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Ernie Muppari posted:I actually like the idea of a multilingual X-Com squad. I'll be segregating my squads by nationality. An all Russian squad of Ivans and Vladimirs. A squad of blonde Swedish women and... I'll just stop now.
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Nov 11, 2013 08:36
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Demiurge4 posted:I'll be segregating my squads by nationality. An all Russian squad of Ivans and Vladimirs. A squad of blonde Swedish women and... I'll just stop now. Separate but equal... Because they're all dead.
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Nov 11, 2013 08:38
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Ernie Muppari posted:I actually like the idea of a multilingual X-Com squad. A whole secret agency of polyglot special forces operators! Everybody just uses their mother tongue because there's no need for translation.
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Nov 11, 2013 08:51
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Mr. Unlucky posted:Wow they really hosed this voices thing up. JUST PUT IN SOME loving ACCENTS! There would never be a squad where everyone is speaking different languages that is so loving stupid, and if it's just an across the board everyone speaks arabic or chinese now instead of dudeguy-americana that's as terrible as it is now, who thought this was a good idea? I modded my game to only have Americans and Canadians   
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Nov 11, 2013 08:55
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zylche posted:XCOM: EU was given out as a bonus for Bioshock Infinite. Steam still thinks that I haven't beaten Classic at all so I think the achievement code might be a bit buggy. That's what actually made me buy Bioshock Infinite. I figured I was paying an extra  for Bioshock instead of seeing it as getting Xcom for free. And I think the code is messed up because I don't have my Classic achievement either. They're talking about better modding right? I think I'm going to be ripping sounds from BC2 and Stalker for some of my soldiers. Or go the Blood Dragon route, grab as many cheesy one liners from games as I can and mod armor to be covered in neon. Either way.
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Nov 11, 2013 09:00
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Mr. Unlucky posted:Wow they really hosed this voices thing up. JUST PUT IN SOME loving ACCENTS! There would never be a squad where everyone is speaking different languages that is so loving stupid, and if it's just an across the board everyone speaks arabic or chinese now instead of dudeguy-americana that's as terrible as it is now, who thought this was a good idea? Because it's just some small feature they threw in for giggles, because they were localizing the game to all of those languages together so why not just have some toggle make this happen if it pleases some people? It's not exactly a major feature of the expansion so I don't know what you're bent out of shape about. Firaxis is not a wealthy studio and they actually had to lay off quite a few people during the development of XCOM, so it's not like they have unlimited money to hire a ton of voice actors and do a lot of recording with different accents. Especially if you want feature parity across all localized versions of the game. In the German version would they have to have americans speak accented german? It would increase the costs of the voice work by an exponential amount for only a little aesthetic change not everyone would notice (I didn't actually think about the voices all being american accents until a few months ago). Basically, what I'm saying is that this wouldn't make any real business sense, even if they did have the resources to implement that feature there's no way they'd make that money back, it's too expensive for too little gain. As for the other stuff, this seems like an extremely hasty judgement on something you haven't had your hands on yet. I dunno, none of it seems very out of place and the game had some pretty silly stuff previously.
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Nov 11, 2013 09:03
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:Because it's just some small feature they threw in for giggles, because they were localizing the game to all of those languages together so why not just have some toggle make this happen if it pleases some people? It's not exactly a major feature of the expansion so I don't know what you're bent out of shape about. Firaxis is not a wealthy studio and they actually had to lay off quite a few people during the development of XCOM, so it's not like they have unlimited money to hire a ton of voice actors and do a lot of recording with different accents. Especially if you want feature parity across all localized versions of the game. In the German version would they have to have americans speak accented german? It would increase the costs of the voice work by an exponential amount for only a little aesthetic change not everyone would notice (I didn't actually think about the voices all being american accents until a few months ago). Basically, what I'm saying is that this wouldn't make any real business sense, even if they did have the resources to implement that feature there's no way they'd make that money back, it's too expensive for too little gain. I imagine Firaxis is actually fantastically profitable. Civilization alone probably banks everything they've done but XCOM is another huge money maker. The're a Take2 subsidiary though so they probably control the funding. I've actually been kind of surprised at their marketing strategy because it's a lot different from other studios. XCOM and Civ5 has been given away for free so many times in bundles and special offers it's crazy. I suppose they want to boost sales for expansions and DLC though.
