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StratGoatCom posted:More seriously, this talk of a new era at firaxis, the departure of a fair number of big names (and who knows how many of the smaller ones), especially the studio head, right after a pretty bad commercial failure and strategically announcing a new civ* at exact the time after two big departures? i tried to ask Jake if there's any hints on what he's ostensibly running to on twitter but he didn't respond also hi i'm back
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Feb 22, 2023 17:58
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 14:52 |
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missed opportunities could be growing wild rice, MN wild rice is to die for
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Feb 25, 2023 09:57
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to rehash the conversation regarding x-piratez in brief for those that aren't familiar, the short version is: mechanically it's pretty cool but there's not really a win condition the way other xcom games have and the art is 110% someone working through a very deep and unresolved fetish
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Mar 15, 2023 16:26
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Night10194 posted:Speaking of piratez I have discovered a powerful speedrun strat for the X-Prison. Just use the pickaxe you're supposed to use to escape your cells to kill anyone you punch out on the ground, since it can target them there. The enemies will panic and surrender before you're done with the second floor. for a minute here i thought i had clicked on the Cataclysm thread and we were discussing how to reliably get out of the prison start and i was extremely confused
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Mar 15, 2023 22:49
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i'm still not clear on how a repeater actually accomplishes its task of doing the work of like 15 bullets at once but you know what i'll allow it
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May 3, 2023 08:13
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there are certain achievements that should not exist and that one is definitely one of them
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May 6, 2023 03:25
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SPARKs are used as your base of fire, basically. you use them to establish the core of your shooting strength and their upgrades let you expand on that in various ways. bulwark stuff means that SPARKs will be resistant to return fire, war machine line means it will generally try to make sure there is nobody alive to return fire. i prefer the latter, by a lot. they become more important on Impossible when everyone's got that extra 1 or 2 health that means they survive extra shots. the SPARK's autocannon has that extra damage that means they will still confirm kills. later on this becomes even more important as hunter protocol can really take a chunk out of an incoming enemy pod and make the resultant tactical situation much more simple
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May 14, 2023 07:08
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i don't think firaxis is as large as relic, iirc that is still a huge chunk of the studio. i suspect a number of deals fell through in the wake of midnight suns not selling that great. like don't get me wrong, firaxis did a fine job and the game isn't bad, but they kinda hit the perfect storm of marvel fatigue and it seemed very here one week and completely gone the next.
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May 31, 2023 20:30
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it was a marvel story, yeah, and those haven't just been wearing out their welcome the last 3-4 years, they've just flatly been getting dumber as writers continually reach for something that hasn't already been done almost beat for beat in the MCU. one of my regular movie group brought The Immortals a few weeks ago and that movie was just terrible, the story basically contradicted itself with its own nonsense and the characters were the least interesting people i've seen in a movie in years.
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May 31, 2023 20:58
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yea midnight suns is fine as a marvel story, i want to be clear. but people have been kind of drifting from the marvel formula for a while from overexposure so i can totally get the fatigue with it too.
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Jun 1, 2023 05:44
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i think xcom 2 base holds up pretty well, but the Chosen are loving obnoxious because they have exactly one setting and never shut up. the Hunter's setting is at least an okay setting but good god last time i played i beelined the warlock just so i wouldn't have to hear his loving voice anymore.
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Jun 2, 2023 01:44
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book club with cap sounds awesome tbh
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Jun 3, 2023 20:16
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GlyphGryph posted:I want to say I would have played if they'd done some sort of original superhero IP, where you can build a team of supers from scratch, identifying talent and then fleshing them out. Now THAT sounds like it would have been fun. That’s basically freedom force. That game was kind of dire to for other reasons.
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Jun 4, 2023 17:18
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my personal take is that the base game is plenty long enough without extra extensions, especially if you're playing with war of the chosen installed. but that's far from a universal notion. lots of folks enjoy the much longer arrangement long war gives and they are also correct in their thinking.
