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Turin Turambar posted:This is kind of funny, because precisely if you are backer, you should know it was going to have low production values. They got $2M funding, including from backers like you. Battletech was 2.7 mill on KS and compare how that looks and feels. Also PP became an Epic store exclusive, which should have brought in additional money.
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Dec 4, 2019 14:53
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Its strange to think that the X-Com remake was so good that everything else is loving terrible in comparison. Gotta get them to do it again I guess.
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Dec 4, 2019 14:55
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Alchenar posted:I think that's likely to be a recurring criticism of mine. Why, for example, was it important to have three resources rather than one? Because they do different things and having 3 resources used for different things means you can have a trading and raiding system for the neutral factions?
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Dec 4, 2019 14:56
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DatonKallandor posted:Because they do different things and having 3 resources used for different things means you can have a trading and raiding system for the neutral factions? I suppose the question then is whether or not those interactions end up feeling meaningful or if it's just so much busywork you're forcing the player to engage in because you've confused "tedious poo poo to do" with "gameplay depth." I haven't played far enough in yet to say whether or not that's the case, but at least early on I'm looking at the amount of resources and the costs of equipment and don't think I'm really going to have to worry about engaging with those systems much. Maybe that changes mid- to late-game on higher difficulties.
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Dec 4, 2019 15:00
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Just went and looked at a few numbers. Hollow Knight has been developed by 4 people on a US$39k budget; it's a completely different game, of course, but it goes a long way to show what can be done on a skinny budget but with awesome art/sound direction. Battletech is probably a better example (3D game, similar jank to PP and a closer $2.7mil budget), but it's undeniable that it had a shitton more of personality, especially regarding characters, cutscenes, etc. That Italian Guy fucked around with this message at 15:08 on Dec 4, 2019 |
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Dec 4, 2019 15:01
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That Italian Guy posted:Just went and looked at a few numbers. Hollow Knight has been developed by 4 people on a US$39k budget; it's a completely different game, of course, but it goes a long way to show what can be done on a skinny budget but with awesome art/sound direction. And Harebrained Schemes is based in Seattle, hardly a low-cost dev environment. Phoenix Point being developed in Eastern Europe was actually pushed as a selling point because they were cutting labor costs significantly. Of course HS was an established studio and they probably had Shadowrun money to address cost overruns, whereas Snapshot Games is much newer (they made one game previously, I think?).
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Dec 4, 2019 15:07
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Battletech owned on release despite the jank, and continues to own through all the DLC and mods, even if I think the entire pilot skill system could use another pass. But I will always work to ensure Yang's quest for the perfect burg will be fulfilled should his request ever pop up.
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Dec 4, 2019 15:08
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Xarbala posted:Battletech owned on release despite the jank, and continues to own through all the DLC and mods, even if I think the entire pilot skill system could use another pass. But I will always work to ensure Yang's quest for the perfect burg will be fulfilled should his request ever pop up. The Training Day missions where you protect the rookies while they lick enemy rear end and shout OSCAR MIKE are perfect
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Dec 4, 2019 15:11
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dogstile posted:Its strange to think that the X-Com remake was so good that everything else is loving terrible in comparison. Gotta get them to do it again I guess. And then they went hard into the Steam Workshop for X Com 2 creating even more of a gap. People are still creating some amazing stuff and pushing the engine to the limit.
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Dec 4, 2019 15:11
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Darkest Dungeon had a $313k budget (with a 75k target) https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1460250988/darkest-dungeon-by-red-hook-studios. Again, 2D game, but you don't have to do a 3D game in order to deliver a "tactical" game with a shitton of personality. E: in the case of X-COM fans specifically, you could have had a superb isometric new XCOM and people would have probably been happy for it to more closely resemble the old school one lol. Something like Xenonauts but with the personality/polish of new XCOM would totally be my jam. E2: point in case, Xenonauts1 had a $154k budget  https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/69341191/xenonauts/description. Imagine that kind of game with a 2mil budget and good art/sound direction.
That Italian Guy fucked around with this message at 15:18 on Dec 4, 2019 |
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Dec 4, 2019 15:12
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That Italian Guy posted:E2: point in case, Xenonauts1 had a $154k budget With a $2M budget it would have been awful, I confidently predict. Knowing how to make a $150K thing well doesn't correlate at all to knowing how to make good use of more than ten times as much money. They'd be better off, in this highly hypothetical situation, making 6 games at $250K each plus some DLC budget and a bunch of marketing. E: "normal" increasingly means "normal if you play computer games occasionally but aren't experienced with the genre", versus something like "veteran" or "advanced" for players who understand the core mechanics and tradeoffs. I think it's reasonable to have the default path be accessible for people who are using a game as an entry to a new genre, but it's best to label it as such so that people who "should" be on a higher level are more likely to be.
