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 Gentlemen, welcome to X-Com. Or, The Bureau. Of Operations and Command. Of X-Com. Or something. Why are you asking so many questions, anyway? Much like the hyphenated and post-scripted name of the game itself, The Bureau is an odd beast. The end result came about as the product of a protracted development cycle and a dozen or so conflicting ideas about what the game should actually be. Even so, I still think that in the end, it's a fun, if occasionally cumbersome unpolished gem of a game. Development Development was started in 2006, but during the official reveal in 2010, it received, to put it kindly, a mixed reaction from fans of the X-Com series. Fortunately for everyone involved, fans got exactly what they wanted with the relase of X-Com: Enemy Unknown and the subsequent expansion Enemy Within. This left The Bureau in something of an awkward position as no longer the heir apparent to the X-Com franchise. It even occasionally feels like the developers were more interested in making their own game, and the familiar elements of the X-Com franchise feel a bit shoe-horned in, though some are integrated more successfully than others. The Bureau had been moving in a different direction with it's gameplay since early in it's development, eventually settling on tactical 3rd-person shooter, which was enough to distinguish it from Enemy Unknown. Now set in the 1960s, You assume the role of William Carter: Grizzled, hard-drinking hard-smoking rear end-kicking G-man extraordinaire with a troubled past (I think I just got protagonist Bingo), dropped into the middle of a massive "covert" alien invasion on US soil. The game has a lot going for it; The late styles of 1950s and 1960s americana, the slick chrome aerodynamic shapes of the early space age, the clunky yet purposeful machined steel aesthetic of pre-digital early cold war-era technology, overexcitable scientists who are way too eager to poke and prod the universe where they almost certainly shouldn't, some solid voice acting and a fun combat system. It's also got a lot of rough edges and sections which were just begging for another few months of development, which I'll try and point out as we go through the game. LP Format As for the LP itself, I'll be splitting the videos into two sections: Combat Missions, and Base sections. Missions vary in length, but are usually pushing 20-30 minutes, and there's a hefty amount of optional exposition within the base itself between missions. Slapping them together would easily make for episodes over an hour, so I'll be breaking them up. At any rate, the base itself is as much a character as any of the game's bipedal assets, and exploring all it's nooks and crannies yields some neat insights and occasional rewards. I'll try and keep the videos as efficient as possible, and any extra logs or memos will be posted separately alongside the videos. If all goes well, I'm planning for weekly updates. So, Gentlemen, let's get started. Welcome to The Bureau.
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Sep 20, 2014 08:33
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| # ? May 11, 2024 04:42 |
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                     Update 2 - Post Link           Update 3 - Post Link                            Update 4 - Post Link                          Update 5 - Post Link             Update 6 - Post Link               Update 7 - Post Link          Update 8 - Post Link     Update 9 - Post Link                Update 10 - Post Link              Update 11 - Post Link  Survivors Ethereal Autopsy Hull Breach Where did this come from? Update 12 - Post Link  The Last War, part 2 The Last War, part 3 McKilligan fucked around with this message at 09:19 on Nov 25, 2014 |
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Sep 20, 2014 08:34
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Glad you are lping this cause I just don't have the urge to play it
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Sep 20, 2014 09:10
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Calling it now, we've been taken over by the alien artifact.Herr Tog posted:Glad you are lping this cause I just don't have the urge to play it NAME REDACTED fucked around with this message at 13:52 on Sep 20, 2014 |
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Sep 20, 2014 13:50
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I was surprised to find how much I legit enjoyed this game. The gameplay is actually a really fun concept and they go really whole hog on the aesthetic and atmosphere, even if the plot has some serious cobbly wobbles from the huge development time and rewrites. It's really fun if you just take it as a cool, fedora-and-vest laced B-movie.
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Sep 20, 2014 14:36
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I actually am among the minority in that I really love the ascetic of this game.
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Sep 20, 2014 18:02
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I remember the first trailers they had for this game when they began advertising it, and BOY do I remember the backlash... And, I admit, I haven't played this game, but from the trailers that first came out they made it look like some kind of an FPS with... aliens from the thing which had somehow combined with static. Glad to see it wasn't that in the end, though. Edit: Also, YET's LP that you mention is Singularity Samovar fucked around with this message at 23:16 on Sep 20, 2014 |
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Sep 20, 2014 20:40
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As it is required: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nF_Ca45JRFs
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Sep 20, 2014 20:48
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This game looked interesting, but I didn't want to get into an XCom game without having even really tried Enemy Unknown. Since that may never happen, I am glad the LP is here instead. Also cause McKilligan rocks.
