hooijdonk17
Member
Word.
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XCOM 2 (PC/Mac/Linux, Firaxis, November 2015) announced [Up: New info/screens in OP]
- Thread starter dex3108
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Word.
BoosterDuck
Banned
I need this game in my veins
FIRAXIS GIFF STEAM STORE PAGE ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ
FIRAXIS GIFF STEAM STORE PAGE ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ
hooijdonk17
Member
Well, I'm busy finishing a second Enemy Within run while waiting for this game, and I realized that 90% of my game time in the last 3 months has been with Firaxis games, namely Civ V and XCOM.. If they get Beyond Earth in shape with a couple expansions and release a GOTY edition at some point, and release XCOM 2 soon, they will pretty much own me for the rest of this year and possibly beyond.
KyanMehwulfe
Member
Map looks interesting, as if it could possible require a few more steps to expand territory than just satellites. Making contact, and then building radio relays to reduce expansion cost or constructing outposts (maybe that boosts the monthly supplies bonus). Maybe an intel element, too, a la Enemy Within.
Speak of the devil, one of my favorite small parts of Enemy Within was the EXALT weapons. They seemed to aesthetically match armor better. So, the new weapon colour and pattern skins are a nice addition. I always like a cohesive weapon and armor theme if possible, though beggars (and survivors) cannot be choosers.
Speak of the devil, one of my favorite small parts of Enemy Within was the EXALT weapons. They seemed to aesthetically match armor better. So, the new weapon colour and pattern skins are a nice addition. I always like a cohesive weapon and armor theme if possible, though beggars (and survivors) cannot be choosers.
hooijdonk17
Member
Elite Soldier Pack DLC kind of fixed that problem I think, allowing most weapons to have matching skin colors to match armor colors.
HP_Wuvcraft
Banned
That looks so goddamn in-depth.
industrian
will gently cradle you as time slowly ticks away.
I was already sold on XCOM 2.
But this sold me on XCOM 2 hard.
I'm going on a media blackout for this shit. I've not been excited like this for a game for a long time. Possibly as far back as MGS4.
hooijdonk17
Member
Original game had no such thing? Maybe you are referring to Apocalypse?
I didn't play much of OG XCOMs but IIRC you actually had to assign your scientists and engineers to actual tasks rather than having this faceless mass of numbers that don't really do much except act as a multiplier to your stuff.
Hopefully the namelist is as easy to mod as EU2012's is, because that means you can fill in the soldier/staff rosters with gaffers instead.
Hopefully the namelist is as easy to mod as EU2012's is, because that means you can fill in the soldier/staff rosters with gaffers instead.
Fragamemnon
Member
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAic4ArPfT0&feature=youtu.be&t=229
The twitch interview with Anna Prosser Robinson was fine yesterday but this is the same demo with less talking over-instead they interrupt the video to ask questions, but there's more information on the new head scientist and Lily Shen in the video than there was on that interview.
Totally stoked for the game. The strategy layer looks much more non deterministic this go around.
The twitch interview with Anna Prosser Robinson was fine yesterday but this is the same demo with less talking over-instead they interrupt the video to ask questions, but there's more information on the new head scientist and Lily Shen in the video than there was on that interview.
Totally stoked for the game. The strategy layer looks much more non deterministic this go around.
Remachinate
Member
I like more dynamic strategic interaction with the aliens hinted at by the dark event window at the end of the video. On the other hand, I'm not sure how I feel about some other elements, like committing to research blind for a surprise upgrade that may have nothing to do with the aliens' research path. Overall it does seem to offer less strategic linearity than its predecessor, which is a great sign.
This is a bit of an aside, but the apex design for the XCOM-like in my opinion would be fully procedurally-assigned abilities/affixes for the enemies at start, on which their research tree would be based, and the player would have to make research decisions to respond effectively, which would be different each playthrough. For example, an AI that teched to multiple shots per turn at low damage would encourage rushing to an armor with DR, while an AI teching to extremely high damage but low accuracy attacks would push you towards armor with defense/dodge. Making the strategic layer a challenge of outplanning your opponent and trumping his research, rather than simply managing resources properly, is something that isn't quite there in existing XCOM. And I think randomizing the aliens' abilities and research focus would be key in keeping that challenge novel between playthroughs.
