Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Henny]

There is nothing stopping you from having a whole squad of MEC troopers, and they're superior to normal humans. It's just that Meld is limiting.

Actually its not just the meld. Its the soldiers themselves.
You want to cut up the most experienced soldiers because a squaddie MEC is... pretty sucky.
If we are talking the base game only i could roll with 3-4 MEC1s before the alien base mission but if you want grenade launchers and other useful support abilities you are probably better off just getting 2 MEC-2s

If we're talking vanilla:

Squaddie Sniper - arguably worse than a rookie
Squaddie MEC - actually pretty useful

[Mephansteras]

I love how the inspirational artwork starts with Half-Life.
On that note, here's hoping that Half-Life 3 will be confirmed to be a WIP project, but not out "within a year".

Pessimism: I don't see how it's good for the developer if the games are played long after their release. I don't think many sales come from that. Paid mods would explain it, but we'll see, I guess. I somehow feel they won't be taking that route.

There are some, though. I know a fair number of people who picked up Civ IV long after it came out specifically to play a few of the big total conversion mods to it. Plus, people talking about an amazing mod for a game can remind people who'd held off on it originally to finally pick it up. Sure, these are usually deep discount sales at that point, but it's still income for a game that was published years ago.

And Firaxis has long been big on mods for the Civilization series. And I'm talking decades, here. I imagine that if they say it makes business sense for them, they're probably telling the truth.

[miauw62]

I love how the inspirational artwork starts with Half-Life.
On that note, here's hoping that Half-Life 3 will be confirmed to be a WIP project, but not out "within a year".

Pessimism: I don't see how it's good for the developer if the games are played long after their release. I don't think many sales come from that. Paid mods would explain it, but we'll see, I guess. I somehow feel they won't be taking that route.

I am willing to accept that Solomon is doing this because he enjoys making good games and because it makes him money, not just for the money, so in that case the encouraging mods thing makes sense.

[Sonlirain]

Squaddie Sniper - arguably worse than a rookie
Squaddie MEC - actually pretty useful

Yeah sadly a max level sniper in archangel armor is the archangel of death while a MEC is just tough as nails.

[Zangi]

Pessimism: I don't see how it's good for the developer if the games are played long after their release. I don't think many sales come from that. Paid mods would explain it, but we'll see, I guess. I somehow feel they won't be taking that route.

Not-Pessimistic:  Brand recognition goes a long way, playing that same game forever also tends to bestow loyalty to that brand for the player.  Like Bethseda for example.  That hype.  Sure, people still play Oblivion and earlier cause of mods.  But they will also want that shiny new game that is coming out next, cause they know it will be chock full of awesome mods sooner or later too. 
Gleefully throwing themselves upon the altar of hype.  Then their friends come in to see what the fuss is about.

Mods are not a bad thing if you want your product/brand to have long lasting recognition.  Well, that is if the game is good in the first place. 
Though, for big arse publishers who have many different games coming out per year...  They might believe long lasting games are a bad thing.  You gotta follow all the hype and buy em all.

[Shadowlord]

I just tried Long War for the first time, on Normal difficulty. I lost everyone in the first mission, and it declared that XCOM was shut down. WELP. I guess this explains XCOM 2.

P.S. Not sure why Long War insisted on freezing the game for a couple seconds every turn to save, or why saving caused it to freeze for several seconds...
P.P.S. Not sure where the original XCOM thread went either. It was on the front page yesterday, I thought.

[timferius]

I just tried Long War for the first time, on Normal difficulty. I lost everyone in the first mission, and it declared that XCOM was shut down. WELP. I guess this explains XCOM 2.

P.S. Not sure why Long War insisted on freezing the game for a couple seconds every turn to save, or why saving caused it to freeze for several seconds...
P.P.S. Not sure where the original XCOM thread went either. It was on the front page yesterday, I thought.

Still on my front page...

Right here

[scrdest]

I just tried Long War for the first time, on Normal difficulty. I lost everyone in the first mission, and it declared that XCOM was shut down. WELP. I guess this explains XCOM 2.

P.S. Not sure why Long War insisted on freezing the game for a couple seconds every turn to save, or why saving caused it to freeze for several seconds...
P.P.S. Not sure where the original XCOM thread went either. It was on the front page yesterday, I thought.

That actually also happens in the base game. It's just that Long War is, yanno, easier to fuck up on the first mission.

[Wimopy]

I dunno if I got lucky or what, but I also started EW+LW on Normal. I've got a 100% success rate and just downed my 2nd UFO.
Then again, it was never the tactical part that gave me trouble, but the management one. I'm bad at efficient layouts and planning research/economy/stuff. But, give me a suitable troop and I'll accomplish the task if possible. (Well, until an army of chryssalids show up.)

Maybe I should try a higher difficulty, but I'm afraid I'll just get curbstomped, so I'll go with Normal for now. I've heard sectopods are real crazy anyway.