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Sep 20, 2014 21:00
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bunnyofdoom posted:I actually am among the minority in that I really love the ascetic of this game.
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Sep 20, 2014 21:02
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Unfinnished is definately a word that describes this game. How does full/partial cover work with regard to damage/aggro? The plane you asked about in the first video is likely a F-104 Starfighter based on the tail and the nosecone. I bet those x-rays found that jet like that too. Not exactly a stellar safety record on those. If you look real close during an earlier cutscene you can also see a P-38 crashing too. Wales Grey fucked around with this message at 21:18 on Sep 20, 2014 |
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Sep 20, 2014 21:11
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Just to note, Mckilligan got it slightly wrong when he was talking about Commander Difficulty. Having an agent go down during a fight doesn't take that agent out of play for the rest of the mission. As long as you stabilise him before he bleeds out, he'll get back up and be ready to go once all of the enemies in the current fight are dead. Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing the rest of this. The Bureau is a somewhat rough game, but I enjoyed playing it and it'll be nice to see another playthrough of it. It certainly looks a lot prettier on the PC than it does on the consoles.
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Sep 20, 2014 22:54
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Wales Grey posted:Unfinnished is definately a word that describes this game. How does full/partial cover work with regard to damage/aggro? Aggro, as far as I can tell, is mostly determined by proximity and damage, enemies will fire at either whoever is closest or is damaging them, but I don't know which they prioritize. There are some neat skills that we'll see later in the game that deal with aggro management. I don't think cover affects it though - you take a TON of damage if you're shot while you're not glued to something though, or if you're flanked, and the same goes for enemies. Nero Angelo posted:Just to note, Mckilligan got it slightly wrong when he was talking about Commander Difficulty. Having an agent go down during a fight doesn't take that agent out of play for the rest of the mission. As long as you stabilise him before he bleeds out, he'll get back up and be ready to go once all of the enemies in the current fight are dead. Truth be told, I've played the game back and forth, but never attempted commander difficulty, some of the later Veteran fights were hard enough to dissuade me from trying anything harder - Might give it a go for a video later on though. Edminster posted:Does the game have subtitles that can be turned on or no? It does - I always forget to turn the drat things on. Expect them to start showing up a bit later, my bad. McKilligan fucked around with this message at 01:24 on Sep 21, 2014 |
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Sep 21, 2014 00:50
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Does the game have subtitles that can be turned on or no? That aside this game looks cool as hell, kind of like a retro sci-fi Hidden and Dangerous 2. I'm looking forward to the rest of it!
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Sep 21, 2014 00:50
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Nero Angelo posted:Just to note, Mckilligan got it slightly wrong when he was talking about Commander Difficulty. Having an agent go down during a fight doesn't take that agent out of play for the rest of the mission. As long as you stabilise him before he bleeds out, he'll get back up and be ready to go once all of the enemies in the current fight are dead. This is actually a bonus most of the time. It means you don't have to worry anymore about babysitting your squad; you can just focus on killing things. McKilligan posted:Truth be told, I've played the game back and forth, but never attempted commander difficulty My 2nd playthrough was on Commander, and I found it much easier than my 1st playthrough on veteran. On the 2nd game I knew what was coming and I knew the mechanics of the game. Then I just breezed through everything.
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Sep 21, 2014 01:39
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I want to see all the men on the field with pink waistcoats. If we're gonna be defeating alien invaders, we should do in the best (i.e. gaudiest) style.
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Sep 21, 2014 08:31
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GuavaMoment posted:This is actually a bonus most of the time. It means you don't have to worry anymore about babysitting your squad; you can just focus on killing things. For myself, I always found the opposite to be true. But then I preferred to hang back and let my squadmates do the heavy lifting. And as Mckilligan has shown with the regrettably late Agent Nils, two level 5 Recons can do a lot of heavy lifting. 
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Sep 21, 2014 11:35
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This is one of the games I was intrigued by the idea of but eventually got turned off by the negative reception. Going to watch this with interest.
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Sep 21, 2014 12:36
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I really enjoyed the Bureau, it was charming to me so I'm looking forward to this. I mean, yeah, it wasn't finished but I tried to looked for all the good parts. Still we don't keep the hat and that really annoyed me.
