.

Looking forward to giving it a spin.

[frigidmagi]

... Oh Lord yes.

[Lys]

One pretty easy way in which the aliens could have gotten humanity on their side is by pretending to be an entirely different group of aliens and being all, "Oh shit, we were too late to warn you about those assholes. Here, let us help you rebuild." Doesn't sound like that's what happened though. A possibility is that after Ethereal Ones suffered a terminal case of acute Xcomite Operationitis, a different group within the alien hierarchy took over, and decided to stop fucking around and just take over the damn place. After all, the goals of the Ethreals were pretty much the only reason they didn't do that to begin with. Though i kind of felt that Enemy Unknown should have taken place in 2020, because that's a cool-sounding date, also the Cyberpunk 2020 references, and then the sequel would be taking place in 2040, which means i could be making Phantom 2040 references right now! Damn you Firaxis, how could you steal that from me!?

[Lys]

Oh random thought! Most people didn't notice this but The Volunteer didn't actually die at the end of the first game. The ending clip didn't do a good job of showing it, but the intent is that she vanished/teleported/ascended a second before everything explodes. It would be pretty cool if The Volunteer showed up in Xcom 2 to do the Star Child shtick and help you out with stuff.

In the one and only game of Xcom Enemy Within i played, my Volunteer was an incredibly awesome Medic-spec Russian Support by the name of Sofia "Scarecrow" Chernupova. She was one of my original soldiers, and immediately became my favourite when she earned that nickname, because fuck yeah Shane Schofield reference. She instantly became my favourite, became my first Colonel, and graced the top of the personnel list for pretty much the entire game. Really, i pretty much pictured her as Xcom's field operations leader. She had all the medals because she fucking deserved them, and was pretty high up in terms of kill count and missions until near the end of the game, when other soldiers overtook her because i damn near never sent Colonels on missions (which resulted in me having like 8 colonels and 12 mayors). You can only imagine the sheer joy i experienced when she turned out to be my first psychic soldier, she shortly thereafter also became my first genemodded soldier, making her into a superhuman badass of badasses.

[rhoenix]

I hear you. Back in the days of yore when the original XCOM / UFO: Enemy Unknown game was out, its sequel Terror From the Deep kind of followed a similar storyline. The idea being that after the Ethereals get their asses kicked, a failsafe signal goes off from Mars with the death of the Ethereal leader, awakening all the troops the Ethereals had stashed at the bottom of Earth's oceans.

The Failsafe wakes them all up, but since they don't have the leadership structure they had before, they start cautiously, assaulting ships at sea, kidnapping the entire crew, and either leaving the ship behind as a ghost-ship sort of mystery, or vaping it. However, they were meant to be the occupation force of Earth as insurance if the Ethereals had trouble, and thus brought all the big guns and ships as well.

The maps were much bigger, the enemies smarter, and there was more interesting tech going on, since the disparity of fighting above the water and fighting below it, or in space, meant that some of your equipment wouldn't work in certain environments.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown was a damn good reboot of the game, but I admit there is a part of me that wants to see them do a Terror From The Deep kind of thing, and this may just be it.

[Josh]

Heh. I followed the Libarc tradition of naming my characters after Libarc members in the first game. DocBen was the first to die, sniping on top of an Abductor and generously shepherding a crew of rooks because my first line was wounded. He caught a spread of missiles off a Sectopod.

The rest of the Libarc crew held up pretty good until the final mission, when Julian (The Chosen One, a sniper) and Allen (Dark Steele flavor, assault trooper) both got mind controlled in the final fight. Julian oneshotted Garvin from like a fucking mile away because an enemy had LOS on him. Allen splatted Tev on a reaction fire. Scottie went down next. Shit was ugly, yo. Havoc died clutching his first aid kit because there was nobody left to heal.

Then they got their shit back together, Julian capped the Ethereal boss and Allen was the only one to make it out to tell the (conveniently edited) tale.

[Lys]

The original X-Com was rather unplayable for me. For starters the game is aggressively ugly, and while i normally care more about art direction than graphics quality, the fact is that nearly any game pre-dating Windows 95 is going to have to be pretty special for me to want to stand looking at it. The obtuse interface, inventory micromanagement, and the whole time units thing really didn't exactly endear me to the game either, though the micro might have been tolerable and the TUs could even have grown on me. What really drove me up the wall was the excruciating slowness with which everything happen, the clunky awkwardness of commanding the units, and the god-damned map design. Fuck the map design, and especially fuck how it's all obscured at the start of the mission. How the does that even make any sense? They fucking flew in, did nobody look out the goddamned window? Really, the whole damn thing was just too frustrating to be worth bothering with.