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Jun 8, 2023 07:46
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Dongicus posted:You can like something while also thinking its bad for most people lol case in point i still like helldivers
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Jun 8, 2023 19:54
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bradford's big fish stories are the funniest thing in any xcom game in history
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Jun 24, 2023 17:21
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The soundbite I give people about Phoenix point is that while it is not a bad game, it fully explains why Jake Solomon did not aggressively seek Gollup’s collaboration on his XCOM game.
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Jun 28, 2023 21:40
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the primary criticism for xenonauts 2 is that there's precious little to distinguish it from xenonauts 1. that said, xenonauts 1 was far from a bad game so if you missed out on it the first time it's a wonderful time to snag it. JA doesn't have the same strategic game, i find.
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Jul 20, 2023 07:58
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Kazzah posted:Hey, did anyone save a copy of these gifs? They've been down for years, and I really liked them. I believe beagle was using a mod to put like twenty soldiers into a mission, and the camera was going nuts trying to pan between them all overwatch-reacting. aw gently caress. yeah that's exactly what was happening there, sucks that they died. i unfortunately do not have copies though, sorry. Alchenar posted:Firaxis have fairly successfully shepherded Civ through various lead devs, I struggle to think they're just going to let the XCOM IP lie on the shelf. chimera squad was explicitly released as an experiment on the xcom formula to see how people would react to it - like, there were literally interviews and press releases stating that specifically. i'm REALLY not sure where the card based stuff is coming from on CS. the game plays nothing like midnight suns. it makes much more sense if you think of it in the context of trying to work up to an XCOM Apocalypse sort of style, where you would be spending a lot of time in smaller engagement zones/going room to room. anyways, firaxis as a whole is kinda low ebb right now. civ is 7 years without a major entry and 6 is generally considered a step down from 5. beyond earth did quite poorly. midnight suns also didn't do great. it wasn't just jake that departed, a lot of senior staff left. it'll probably be quite some time yet before we see anything major on any front since at this point the only major leadership position that hasn't turned over is sid himself afaik.
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Jul 24, 2023 08:40
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StratGoatCom posted:Also, Midnight suns was objectively a disaster for the studio, given how much money that marvel white elephant ate to little gain, yeah it's a shame that midnight suns beat up the studio so bad because it's not a bad game per se, but it's also not a 250 hour obsession fest the way the last few XCOMs were. marvel fatigue is SUPER real though. i think a lot of people just didn't want to give it the time of day because they'd had plenty of marvel already. and that's reasonable. Alchenar posted:CS reduces the tactical experience to a series of small arenas, and the practical effect of balancing the game around limited per mission special abilities is extremely close to being card based for all intents and purposes, it's just lacking the randomness of the card draw. lol bruh
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Jul 24, 2023 17:20
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yeah deckbuilding is about minimizing both the randomness involved and the less powerful cards you can potentially pull. like if you have a few cards that do 5 damage to 1 target and 3 damage to targets in a cone, but the way you are using the character is they basically only ever have one target, then the conals are pointless and you should trash them so you are more consistent. the thing is, chimera squad doesn't give you any kind of "deckbuilding" mechanics at all short of the random squad recruits you can bring in throughout the game. you are always going to draw your "cards" again in a distinct number of turns because they don't go into a deck, nothing is ever shuffled, you don't even get your "card drafts" randomly, it is always the same choice and you make that choice permanently. so "chimera squad is actually a precursor card game" is extremely dumb. you might as well ask what isn't a card game at that point. Coolguye fucked around with this message at 17:59 on Jul 24, 2023 |
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Jul 24, 2023 17:57
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firaxis has gone into hibernation before. it was 6 years between alpha centauri and civ 4 with nothing to note but the Pirates remake in the middle, which frankly was a step down from the 1993 version in a lot of ways if you can ignore how much harder the 1993 version is to learn. then it was another 5 years between civ 4 and civ 5 with nothing but weird me-too games like colonization and railroads in between. midnight suns is the most recent release and that was 3 years ago. if the cycle holds you'll see another couple smaller games in the vein of CS or just some random bullshit, and everyone will be pleasantly surprised when another flagship product comes out and probably resurrects the studio again. I think a lot of the issue with much of firaxis's catalog has a lot of potential fatigue with it too. XCOM is great, but it's not a game that lends itself to frequent releases. We're ready for XCOM 3 now, but I don't know that we would've been even a few years ago. Civ is also notoriously hard to get right, and when you do get it right people spend 5 years at least running it out. Strictly speaking this is the time to just embrace the indie studio nature and go do some weird, offbeat stuff to try to develop new IP, but firaxis has generally not been that kind of studio. Coolguye fucked around with this message at 19:23 on Jul 24, 2023 |
