First new XCOM images revealed!

[Hobbes]

I'm not sure what to think. I just hope the aliens aren't all men in black style and they really do use the original monsters and add some new ones. Other than that there's something I don't like about the art style. Too cartoony or too blocky, I can't tell. I would have preferred something more realistic looking but I'm guessing they want the style to be consistent with the xcom fps, which would suck imo.

 

I was kinda hoping that the base uniforms would be black rather than green but I must say that overall I like the look of the XCOM soldiers - no helmets, tough body armor and big guns.

Regarding aliens, someone mentioned before that they must still be working on the graphics for those and what you're looking at are models, made to test the combat system. They should also have a release schedule so later we'll see what the aliens look like (other than the Sectoid, which should look the same as revealed since the same happened with the XCOM trooper).

I prefer the cartoonish, more blocky style rather than realistic - it goes back before the FPS to the original games.

[ShadowBlade]

Twitter tells me they've dropped the time units system for one move and one action, or two moves.

That's how it works in several tabletop wargames, I believe. The reach of each move and effectiveness of each action is probably determined by each soldier's stats. Though personally, I'd experiment not only with the move-move and move-action alternatives but also a third action-action option.

 

Ultimately, that's how it worked in practice in UFO Defense and TFTD at least. You generally didn't have enough TUs to do more than one significant thing after moving, and if you stayed put you could fire 2-3 snap shots or auto shots. Or you could just move till you exhausted your TUs (or Energy), covering more ground than if you had moved and fired.

 

I wouldn't be surprised if the Energy stat, in the absence of TUs, governed how far a trooper could move in a single move action. Maybe affected by the synergy of Weight and Strength. But I'm just wildly speculating at this point. It's just how I'd do it if it were up to me.

[Sunflash]

Twitter tells me they've dropped the time units system for one move and one action, or two moves.

 

 

My only hope is that we don't lose the abilty to prime a grenade in the rear and hot-potatoe it forward.

[Pete]

I do wonder f the two "bag guys" in the foreground of the third shot are the Men in Black that didn't make it into Enemy Unknown the first time around (they were on the cards originally, I think as a third side[/i]).

 

I would have thought the red alien heads are actually four more aliens behind, and show you the direction of unseen enemies. That was my first thought anyway, and I suspect it simply replaces clicking through the visible-enemy-counter that's present in the original to work out where all the visible aliens are.

 

There are a few things that worry me a little though from the article if I'm honest:

 

Is this going to be dumbed down for the "wider console audience"?

Firaxis is undeniably streamlining aspects of the game and removing no small amount of micromanagement, but from what I've seen I wouldn't call it "dumbing down" the game so much as getting rid of tedium and uninteresting mechanics. Soldiers still die permanently, fog of war and line of sight are hugely important in combat, and you absolutely can lose the game if you screw up too badly.

 

Whilst I know we know nothing other than what has been posted, "removing no small amount of micro-management" suggests far more has been removed than simply time units.

 

My other concern is this:

 

How do those games relate to each other?

The shooter takes place earlier in the fiction, chronicling the aliens' first attacks in the United States. The strategy game we're talking about here deals with the global response to the later full-blown alien invasion of Earth.

 

I think I felt better about this game when I thought it was less related to the FPS. This suggests a link, although if the black goo and titan's from the FPS are all controlled by the guys we finally see in Enemy Unknown then that's not a problem

 

Heck, if the black goo from the FPS turns out to be the deadly Micronoid Aggregate from Apocalypse I'll probably get the FPS too

 

Anyway, I probably should just wait for a few more questions to be answered before getting too worried.

[Thorondor]

Other than that there's something I don't like about the art style. Too cartoony or too blocky, I can't tell. I would have preferred something more realistic looking but I'm guessing they want the style to be consistent with the xcom fps, which would suck imo.

When looking at this latest imagery, I did find (much as another poster mentioned earlier on in the thread) the choice in style to be a bit reminiscent of the one used for UFO: Aftershock and Afterlight ('neon-coloured' lines, etc).