I do hope they're allowing mods for the sake of PR and a long-term investment. I probably shouldn't worry, since they did the Civ games nicely and Solomon does seem like a decent guy so far. Still, it's not only Firaxis that gets the say in this (I'm thinking publishers can have influence here), so I probably won't calm down unless mods get confirmed to be fully free.
Though the Internet backlash of paid mods probably scares them away for now, if nothing else. Doesn't seem like 'being the first to introduce paid mods' is something anyone wants their company associated with, unless they have a good fanbase (I'm betting on Valve or Blizzard, if anyone).

[KingofstarrySkies]

Star wars mod please

[Wimopy]

Looked at your avatar and I knew: UNIT mod please vs a coalition of Doctor Who enemies.
Top tier enemies would be Daleks, spiced with a few unique enemies as bosses. Oh yeah, that sounds good.

Playing the role of Storm Troopers. Yes. Rebels vs Combine (HL2). Yes. I see a lot of potential which Firaxis couldn't do because of licences. I can see why they used those inspirational pictures. They're definitely doing the hype thing well, and not just for the game itself but everything in connection with it. Props to the PR department.

[KingofstarrySkies]

Instead of Commander, you're the Doctor. Winning. WINNNNINNG.

Halo conversion would work quite well, actually.

[Flying Dice]

It's curious how people have already forgotten that Solomon became a dev in the first place because he was a diehard X-Com player who wanted to remake it right, that Firaxis gave him multiple shots at doing so (and that he kept at it when he could have been furthering his career by working exclusively in his role as a fixer for Sid, or on a more immediately lucrative project). That, and that of the major modern devs, Firaxis is one of the least evil, and that Take-Two (the parent company of 2K Games, which published EU) is responsible for publishing, among other things, XCOM: EU, the Bioshock series, Oblivion, the GTA series (Rockstar is one of their subsidiaries), Serious Sam, a lot of the major X Tycoon games, several other Firaxis games (including multiple Civs and SM's Pirates! and Railroads!), Borderlands 1 and 2, Red Dead Redemption, &c. &c.

These are not evil companies. The big cheese at Firaxis is one of the least evil and most player-oriented devs in the business, the project lead is an old-time X-Com fanboy who made nuCOM his life's work and wants it to be as timeless as the original, and the worst you can say about Take-Two is that they published Duke Nukem Forever.

[Henny]

Here's a reddit comment from amineri, one of the people behind Long War:

A few things that I extrapolated from what Solomon/DeAngelis said in the IGN article, along with the current state of XCOM EU/EW modding.

First off, how we currently mod for EU/EW.

1) Most of our gamecode modding we do by directly hex editing the "compiled" unrealscript within the unreal packages. I built a tool to specifically make this easier for us (built in Java), but building code still basically requires being able to build code in hex, which is pretty much a huge pain.

2) We add assets by using a specific version of the free Unreal Development Kit (UDK), version 8916, which is compatible with the base Unreal Engine Firaxis used for EU/EW. After installing Long War EW, you'll see a new package called "LongWar.upk" which contains a bunch of textures. We also use UDK to create voice banks (TrackTwo does, anyhow).

3) We also can use UDK to create an Unreal Engine thing called a "Mutator". In object-oriented speak, a mutator is a child class that inherits from a compiled class used in game code. If the mutator (child) is instantiated at run-time instead of the original function, this allows new/reworked game-code to be substituted at run-time.

However, the game has to be architected to support mutators, which EU/EW wasn't particularly well, although we did mod in some support for mutators. Wasteland Ghost used mutators to create the : (a) random alien pod spawns (b) random XCOM LZ (c) random meld placement (d) random alien drop-in locations.

4) GUI mods are done by extracting the SWF/GFX embedded files, opening them with a SWF/GFX decompiler and editing them, and then updating the embedded SWF/GFX files within the unreal package.

5) The big problem with using UDK in EU/EW is that EU/EW has a lot of native code/custom extensions to the engine. The result is that using the free UDK version 8916 can't build a lot of assets that work with XCOM. The other issue is that a lot of 2D art assets were bound into SWF/GFX sprites, so we had to hex mod a fair bit to expose those assets to make them run-time swappable.

So what does this mean for XCOM 2?

1) Firaxis releasing a compatible UDK, along with sufficient underlying source, means that the current method of hex-modding will thankfully die away. Instead, the mutator-based approach will take over. To change some code, you'd presumably write a mutator (child) of the class you want to change, and then register it with the game, thus enabling it as a mod. Two mods that change the same class would be incompatible with each other.

2) Further, a compatible UDK will finally allow things that we couldn't do in EU/EW, such as (a) import new 3D assets, such as weapons, armors, aliens, etc (b) import new animations (c) import new sounds (d) create new maps.

3) All of this also requires re-architecting some of the EU/EW systems for managing assets, which is part of the work Firaxis must have been doing to enable modding support.

TL;dr -- Firaxis releasing a compatible UDK as a modding environment, along with relevant scripts, is a GREAT boost for modding, allowing all of the flexibility that we currently have with our "low-level hacking-type modding" for EU/EW, while opening up tons of new possibilities.

[scrdest]

Apparently, the team working on nuCOM had mandatory oldCOM Fridays, and new hires were supposed to beat the original before starting work on nuCOM.