I've been playing in Game Maker a bit to see how doable it would be, but it'd be nice if an actual studio realized my dream so that I wouldn't have to do the design heavy lifting.
Rentahamster
Rodent Whores
I'm wondering if I should do the same. But..it's so haaaard.
Funky Papa
FUNK-Y-PPA-4
Man, the new R&D aspect of the game is granular as fuck.
Love it.
It's like XCOM were the training wheels, kiddie versión of XCOM 2.
Love it.
It's like XCOM were the training wheels, kiddie versión of XCOM 2.
Poodlestrike
Banned
Reject spoiler culture in all its forms. The joy is in the doing, not merely the knowing. There'll still be surprises either way.
Imperfected
Member
I wonder how much of the added complexity is something they became comfortable with because PC became their primary target market.
Poodlestrike
Banned
Realistically, there's absolutely no way to know.
Fragamemnon
Member
"please no" is my vote on this.
There's really no reason that we can't have diablo-style prefixes/affixes to almost everything in the game, all generated by RNG. Dropped guns, gun upgrades, crafted stuff from engineering, aliens (LW does this with its way of rolling to assign perks to aliens), soldiers, territories, facilities, etc. Randomize *all* the things.
It sounds like it would be a bear to balance, but in practice it might not, just nerf the combos that are too broken.
Hopefully, it sounds like they're on the right path. The original felt more like a half-step in regards to modernizing the XCOM formula, hopefully this goes the whole way.
Funky Papa
FUNK-Y-PPA-4
XCOM 2 |OT| It's raining chryssalids.
Rentahamster
Rodent Whores
Multishot lightning enchanted let's go baby.
Poodlestrike
Banned
Remachinate
Member
Diablo-style affixes were exactly what I was evoking. However, I don't know if randomizing *everything* is the way to go. The player would still need some baseline choices to make strategic decisions impactful. That's why I don't like random results from crafting; you're not making an allocation of resources with a deliberate plan to counter the aliens, you're just pulling a slot machine and hoping for a jackpot.
I don't think LW works the way you mentioned though; I'm pretty sure all abilities aliens gain over time are according to fixed progression charts. Which is why it can become as predictable as Vanilla after enough playthroughs; of course, the value of the mod is that it's deep enough for that it takes a lot more playtime to reach that predictability.
Remachinate
Member
XCOM 2 |OT| Look at me, I'm the insurgent now
BennyBlanco
aka IMurRIVAL69
The more I see of this the more hyped I get. This could end up my GOTY.
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Shake Appeal
Member
Scratched from the canon, I hope. I find Van Doorn jokes tremendously unfunny and am quietly satisfied when he gets killed in LW.
WhirlwindMonk
Banned
My impression was that it wasn't fully random. It was more "develop a new grenade" or "develop am improvement to our armor" I thought. And some randomness makes sense to me. You're picking up bizarre, alien technology and materials and handing it to your scientists and saying "use this to make me a better gun." They can't glance at it and magically know what to do with it, they have to experiment and figure out how it works, and if the thing has five uses, which one they discover first will depend on the order of their experimenting, and this be somewhat random.
Fragamemnon
Member
In LW many navigator perks have both a research threshold and chance to appear once that research threshold is reached associated with them. It's awesome, results in fun things like people not checking floater perks and getting plastered by CCS.
Johnnylump would have taken the non-deterministic outcomes in LW even further but he's technically constrained by XCOM's code on one end and a fanbase that actually dislikes non-deterministic outcomes on the other.
I'm perfectly OK with the concept expending resources and getting something that isn't easily usable with my current strategy, to the point of even just getting a paperweight. The other option-getting a deterministic outcome I can plan around over and over again regardless of campaign-is much worse for someone like me who will probably replay this game for thousands of hours.
Of course the real challenge in this is making sure that expected value is roughly the same for a given amount of resources invested regardless of where you invest them. Without that balance, people will just invest into the higher yield EV options and ignore lower EV ones.