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Sep 21, 2014 13:57
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Man, this game would have been custom tailored to have an DLC that replaced all the dialogue with material from the Archer series instead. Hell, even one of the trailers were very much Archer in all but name: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkkxRdIoTIQ
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Sep 21, 2014 16:54
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Sylphosaurus posted:Man, this game would have been custom tailored to have an DLC that replaced all the dialogue with material from the Archer series instead.
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Sep 21, 2014 17:19
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Wales Grey posted:Unfinnished is definately a word that describes this game. How does full/partial cover work with regard to damage/aggro? Actually that crashing twin-boomed aircraft was a much more era-appropriate C-119 Flying Boxcar. Easy to make that mistake given how dark it is.
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Sep 21, 2014 20:38
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OK, one thing I don't get in the design of this game - why aren't the alien vessels flying saucers? I mean, in the other X-Com game they most definitevly are saucer-shaped. Here they look like... I dunno, Mass Effect-style spaceship, all pointy edges and such-like.
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Sep 21, 2014 21:46
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Samovar posted:OK, one thing I don't get in the design of this game - why aren't the alien vessels flying saucers? I mean, in the other X-Com game they most definitevly are saucer-shaped. Here they look like... I dunno, Mass Effect-style spaceship, all pointy edges and such-like. keep watching.
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Sep 21, 2014 21:49
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I enjoyed this game considerably, for what it's worth; though I only did one playthrough and I never even attempted the highest difficulty setting, because there are a couple of missions that are just absolute clusterfucks. edit: This game fills an interesting niche as the game play mix of Sci-fi powers and squad command is basically not-Mass Effect 2/3, so if you liked how those games played this is a fun and slightly more tactical alternative. edit 2: Talking about ways this game is incomplete, unless they fixed it in a patch, the worst in my opinion is the sound effects missing from the audio logs, leaving no pauses between exclamations and chatter when they're really needed. Singularity has some of the same problems, but it's really bad in this game. marshmallow creep fucked around with this message at 02:10 on Sep 22, 2014 |
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Sep 22, 2014 00:47
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I... finished the game. It's not bad. But really, it wasn't that much of anything. If it wasn't for the development horror stories and the internet backlash, I figure it'd just be another forgotten 6/10 shooter. Hated the checkpointing and the squad AI, though.
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Sep 22, 2014 04:17
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I played this game a few weeks ago and really liked it. It wasn't anything like what I expected, but I had a great time regardless. I also hadn't heard of it until I saw it show up on sale on Steam one day, so I wasn't aware of an Internet backlash. Nerds will be nerds, I guess. I love the XCOM series, and for this one you definitely have to set aside your preconceived notions of how things should and should not be. e: Now that I've read a bit more on the negative reception, I'm glad that I played the game before hearing about it. It's a lot better than what some of these people would lead you to believe. It's a pretty short game, but it's also only $20 MSRP (or you wait until it becomes $5 on Steam again, like I did) QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 07:22 on Sep 22, 2014 |
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Sep 22, 2014 07:18
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I had the opportunity to get this game - plus several others - for a few bucks in a recent bundle sale and I still passed on it; that was how much the negative reception had put me off. I think the main thing that dissuaded me though was how much it seemed like 'Mass Effect lite'. I'd definitely had enough of that after three of those games. I was actually really disappointed when they moved away from the procedural first-person approach they were going for early on and went the 'yet another third-person console cover-shooter' route instead. Maybe the light tactical elements are its saving grace though, I dunno. (But they still seem too reminiscent of Mass Effect for me.) So far though the game looks quite pretty, at least. I'm digging the 1960s design stuff. Glad to hear the subtitles will be switched on later. Hearing about the continuity errors and whatnot is interesting, but knowing what the characters are saying so that I can follow what's happening would be good too. (Personally I almost always play games with subtitles disabled too, but they're great for commentated LPs.)