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Nov 11, 2013 09:08
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itskage posted:Dumb stuff reviewers keep doing that everyone should stop doing if you are doing it: RELOAD. How are you not reloading after every firefight? Don't you know that just means halfway through the next fight you'll have half your team out of ammo? I guess on meld levels you might want to rush a bit but on the whale level where burning down the zombies is all you do...
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Nov 11, 2013 09:13
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No midnight release, no preload. drat you Valve! 
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Nov 11, 2013 09:15
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more friedman units posted:A whole secret agency of polyglot special forces operators! Everybody just uses their mother tongue because there's no need for translation. loving BOSS is what that is. I would also accept an esperanto localization of X-Com. Atentemo Konfido EDIT: Bloops, wrong thing pasted. Ernie Muppari fucked around with this message at 09:26 on Nov 11, 2013 |
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Nov 11, 2013 09:17
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Trying Ironman Classic and my luck is really swinging both ways. I build sats on time, the queue has them before the council meeting, only to give me the first month report right before the satellites actually finish, wtf? That cost me quite a lot of money and I am not doing well financially. Slingshot, first mission, mouse goes wonky when aiming a rocket, as it sometimes does, and I blow up Zhang. Great. Next mission, the same Slingshot mission again. Huh? I save Zhang this time. Didn't know that could happen, but I'll take it.
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Nov 11, 2013 09:25
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Speedball posted:…man, am I just a scrub or is Classic that much of a jump over Normal? I'm trying to be smart about everything but I'm still getting my rear end whipped. Normal cheats in your favor, in a way you probably would never notice if you weren't aware of it in the first place. Yes, it's a big jump just because your training wheels got kicked out and you suddenly have to deal with REAL percentages.
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Nov 11, 2013 09:29
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Coolguye posted:Normal cheats in your favor, in a way you probably would never notice if you weren't aware of it in the first place. Yes, it's a big jump just because your training wheels got kicked out and you suddenly have to deal with REAL percentages. Oh, really? drat. Then I guess it's time to learn how to really play XCOM. I should be less apprehensive about blowing poo poo the gently caress up, I suppose?
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Nov 11, 2013 09:31
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Speedball posted:Oh, really? drat. Then I guess it's time to learn how to really play XCOM. Here's the relevant portion of the OP, since it's kinda big: quote:On Easy and Normal, the game also 'stealth cheats' for you, as well. Every successive shot you miss will give your soldiers hidden bonuses to Aim, so if you keep plinking away at those 45% shots you will almost certainly see one hit. Aliens are less likely to hit you successively in the same manner. It's generally not a good idea to spend a lot of time on Easy/Normal for this reason, since it will give you bad habits that won't translate well to higher difficulty levels. To answer your question, yeah, blowing up poo poo is critical to a good mission. You don't even need to kill with your explosives, just remove the cover so your soldiers can shoot at the exposed aliens. Though on Classic your explosives will murder most things until Mutons start showing up, so the point is somewhat academic.
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Nov 11, 2013 09:37
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Coolguye posted:Normal cheats in your favor, in a way you probably would never notice if you weren't aware of it in the first place. Yes, it's a big jump just because your training wheels got kicked out and you suddenly have to deal with REAL percentages. Yup, and it does that while buffing aliens in battle a bit, removing the limit on how many can attack you at a time, and slightly increasing the difficulty on the geoscape. It would be really nice if normal was just a bit more like classic since, for me at least, classic is to intense for me to relax while playing (particularly when I get to Confounding Light), but normal is just too easy (like, I barely have a reason to have my squaddies do anything interesting).
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Nov 11, 2013 09:37
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Speedball posted:Oh, really? drat. Then I guess it's time to learn how to really play XCOM. The lives of your soldier are far, far more important than being able to recover one or two weapon fragments. Just don't OVER do it. Fire when you're able, blow it up when you must. Or if they're 4 sectoids just clumped up together, because then, then it's just too hard to resist. A good trick in theses cases is to open fire with who you can, and leave your grenade for last to see if anything's still alive.
