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http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/09/25/some-things-you-should-know-about-the-xcom-demo/

 Lynata wrote:
So how exactly do these actions work, what is possible by combining them, what actions do you have available? Obviously not as much as with TUs, but how exactly are people limited?

Well, the typical actions are: shoot, use item (throw a grenade), go into overwatch, hug cover, suppress enemy, reload.
Soldiers are divided into categories along the lines of: Heavy, sniper, assault etc.. Every time soldier gains rank he gains a skill (or can pick from two skills available on his "level").
Skills shown in game are one use only.
After moving twice you can still shoot (assault).
Shoot bazooka (heavy).

The whole idea looks decent. Definitely less amount of "micro" (stand up, move, look around, pick shooting option, target enemy, have 1 too few AP because you had to turn again, start crying) and more "macro" so to speak. No idea how fun it will be in the long run. 4 guys in the squad at first. Up to 6 with upgrades.

Soldiers automatically look around covers while taking cover. No more running into the open, dancing around and walking back.

Palindrome wrote:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/09/25/some-things-you-should-know-about-the-xcom-demo/

Thank you.

FYI: Maybe I worded things with perception a little off. It's not like you see every position of the enemy from the start. But if a Sectoid is behind a cover you know he's there. No more crouching behind a wall and being invisible.
Opening doors lets you see the whole room. You know if there is a enemy just next to the door.
Everything has 360 LOS and can see/be seen from cover. At least that's the impression I got from the demo.

Palindrome wrote:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/09/25/some-things-you-should-know-about-the-xcom-demo/

Thanks for the link, I really hope the author right.
The demo is just bad IMHO. It only shows that game could be nice, not that it is.

 Macok wrote:

Opening doors lets you see the whole room. You know if there is a enemy just next to the door.

I'm not sure about that, the demo is too heavily scripted to tell but the tutoral mission at least has hidden enemies in the same room and the 'campaign' mission doesn't have large enough rooms for aliens to hide in. I think I have seen a preview video wherea previously discovered alien has hidden within a room.

I must be the only person that liked it. I hate the dumbing down of any game but at least its a turn based strategy game. They don't make them like they used to. I think its being judged too harshly. Yes I will miss the inventory system, yes i liked standing, crouched stances, but i will get over it.

I will say the whole time I played it i thought of how a remake of chaos gate would look like this and got a little hard.

Oh no. I did like it. I definitely wouldn't if it was just original with better graphics.
The demo, however, as something that should hook you up, kinda sucks. It doesn't show why the price is at the whooping 50E and no preorder discount. For me at least (aside from nostalgia maybe).
I really hope it's going to be good and earn a ton of money. I love turn based strategies with customable forces / experience etc.. There aren't many great games like that on PC and big success of this one could lead to similar projects.

I am extremely hyped for this game.

For those who might want to see some gameplay, OXM has a quick 5part series up on youtube. I would link it here but Im on my phone. A search for XCom OXM should deliver though.

The Civ V pre-order bonus on Steam has been unlocked overnight.

Pre-ordered, thanks for the heads up Palindrome!

Civ 5 (and the copy of Borderlands my mate lent me) should keep me going till it comes out now...

Not very impressed with Civ V, at least it was free

Nothing wrong with it being free!

Otherwise, its like an alternate Total War (as a good thing) as opposed to a proper Civ game, but its not bad...

I enjoyed Civ V a ton.

I am at the moment

Its just not the same as Civ 3 i suppose (its a dumbed down version from what i can tell), still fun as heck though so its going to get a lot of play time...

Alright, so I finally got to play the demo. In some ways, it's better than I expected, in others I feel my fears vindicated. It's certainly not the X-Com I know, which makes me sad because I think it could have been. On the other hand, it's still fun. Ironically, it actually reminds me more of "Incubation" rather than the Microprose classic it wants to be a spiritual successor to.
I'm on the fence on whether to actually buy it, but when it drops in price some day I will very likely cave in at the latest. For the moment, I've got enough other games to keep me busy.

What I like:
+ assault rifle graphics (very "chunky" and reminding of the original game)
+ new X-Com logo (looks very professional and keeping to the flair; love the latin motto)
+ looking/shooting around corners
+ combat felt very dynamic (I really liked the use of cover or how your people kick in doors and smash windows - nice job on all the animations)

What I dislike:
- silly voiceover in the opening (it's fine if you want to do a narration, but for the love of Mother Earth, don't use the "dark drama voice" when you want to do stuff like politicians or news reporters; felt way too forced)
- redundant action confirmation (ever heard of tooltips? but I guess console UI is to blame here)
- mouse reaction felt extremely sluggish compared to my other games (console UI again?)
- still dislike the whole TU system being replaced by a "walk+shoot or just run" approach
- unable to freely turn the camera (you can only watch from 4 angles)
- no mini map
- no fully destructible environment