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Dec 4, 2019 15:27
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DatonKallandor posted:Because they do different things and having 3 resources used for different things means you can have a trading and raiding system for the neutral factions? Not really all that meaningfully. Compare the three resources to, say, alloys, credits and elerium from XCOM. They are three different resources that you get in different ways and in different quantities for different uses. Want more money, build more satellites. Want more elerium, pretty much your only option is going after UFOs. By contrast, food/tech/materials are all obtained in more or less the same ways. Scan poo poo on the world map, do supply missions, research stuff or trade.Yeah you can build a steady supply of food if you need to which is like satellite gameplay if you squint, but beyond that the resources feel very interchangeable. I pretty much never found myself in an elerium situation where I was cheering that I got a good haul, for example. The lack of researchers and engineers as possible resources doesn't help either. Honestly, the game just feels pathetically easy overall. I'm playing on the hardest difficulty in quasi ironman (because lol @ trusting a new game to not gently caress up) and I've had only a single meaningful setback in the entire campaign. I did a nest raid mission where the game decided to spawn a layout that required me to funnel my troops through a one tile corridor against over a dozen enemies lined up in ambush formation with grenade launchers. Due to line of sight bullshit the first guy in line was the only person who could shoot, and my squad was instantly wiped out by grenades because it was impossible to space them out. Reloaded, exited the mission, came back to a map that wasn't broken af and wiped the floor with them in five minutes. I have no idea why you'd ever raid unless that becomes an endgame thing. Simply flying around and hitting events gets me more resources than I have to spend, and that is while purposely avoiding resource collection missions, because why would I bother playing more tactical maps? I've actually run out of research in the early game, which feels like a goddamn cardinal sin for this sort of game.
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Dec 4, 2019 15:48
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I've not played yet, but hearing all of the criticism is disheartening, I was really excited for this one. I do have a question though. Why don't some people like the FPS aiming mechanic? Being able to shoot with a ring instead of dealing with crazy RNG numbers sounds much better to me. Granted, I understand you might hit part of the ring the enemy is not in, and that sometimes it might get caught on environmental stuff, but this looks like a vast improvement to me? Is the ring mechanic fake and it just does a RNG calculation on whatever is at the center of the cursor? If the entire ring is filled by the enemy, are you guaranteed to land every bullet? Also, the launch of this game just reminded me about the existence of the greatest XCOM game ever made, Xenonauts. And to be clear, this is not a matter of subjective taste and personal preferences, but an objective fact. So if you were disappointed by this one and somehow never played that one, give it a try, it is probably online for $2 at this point if it is now, it will be for the Christmas Steam sale. The new XCOM games are certainly impressive graphically but there are two core mechanics in them which makes me not a huge fan. I truly despise the free move enemies get when you first see them, it either means you have to exploit it, you have to play super cautiously or you have to get destroyed by things out of your control. Also, they took away my time units! Give me back my time units dammit! I'm a big boy now, I can both walk and chew guns at the same time. Diogines fucked around with this message at 16:58 on Dec 4, 2019 |
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Dec 4, 2019 16:09
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I think the problem with xenonauts is mostly in "what the gently caress, reapers" and that terror missions are complete unabashed bullshit.
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Dec 4, 2019 16:22
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Xenonauts is overlong and excessively uninspiring, but there's no accounting for taste. I'm waiting for PP to appear on Game Pass. It seems this 90's superdev curse keeps on trucking.
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Dec 4, 2019 17:08
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I think the game is pretty good so far. It's about on par with how I remember vanilla XCOM. The problem is you have way better, more polished options (assuming you didn't get burned out of playing xcom 2) and with the game being on Epic's store you probably won't have modders rushing in to fill the gap. [e] Did they change the music from the alpha? I remember the battle track being a banging electronic song. DrManiac fucked around with this message at 17:14 on Dec 4, 2019 |
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Dec 4, 2019 17:12
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I think the most hosed up part of the game is how they managed to mess up the ONE soundtrack during battles. Clearly they are trying to make something similar to old xcom music and took inspiration from this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RulD-L_5cOI&t=197s and couple of other tracks with the droning I mean listen to this version too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoD1nA6fzik But they seemed to only understood the droning part and the creepy jingle without understanding it also doesn't need to be grating to listen to and maybe have a melodic section as well though not completely necessary its sad really boredsatellite fucked around with this message at 17:26 on Dec 4, 2019 |
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Dec 4, 2019 17:12
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Sandepande posted:Xenonauts is overlong and excessively uninspiring, but there's no accounting for taste. How is Xenonauts 2 shaping up, anyway?
