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Watching it, I'm kind of underwhelmed. Its a lot of small fights on small maps that feel even more deterministic than the original reboot.
The turn order doesn't help that impression either, mostly it feels like if you make an early mistake (or just get Xcom'd on a few chances to hit) a failed outcome is inevitable and you have to restart the mission (which makes it feel even more artificial).
It seems fine, but eh. Not excited about it. The lack of exploration or personalized character building doesn't definitely doesn't help.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2020/04/25 00:15:04
Got the game last night, and have sunk a fair amount of time in it. And I am left somewhat underwhelmed, it looks and sounds good and the gameplay is more than good. But it lacks any real amount of surprises, the chance for personalization and varied gameplay. The meter that ticks away, at the end of every turn and makes it all boil down to busy work and stress
I don't mind the game so far but I definitely don't want the normal xcom 3 game to be like this. The lines are pretty corny and something i'd expect from a game like BattleTech from harebrained studios. When I saw gameplay outside of my own the viper lady and muton dude sound nothing like their respective species. I don't even think the free advent sound like their xcom 2 counterparts.
The game....will take some getting used to. I don't actually mind most of the game so far. The difference in tone is huge in comparison to xcom 2 and I don't entirely like it. After the mayor dies in the first mission I almost imagine a laugh track to one of their lines responding to it. The camp is huge so if you're expecting a serious tone then you're gonna be disappointed big time. Some of the bad humor reminds me of the new star wars trilogy and terminator 3 and beyond. Some franchises don't need lots of bad humor or possibly much humor at all because it ruins the tone.
It's enjoyable, but I didn't really expect much from it. $10, after all. The breaching sequence is neat, and you can get some handy bonuses from it (as well as some problematic disadvantages). Mobility tends to be limited in the fights. The battle areas aren't very big, and your weapons can easily shoot across the rooms that you're fighting in. You have "per mission" limits on some of your resources and abilities. But a lot of the missions tend to consist of just a single encounter. So frequently there's no reason to save any abilities.
I've cleared two of the three enemy factions (the alien tech faction, and the hybrid church faction). The final missions for both had some interesting encounters.
The game provides some glimpses into the state of affairs five years after Liberation Day. Your team's official mandate is "Reclamation" - i.e. getting ahold of potentially dangerous alien technologies. That's your initial excuse for being in City 31. Kelly - the survivor from the tutorial mission in XCom 2 (along with Bradford) is your superior at XCom. You get frequent updates from her with new information that pushes the story along Bradford's not so keen on putting aliens on the team, but goes along with it (so far, he's only shown up in the transcript of a conversation with Kelly). The Commander's opinion is left unstated. City 31 was an important urban area during the Occupation, with extensive manufacturing facilities, gene clinics, and even a starport. The latter is currently not being used, though there are a number of spaceships still locked down there. While the aliens living in City 31 are free, there are a number of references to camps that were (and probably still are) being used to evaluate and rehabilitate the alien population after Liberation Day.
Also, as I mentioned above, XCom 2 is free to play right now. Both it and its DLCs are also heavily discounted.
Between the discounts on XCom 2, and the newly released Chimera side story, I'm wondering if we're about to get an announcement regarding XCom 3.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2020/04/25 21:10:08
I think I'm starting to agree on repetitive gameplay and the fact everything is too closed off. Also the dialog is extremely campy and cheesy. The most issues I have are evac missions with endless reinforcements. God I hate those missions. Kinda bummed you only get 8 of the 11 characters. I'd also agree with someone I heard reviewing that it can be a bit easy or forgiving at times for xcom. I'm also not fond of having a character death equaling mission restart. I've had a couple game crashes so far but nothing as frequent as most xcom games.
A big game breaker or bug is that in one critical mission I was on the 3rd encounter. My character with data escaped in time. I made the mistake to stay behind and stabilize some dude but not remotely. Oddly if you stabilize somebody and leave them behind during an evac mission you will still win. In this mission I only had 1 person stabilized and 2 bleeding out after my one soldier escaped with the package. According to game logic this should be a lost mission but since the bleeding out troops never fully bled out it considered the mission successful.
Not only this but soldiers badly injured in a fight are auto healed by the next day except for a scar. In xcom 2 if your soldier was bleeding out and they lived the mission on hardest difficulty it could take like 40 days for them to be back in the fight and this isn't even considering the extra disabilities you'd need the special medical facility to fix or being shaken or even just being tired of too many missions after another. In chimera squad the worst you get from almost bleeding to death is a scar and you can get it healed within a few days. It kinda takes away the severity of soldier deaths which is odd considering the characters are all unique.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2020/04/27 07:47:37
Allowances have to be made for the gameplay. With the way that the game works, having someone out for forty days would keep them out for half the game since things move much more quickly than they did in the original (you have a combat mission pretty much every two days in Chimera, whereas you can sometimes go for a couple of weeks without a mission in the regular games). And you usually can't ignore those missions if your team is in bad shape - again, unlike in the originals.