FTFY
I could manage to get 4k even on a 750ti for Xcom, let's see what X2 brings to the table.
Battlesmurf
Member
I don't want to sound like a broken record so I apologize in advance-do we know anything about squad size yet?
Remachinate
Member
I actually want to talk about the bolded for a bit, because how well randomness works in a game depends largely on how it's implemented. Soren Johnson did a fantastic presentation at GDC 2014 (skip to 22:40) that touches on the value of randomness within a game. Essentially, he separates rolls into "pre-luck" and "post-luck": randomization that happens before and after a player makes a decision, respectively. He hedges against saying that the former is objectiviely good and the latter is objectively bad, but makes that point that the former provides clear decisions and encourages adaptive thinking, while the latter represents a loss of control that can frustrate the player and make them feel like a "victim."
I think that the non-deterministic outcomes in XCOM you're referring to in your post are the "post-luck" hit chances for individual soldier or alien shots. And I think it makes sense that some of the fanbase largely dislikes this design, as they can make the best decisions for a given turn and still have things fall apart: lose a soldier, start a panic wave, abandon a mission. Percentage rolls are more tolerable where they happen a lot and averages can be relied upon, but when a single hit or miss can drastically change outcome of a battle, the "post-luck" impact is greatly heightened. I get that this helps reinforce the emotional theme of being overwhelmed by a terrorizing alien force, but it's aggravating from a ludic perspective.
Compare to Invisible Inc., a excellent game that introduces random/procedural elements in the creation of levels, and placement of guards and objectives, but is almost completely non-random once the player starts making decisions. However, the game is still able to create tension because the player doesn't have perfect information--until he looks through a door, he doesn't know what's behind it, and until he observes a guard, he doesn't know where it'll go. But the player has all the tools to combat this uncertainty, and his success is purely based on the quality of his decisions.
I feel like the latter game, with it's "pre-luck", is a much better design that provides uncertainty and novelty without making the player feel like he is "cheated". I will say that XCOM does mitigate the problem of "post-luck" somewhat because of its forgiveness--some amount of soldiers are expected to die, and some missions are expected to be lost, while still being able to win the game--but when you're hours into a campaign, that forgiveness has run out, and on the razor's edge of defeat, a bad roll that forces you to start over from square one feels terrible. The only reason a player should have to start over is because of bad play--a set cumulative poor tactical decisions, or strategic choices that didn't respond effectively enough to the enemy.
That's why I like the idea of randomized enemies but not uncertain research results--when a challenge is unexpected, you can adapt and play around it, but when your planning is undone by a bad research result, it just feels bad.
I think it's reasonable for your starting research paths to be randomized at the beginning of the game, but you should know exactly what you're getting once you start them for the reason above.
I can't say I have a lot of balancing experience, but I imagine a good start would be to balance the EV of different bonuses per resource against a baseline enemy before affixes, so that they're all equally good versus an unknown enemy, but certain choices become optimal once specific affixes become known.
Poodlestrike
Banned
Game looks a lot prettier, may have to ease off the downsampling a little.
Same as before.
Gotta imagine that'll be a day 1 mod, tho.
bonesmccoy
Banned
My $$$ is on an alternate universe/dimension thing - a nod to X-Com 3.
At some point the Volunteer pops up in this new, alien dominated world.
Eighty Deuce
Banned
XCOM2: Anal probing intensifies
Shake Appeal
Member
Unknown, but almost certainly the same as the vanilla first game.
Fragamemnon
Member
Let's try to keep this in the context of Long War, since that is what I was remarking on earlier in terms of strategy gaming fans disliking non-deterministic and/or wide variance of possible outcomes.
The thing that has always gotten people to rage on the Nexus and Reddit about LW is the missions that are unwinnable. Part of the LW design is that you're supposed to have setbacks and supposed to have unwinnable missions, and one of the soft skills of commanders in LW is recognizing these situations and withdrawing quickly. What we found out is that players consistently fail to recognize a situation as unwinnable and either squad wipe or take horrendous casualties for very little gain. This has nothing to do with missing a 85% up close shotgun shot twice in a row-the failure here isin your terms "pre-luck" but the player still perceives it as being victimized.
