XCOM: Enemy Unknown - Strategy Game - Developed by Firaxis

Another way of looking at it is that each soldier seems to have a lot more character to them this time around. In the first game soldiers were randomly generated from the ground up. But in this game they seem to be putting a lot more effort into the art and presumably the voices too. In Valkyria you started with a pool of soldiers, finite, but more than you needed for a single fight. They each had their own set personality.

If they do something like that in the new XCOM it would certainly change how people would handle their soldiers. But if they keep the same level of lethality as the original, you might be going through soldiers a dozen a month. At that point making each soldier a special snowflake might be wasted given how fast they die in a fire.

Tanglebones wrote:
MoonDragon wrote:

Am I the only one who's disturbed by "press Y to scan for UFOs" visible in this image?

I am not only disturbed, I am horrified. Nay, my very soul is stricken to the core!

This is also the grognard in me talking, but that interface is horribly cluttered.

I was reading up on the developer notes for Xenonauts and they specifically mentioned that they are upping the complexity of the air battles to make them more interesting. But ONLY to a certain degree because they recognize that its something you will be doing a lot. Forcing the player to perform repetitive minigames that never change is just bad game design.

The whole scanning thing worries me because I can't help but feel the consoleitis. That screenshot just reminded me of a major ramification of having only one base. It means that your radar coverage no longer depends on strategically placing bases with radar installations over the globe. It also means that your interception aircraft have a single point of origin. And hiding the location of your base becomes either less important or a lot harder.

First off, that kinda sucks. And secondly, what are they going to replace it with? It had better not involve me sweeping my metal detector across the globe...

MoonDragon wrote:

Am I the only one who's disturbed by "press Y to scan for UFOs" visible in this image?

Well what would you use to scan for UFOs, X? Bah! LB?! Monstrous! Traditionally, Y is the go-to scanning button. It was good enough for our forebears and dammit, it's good enough for me.

Snark aside, that screen gave me an uncomfortable Mass Effect 2 vibe but despite that scanning, I still love that game. /shrug

I know some of you are concerned about trampled memories and rose-tinted whatevers but some very good people are working to put this together and I'm excited to see this in action.

MilkmanDanimal wrote:

Will it be my same old X-Com? No, but if I want to play same old X-Com, I'll, you know, play same old X-Com

That is an excellent point. It's not like Firaxis' attempt at something new is ever going to take the old one away from us. It runs very nicely in DOSBox, which means it should continue to run for a long, long time.

At this point, any game they do is going to be a spiritual successor at best. Remember, X-Com 1 was a system-seller in the era of the 486 -- I had a friend who bought a very expensive 33 megahertz computer to run it. It cost him almost three thousand dollars. And the primary reason he bought it was to run X-Com.

So, you can read two things there. The first is that the original was so amazing that it was selling multi-thousand dollar computers. (and, yes, it really was THAT GOOD.) The second is that it was amazing on thirty-three megahertz machines. The computer I'm working on should be on the order of 500 times faster, and for doing 3D graphics, it's probably, geeze, maybe millions of times faster. I have a thousand times as much RAM in this machine as my friend did on his top of the line X-Com beast.

In 2011, anything called X-Com should look almost completely different. We should know the very broad outline that it's a tactical combat game about defending the Earth from a Mars invasion force, and that Earth will start out way, way behind in tech, and will need to cannibalize knowledge from the aliens to have a hope of fighting back.

But from there? They could do anything with it. The original was eighteen years ago. If programming a modern machine is like working with a symphony orchestra, then X-Com 1 was a masterpiece on kazoo.

The whole scanning thing worries me because I can't help but feel the consoleitis. That screenshot just reminded me of a major ramification of having only one base. It means that your radar coverage no longer depends on strategically placing bases with radar installations over the globe. It also means that your interception aircraft have a single point of origin. And hiding the location of your base becomes either less important or a lot harder.

Or it just means you need to hit Y to switch to radar mode. Oohhhhh it's all console and stupid now.

Seriously, is there anything anyone can do to make a modern x-com game that you won't complain about?

Tanglebones wrote:
MoonDragon wrote:

Am I the only one who's disturbed by "press Y to scan for UFOs" visible in this image?

I am not only disturbed, I am horrified. Nay, my very soul is stricken to the core!

Yeah. Scanning should be X dammit!

Everything should be X

dejanzie wrote:
Tanglebones wrote:
MoonDragon wrote:

Am I the only one who's disturbed by "press Y to scan for UFOs" visible in this image?

I am not only disturbed, I am horrified. Nay, my very soul is stricken to the core!

Yeah. Scanning should be X dammit!

Gather the smelling salts, I shall surely be overcome by these vapors!

I would say that you could probably play the original game entirely with a controller, had that been an option. There was nothing about it that says, "PC ONLY!!!!" to me. I played the HELL out of the original and I just don't see what you could do there that would be "sullied" by a console.

I'll play it on my PC because I game on the same monitor no matter which system I'm using, so I might as well enjoy AA, etc. But I really don't get what people are talking about with this game when they say that consoles are ruining it.

I like the geoscape UI.

If pressing Y finds me a ufo to either shoot down or just enter combat I'm fine with that. As others have mentioned the original flight combat wasn't really much more than a few button presses and honestly from what I've seen playing the current build of Xenonauts there isn't much there that convinces me that pushing Y would be any worse. It's a means to a end.

The the single base confirmed?
Is it one base for the entire game?

Hobbes2099 wrote:

The the single base confirmed?
Is it one base for the entire game?

