It's dumbed down because the basics are way less detailed and emergent than the original. You have no real inventory, instead you choose a really limited loadout that prevents soldiers from taking more than 1 grenade or 1 medkit unless they get some equally gamey class-based upgrade.
I sort of agree with this, but would also argue the point. Yep, you get 4 slots - armor, main weapon, secondary weapon, misc. Yep, miscellaneous means "1 grenade" or "1 medkit" or "1 health booster". But limiting the slots from the original does two big things - it makes you optimize your squad, and it helps the devs balance the game (probably more for multiplayer). Yes, I like the way you could customize load-outs in the original, like someone mentioned about rocket teams, with a shooter & an ammo carrier. But I think this system works.
The strategic layer is very gimped, as the aliens no longer act with purpose, but instead are just there to get fought off by you when the script deems it appropriate.
Did they 'act with purpose' in the old one? As I recall, scouts and battleships and whatnot tended to just wander around. I mean, they had those ten mission types, but they all boiled down to "Fly around a bit, land maybe." Doesn't really matter whether it's labelled an abduction mission or resource mining or what. None of them fulfilled any strategic objective. Even the supply ships did not, in fact, carry supplies- You could shoot them down all your wanted and it'd nerve starve out the alien base. Heck, you could interrogate everyone onboard and not get the base's location.
Even moreso on the tactical map, where 90% of the time you'd just fine snakemen moseying through random fields of grass. The aliens never really had any sense of tactics or any real objectives.
You could follow a supply ship to an alien base. Can you do that here? And more than that, the point is their activities really happened in the world, they weren't randomly generated when the game decided to give you something to do. For example, in this game, I got a VIP mission. The first time it was a scientist escort. Then I reloaded and now it was a politician arrest. The mission wasn't the result of what the aliens were doing, but was simply randomly generated when x amount of days passed.
Also, note that I said "strategic layer". They're not really doing anything significant in the tactical map in either case. Like in the original they just wandered around and at most shot at civilians. Here they just stand around some spots and give you a shitty cutscene when they enter your FOV. Then again, you'd think they'd drop what they're doing when they see a Skyranger landing nearby and start hearing gunfire.
The aliens aren't always static. They do move around some, and they will vary their tactics on you. I have had an Elite Muton try luring my guys back towards friends - continually moving back if I try advancing on him, instead of shooting him from a distance. Mutons & Cyberdisks will use grenades if you cluster your squad up, instead of simply shooting. Large groups will send out flankers on you. However, some seem... simpler, I think, than others, like Thin Men vs Mutons. Plus some of them are "smart" enough not to rush in - if you set up at a door, send one guy to bait them & retreat, they won't all come rushing out into your waiting fire.
I do agree about the gunfire issue, but again, that's probably a game balance issue - if everything converged on you, it could get impossible to win. Still, games have done that - Thief, I remember having to hide bodies after you knock out a guard, because if another guard stumbles over the body, he'll raise the alarm.
There is nothing intuitively realistic about the Simoleon prices in the strategic layer, they're all really nonsensical for the sake of balance. There's a slew of oddities and limitations only there to introduce balance to X-Com features broken by streamlining (such as explosives that liquidate weapon fragments).
Were prices ever realistic? 500,000 dollars for an interceptor is incredibly low. Even 1970's aircraft cost four times that, according to my incredibly unscientific ten second wikipedia search that could easily be inaccurate. I don't mind the elimination of all the extra zeroes anyway.
The point is proportions. A power generator facility or a satellite should not cost as much as manufacturing 4 medkits. Just for reference, in X-Com, a medkit cost 28k to produce. The cheapest facility, storage, cost 150k, and that was basically a hole in the ground, whereas most other facilities cost 400k+.
Don't get me wrong, the original's proportions (and especially quantities) were questionable, but not anywhere near as fucking bad as this. "XCOM, you're our first and last line of defence! Here's your monthly allowance. You can make 3 medkits with this. Now fuck off.".
This, I think I would really agree with. OG, sell corpses for about 8k, hire scientists/engineers for 50k, build a new base for $1M, etc. This one seems a bit forced on the price scale, especially since you could get major funding in the original game from selling off UFO loots, while here you get limited sales, and mostly have to rely on the funding. Although, they do scale the production price based on your engineers... which now that I think of it, doesn't make sense, as you have robotic production.
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Topic: XCOM: Enemy Unknown (New by Firaxis) (Read 960805 times)