However there's a fan made remake called UFO: Alien Invasion which had both time units and inventory micro, but it also had maps that i could actually orient and plan on. No bullshit darkened maps, no weird spacial relations or blind spots, no achingly slow unit response and performance, plus an interface that was fairly straightforward and easy to figure out. That one was actually fun as i could actually plan manoeuvres, move my units into position, and execute assaults in a straightforward and intuitive manner. The time units also had a certain charm at times, though they're not my preference. So yeah i can see how the classic game could have been good had it not been made in the early 90s.

Though speaking of interface design, i found the inventory management system somewhat lacking in X-Com: Enemy Within. Sure it was pretty simple and straightforward while still offering meaningful tactical decisions, which is exactly what i wanted, and i'm certainly glad i never had to play without the button to unequip all items from all soldiers not in the squad. However the way that the game assigns the actual items to various soldiers instead of assigning an item priority is stupid. Like each soldier has the actual item in their possession when they're not out on mission. Why? Why does my assigning a heavy plasma to one heavy automatically make it unavailable to all the heavies unless i have him unequip it? It makes more sense that equipment selection is a matter of priority, so if i only have one heavy plasma but four heavies, i should still be able to assign a heavy plasmas to each of them. So no matter which of them i choose to go on a mission, they'll be properly equipped for it. And if i choose to take two heavies on a mission? Then one one gets the heavy plasma, and the other gets a heavy laser if available, or an LMG if not. Rank would determine who gets priority, with a button to flip between prioritizing high rank and prioritizing low rank.

That would have made the whole affair so much easier, and it seems so obvious to me that i find it difficult to imagine why they didn't do it that way. Here's to hoping X-Com 2 does it better, because having to re-arm everybody every time i send a different squad on a mission was pretty damn tedious. It got to the point that i considered building vast surpluses of equipment simply so that i could have enough for everybody and not have to bother redistributing items.

[Josh]

One game I seriously overloaded with tech, weapons in particular, because I thought that when the invasion of X Com HQ came the troops that you had with your regulars were just your backbench rookies, so I made sure they were packing at least laser rifles and several had plas carbines.

Then it turned out that it was base personnel with rifles regardless. So I spitefully got a couple killed out of irritation.

So then I had a shitload of spare weaponry whenever I got a request.

[Lys]

The first time i got that mission i'd been levelling up my lower ranked soldiers, so all of my top guys were completely unequipped. Since this was stupid, i reloaded the game and gave them their usual gear. Did pretty well in the mission too, since i only lost one of the Base Security guys near the very end.

[Lys]

So there's apparently been a lot of discussion on the internets as to the snake alien thing in the trailer, here's an executive summary:




j

[Hotfoot]

See, this is proof that hanging out in the chans rots your mind.

[Lys]

Bollocks, this shit's hilarious.

[Josh]

I'm rather embarrassed to admit that I did not notice the tits on the snake.

[frigidmagi]

I didn't notice them either. I was busy freaking out that there's another cobra trying to kill me and oh God some asshole gave it the ability to use firearms!

[rhoenix]

Heh.

The worst part is that in the original XCOM, seeing snakemen also meant you were going to see Chryssalids. FUN!

Come to think of it, they were the only unit from the original XCOM that didn't get included in the remake, unless I'm missing one.

[Lys]

The Muton's two terror units and the Floater's terror unit were not included either. These are respectively: the Celatid, a floating acid-spitting flesh-sack; the Silacoid, a slow monster that melts and eats rocks; and the Reaper a huge bipedal cyborg boar-thing. The Celatid's acid-spitting bit was given to the Thin Man, though it went from being one of the most powerful weapons in the game to one of the weakest. The Silacoid was stupid and utterly unthreatening so there was no point in bringing it back. Finally, the Reaper's role is taken by the Muton Berserker, which is much cooler anyway.

[frigidmagi]

The Muton Berserker only really scared me in tight quarters. If I can pull it out in the open, I can play shooter tag with it and kill it before it touches anyone. Although motherfucker do those guys absorb a lot of fire power.

[Josh]

Yeah, the main threat with the berserker is if you found him inside of a ship or a building.

I fucking love love loved mind controlling them and sending them to punch sectopods. It was almost as good as controlling three elites at once for a grenade death orgy.

[Lys]

Yeah the Muton Berserker's out of turn move was poorly thought out. What they really should have done is make it so that every time the Berserker is shot, it moves toward the nearest target, irrespective of who took the shot. Another possibility would have been that when shot the Berserker does indeed move toward the shooter... but it gets the double the move distance and only does it once each turn. Either of those things would have made them a lot more threatening.

[Hotfoot]

What I'd like to see is a sort of dual campaign mode, or a co-op campaign mode. Or some strange mode where everyone plays a splinter group of XCOM/Aliens and they vie for control of Megacity One....

GIVE ME NECROMUNDA ALREADY YOU BASTARDS!

[Lys]

It sounds to me that what you actually want is an XCOM Apocalypse remake with multiplayer.