Also worth noting that missions that require you to evacuate still reward you for knocking out enemies (for interrogation), even though the unconscious enemies presumably should have been evacuated by their friends after your team leaves. Also, sometimes I find the evacuation missions a bit silly. Endless waves of enemies when raiding an enemy factory makes sense. Endless waves of enemies when the bad guys are trying to kidnap a hostage in traffic does not.
There are some hand-wave moments. But I generally ignore them. It's a ten (or twenty if you wait) dollar game. And it's a decent game for ten bucks, imo. I wouldn't spend sixty bucks on it. But I'd say that it's worth ten.
On another note, one of the achievements suggests that there are multiple endings based on what you do during the game. But I haven't seen any decision points yet aside from who you investigate first, second, and third..
There's a bug that deletes the equipment of a character if you unequip a legendary gun, I lost all of the gear on Terminal, which included my motile inducer, and I have no idea how far back I'd have to go to change it, as it did it more than a few missions after - I had taken Torque out to train, given Terminal the gun, than gave it back to Torque after she finished training.
Guess this run is over, time to start a new one... Hopefully I can get Torque right away again, she's super good.
warboss wrote: Is there a permanent stickied thread for Chaos players to complain every time someone/anyone gets models or rules besides them? If not, there should be.
Between the discounts on XCom 2, and the newly released Chimera side story, I'm wondering if we're about to get an announcement regarding XCom 3.
Doubt it. Firaxis seems allergic to announcing things in advance.
Their main page is still highlighting the release of the Gathering Storm expansion for civ 6, and the last announcement is from November. The Xcom site is up to date on this release, but that's as far is it goes.
https://firaxis.com/
But its also very common practice to discount a previous title when a new title comes out. X2 is discounted because this came out, not because of a potential future announcement.
honestly this game is casual enough that I can get into it. I never got into the first 2 x-com games, but this is arcade-y enough to be a fun introduction for me to get my feet wet. It's a fun little story so far, and gives me enough tactical decision in order to be fun.
One of the better ten buck purchases I've had in the past few years.
The people in the past who convinced themselves to do unspeakable things were no less human than you or I. They made their decisions; the only thing that prevents history from repeating itself is making different ones.
-- Adam Serwer
My blog
Eumerin wrote:2.) One of the new endings in War of the Chosen reemphasized the idea that something was coming, and that the harbinger of that was from underneath the ocean. That would suggest that the original hint still holds.
Indeed it could. However, all we see is a glow coming from a sea canyon.
Eumerin wrote:3.) It's highly unlikely that whatever is coming has been hiding under the ocean for a very long time, as was the case with TFTD. The Ethereals in the reboot are running from something. It's unlikely that they'd run to the planet that this unknown threat was hiding on. So while the new threat might emerge from underneath the ocean, it's unlikely to be the original source of it.
Maybe, maybe not. What hits next just might not be what the Ethereals were running from. Or it could be a seed planted by who the Ethereals were running from to trap them, but
Spoiler:
the massive release of psychic energy by the Commander to counter the Ethereals woke it up and it starts to build
Tannhauser42 wrote:The next game could be an interesting cross between TFTD and Apocalypse, in that the new alien enemy will be aquatic in nature, but coming from another dimension. Or, if not another dimension, they're using portals to travel to Earth rather than coming by space.
Very true.
Voss wrote:Well, its easier to do flyovers with probes in space than it is to deal with the interference of all that water and pressure.
A lot depends on the mode of transportation that you are dealing with, and the medium present on the other side.
It could be that a species is capable of forming portals, but they live in oceans so naturally plant portals in the medium they use just like Stargates of SG-1 were usually planted in air instead of undersea or space (until more advanced gates were created).
It is also possible that what we consider seawater is the only proper medium for reception of the portals, and they would be unstable in gaseous atmosphere or space.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2020/04/29 02:02:00
Are you a Wolf, a Sheep, or a Hound?
Megavolt wrote:They called me crazy…they called me insane…THEY CALLED ME LOONEY!! and boy, were they right.
Eumerin wrote:2.) One of the new endings in War of the Chosen reemphasized the idea that something was coming, and that the harbinger of that was from underneath the ocean. That would suggest that the original hint still holds.
Indeed it could. However, all we see is a glow coming from a sea canyon.
You're talking about the vanilla XCom 2 ending. The War of the Chosen expansion pack added a few new segments to the ending. One of those new segments emphasizes the same point that the next threat is somehow linked to the ocean.