Another example of players hating randomness is the LW implementation of Lightning Reflexes. Bypassing overwatch w/ 100% success rate is OP and trivializes alien actions, so Lightning Reflexes was changed to have a slight chance of failing. Players got their scouts gibbed left and right because they assume that 3% chance is close enough to 0%, and made greedy plays based on using lightning reflexes instead of safer sequences so that they could get the meld or get done with the mission a turn sooner. They then raged about how garbage lightning reflexes is over and over in their feedback.
That's my issue with people complaining about being victimized by bad rolls in XCOM-there are very often safer turn sequencing or decisions that would mitigate the impact of bad rolls but players don't want to take the time to develop better turn sequencing strategy and habits. The greatest killer of XCOM operatives in LW is carelessness and greed, and I love it that way.
I guess in general I don't agree with Soren's idea that bad luck after a player makes a decision is harmful. Decisions should be made specifically taking into account the rangeof the possible random outcomes that might happen after the decision is made. Now players may hate doing that, but that's fine. They can hate it. It doesn't make it bad.
See I'm OK with losing a campaign due to factors outside of my control. It's fine, though I would try to gate it behind higher difficulty levels. Losing is fun!
If you're planning is so brittle that it gets wrecked by just a couple of bad results, you should feel bad. Where is your contingency or risk mitigation? Did you not factor in the range of outcomes when making your decision in the first place?
yeah, FeelsBadMan because you fucked up.
Garth's said it is 4-6 again. They strongly believe that those numbers are the best for pacing and weight of actions,and honestly even after 2300+ hours of LW I'm inclined to agree they are about right. 5-7 is actually IMO perfect for the blue move/yellow move system.
Remachinate
Member
To be fair, if that's the fanbase complaint you were referring to, a good part of that issue comes from the fact that vanilla teaches you all the skills you need, while Long War forces you to be autodidactic. If you start LW cold, you'll wipe to a landed Harvester in month 1, or send all your Avalanche Interceptors against a Fighter and then lose your satellite when they're all being repaired. The issue some fans have is more that LW is much more trial-and-error design than vanilla's transparent one, rather than it's non-deterministic. That's not to say that either design is bad, just that it's a different design argument than randomization.
However, you're right that the same trial-and-error gameplay applies to the tactical layer, which is much less forgiving than vanilla, and players come in complacent in their decision-making because the risk mitigation isn't as mandatory. I can easily see misattribution of their frustration to random outcomes of shots when it could have been mitigated by more defensive, less careless play.
Sure, and I think that's why Soren doesn't say "post-luck" is bad per se. However, there's a difference between accounting for uncertain outcomes and adjusting your play to compensate, and being victimized by a bad roll when making it was the best play available. When individual bad rolls cause problems that can be planned for, it's workable. So spending 5 days to randomly get poison ammo, which may or may not be useful for certain game states, over spending that time researching a guaranteed but less powerful-on-average item, it's playing the risk/reward game, and you can decide whether the worst-case outcome is tolerable. But it's when you have no way to manage those bad rolls that it becomes an issue, and I do think XCOM does have some of that.
Different tastes on that one! I wouldn't want to have to restart LW after 20 hours sunk into the campaign. aintnobodygottimeforthat.jpg
DannyDaNeato
Neo Member
It doesn't look like this has been posted yet, but Micheal McCann isn't returning for XCOM 2's ost, as many have suspected. Timothy Wynn is doing the ost, who did these three cutscene songs for Enemy Unknown:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq-1WfDEVZ0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ex10MYXVr9A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5zAJrQcAcc
(Source is this post on Garth DeAngelis' twitter)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq-1WfDEVZ0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ex10MYXVr9A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5zAJrQcAcc
(Source is this post on Garth DeAngelis' twitter)
Argh, curses. McMann better be aboard for Deus Ex:MD though!
TC McQueen
Member
Already confirmed. His name was literally in the credits on some initial reveal art.
HP_Wuvcraft
Banned
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