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Sep 22, 2014 11:38
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I played some of this game recently, sort of curious how much the negative reaction was justified. I'll say one thing in its favour, it nails the style and design of environments, to an excellent degree. The actual gameplay is pretty lackluster though. Enemy variety isn't all that great, and your squadmates require all but constant babysitting. They're not autonomous enough to survive on their own, but they also override your decisions under some circumstances, which gets them killed because the AI is bad about handling cover. Until they got a high enough level for skill spamming, they're rather annoying. And there're so many tiny issues. If you retreat back from a designated combat area for example, you will notice that no cover designation is placed outside of those. There's also a lack of situational awareness unless you drop into battle focus constantly. Not even simple markers where the heck your allies are right now. For all the skills you get, there isn't exactly a whole lot of tactical depth to using them either. I could go on for a while. The plot also goes bonkers and really stops making a whole lot of sense later. The game is set as prequel to EU/EW, so somehow all of what happens in this game is kept under wraps. Everything. Just keep that in mind as you watch. Really, the game could have been fine without the XCOM connection, better AI and just more time to flesh stuff out. But that's not what we have, sadly. It's basically a 6/10 shooter.
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Sep 22, 2014 12:42
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Antistar01 posted:I had the opportunity to get this game - plus several others - for a few bucks in a recent bundle sale and I still passed on it; that was how much the negative reception had put me off. I think the main thing that dissuaded me though was how much it seemed like 'Mass Effect lite'. I'd definitely had enough of that after three of those games. I've only played Mass Effect 1 and 2, but I find that I enjoy the combat in The Bureau much more - if anything, I would says that it's Mass Effect +. When I played ME, your squad members' powers were entirely at your disposal, to the point where it really didn't matter that my squadmates were separate entities at all. Their location and battlefield placement were largely irrelevant - you COULD issue movement commands, but it's never critical and rarely even useful to do so. As we'll see in future updates, location and placement are far more important in The Bureau, and there's a very satisfying risk/reward element. Do you want to place your sniper on the far side of the map to get better flanking on the enemy, at the risk of being unable to revive him? Do you separate your commando from the squad to draw more powerful enemies away while you deal with the chaff, or would you rather cluster everyone together near your support and engineer and buff the hell out of your damage and defenses? Granted, your squaddies ARE stupid as hell when left to their own devices - I've seen them jump onto grenades, hop back and forth over walls for minutes on end, get stuck 200 meters down a straight path behind me, and do nothing but shoot walls for entire encounters. The game is more designed for you to be taking constant, precise control and always be issuing new commands, rather than just spamming abilities whenever they've cooled down. Ztarlit_Sky posted:Really, the game could have been fine without the XCOM connection, better AI and just more time to flesh stuff out. But that's not what we have, sadly. It's basically a 6/10 shooter. I definitely agree. It's just so frustrating because when the game is hitting all the right notes, it really does shine, and you can catch of glimpse of what might have been. But as the final product stands, 6/10 isn't an unfair score. I've obviously got a massive soft spot for it though. McKilligan fucked around with this message at 14:33 on Sep 22, 2014 |
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Sep 22, 2014 14:30
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I remember when this game was supposed to be like a Bioshock version instead, I though that game looked pretty interesting with all the strange things and the enemies were pretty unique.
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Sep 22, 2014 15:21
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McKilligan posted:I've only played Mass Effect 1 and 2, but I find that I enjoy the combat in The Bureau much more - if anything, I would says that it's Mass Effect +. That's the thing though, Mass Effect's design decisions would actually be better in this game. You cannot rely on the AI to handle itself, so you constantly need to break and stop what you're doing as character to hand out commands. When you cannot rely on the AI to actually follow your orders with respect to positioning, you cannot reliably make these tactical decisions. The maximum, erh, operating range before AI just follows you no matter what orders you give doesn't help this either. Furthermore, constantly stopping for orders in between your own shooting goes against flow pretty badly and is generally not something to support in design. This is where having quick commands to use outside of battle focus would help, as would having all the contextual information such as a minimap with allies/enemies. From what I understand, the game was designed as first-person shooter originally and had to shift tracks late in development, it kind of shows in my opinion. Mass Effect's simplifications are a consequence of technological limitations to the AI and were generally smartly executed. Dumb stuff I've seen includes avoiding a grenade by taking the outside route around cover, into open fire. And another time, I ordered an ally to attack a target around a corner to him... which made him go the long way around it just to stand in the middle of the courtyard and get shot to pieces. The AI generally dodges grenades, but that's basically the only thing it's properly designed for. And even then it can just run straight into a wall and go down anyway.
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Sep 22, 2014 15:53
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Not sure if its just me or not, but when you speak during dialog, especially in the second video it can be hard to hear you or the game. If theres subtitles it might be good to put on and lower the volume of the game far more when you speak, or just add text when you want to add something during dialog. That aside, I'm enjoying the LP so far. Love the little quips you make during dialog and all the little details in the game so far. Kinda curious how this all goes down.