Eumerin wrote:2.) One of the new endings in War of the Chosen reemphasized the idea that something was coming, and that the harbinger of that was from underneath the ocean. That would suggest that the original hint still holds.
Indeed it could. However, all we see is a glow coming from a sea canyon.
You're talking about the vanilla XCom 2 ending. The War of the Chosen expansion pack added a few new segments to the ending. One of those new segments emphasizes the same point that the next threat is somehow linked to the ocean.
The video remained the same, just the words changed. So all we "see" is a glow coming from a sea canyon.
Are you a Wolf, a Sheep, or a Hound?
Megavolt wrote:They called me crazy…they called me insane…THEY CALLED ME LOONEY!! and boy, were they right.
Had anyone else made it to the sacred coil final mission? That crap was insane. I tried to do it without verge, but I had to put him back in the squad before I went insane trying to do the second room encounter without losing a guy. Only managed to win that room because of weapon abilities and abusing terminal’s support and the team up ability to shut down reinforcements before they showed up.
Hard to say my favorite characters. You only get to use 8 total per campaign. I just got claymore but haven't tested him out yet. I recently beat the scavenger faction with the muton. Verge proved invaluable against the big muton dudes that use duel and melee people. The final mission was a little tough. Lots of various encounters and you have to prevent the ufo from taking off. I also had to kill the warlord chieftain of that faction. Shotgun lady is fun. Perhaps I can use bloodblood the pistol dude more. I heard he combos well with claymore due to damage buffs.
I'm finding using the breach bomb that forces enemies to reload their weapons to be nice. It takes care of those annoying aggressive enemies in every room that inevitably end up being there. That way I can shoot at surprised enemies instead. Of course I think that breach grenade only effects enemies at a breach location rather than the whole room so it's worth being careful over. I might check it next time since I think one aggressive enemy shot me even though I disabled most of them once.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2020/04/29 04:46:57
Had anyone else made it to the sacred coil final mission? That crap was insane. I tried to do it without verge, but I had to put him back in the squad before I went insane trying to do the second room encounter without losing a guy. Only managed to win that room because of weapon abilities and abusing terminal’s support and the team up ability to shut down reinforcements before they showed up.
I beat it, although I restarted the encounter a number of times. There are a few things to keep in mind -
Spoiler:
1.) The boss gets a turn after each of your characters takes their turn, but only for the first "round" of turns. After that, he gets the same number of turns as everyone else. He has Lightning Reflexes, so overwatch is useless against him during his initial series of turns (he automatically dodges the first overwatch shot against him on that activation, and his "I get to go after each of your characters do" ability means that you can't have more than one character on overwatch at a time at the start). Unless you can burn him down very quickly (I couldn't), it's best to ignore him initially and instead focus on clearing out the other enemies in the room, and keeping your characters up (since they're all taking a nasty hit right at the start of the encounter). He tends to take one swing at each of your squad members, though I've also seen him hit one squad member twice - which means that one of the members of your squad doesn't get hit by him.
2.) Aside from the boss, your normal target priority (whatever it is) remains the same. If your hacker is with you (I was training mine, and didn't bring her on the mission), then there are a couple of good targets for her. Hacking the nearby robot, setting its self-destruct, and baiting the boss into attacking it would be amusing.
3.) You need to shut down the portal ASAP. Fortunately, the way to do that is fairly straightforward (once you realize it needs to be done, that is; I didn't on my first attempt). Your early enemy kills should probably be done with an eye toward letting team members quickly and safely get to the controls on each side of the room.
4.) AP ammo is *extremely* useful in the third room of the mission.
The Hybrids were the second enemy that I went up against. My squad had the second armor upgrade, and all of the weapons upgraded except for the pistol (I only have one squad member who uses a pistol, and I don't use him all that much). I picked the "more alert enemies" dark event instead of the "more Andromedans" dark event. (though I still had to face plenty of Andromedans).
Tiger9gamer wrote: Had anyone else made it to the sacred coil final mission? That crap was insane. I tried to do it without verge, but I had to put him back in the squad before I went insane trying to do the second room encounter without losing a guy. Only managed to win that room because of weapon abilities and abusing terminal’s support and the team up ability to shut down reinforcements before they showed up.
What are people’s favorite characters so far?
I completed the game with Godmother, Terminal, Blueblood, and the Viper lady, and yea. The Psi related missions were a pain in the rear. It took two attempts but did it the last time, I have to mention that I had been lucky and gotten the epic weapons for all said characters beforehand. I was however very annoyed when it came to dealing with the leader of the Sacred Coil, that one was all shades of bad. As for favorite characters, I have to say Viper and Blueblood.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2020/04/29 18:08:50
Granted, I went for Sacred Coil first so they weren't too hard for me.
But for me, Sacred Coil was solved by AXIOM SMASH, because rage is amazing.