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Nov 11, 2013 09:38
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Demiurge4 posted:I imagine Firaxis is actually fantastically profitable. Civilization alone probably banks everything they've done but XCOM is another huge money maker. The're a Take2 subsidiary though so they probably control the funding. I've actually been kind of surprised at their marketing strategy because it's a lot different from other studios. XCOM and Civ5 has been given away for free so many times in bundles and special offers it's crazy. I suppose they want to boost sales for expansions and DLC though. I was really surprised when the layoffs hit but it was a thing that happened. I believe both prior to the release of civ 5 and xcom there were layoff waves at Firaxis. I can't really speculate why it happened, but suffice to say they don't exactly have unlimited resources. Coolguye posted:Here's the relevant portion of the OP, since it's kinda big: I really don't like that hidden cheating in favor of the player. It should be upfront about it, because it ultimately just serves to reinforce bad habits and doesn't help the player improve. If players don't know their 45% shots are actually 65% shots or whatever then they get a mistaken "feel" for those percentages. Because people generally don't actually just innately know what these kind of percentages mean and have to experience them to know. If the game was actually visibly boosting the percentage chance to hit (with a tooltip explaining it's because you're on easy or whatever) then it would at least not actively sabotage a player's effort in learning the game like the current implementation does. Dr. Video Games 0031 fucked around with this message at 09:43 on Nov 11, 2013 |
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Nov 11, 2013 09:38
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:I was really surprised when the layoffs hit but it was a thing that happened. I believe both prior to the release of civ 5 and xcom there were layoff waves at Firaxis. I can't really speculate why it happened, but suffice to say they don't exactly have unlimited resources. They basically happened for the same reason why Brian Fargo went back to Kickstarter to start fundraising for Tides of Numenera while Wasteland 2 was in heavy development. Game development is a very boom or bust sort of cycle. Obviously, you have lots of creative directors like artists and writers, software architects, graphic designers, programmers, people of all sorts of stripes. In 'pre-production', the creative directors and software architects basically work furiously to come up with a full, clear, and attainable vision for what the game should be, how it should play, and how they should go about making it. They have an absolutely mammoth amount of work to do because they're effectively doing the work God did before the Garden of Eden. There is nothingness, and they are thinking into being a thing. After pre-production is done, though, they have increasingly little to do. The first 25% of development time they will be required by the building team (the graphic designers and programmers) to answer questions, provide guidance, and modify the design document when faults and inconsistencies inevitably come up. Quite soon, however, this design team has no truly productive work to do on the project. Conversely, during the design process, the building team has no truly productive work to do. To expect them to build anything would be like expecting construction workers to build a bridge without any blueprints. There are two ways you can resolve this issue. The one most commonly used by the game industry as a whole (not just Firaxis or anyone) is to basically consider the building team to be expendable. You bring them on after the design team has finished their work, and after they finish their building work, you fire them. This is why being in the games industry sucks so loving much unless you're a big shot. The one that people are trying to use more frequently is to carefully time projects such that you always have meaningful work for both teams to do. The design team moves on to a new game after the building team is off and humming, and then the second the first game is released you throw the building team over to the next. Brian Fargo actually explained this exact dynamic in his pitch for Tides of Numenera - if he didn't get another game going, he was gonna have to fire the Wasteland 2 team after WL2 went gold. He hated the idea of doing that, so he went and looked for funding for a new game so he could keep them around. The entire thing requires a ton of finesse, though, and if you gently caress it up you can still end up with a good 3 month period where one team doesn't have enough to do, and you're paying some very highly skilled people some very good money to basically sit around and do nothing. In Firaxis's case, it's actually a really new thing for them to have two successful IPs at once to DO this with. If you look back at their history, you basically see Civ, Civ, and more Civ, with occasional forays into something a lot like Civ (Alpha Centauri), and questionably-spirited tries at old ideas (Pirates!). XCOM is the first time they've had a game come close to matching Civ's success to keep a team around after a release, so it doesn't surprise me they haven't gotten the fine timing down yet, particularly with how tortured XCOM's development was. Coolguye fucked around with this message at 10:01 on Nov 11, 2013 |
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Nov 11, 2013 09:53
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Coolguye posted:Excellent development talk. I remember the talk around the Kickstarter thread when they announced Torment and I myself was a bit annoyed at it and thinking "I wish they wouldn't use Kickstarter as a general fundraiser". I like Kickstarter to help small studios start up but now I totally understand the thinking they used and see it as a good thing. I hope XCOM helps Firaxis branch out though because I'd love their take on a space colonization game ala Master of Orion if they're serious about reliving the glory days of Microprose.
