I'm pescetarian. I don't eat chicken or bacon. Or even chicken bacon, whatever foul mutation might produce that.
But that's utterly and completely besides the point. I'll still refrain from judging this thing until I get to try a piece of it myself, but I don't think I'll be watching it too closely. And no, I wouldn't wish Valkyria Chronicles-type movement on anyone. Seriously, what were they thinking?
Now, as for what kind of time progression might be nice in a "revamped" X-Com... I don't see any problem with turn-based, but I do think the game would do well in a realtime environment, provided they managed to get a good enough AI to fend for itself in some way. Turn-based would be more faithful to the original series, what with reaction shots and the "mutual surprise" facets.
I've actually been thinking about a kind of X-Com -"like" game. However, I thought it would be nice to take a break from the usual alien attacks and go for demons warping in from beneath. It would allow for an easier explanation of why there are close-combat "terror" units in the enemy force, which was a little weird with the otherwise high-tech aliens (sure they were terrifying, but there are long-ranged weapons of terror too). You wouldn't have the game aspect of shooting down enemy UFOs, which could be a good thing or a bad thing. All depends on how it's worked out.
Otherwise, it would be pretty much the same concept... Demon portal opens up somewhere, some imps pop through and start terrorizing the populace, you grab a couple squads of ill-equipped soldiers and toss them into the fray, you start researching the demon corpses to find out what makes them tick and (more importantly) what makes them stop ticking, eventually the gates get bigger and bigger and the demons coming out get nastier. You could have semblances of a hellish civilization with various types of hell-powered "machines", and you could even go the DooM route of having the demons start incorporating our technology into their designs (almost a reverse X-Com, innit?). Eventually the ruling class of demons would start to appear with their powerful psychic abilities, and you'd have to start looking for willful minds in your own stock in order to combat the threat.
Endgame would be about a titanic demon gate that you would have to let them open up so that your own guys could go through and fight the menace on their home turf. This would provide a plausible explanation for why failure of your first attempt would result in losing the game (which struck me as a little weird in X-Com, since you could theoretically just build and equip another Avenger to head out to Mars and beat up the alien forces as they try and recover from the last assault).
Yeah, so the idea is riddled with holes, but c'mon... I think it's probably best if X-Com is left to X-Com, and that something else just be made in its spirit.
Also, shooting demons with tank cannons. You know you want to.
Author
Topic: X-COM Reboot: Suicide Pact, anyone? (Read 34008 times)