 

And, to me at least, the troopers but especially the weapons' models, do also evoke a sort of Warhammer 40k:DoW look in terms of proportions/being beefed up, etc.

 

::

 

Actual gameplay mechanics are far more important than this, evidently, but the fact is these are things we're bound to be looking at for most of the time we spend with the game, particularly during tactical, so it's not entirely irrelevant either...

[ShadowBlade]

When looking at this latest imagery, I did find (much as another poster mentioned earlier on in the thread) the choice in style to be a bit reminiscent of the one used for UFO: Aftershock and Afterlight ('neon-coloured' lines, etc).

 

And, to me at least, the troopers but especially the weapons' models, do also evoke a sort of Warhammer 40k:DoW look in terms of proportions/being beefed up, etc.

Sort of like the Imperial Guard, but keep in mind the guns of UFO Defense weren't exactly "realistically sized". In the very introduction we can see that even the Assault Rifle is bigger than its real life counterparts. What's more, the Autocannon guy in the intro is indeed quite beefed up. In fact, you could say all the troopers looked action hero-like.

 

And hell, what's these complaints about cartoony-ness? The first two games had a distinct, unique comicbook-like art style, and I certainly wouldn't mind if the remake wanted to keep some link to that.

[Bomb Bloke]

The art style puts me in mind of a low polygon count, to be honest. But overall I like it.

 

Is this going to be dumbed down for the "wider console audience"?

Firaxis is undeniably streamlining aspects of the game and removing no small amount of micromanagement, but from what I've seen I wouldn't call it "dumbing down" the game so much as getting rid of tedium and uninteresting mechanics. Soldiers still die permanently, fog of war and line of sight are hugely important in combat, and you absolutely can lose the game if you screw up too badly.

Yeah, right. Removing micromanagement and dumbing a game down are synonymous terms. Options to skip micromanagement are one thing (eg, having the game remember what items you assigned to each squad member so you don't have to organise them every single mission), removal is quite another (eg, having the game automatically assign every trooper a big + small gun, with no option to have them carry around a few different rifles or a bunch of spare rockets to bolster the supply of the guy carrying the actual launcher).

 

That may just be my inner cynic running wild, but as soon as I hear someone try to be "diplomatic" about such things instead of giving straight examples of what's being chopped out...

[silencer_pl]

I liked that in Apoc that I could equip individual agent and the game remembered this. I almost hated every game to swap weapons around.

[FullAuto]

OTOH, if they're talking about getting rid of some of the menus and doing away with having to buy 200 electroflares every month, with the stock being kept at a certain level, resupplied, and your money debited automatically, that's fine by me.

 

You can trim quite a lot of the minutiae and yet have the game remain essentially the same. Is anyone else here really bothered if you don't have to remember to keep buying items, or outfitting each trooper all over again every mission?

[Bomb Bloke]

I'm saying that not having to remember is one thing, not being able to do it is quite another. But again, much as I want to jump up and down and argue with the devs as to how it should be, I don't actually have a clue what they're really doing.

[ShadowBlade]

You can trim quite a lot of the minutiae and yet have the game remain essentially the same.

True.

 

Is anyone else here really bothered if you don't have to remember to keep buying items, or outfitting each trooper all over again every mission?

The base stores management point is debatable. I never found manual sales/purchases tedious: for instance, I always grinned widely whenever I found I had a huge pile of surplus alien weaponry back at the base, which I'd enjoy translating into a huge cash injection. But to address your example, since flares are reusable, I never had to buy more than 20 or so in total. Then again I rarely used flares since I avoided night missions like a plague.

 

I do agree with you on the soldier loadouts, since the original game had a very crude way of remembering equipment, amd it rarely worked as intended. It'd be nice if this time around the game were smarter in that area, and maybe provided a way to save various customizable loadouts so that one could rapidly kit out rookies.

[CapnKill]

So what do you guys want to see fixed from the original?

 

For me Psionics while fun, ruined the end game. It made everything insanely easy, so I hope to see some tweak on that.