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Dec 4, 2019 17:18
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everything fun is buried under five or six things that ain't.
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Dec 4, 2019 17:27
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Diogines posted:I've not played yet, but hearing all of the criticism is disheartening, I was really excited for this one. I do have a question though. Thats my problem. The ring lies, or there's something else afoot. Ive taken shots with a sniper where the entire inner circle is absolutely full and the outer circle is made up of the rest of the targets body, fire, and nothing. I think the cryogenic lab mission had a disproportionately high amount of occurances for this for some reason.
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Dec 4, 2019 17:30
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I haven't had a single instance of the ring lying yet, that wasn't explainable by a buggy invisible wall (these are easy to spot because the game knows there's a wall and won't highlight the target's body parts). The invisible wall thing happened once so far. It absolutely isn't faking it and just doing a hit percentage - they do calculate every bullet (you can easily see that by how the destrutability works).
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Dec 4, 2019 17:37
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So I sank most of my afternoon into it by now. The game is slowly growing on me, the faction intros are kinda nice, the faction recruited soldiers come with their own gear, the mist is nasty, mind-control critters are horrible, cause if they mind-control a soldier who has a medpack they will use it on them. Destroyed faction havens can (probably) not be rebuilt. But you also get nice toys over time: the indie faction has a huge LMG, your heavies get a MGL with a ton of ammo, so you can level maps. And once you get the rocket buggy things become quite fun. If you can get over the bad music and low production value there's an ok game underneath it seems.
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Dec 4, 2019 17:40
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Note on the 3rd difficulty and up faction soldiers don't come with weapons anymore, only faction armor. That significantly ups the difficulty.
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Dec 4, 2019 17:58
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Dec 4, 2019 17:58
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If your soldier is behind full cover, and you go to shoot an enemy with return fire, your soldier gets out of cover and then gets shot by the enemy and any other enemies that are on overwatch. Sometimes the enemy you are shooting at gets to shoot you first for some reason. It’s better to be behind half cover in this situation because then you don’t step totally out of cover to shoot. Or, you get return fire on your guys and just go on overwatch and never offensively fire on anyone and probably come out ahead. What is this.
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Dec 4, 2019 18:07
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Pharmaskittle posted:Trip report: I'm still somehow hanging on in my first campaign with 3 soldiers after losing 2 by underestimating the need to carry multiple medkits for bleeding. Those remaining three are a well oiled machine by now Lol I got ambushed while desperately looking for recruit havens and encountered two new enemy types, one of which completely wrecked my remaining squad. Pretty appropriate ending to my first campaign, hyped to start another tonight.
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Dec 4, 2019 18:14
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These "Destroy X of faction Y" missions are annoying. Once you clear the map the mission should auto-complete, instead you still gotta blow up 5 generators.
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Dec 4, 2019 19:23
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In the hardest difficulty faction soldiers comes with nothing. Actually I think most people should just start on legend difficulty otherwise a lot of the systems are not engaging at all. Even on legend I feel the resources system is ill balanced, after a few hours my income from just running missions and exploring the map completely outpaced my ability to spend it. The ring, while able to do some cool poo poo like doing limb targeting or shooting out a piece of cover, has its own problem. Early on your troops are not that accurate and having less people (less action available) means it's hard to capitalize on any opening you create. The more complicated system also makes damage less predictable. Your shot can hit body parts with differing amount of armor, or even weapon, which has separate health pool. I feel it makes shooting in general too fiddly, taking up too much time for each shot when it should be snappy. When I read about the evolution system I felt they needed like 5-10 different mutations for each body part for each alien to pull it off in a satisfactory manner and I feel even now there's maybe 3 different mutation max for some part for even the most common alien. I think give it a year with all the DLC and some polish is the way to go though I think there's some fundamental design issues that I doubt will be tackled that'll make the game truly great and provide a tight experience like XCOM. pedro0930 fucked around with this message at 19:57 on Dec 4, 2019 |
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Dec 4, 2019 19:33
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I backed this and started up the epic launcher this morning, drat thing hasn't moved past 75% on the downloads yet it's still killing my bandwidth somehow. Oddly enough the download seems to progress faster if I pause it, according to the info the launcher is giving me.