The people in the past who convinced themselves to do unspeakable things were no less human than you or I. They made their decisions; the only thing that prevents history from repeating itself is making different ones.
-- Adam Serwer
My blog
Melissia wrote: Granted, I went for Sacred Coil first so they weren't too hard for me.
But for me, Sacred Coil was solved by AXIOM SMASH, because rage is amazing.
Smash is hit or miss, and for me it's been largely miss. There's been a couple of times when he's instantly knocked someone out, and there have been times when other effects are triggered. But most of the time he only does four damage.
He's been handy for leading the way into door breaches, though.
Automatically Appended Next Post: I finally researched venom rounds, just before finishing the Progeny storyline (my final one). I should have done it *much* sooner. They are AWESOME!
I beat the campaign. A couple of comments (including spoilers) -
Spoiler:
The ending isn't anything special. IMO, the Sacred Coil (Hybrids) final mission was by far the most difficult of the missions in the game. But I paid ten bucks for it. I'm not expecting big, dramatic cut-scenes with 3D animation.
One thing worth noting, though, is the very final scene. A month later, as the team scrambles on another mission, the camera cuts away to reveal two shadowy figures lurking in the shadows. They state that XCom doesn't know it, but the organization is already at war.
Is that a hint for an upcoming plot line? Or is it just a throwaway line that has no relevance to whatever Jake Solomon has planned? (note that Solomon was not involved with this game)
We'll see, eventually.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2020/04/30 05:59:46
Yeah I think blueblood is my current favorite. Hard to say honestly since this requires more gaming. Verge, shotgun lady and grenadier/demolitions guy is also alright for crowd control. Honestly he helps a ton on some missions and allows the same grenade used in an encounter to be used in the next one. Shock grenades are my friend right now. Basically a grenade that is better than an aoe version of verges stun power and it does damage too.
Some of the dialog is cringy as all hell though esp. The commercials.
I'm so glad I got the armor upgrade bought finally. Oddly I think cash is what I struggle with most of all right now. The city is fully covered by field teams. A couple on level 3 and maybe a level 2 with the rest at level 1. I'm finding level 2 districts really good for mission bonuses.
I'm only playing on 2nd hardest difficulty but so far ive never lost even though I should've with at least one mission. I call bugs to somehow give me that win.
Also worth noting is regardless of countdown timers as long as there aren't infinite enemy reinforcements coming in per turn you auto complete the objective usually if all the enemies die or get knocked out or flee the scene. Also after encounters you reload weapons auto for the next encounter just before your breach.
I'm more focussed these days on killing really obnoxious enemies I have good shots at! If my aim through breach is most as good I skip surprised enemies and depending on enemy guns and whether they got hit by cease fire naded, flash nades and his claymore mine. Also various new weapon upgrades and new gear has helped quite a bit.. I still say it very much saved me in many situations that would've ended worse.
Anyway I may change my view of this game now. Still not my thing but I'm trying it out. It's got a different action patched sequence and the character is decent and sometimes fun y but often cringy. For 10 USD it's a steal but
Eumerin wrote: Smash is hit or miss, and for me it's been largely miss. There's been a couple of times when he's instantly knocked someone out, and there have been times when other effects are triggered. But most of the time he only does four damage.
And then he rages, gets a second attack, and knocks the enemy out.
It was never about just the one unaugmented smash.
The people in the past who convinced themselves to do unspeakable things were no less human than you or I. They made their decisions; the only thing that prevents history from repeating itself is making different ones.
-- Adam Serwer
My blog
Eumerin wrote: Smash is hit or miss, and for me it's been largely miss. There's been a couple of times when he's instantly knocked someone out, and there have been times when other effects are triggered. But most of the time he only does four damage.
And then he rages, gets a second attack, and knocks the enemy out.
It was never about just the one unaugmented smash.
Over the course of my entire campaign, he raged exactly twice. And I was using him quite a lot.
Eumerin wrote: Over the course of my entire campaign, he raged exactly twice. And I was using him quite a lot.
I've had him rage twice in the same breach, by building up his rage through the psyche up action. In fact, using psyche up and smash basically every turn, and breaching from a door which had high threat, he was pretty consistent at it.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2020/04/30 15:11:15
The people in the past who convinced themselves to do unspeakable things were no less human than you or I. They made their decisions; the only thing that prevents history from repeating itself is making different ones.
-- Adam Serwer
My blog
Unfortunately I managed to run into a pretty bad game breaking bug where my regular SMG's and epic body armor have completely disspeared. it sucks because I love the versatility of Terminal, and going into harder missions I don't know if I can go without her in the squad. it's really odd.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2020/04/30 15:57:02
413th Lucius Exterminaton Legion- 4,000pts 
