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Alchenar posted:Something that I think is actually underrated about the game is Gollop further developing his thesis that the humanity wouldn't come together in the face of extinction but that the guys trying to save the world would have to deal with petty short mindedness and ideological emnity. That's a theme the Firaxis games have junked. Is it? EXALT is basically just that. ADVENT is a more advanced version. They're human/former human factions who have turned on the rest of humanity for whatever reason, though hook or crook. ADVENT has the slight redeeming factor of them being generally tricked into the worst of it, but that's it. Heck, War of the Chosen implies that the three Hero Class factions don't really see eye to eye or get along and they only grudgingly work together through a third-party (that is to say, X-COM) and never together.
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Apr 24, 2022 19:11
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Kchama posted:Is it? EXALT is basically just that. ADVENT is a more advanced version. They're human/former human factions who have turned on the rest of humanity for whatever reason, though hook or crook. ADVENT has the slight redeeming factor of them being generally tricked into the worst of it, but that's it. Heck, War of the Chosen implies that the three Hero Class factions don't really see eye to eye or get along and they only grudgingly work together through a third-party (that is to say, X-COM) and never together. Its absolutely wafer thin in Firaxis's games and does not intrude onto the players decision making in any way.
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Apr 24, 2022 19:36
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Alchenar posted:Yeah it's just weird because Gollop literally invented that progression of starting off with junk, getting useful stuff and parity with the aliens, then finally getting access to some cool poo poo that's better than what the aliens have.
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Apr 24, 2022 20:50
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Alchenar posted:Something that I think is actually underrated about the game is Gollop further developing his thesis that the humanity wouldn't come together in the face of extinction but that the guys trying to save the world would have to deal with petty short mindedness and ideological emnity. That's a theme the Firaxis games have junked. I think that's less a sociological theory and more of an expectation that it would enable better and more immersive stories and emergent narratives. My only exposure to the classic X-COM games was Apocalypse, and I really liked how the faction mechanics led you to make pseudo-roleplaying strategic decisions. It feels more organic to choose to save a Megapol building and ignore / collateral damage a Marsec one because they're more important suppliers, than to choose a mission in Continent X over Continent Y because it was randomly determined to give you an engineer instead of a scientist. I haven't played Phoenix Point yet so I don't know if it goes in the same direction.
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Apr 24, 2022 22:13
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One of the really interesting things about the original XCOM (and remember this is 1994, these are original ideas about how games can work) is that each nations funds XCOM but the funding is not based on how well you are doing overall but how well that particular nation thinks you are doing at protecting it from the aliens. Because you start with one base that can cover a continent it is almost inevitable that you will lose countries and 'where to start?' is an interesting question. It is part of the emergent narrative and an expected strategy that around mid-game XCOM sets up factory bases to manufacture alien technology and sell it on the black market in order to fund operations. In Terror From the Deep it was even more cynical - nations don't fund you at all and it's shipping conglomerates paying XCOM to protect the sea lines. The original vision for Apocalypse took what ended up in the game way deeper, with XCOM needing to interact with the city's political parties and every faction having a set of leaders that you would have relationships with and might need to surveil with agents to see if they'd been secretly facehugged and turned into alien infiltrators.
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Apr 24, 2022 22:32
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Bogart posted:If I wanted to see humanity unable to come together about a clear existential threat, I would google “Covid hoax” or “unmask our children”. Nihilism is such a lazy armor for your fictional product to wear. Have you considered that maybe humans… are the real monsters? There’s potential for a zombie franchise or million in that.
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Apr 29, 2022 14:15
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Alchenar posted:One of the really interesting things about the original XCOM (and remember this is 1994, these are original ideas about how games can work) is that each nations funds XCOM but the funding is not based on how well you are doing overall but how well that particular nation thinks you are doing at protecting it from the aliens. Because you start with one base that can cover a continent it is almost inevitable that you will lose countries and 'where to start?' is an interesting question. It is part of the emergent narrative and an expected strategy that around mid-game XCOM sets up factory bases to manufacture alien technology and sell it on the black market in order to fund operations. The weird thing about the original is that it's not that complex, really. The nation funding happens and it goes up and down based on alien activity in their regions- they are completely unimportant in the grand scheme of things. When you're making laser cannons and raking in money, the national funding is a pinprick- you could win the game without any funding fairly comfortably. The mods try to make it more important, through X-piratez' gradual development of government ties and the Mutant Self-defense Force which reduce enemy terror missions and replace point-hurting enemy faction missions with point-beneficial or neutral government patrols and mutant traders. X-com files has the alien invaders make pacts with countries early on and set up embassies which are actually quite difficult to attack- they require the use of a very limited item and are a long-two parter, but unlike the original or X-piratez, that does get the affected country back on side. There's still not much of an effect to the game, though. Nations just don't matter that much other than money. I think even Apoc had the problem that the factions became far less important as the game went on, especially with as barebones as the implementation ended up being. I think the only one that really made the nations important was xenonauts, where losing all of the countries was one of the loss conditions, even if you didn't need the money.
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Apr 29, 2022 16:09
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Ugly In The Morning posted:Have you considered that maybe humans… are the real monsters? There’s potential for a zombie franchise or million in that. holy fiuck
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Apr 29, 2022 18:27
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I'm mid game and my observations are: 1) oh wow this is a grind. Gollop's XCOMs have always had a bit of a pacing issue but this really does suffer from an overly long mid-game. 2) there's now way too much stuff going on. The DLC isn't integrated into the main game so much as treated as a bolt-on, which is interesting in one respect because you can customise your game experience, but it also means that if you turn them all on then there's a million things competing for your attention all at once and realistically you should only actually pursue a few of them. Really does highlight just how good a job Firaxis did both on pacing their game so there's a constant stream of new things and of making sure that when they changed the game with DLC that they changed the whole game so it made sense.
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May 10, 2022 21:47
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You guys should check out the 40k xcom that just came out, it's really been scratching the itch for me
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May 10, 2022 22:23
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Alchenar posted:2) there's now way too much stuff going on. The DLC isn't integrated into the main game so much as treated as a bolt-on, which is interesting in one respect because you can customise your game experience, but it also means that if you turn them all on then there's a million things competing for your attention all at once and realistically you should only actually pursue a few of them. This issue in particular is very annoying to me. Nu-Coms and a bunch of other video games also suffer from it and I hate how developers barely spend any effort integrating their DLCs organically into the main content.
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May 11, 2022 08:03
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I've been playing over the class overhaul mod, it's really made the game a fair bit better for me.
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May 11, 2022 11:34
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