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Nov 11, 2013 10:29
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:They didn't, he said as much on his twitter. No early XCOM for him. Kind of silly considering the people there who actively wanted him to have an early copy but the people in video game PR are known for having their heads up their asses at all times. There's probably some Firaxis bigwig that has to sign off on early copies that thinks LPs harm the industry.
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Nov 11, 2013 10:34
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Coolguye posted:They basically happened for the same reason why Brian Fargo went back to Kickstarter to start fundraising for Tides of Numenera while Wasteland 2 was in heavy development. I know about the cycle, it just seemed odd to me considering they actually did have multiple projects in development at the time of the layoffs, so I was unsure of the exact causes.
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Nov 11, 2013 10:54
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I remember a (darkly) hilarious story that was doing the rounds a while ago - a company got caught in limbo between development cycles and had literally nothing happening for them. The team suggested they maybe start putting together assets and the like for a possible expansion, to keep themselves from getting rusty more than anything, but were told no and just to wait a bit longer. Most of them ended up playing Doom all day, starting their own little home games or just goofing off and effectively staring at their desks. They ended up making an expansion pack anyway. e; my fairy is back  I need to find and kiss the one responsible.
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Nov 11, 2013 11:13
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Demiurge4 posted:hope XCOM helps Firaxis branch out though because I'd love their take on a space colonization game ala Master of Orion if they're serious about reliving the glory days of Microprose. Man, Firaxis doing their reboot/take on MOO or SMAC they way they did for XCOM would be too much to hope for.
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Nov 11, 2013 11:19
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Hey, I liked the Pirates! Reboot. 
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Nov 11, 2013 11:33
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SMAC is such a weird oversight. I'm sure it doesn't do Civilization numbers but it seemed to at least be a cult hit. There's so much more interesting things to do with terraforming and colonizing new planets and new interesting tech. Yet it just lays there doing nothing. Sure we occasionally get a space strat game but nothing like SMAC where you're down on the ground.
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Nov 11, 2013 11:34
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SMAC had at least three times the hard science checking of Mass Effect - People just aren't interested in setting creation anymore.
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Nov 11, 2013 11:53
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It also has a lot more competition than something like X-Com or Civ. There's been a shitload of space strategy games lately, both turn based and real time. Regardless of whether or not they are any good, but X-Com and Civ are somewhat distinctive at least when you're just browsing games in a store like Steam.
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Nov 11, 2013 12:21
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An optimist me would think that the furor that a SMAC reboot would cause amongst the elder gaming generations would be advertisement enough for the younger gamers to pour their cash into it. Seriously, I can't think of a single person who played SMAC and didn't  themselves at the thought of a reboot.
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Nov 11, 2013 12:32
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Alpha Centauri is up there with Master of Orion 2 and Master of Magic as games I can only hope will be equaled again one day. What's amazing to me is that they're all unbalanced and easy to break in half, but that's also part of the fun instead of killing enthusiasm for the game. AC still has the best fiction in any video game I've seen. I'm certain a big reason why those three have such a legacy is because they easily lend themselves to an organic narrative. AC has its fiction, MoO2 and MoM have a lot of stuff you can customize to your playstyle, etc; just like the original X-COM did. I hope Firaxis makes the sequel to EU/EW a lot more freeform in terms of the campaign since while the battle part is mostly great, the real potential is meta stuff (like medals!) for me when it comes to being attached to your soldiers and their fight against alien scum.
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Nov 11, 2013 12:33
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toasterwarrior posted:Alpha Centauri is up there with Master of Orion 2 and Master of Magic as games I can only hope will be equaled again one day. What's amazing to me is that they're all unbalanced and easy to break in half, but that's also part of the fun instead of killing enthusiasm for the game. AC still has the best fiction in any video game I've seen. There was this one poster that would post gigantic essays cataloging every problem with the game. Every bug, every loophole everything he considered unbalanced and raging about what a horrible godawful waste of time the game was. He must have spent hundreds of hours pouring over it. At the time I couldn't even figure out what was wrong with the guy (now of course you can go to any RPG/Strategy forum and see the same thing). He was banned eventually.