What I'm unsure about:
- new X-Com logo on people's breast (as good as it looks, it's too "complex" to serve in this function - classic logo would have been cool here, would've preferred the new one to appear only on bigger stuff)
- new Skyranger (generally it's a very good design, but it has little in common with its predecessor and looks more like a tiny shuttle rather than a fully-fledged aircraft ... had to be done due to the smaller squad size I guess)
- base personnel uniforms (honestly? green pullovers? way to kill the sci-fi flair)
- faces in the engine (not a problem in the actual game, but in the cutscenes ... ehh, they could've done better I think)
- no ammunition management (removes a layer of tactical complexity, replacing it by an inflation of something that used to be the sole characteristic of laser weapons)

Ultimately, I think it'll be a fun game, even though it fails to catch the tactical complexity of the original. The overall visual design, to me, somewhat hits the "awkward spot" where you are kinda reminded of the original but it still feels different, like with various Hollywood remakes these days.

Also, lol @ some of those posters in the German level.

PS: Can you actually capture an alien in the demo? I half-expected to be able to knock one down with the rifle butt, yet was sadly disappointed at such an option apparently not being available.

 Lynata wrote:


What I dislike:
- silly voiceover in the opening (it's fine if you want to do a narration, but for the love of Mother Earth, don't use the "dark drama voice" when you want to do stuff like politicians or news reporters; felt way too forced)
- redundant action confirmation (ever heard of tooltips? but I guess console UI is to blame here)
- mouse reaction felt extremely sluggish compared to my other games (console UI again?)
- still dislike the whole TU system being replaced by a "walk+shoot or just run" approach
- unable to freely turn the camera (you can only watch from 4 angles)
- no mini map
- no fully destructible environment

Apparently the voice over is restricted to the opening couple of levels and the occational significant event.
The UI is indeed poor
You can rotate the camera (the Q and E keys IIRC)
Not sure about the mini map
I read a preview where a muton destroyed an entire building to get to the trooper hidden within it so that sounds like the terrain will be at destructible to a high degree. You can also smash up downed UFOs.

I don't think you can capture an alien in the demo, I read that you need a special grenade to do that, the updated equivelent of the thermal shock bomb.

Palindrome wrote:Apparently the voice over is restricted to the opening couple of levels and the occational significant event.
The UI is indeed poor
You can rotate the camera (the Q and E keys IIRC)
Not sure about the mini map
I read a preview where a muton destroyed an entire building to get to the trooper hidden within it so that sounds like the terrain will be at destructible to a high degree. You can also smash up downed UFOs.

Oh, I wasn't referring to the liaison officer's (?) voice, just the couple sentences in the intro about how X-Com was activated. The guy was apparently supposed to be some government agent, but he came across as if he tried to narrate a bad horror story on a campfire. Sheesh. The guy you hear during the missions was alright, I think.
And yes, I know you can rotate the camera in limited angles. That's what I was criticising. I don't see why free camera rotation wasn't possible.
As for destructible environment ... you can blast through walls, but not through floors and roofs or a building's supports.

"You’ll be able to blast your way through the walls of a building; most of the buildings are designed to have additional points of entry, but full destruction isn’t implemented. Fully destructible buildings have huge implications for gameplay and level design that have to be balanced. Also, once you discover that high explosives solve all your problems, then there’s this temptation to have high explosives be your ONLY solution. That would have removed some of the fun of the game. It’s much more fun to say “okay, that plan worked. But what if I came at that a different way next time?”
- Jake Solomon, Firaxis Lead Designer

I wonder if this means that you can only place explosives at pre-determined points? Or will you at least be able to blast any and all walls? Guess that remains to be seen. It's a shame either way, I liked having that option for total destruction in the original game.

Palindrome wrote:I don't think you can capture an alien in the demo, I read that you need a special grenade to do that, the updated equivelent of the thermal shock bomb.

Ah damn. Oh well, thanks for the info - I thought I could've missed a button or something.

you can blast any wall at any time with virtually any weapon, just like the other xcoms, grenades annihilate walls like they are going out of style. but you cant really completely level a building with a withering hail of explosive firepower like terror from the deep.

The demo really has relieved all of my fears about this game its going to be awesome, I hope that the game supports mods in the future to go full on 16 man death squad xcom walking into certain death.

I'm glad the demo came out as I was about to preorder...

Really dissapointed with the choices they made in terms of gameplay.

And yes, that UI needs to die a horrible horrible death.

This vid made me want this even more.

http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/ns2k61/xcom--enemy-unknown-team-gt-ufo-walkthrough

Just played it, and while I found the demo entirely too linear, the RPS article linked above is good reading. I figured it wouldn't be that linear afterward, but it's good to have that confirmed. I could see the potential for the game just through the demo, and it has me reasonably excited. Still on the fence whether I want to wait for the Christmas sale and get it for half price, or pre-order and get Civ V now.

 kirsanth wrote:
The problem is in execution.
As example I think D&D games at level 1 are worthless, especially if combat is involved.
The bad guy rolls a '20' and you roll a new character.
That is how the original x-com started.

