I believe what they've said is that plasma is powerful but expensive. Lasers aren't too much harder to get than in the original, and are one of your first major steps towards not sucking. Plasma (both the light and heavy steps) are difficult to research, requiring a very large time investment which can be reduced by interrogating aliens, and difficult to build at the foundry, further encouraging the player to take risks to bring aliens back alive. Supposedly, getting plasma weapons in a reasonable amount of time is likely going to involve sacrificing a good number of arc thrower rookies and even then there won't always be enough to go around.
That only reinforces what I'm saying. Once you research plasma weapons, what's the point of using of using laser weaponry any more? They just exist to plug the gap between your starting weapons and plasma guns.
Also, I think that bum-rushing plasma weaponry shouldn't be too hard. The earlier aliens die pretty easily to rifles and grenades, so unless the difficulty curve is very steep or the research times for plasma guns are ridiculously long, you should be able to skip laser weaponry without too much trouble. It's probably something that you should try once you get a hang of the game, however.
I always loved the lasers because they freed up so much space in the Sky Ranger because you didn't need to fill it with clips.
They were also great for base defence, because you didn't have to worry about the 80-item limit in the battlescape. The lasers needed no clips, and as weapons were loaded first or something, so you were pretty much guaranteed to start with them and not, say, 20 smoke grenades.
Author
Topic: XCOM: Enemy Unknown (New by Firaxis) (Read 961664 times)