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Jul 24, 2023 19:19
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yep sorry i mixed up CS and MS i should probably double check wikipedia instead of working from memory
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Jul 24, 2023 19:26
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i definitely was explicitly not counting simgolf, that absolutely hits the whole "minor, random thing that nobody cares that much about" thing that firaxis is prone to. but i flatly forgot about civ 3 (like many others did)
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Jul 24, 2023 19:39
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those're the only ones that matter anyways  e: in seriousness, in my mind civ 3 came out prior to SMAC/was done by microprose, not firaxis.
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Jul 24, 2023 19:46
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Sombrerotron posted:Anyway, maybe your getting confused about its release was because Civilization: Call to Power (remember that one?) came out around the same time as SMAC.
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Jul 24, 2023 19:56
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ex2HqFR4eHc e: aw dammit that one has a mission in the middle but whatever there's lots of stupid base chatter in it
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Jul 24, 2023 21:00
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the most memorable soldier from my last xcom 2 campaign was frylock because, rumor had it, he was actually a box of fries
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Jul 24, 2023 21:51
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sparks are all about action economy rather than punching and being a big loud tank. they have a big loud tank tree but frankly it's not very good even on low difficulties. but action economy boi starts early with overdrive do stuff like let you take a shot at an enemy and at an objective, and only gets better from there when hunter protocol gives them free shots at half of an attacking pod. sparks also, tbh, "click" a lot more on Legend because the extra damage their autocannon is doing suddenly becomes the difference between a wound and a kill.
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Jul 25, 2023 18:37
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that's kind of my story with PP as a whole. i played it briefly at a friend's and i didn't really get jazzed by it. not turned off, just not excited. then when it came up again for sale or whatever i was always just like 'meh'
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May 1, 2024 08:37
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the funny thing is that even xcom 1 had soldier progression: https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Experience it's clear the intent is basically "if you use a soldier a lot, they will get better, eventually", but the implementation is so painfully 90s that reading it is a weird form of dry comedy. and even THAT is better than simply having nothing. i didn't like the new chaos gate game for a few big reasons that mostly boil back to "the game relies on not telling you crap to make things hard". if you quickly pick up on a few major mechanics, the battlescape becomes trivial - your damage can outstrip enemy health and since you get your action points refreshed upon entering and leaving combat, you can creep up to an enemy pod, use your last-ish AP to trigger it, wipe the enemy pod with your refreshed AP (because your positioning is good), and then your AP is refreshed AGAIN after the wipe. you have once-per-mission powers that also increase your mobility, so you can potentially do this to wipe 3-4 pods in a single turn. in extreme cases you can functionally win the entire mission in one real 'turn'. there are numerous entire classes that make no real sense because mobility is so huge, and they simply do not have the mobility you require. there's no point in some super tough terminator armored paladin or your hero apothecary if your power armored super-teleporting purgators and interceptors are killing everything before any damage can be dealt. understanding this is the difference between my friend's game with multiple dead knights and many more with accumulating critical wounds vs mine with no critical wounds whatsoever and multiple max level characters at around the same day count in game. then, on the opposite end of the spectrum, if you do not perceive from the get-go that your cruiser's speed is absolutely vital to the geoscape, you will irrevocably lose some swaths of the map that will then become eternal problem areas for the rest of the game. but conversely, if you repair your engines early, the rest of the game becomes extremely manageable. again, understanding this is the difference between my friend's game, where he ended up forced to exterminatus a few planets simply because he was unable to arrive in time, and mine where i was routinely stomping infestations flat before any of them could get severe. the extra missions i was able to do also supercharged my progression in other ways. i had more of my ship repaired, more requisition, more everything just because i was ALLOWED to succeed more at a baseline. these 2 screenshots were taken at roughly the same day count in game. friend's game:  mine:  i'm not some kind of prodigy at these games, i was just genre-savvy enough to smell the traps before my friend did. for all their flaws and problems, when i get the xcom itch, i still boot up 2 or chimera squad, depending on how much time i want to spend on it. i keep meaning to give the jagged alliance remake a shot, though, was that any good?