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Dec 4, 2019 19:47
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Here's the thing about free aiming: a) it's completely free to do so do it every time so it's not special, b) puppeting your soldiers constantly like that removes any sense that 'they' are taking the shot and so removes your willingness to care about them, c) adds very little to the game tactically. Compare contrast with Battletech which has a basically identical concept of shooting 'body parts' to disable an enemy but makes the ability to do that in a deliberate sense a tactical choice that you have to expend a resource to do. Caros posted:Not really all that meaningfully. This. XCOM's resource system is based around credits/supplies as your primary resource, with secondary resources channelling your decisions on when and what to invest in. You also have direct gameplay decisions to make about whether you want to take risks for extra resources. In Phoenix point the three resources could just be replaced with one resource called 'supplies' and there would be no functional difference in how you played the game. This is classic 'a game being complicated does not mean it is complex' stuff.
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Dec 4, 2019 20:23
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I've never seen a game where body parts being a thing is more important than in Phoenix Point. I literally can't understand how you could possibly think different. It even works similarily to Battletech, because just like Battletech your actual positioning relative to the enemy determines which body parts you'll hit - just even more so, because it's not 4 facing, it's fully simulated.
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Dec 4, 2019 20:26
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Letting free aiming be usable every single turn with zero drawback is a weird choice, though. I feel like the default shot is fine for stuff like the hell cannon since it seems to select the easiest possible shot, but I feel like it should be a little more special. Just have it use like, ONE will point so I feel like I'm managing something. Still enjoying the game a lot though
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Dec 4, 2019 20:32
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boredsatellite posted:I think the most hosed up part of the game is how they managed to mess up the ONE soundtrack during battles.
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Dec 4, 2019 20:36
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When this hits game pass I'll give it a shot but in the meantime: do you HAVE to use free aim or is it totally optional? It looks really tedious. Beagle bashed something for zero and showed some other guy bashing for four; is that because they were bad soldiers to do it, bad weapons to do it, or both? Is directing reaction fire and overwatch cones as busted as it seems?
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Dec 4, 2019 21:53
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RBA Starblade posted:When this hits game pass I'll give it a shot but in the meantime: do you HAVE to use free aim or is it totally optional? It looks really tedious. Beagle bashed something for zero and showed some other guy bashing for four; is that because they were bad soldiers to do it, bad weapons to do it, or both? Is directing reaction fire and overwatch cones as busted as it seems? You don't have to use it, but because it's always an option and there's a marginal advantage to using it, it ends up being busywork you feel obliged to do.
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Dec 4, 2019 22:20
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RBA Starblade posted:When this hits game pass I'll give it a shot but in the meantime: do you HAVE to use free aim or is it totally optional? It looks really tedious. Beagle bashed something for zero and showed some other guy bashing for four; is that because they were bad soldiers to do it, bad weapons to do it, or both? Is directing reaction fire and overwatch cones as busted as it seems? I don't know what's busted about overwatch. It gives you a little bit more control on what you want to hit while you do have to have some slight idea on where the enemy may come from. You don't have to free aim, I think you just aim center mass if you don't. You get sort of a highlight effect on where you are aiming at even if you don't use free-aim.
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Dec 4, 2019 22:38
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Get shotguns and grenade launchers asap. Starting guns loving suck. Do I have to do the second faction mission to unlock their tech? Sirens are retardedly tanky currently as are the big 4 legged guys that cum goo from 400 meters away without LoS.
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Dec 4, 2019 22:39
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So, are evolving enemies actually a thing in this? That sounded interesting.
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Dec 4, 2019 22:59
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The overwatch cone rules. It's easy to control and lets my guy watch out for a crab man coming through a doorway 30ft away to snip his head off instead of taking a potshot at one repositioning on the other side of the map.
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Dec 4, 2019 23:04
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Ersatz posted:So, are evolving enemies actually a thing in this? That sounded interesting. Yes. So there are a bunch of base models of enemies and they start out with a few different arm choices. So on one mission they might have a melee arm and shield arm and on another they might have a machinegun and grenade launcher. As the game goes on the enemies unlock more specialized body parts and start being able to swap out for new heads/bodies/legs with special abilities too. You start seeing stuff like increased armor/health, acid spit attacks from the head, the ability to generate a cloud of ink to provide cover etc. Every enemy of that base type will spawn the same within a given mission, but they can change radically between missions Zore fucked around with this message at 23:16 on Dec 4, 2019 |
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Dec 4, 2019 23:09
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