Saving mid-mission was possible, but regardless it gets back to your examples. The game did not only kill you for dumb stuff like you imply. It (and apparently this one too!) kill you for doing everything RIGHT. Oddly, that is not a bad thing to me. However, there needs to be a actual means to progress through this besides RNGs, which is what the first 100% relied upon.

The weird wording is basically saying that the current model is basically TUs in real time.


The first two points seem contradictory, and to some extent are, or at least can be. You are describing gameplay that I imagine from something like Dark Souls (which I love!). "Don't do that stupid gak and you won't die!" That is not the game we are talking about. In Dark Souls, if you played perfect, you won perfectly. And it was tactical and strategic.

X-COM, my first mission was against cyber-discs.

Don't get me wrong - I loved the first game. It's just one of the ones I put on a list as having aged badly and am psyched is being redone by people that seem to want to remake a modern version of the first one, instead of just reskinning it.

(see the X-COM FPS for an even worse option)

I dunno, I think that is what really put the original up there for me. If you are facing a technologically superior opponent with a numerically inferior unit, you should goddamned well need luck, especially if you want to win unscathed. Even if you do everything perfectly, you should have a chance to have your best sharpshooter get blown to pieces jumping off your dropship. Unless you think it's more realistic that your enemy doesn't see it coming in, what with their better tech, and realize "Hey, those guys are the enemy response team, and they might be a threat, lets focus our fire on them." I guess it's two contradictory schools of thoughts on games - I'm more the Myth and XCom school, where it uses randomness to simulate the fact that gak happens, and then there is the school that "If I make all the right moves I should win every time." That separates decent games from ones that I will still be playing fifteen years later, I guess.

When i first heard that this game was being remade, i did blackflips of enjoyment (well in my mind). I spent far tooo much off my youth playing the original xcom game whilst at college.

But here lies the problem. When a game is really good and you have emotions and experiences tied to it, its very unlikely you will get those feelings with a game thats remade.

Yes we wish for the oldgame with just better graphics... But lets face it most people new to the game (which probably account for most of the market dynamic) wont get on the with old parts of the game that us diehards actually want.

So the reality is that we wont get the game we want or remember it used to be.

Yes i want to preorder it... But i wont. Why? because the old nostalgia for the game just cant be brought back...

 brainscan wrote:
Yes we wish for the oldgame with just better graphics... But lets face it most people new to the game (which probably account for most of the market dynamic) wont get on the with old parts of the game that us diehards actually want.

I don't, actually. If I wanted to play a game just like XCOM, I'd play XCOM. The reason I'm actually considering buying this is because it's different enough to be a different game.
Pre-order bonuses and high price suck so I still can't decide. I'll cave in eventually I think

 Macok wrote:

Pre-order bonuses and high price suck so I still can't decide. I'll cave in eventually I think

It costs the same as virtually every other non indy game, I don' tunderstand why this is an issue.

If anyone wants a more traditional X-COM they may be interested in watching this.




Xenonauts is apparently very near to reaching beta so a full release shouldn't be that far off.

Watch Xenonauts, but do not buy it yet, or in quite some time.

I bought the game early to support development a long time ago. They are SLOOOOOOOW to update, but there has been progress.

They're also a bit unwilling to do anything to make the game better, while strangely focusing on aspects that didn't need more to it like the interception.

Also, there are a lot of UI shortcuts in the new XCOM game for keyboard and mouse users. Not sure what's the issue here, maybe more rose colored glasses.

Given that XCOM has an utterly evil staggered release this is how to cuircumvent it on Steam:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/forums/showthread.php?6317-How-to-unlock-Dishonored-and-X-Com-tomorrow-morning-%28For-EU%29

Technically it is against Valves terms of use but providing that you dont use this method to actually buy games in a different region they don't seem to care. Plus you get to play 3 days earlier.

I loved the original X-COM, but I don't really understand people's need to have a new X-COM be exactly the same as the old X-COM.

What I want is a new experience of fighting an alien invasion through turn based tactical battles. This means taking as much of the good stuff as possible from the old game (getting new tech off of aliens, base management, having guys slowly level up then get wiped with a bad move/unlucky shot), and bringing in new ideas.

I love the idea of the new cover mechanic, and love that it makes my guys dynamic soldiers that'll look around corners. And I don't get why you need an inventory screen in order for guys to get loaded up with gear (just letting pick a grenade through the HUD is streamlining that should have been in place a decade ago). And I like that this game gets right into the meat and potatoes of combating aliens, and doesn't end up with a ten turn wander around the map looking for an alien standing in a corn field by himself.

Whether the new game will work or no I don't know yet (stupid staggered release) but whether it works or not it won't be because it wasn't a copy of the original game.

The method I linked to works, I played a couple of missions this morning and my Steam account hasn't been banned (yet )

STOP PLAYING AND TELL ME HOW IT IS!

Sorry, I was blocked from paying for it for some reason...