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[Chthonic]

I was at the XCOM panel at PAX East yesterday.  The devs said that the highest difficulty level for the new XCOM (it goes from "easy" to "classic" with a toggleable ironman mode in which the computer saves your game when it feels like it, and there is only one save) will aspire more toward Dwarf Fortress style Fun than conventional fun.

It was good.

[ililiilliillliii]

it's pretty satisfying that throughout the whole gaming community, toady's magnum opus is recognized for the masterpiece that it is.  It's even better that the guys working on XCOM (a masterpiece in its own right) think highly enough of DF to casually throw references to it.

[Biopass]

it's pretty satisfying that throughout the whole gaming community, toady's magnum opus is recognized for the masterpiece that it is.  It's even better that the guys working on XCOM (a masterpiece in its own right) think highly enough of DF to casually throw references to it.

I'd call the original X-COM a masterpiece, but I'd be hesitant to call the new X-COM one until I have a chance to play it for myself.

Also, wasn't at the panel, but did see someone in a DF T-Shirt, who I naturally greeted.

[Cobaldunderpants]

X-com Mastercraft quality?

Dwarf Fortress Artifact quality?

With spikes of adamantine of course.

[Chthonic]

I'd call the original X-COM a masterpiece, but I'd be hesitant to call the new X-COM one until I have a chance to play it for myself.

I went to the demo yesterday, and now I'm conflicted.  They are limiting your squad to 6 soldiers (four at the outset) and the soldiers have classes (i.e., sniper, heavy, etc.) and receive special abilities as they level up.

One of the things I liked about original X-COM was that you could be fluid in how you equipped your soldiers depending on the mission--there were thousands of possible strategies and loadouts, and hundreds of successful ones hidden among the failures.  Here, it seems like they want to force you to use _their_ strategy.  Which isn't a particularly good one . . . which is why (at least in the build we saw) you can kill a muton with just one shotgun blast.

I beat Terror from the Deep on Superhuman, and it took some hella out-of-the-box thinking in order to do so--the sort of strategies that I don't think are going to be possible in this game

[cephalo]

6 per squad is a huge gamble in my mind. That's a huge deviation from the XCOM formula that touches many aspects of the game. Only one base is also a huge gamble. This might be a good game, but it already isn't XCOM.

[Shinotsa]

Well I think the problem they're having is that they are actually making a game. If they really wanted to they could whip up the original XCOM with updated graphics in no time at all. Instead they're trying to make a new game that takes the spirit of the first game and adapts it for the different market that exists ten years after the original released. If I want to play the original XCOM I'll play the original XCOM. I don't think the graphics bug any of us who play it all that much. But kids these days wouldn't relish the expendibility of troops and the sheer amount of management that the original took.

Not saying I like the trends. Just pointing out the elephant in the room.

[shadow_archmagi]

Well I think the problem they're having is that they are actually making a game. If they really wanted to they could whip up the original XCOM with updated graphics in no time at all. Instead they're trying to make a new game that takes the spirit of the first game and adapts it for the different market that exists ten years after the original released. If I want to play the original XCOM I'll play the original XCOM. I don't think the graphics bug any of us who play it all that much. But kids these days wouldn't relish the expendibility of troops and the sheer amount of management that the original took.

Not saying I like the trends. Just pointing out the elephant in the room.

Also, to be honest, the original was tedious and clunky as hell in many ways. Even routine fights that you were 100% going to win could require thirty turns of carefully manipulating twenty soldiers. Soldiers with no strength would automatically equip heavy weapons, and you wouldn't know about because there was no way to check stats at the inventory screen. Sometimes you'd get cases where instead of every man carrying a rifle, a clip, and a sidearm, you'd get one soldier with three plasma rifles, one soldier with four laser pistols, and one soldier with every single spare clip and no guns.

[Chthonic]

I agree that it's got to be a new game, and all.  But if you're going to make a remake, I think that it's a good idea to fix what's broken and hang on to the things that worked and made the game memorable.  Especially with X-com, when you screw up the formula, you get abortions like Enforcer.  If you want to make a completely different game, make a completely different game--surfing the name recognition of the original IP is a recipe for fail.

Also, to be honest, the original was tedious and clunky as hell in many ways. Even routine fights that you were 100% going to win could require thirty turns of carefully manipulating twenty soldiers. Soldiers with no strength would automatically equip heavy weapons, and you wouldn't know about because there was no way to check stats at the inventory screen. Sometimes you'd get cases where instead of every man carrying a rifle, a clip, and a sidearm, you'd get one soldier with three plasma rifles, one soldier with four laser pistols, and one soldier with every single spare clip and no guns.

The fights that devolved into thirty turns of searching for an alien hidden in a closet could have been fixed simply by making aliens not hide in closets--I don't think that it was a matter of twenty soldiers versus four or six.  TFTD fixed the no-stats-at-the-equip-screen.  Never saw the problem with three plasma rifles--most of my guys equipped fairly reasonably, but I tended to tailor their equipment for particular missions anyway . . . the worst AI equipping happened during base defenses because of the weird item limits--I remember that often you would be stuck with a bunch of heavy plasmas or blaster launchers without any ammunition at all (if you weren't being careful to sell off your surplus stock).

[nenjin]

I'm on the side of "tons of of soldiers got really tedious." If you tried to keep your survival rate up, a single mission could take an hour, where you'd meticulously hunt down every alien and move in cover formation across the whole map. In the beginning, that was great. Toward the end it was like "Ok, I have to bring a long a bunch of cannon fodder I don't want, just to protect the guys who get stuff done."

So yeah. I'm ok with 5 veterans and a newbie to break-in. The only difference is that it won't "feel" quite so epic as dropping 15 guys into a hot zone....but it won't be such a clusterfuck then, either.

[MarineMorton]

So yeah. I'm ok with 5 veterans and a newbie to break-in. The only difference is that it won't "feel" quite so epic as dropping 15 guys into a hot zone....but it won't be such a clusterfuck then, either.

But the whole idea was it could be a clusterfuck at any moment it was a fight with time to kill the brain!!!

[nenjin]

Some people like the clusterfuck at disembark. I get the impression from the devs they didn't think it was a core part of the game though. To me, having everything go south the minute you disembarked just resulted in me reloading the save. So personally I don't see a lot being lost here.

[kaenneth]

Now, if the hardest difficulty gave you 7 soldiers, who were short, and had beards, and the 'aliens' were giant badger husks...

[caddybear]

Play Xenonauts if you want a remake of the original. The new X-Com sounds interesting, but we'll have to play and see if it's any good since it's very different to the original.

[NW_Kohaku]

I haven't been following the new XCOM too closely, but I'd also say that a demo released for an expo is oftentimes just a quickly-rushed-out prop with kludge mechanics while the real thing is still being built. 

I wouldn't look at a demo and say that they are necessarily constraining you to just the one strategy that works right away, as they may have many more strategies planned that just aren't working enough to show off at a demo.