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.
Didn't UFOEE missions work the same way? As far as I could tell, the success or failure of their missions had no impact on their campaign. In fact,the only difference between, say, Alien Research, Alien Harvest, and Alien Abduction is the points value for the Alien Score, which only affects your funding. It'd be really neat if destroying all their research ships resulting in them deploying troops less optimized for anti-human combat or something, but as it is the missions system is basically the game waiting a bit and then rolling a d10 to decide what to throw at you. Admittedly, the Alien Base thing was neat.
And you do, in fact, still get UFO landings from time to time- I just finished a mission where a large ship landed in the middle of nowhere and I raided it, just like I would've in the old xcom.
It still at least felt more emergent. What I really mean is that they flew around the globe and did stuff. You could see it happening all the time and intercept them from their missions. Here it seems to suddenly turn out there's abductions simultaneously happening in several different places and you can only go after one, even though it can be like 2 happening right next to the base and one on the other side of the world, yet it doesn't care that in the time it takes to get to that 3rd location, you could handle the other two with one squad (not to mention if you could send out multiple squads).
And in between saves, it's not consistent with what the missions are doing or what the rewards are. Like it's just asking you to reload in case you don't like the country/reward combination.
I guess it all comes down to the original just having a better illusion of the aliens doing something meaningful in the strategic layer.
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.".
I admit, jet-fighters costing twice as much as soldiers is slightly sillier than jet-fighters costing ten times as much as soldiers. On the other hand, I can appreciate how the devs might've wanted to rebalance to make medkits more scarce, since in Enemy Unknown I seem to recall every soldier always having one.
It's like they went too far, though. In addition to the prices, they've limited the soldier inventory so that the trade-off to having a medkit is not having a grenade. And similar things apply to other equipment elements, where it actually gets even more nonsensical. "Do you want a nano-fiber vest with your regular armour, or a grenade? Can't have both!". They're just totally unrelated items and they cost a lot to produce at the start, yet a guy can only take one of them.
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Topic: XCOM: Enemy Unknown (New by Firaxis) (Read 960790 times)