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Nov 11, 2013 12:46
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There's implassic, but what I'd really like to see is a mod that reins in Classic's galloping panic just a little bit. Just so you get a little time to breathe and try more than one possible Geoscape approach. Classic Battlescape is quite well balanced imho, though you do get some really profoundly unfair missions from time to time, like certain Small Scount landings are in the most literal possible sense a shooting gallery for the aliens. You're always on edge though because you can't guarantee your veterans aren't going to bite it, all you can do is take reasonable precautions. So you have to make sure you have backup plans in place, and it helps a lot with preventing the gameplay from falling into an autopilot script and making the player permanently lose interest. A mod to make SHIVs and Alloy SHIVs available without needing Experimental Warfare and a Foundry (and a chunk of a power generator to power that Foundry) would also be nice. SHIVs are expensive for the early game, so they wouldn't be super OP (and over-reliance on them would really come back to bite you on short order anyway) but they'd mix up tactical play a lot. If EW weren't coming out in four days (  ) I might actually have a crack at doing that.Normal is too heavily skewed in the player's favour, but I'm still going to play my first game of XCOM:EW on Normal, because you kinda have to know how all the systems work playing Classic in order to avoid get hosed in the rear end by certain late-game surprises. Oh cool, the Hyperwave Beacon just summoned this UFO I can't shoot down, it'll take me a month and a half to research something that can and I'm pouring all my resources into fighter development to deal with this thing. Oh cool, now there's Elite Mutons and Ethereals in UFO boss rooms and they're massacring my squads because I didn't know I had to have multiple MC-capable Psi Operatives to counter them.
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Nov 11, 2013 14:16
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The first few months of Classic, when you have to deal with UFOs and Thin Men, and then your first terror mission, are super rough. Afterwards, it becomes pretty smooth sailing if you play well. My metric was if I can make it through the first terror mission the rest of the campaign will generally go alright even if there's a catastrophic fuckup along the line.
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Nov 11, 2013 14:32
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So I wanted to replay an iron man classic game before Enemy Within and I'm doing really well. One of the sectoid commanders is in high cover so I'll just move slightly forward to grena-  There goes my A-Team.
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Nov 11, 2013 14:32
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Demiurge4 posted:So I wanted to replay an iron man game before Enemy Within and I'm doing really well. One of the sectoid commanders is in high cover so I'll just move slightly forward to grena- Vahlen looks hilariously smug there for some reason.
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Nov 11, 2013 14:33
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poptart_fairy posted:Vahlen looks hilariously smug there for some reason. "I warned you about using explosives"
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Nov 11, 2013 14:39
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itskage posted:Dumb stuff reviewers keep doing that everyone should stop doing if you are doing it: Darkhold posted:The thing that drove me crazy in most of those vids: Is it that time again? Because boy howdy. Dumb stuff I hate in the preview and review vids, usually with Firaxis staff on deck: You wanna do this obvious mouse trap move? I know people are new to these games. I know people might want to see things gently caress up gloriously. But please, don't have people do that by your accord and suggestion. Don't have the reviewers at your behest and choices run into open territory at the last guy making a move. poptart_fairy posted:e; my fairy is back Neat. You need to save that .gif 
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Nov 11, 2013 14:40
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poptart_fairy posted:Vahlen looks hilariously smug there for some reason. It's because she's the Enemey you see. I really hadn't realized how much I loathe her until I started typing this post. Exercise restraint while using explosives you say. What false advertising. My I/I clear was a festival of explosions. All it was missing was the 1812 overture.
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Nov 11, 2013 14:45
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So when is EW scheduled to drop on steam? Is there going to be a midnight release or is the fact it is dlc going to prevent that?
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Nov 11, 2013 15:20
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Dinictus posted:Neat. You need to save that .gif Actually, whenever someone's avatar changes, their original stays on the server. If you look at the end of the URL, the last number goes up incrementally whenever the avatar changes. So with Poptarts here, it seems they've had their avatar change away from the fairy and back again several times, because their current avatar is 0003.gif, and 2 and 1 are both the same gif. Also you can change it to .jpg or .png to see what other avatars the person has had. So poptart_fairy has previously had  and  as avatars! It can be neat to check your own avatars that way, if you've had a lot of changes.I kinda miss this one I used to have.. 
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Nov 11, 2013 15:36
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ThePhenomenalBaby posted:So when is EW scheduled to drop on steam? Is there going to be a midnight release or is the fact it is dlc going to prevent that? DLC sometimes gets a midnight release but I think it's been stated that EW is not going to.
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Nov 11, 2013 15:46
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