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May 3, 2024 07:39
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the main simulationist piece that made the OG XCOM outstanding was its ballistics and destruction models. that's the end of the simulationist bits that actually mattered.
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May 3, 2024 15:08
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yeah, jake leaving isn't much of an issue in my mind. he also wasn't involved in chimera squad, and frankly CS turned out great all things considered. the layoffs at firaxis after midnight suns fell flat on its face though that definitely made me think that xcom 3 is gonna be backburnered for another gorillion years.
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May 3, 2024 19:05
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Kennel posted:They should make XCOM Enforcer 2 xcom interceptor: the re-engagement chaosapiant posted:Folks getting let go is never a good sign, true. But XCOM is one of Firaxis's best selling franchises and I don't expect them to put it to sleep so soon. i mean WotC came out in 2017. it's already asleep, the question is whether or not it's in a coma. CS came out in 2020 so we're already longer than that. i doubt we're going to get another high effort, quirky formula experiment dropped out of nowhere this year either.
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May 3, 2024 21:25
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xcom 3 is very heavily hinted to be a combination of apoc and tftd so interceptor's probably out of the question for now
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May 3, 2024 22:59
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Alchenar posted:XCOM 2 was their analogue of TFTD
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May 4, 2024 01:19
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Alchenar posted:The weapons tech is Magnetic Weapons, the entirely new enemy is a guy in a diving suit, and they moved the alien base from orbit to the bottom of the ocean. Turn your monitor on
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May 4, 2024 16:41
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Babe Magnet posted:chaos gate rocks, and aside from a little bit of a difficulty spike from the new mission types (especially the dreadnaught-based ones they throw at you before you can even get the dreadnaught lol) the DLC is very good too. the only dudewatch games out there do basically nothing with a super cool ruleset so for freakin sure it is beyond time for it to get some real limelight
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May 6, 2024 06:48
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whatever funding he found, if he learned anything from sid he'll get out from under those 'helpers' as soon as possible. if there's anything the last few months have taught us it's that if your studio is beholden to a publisher in any way beyond "we're working together on the next game", you better get comfortable with the fact that you're gonna be thrown out with the garbage to make a quarterly report look better.
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May 15, 2024 07:19
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 14:52 |
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psi ops make more sense if you think about them as a completely separate victory track. yes, you can throw a ton of resources early into new weapons, armor, and facilities and gizmos, or you can dump a ton of resources early into making a couple saiyans. the latter is more awkward since there's that long stretch of time that your saiyans are training in the hypertonic lion tamer and you're holding the line with yamchas, but ultimately it requires less research and less space unearthed in the Avenger so that's a thing you can do if you want i guess. (i prefer SPARKs) e: Ravenfood posted:Yeah but why would I risk bringing them along when I can stick them in a tank until they are max level? eventually your b-team will become Magi and you rotate around. simple as. this usage style is completely, 180 degrees different from the way everything else plays, though, and no hinting exists in game to point out any of this. you just have to try it and then back into "solutions" like this. Coolguye fucked around with this message at 15:47 on May 15, 2024 |
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May 15, 2024 15:37
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