Is base an issue?

Tanglebones wrote:
Hobbes2099 wrote:

The the single base confirmed?
Is it one base for the entire game?

Is base an issue?

Does it belong to us?

MilkmanDanimal wrote:
Tanglebones wrote:
Hobbes2099 wrote:

The the single base confirmed?
Is it one base for the entire game?

Is base an issue?

Does it belong to us?

But above all, will it blend?

It's not a BIG issue. I haven't played X-Com in years, but I remember having more than one base, spacing my multiple bases out across the globe to better detect alien bases and shoot down alien ships before terrorizing a site. I remember feeling smart for doing that and countries not cutting my funding because I was able to keep them happy.

Does the new X-Com need to have this feature in order to be a "proper" and "faithful" remake? I don't know, maybe.

Will I still enjoy this game even if it's only allows one base and only 4 members that in that one squad? I'm pretty sure I will.

Can someone answer my question now?

Hobbes2099 wrote:

The the single base confirmed?
Is it one base for the entire game?

I could see it not being a bad thing. Have a main, massive base, then satellite (Hanger+Radar only jobs) bases for interceptors, or sane fuel loading to have interceptors actually *gasp* patrolling. Which, having a net of patrolling craft with better sensors strikes me as a sane, reasonable way to do it.

I don't care what anybody says, this looks awesome.

Hobbes2099 wrote:

Can someone answer my question now?

tkyl's probably the only one who *could*, but I doubt his job is worth throwing away just yet

Tanglebones wrote:
Hobbes2099 wrote:

Can someone answer my question now?

tkyl's probably the only one who *could*, but I doubt his job is worth throwing away just yet :P

That's basically my confusion; has "a single based" been mentioned in any leaks, screen shots or anything? Or is it just speculation at this point?

Hobbes2099 wrote:
Tanglebones wrote:
Hobbes2099 wrote:

Can someone answer my question now?

tkyl's probably the only one who *could*, but I doubt his job is worth throwing away just yet :P

That's basically my confusion; has "a single based" been mentioned in any leaks, screen shots or anything? Or is it just speculation at this point?

Yes, it has been mentioned. Yes, one single base ever.

So yeah, you only have one base. Building different bases has been removed, but you still buy satellite coverage (the new radar) and build hangars for interception in different countries. Your single base is like way more crazy awesome than any base from the original, though, and presents lots of opportunities for more decision-making in terms of digging deeper as well as what kind of expansion facilities you add on (see the screenshot of the "ant farm" that we put online Monday).

... I sort of want to find out that if you dig down far enough you run into the aliens that live inside the hollow center of the Earth.

Hypatian wrote:

... I sort of want to find out that if you dig down far enough you run into the aliens that live inside the hollow center of the Earth.

Or Creepers.

Hypatian wrote:

... I sort of want to find out that if you dig down far enough you run into the aliens that live inside the hollow center of the Earth.

Remember Losing is 'fun'

If there's one thing I've learned from videogames (especially WoW), it's that the Earth is a thin, fragile skin over teeming evil. The surest path to disaster is to dig a big hole.

I think one complex base with lots of options would be way better than multiple simple ones.

Tanglebones wrote:
MoonDragon wrote:

Am I the only one who's disturbed by "press Y to scan for UFOs" visible in this image?

I am not only disturbed, I am horrified. Nay, my very soul is stricken to the core!

heh, on the small image I read the "funding council report" as "f*cking council report", which gave me a bit of a laugh until I leaned in closer.

Maybe if we're "lucky" the scanner game will be just like the one loved so much in Mass Effect 2!

Whatever the case it's pretty dog-gone exciting to know that this game is in the works.
I think I may dig out my old original XCOM manual and thumb through it for fun.

EDIT: Found it! Glad to see it's still intact. Sadly, most of my gaming-related stuff was ruined in flooding several years ago, but a few of my favorite manuals still remain. Can you guess the other three?

IMAGE(http://www.pucemoose.com/pics/four.jpg)

Is the big grayish one Fallout?

And for the one under X-Com, I'll guess Pool of Radiance, but that's a pretty wild-assed guess.

Malor wrote:

Is the big grayish one Fallout?

And for the one under X-Com, I'll guess Pool of Radiance, but that's a pretty wild-assed guess.

My guess is the second one down is from the Janes Apache game.

The single base design actually makes a lot of sense from a design standpoint. In the original game, once you knew what you were doing, you had one or two bases that were dedicated psy, research, and production hubs. Any bases past that were basically lovingly crafted kill zones manned by your top troops, so that aliens would find them, try to attack them, and eat blaster bomb.

The end result of that design was that most of the base defense missions after the 1st had little drama associated with them.

A single base means that base defense missions, no matter when they are in the game, are important. You're betting the farm when you're attacked, so it makes keeping the base secret early on is incredibly important. It also makes good defensive design an absolute key strategy.

One thing the original game didn't handle very well was the aliens "forgetting" the location of your base the moment you defeat them. If they manage to pinpoint it I don't see why they wouldn't just send every ufo to your location and level the mountain with their guns.

Irongut wrote:
Malor wrote:

Is the big grayish one Fallout?
And for the one under X-Com, I'll guess Pool of Radiance, but that's a pretty wild-assed guess.

My guess is the second one down is from the Janes Apache game.

Verrrry close! The big grey one is Fallout 2, and the one just under the X is the first Fallout.
As for the bottom one, it's the manual for an action/platformer released a couple of years after Fallout 2.

Oh man this game is gonna be pretty awesome.