 

Also the Blaster bombs, fun, yes, overpowered, very much so. Perhaps they can make those insanely harder to get or the ammo super expensive.

 

Other thoughts?

[FullAuto]

Proper actual AI that actively participates in battle rather than sits there and ensures every enemy is just a trap to walk into. The AI should use teamwork, tactics, etc, and should actually make a fight of it. They should be in it to win it, rather than acting as a kind of tripwire.

 

It's not as if small unit tactics are a niche subject, you can find manual after manual about them on the internet, yet games persist in enemy forces where each enemy is essentially 'alone' and you just fight them one after the other. It reduces the game to a simplistic level where you can afford to bring your entire team to bear on each enemy, one at a time, and destroy them, before moving on to the next one. You could add a random element for surprises, but the enemy should have a motive, a logic behind their actions, even if it's difficult for the player to grasp. Tactics are not difficult to program, either, as you can shape them into simple behavioural rules.

[ShadowBlade]

I get the feeling the AI will not be so hot on release, somehow. An inexplicable hunch.

[Hobbes]

OTOH, if they're talking about getting rid of some of the menus and doing away with having to buy 200 electroflares every month

 

I usually prefer to buy a single pack of 300 electroflares at the beginning of the month... you get a better discount, but people keep sticking to the smaller packs of 50 for some reason...

[FullAuto]

Brilliant because it is broken?

[Bomb Bloke]

Or like those fleeting moments when a cowardly rookie soldier somehow sacks up and guns down a duo of Sectoids after he dodges several bursts of deadly plasma fire in X-Com: UFO Defense.

... cut to a picture of a rookie gunning down a duo of... Floaters.

 

The guy seems to be forgetting that back in the day, if you wanted to know about a game before playing it, you read the manual. Games that forced you through a tutorial were exceptions rather then the rule.

 

And while the game had many holes in it, I'd argue that the things he's pointing at - the freedom to do things your way, no matter how silly your way might be, and a progression system that allows you to become powerful to the point where you can utterly crush your opposition - are two specific gameplay features that more games should have.

[Space Voyager]

The guy seems to be forgetting that back in the day, if you wanted to know about a game before playing it, you read the manual. Games that forced you through a tutorial were exceptions rather then the rule.

Back in the day, no game of mine had a manual. Originals weren't even possible to be bought around here. So it was trial and error all the way. And I loved it.

[Bomb Bloke]

Video game manuals were a huge part of my childhood. I know that sounds silly, but I carried those things around like a kid these days carries their phone - my computer time was limited (in an attempt by my parents to stop my brain rotting), so when I couldn't play the things, I tended to read about them.

 

Heck, I value(d) some of those old manuals over the games they came with in some cases.

[silencer_pl]

Back in the day, no game of mine had a manual. Originals weren't even possible to be bought around here. So it was trial and error all the way. And I loved it.

 

The joys of playing random Spectrum / Commodore games bought 'underground'.

 

Yep it is a game - what is the goal ? Who cares... you play... you enjoy every new thing you find out.... Last year I was playing on Emulator old beat'em up Renegade and I found out that you can throw enemies..... 5 years of playing in my childhood and I didn't know - joy of joys....

 

But now ? If you don't know how to play it - you call it piece of crap - maybe because some games are more advanced....

[FullAuto]

I had several hundred games in the Commodore/Amiga era, about 10% of which were actually bought. The rest were copies, sometimes not even labelled. Manuals, unless they were 200 page monsters filled with technical info for playing a sim, were not neccesary.

[Hobbes]

I had several hundred games in the Commodore/Amiga era, about 10% of which were actually bought. The rest were copies, sometimes not even labelled. Manuals, unless they were 200 page monsters filled with technical info for playing a sim, were not neccesary.

 

I had the same experience with the ZX Spectrum. To me a game needs to be playable without having to read 200 pages of a manual - I had both the UFO and Apocalypse manuals but didn't pay them any attention when I started playing. Even now when I get new games I never bother to look at the manual except to find out how small details work.

 

It really depends on your favored type of learning - some people learn better by doing things, others by reading and visualizing them first.