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Sep 22, 2014 21:01
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Where are the videos?
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Sep 22, 2014 21:20
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DeliciousCookie posted:Not sure if its just me or not, but when you speak during dialog, especially in the second video it can be hard to hear you or the game. If theres subtitles it might be good to put on and lower the volume of the game far more when you speak, or just add text when you want to add something during dialog. Already been mentioned, he just forgot to turn them on, he'll be putting them in later videos. cokerpilot posted:Where are the videos? They're there, just hard to get to because the images are timg, but not so big that timg makes them shrink. Try right clicking on the images for the videos and pick "open in a new tab", or use the links in the quote above where I stripped out the images.
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Sep 22, 2014 22:22
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I'm glad this thread is happening because I was totally confusing readers with references to it over in my thread. Nice work with the images, man, did you make that one yourself?
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Sep 22, 2014 22:24
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McKilligan posted:Granted, your squaddies ARE stupid as hell when left to their own devices - I've seen them jump onto grenades, hop back and forth over walls for minutes on end, get stuck 200 meters down a straight path behind me, and do nothing but shoot walls for entire encounters. The game is more designed for you to be taking constant, precise control and always be issuing new commands, rather than just spamming abilities whenever they've cooled down. Yeah, and I think that giving them the exact same AI as the enemy was completely intentional, because otherwise the player wouldn't spend more time babysitting in command mode than they would be shooting.  For higher difficulty levels, that means the entire game is an escort quest, which is a fundamental problem if you want to make something that even most tactical games fans would enjoy playing.A major issue is that the path your guys take to get to a position you assign is the shortest one. This means that if you assign a flanking position and expect them to run around the side first and keep in cover, you may be surprised to see them bleeding out laying in the middle of the enemies they were supposed to flank, because the shortest path on a triangle is the hypotenuse. You have to set multiple waypoints. If I were a guerilla warfare commander, and Carter's apparently the best thing since sliced bread, do you think I'd have to be sure to tell my highly trained agent that he shouldn't run through the enemies to get to where I want him to go? Every time I do it? If this were a tactical overhead game, that's exactly what you'd expect to do, and that's fine. Because it's easy to do it, and you're not just stuck in a bunch of corridors and arenas so the correct route can be tricky, and you're not playing someone on the ground. Here, there's no point at all to it. It's laziness and incorrect use of UE3's features that make this kind of thing easy, same as the weird grenade dodging. I think they used the same AI there too, where the enemy's supposed to appear to be dodging the grenade but tries to stay within its radius of damage to let you have the satisfaction of blowing poo poo up instead of just scattering enemies. I'm not saying "oh god this is the worst game ever made" because of this, it's got lots of merits, I'm just trying to explain why I think these are flaws and not an appropriate part of a rather tricky and under-explored genre. I love weird games that barely made it to release that try something new. Edit: I have decided that beating your teammates up until they beg for mercy may almost make up for how stupid they are. Speedball posted:Nice work with the images, man, did you make that one yourself? Oh man, how did I forget those? They're insanely sexy. Great job, McKilligan. The Wizard of Oz fucked around with this message at 06:20 on Sep 23, 2014 |
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Sep 22, 2014 22:42
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Carter has a gorgeous voice.
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Sep 23, 2014 13:36
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Samovar posted:I remember the first trailers they had for this game when they began advertising it, and BOY do I remember the backlash... And, I admit, I haven't played this game, but from the trailers that first came out they made it look like some kind of an FPS with... aliens from the thing which had somehow combined with static. Glad to see it wasn't that in the end, though. MadScientistWorking fucked around with this message at 15:11 on Sep 23, 2014 |
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Sep 23, 2014 15:09
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I remember seeing the original trailers back at the beginning when they were first thinking of it, and I thought it was so cool! Body Snatchers! Old Timey references! Murdering aliens! Non-traditional FPS combat! I thought it was going to be so much fun! And then everyone bitched that it wasn't the original X-Com being remade and I got so disappointed when I heard they changed a lot of it. I honestly think most of the stuff at the end being really awkward or stilted is because it was remade or changed so much. It's obvious it was made with love and the people who worked on it actually wanted to make a good game, it's just that too many things got in their way. It's pretty disappointing, because a lot of them are graphical quirks you can't really fix with "just a patch".
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Sep 23, 2014 16:06
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