XCom Chimera Squad

[MCerberus]

It should be noted that the is bureaucratic daylight between XCOM and the XCOPS. The rulers of city 31 seem to be a "Reclamation Council", which you (the chief) work for. Some of the officers happen to be retired military. You're under a civilian authority

[Grey_Wolf_c]

It should be noted that the is bureaucratic daylight between XCOM and the XCOPS. The rulers of city 31 seem to be a "Reclamation Council", which you (the chief) work for. Some of the officers happen to be retired military. You're under a civilian authority

The difference to me is of scale rather than anything else. In XCOM 1, you work for the world governments, and try to keep the world together in the face of alien invasion. In XCOP, you work for the borough governments, and try to keep the city together in the face of racist invasion.

Grey Wolf

[MCerberus]

The difference to me is of scale rather than anything else. In XCOM 1, you work for the world governments, and try to keep the world together in the face of alien invasion. In XCOP, you work for the borough governments, and try to keep the city together in the face of racist invasion.

Grey Wolf

I'd say that we don't know Grey Phoenix's motivations. They could be like that faction from Enemy Within that's just using circumstances for power. Hell they could be former Advent collaborators

[Forum Explorer]

As I said in another thread, the XCOM games have generally been quite ironic, in the sense that the story and the gameplay are about two different things. Storywise you're certainly supposed to be the underdog, always fighting against impossible odds with inferior technology, as you lead a disparate group of free-willed individuals against mind controlled alien drones.

In gameplay your weapons are pretty much always on par with, or are strictly better than, the aliens', even though they're built from alien patterns by like 8 people in a garage. Your soldiers are, compared to most aliens, absurdly hard to kill, to the point where a mission with any deaths on your part is both a rarity and a failure. Oh, and of course you're literally mind controlling all of your soldiers in the field, i.e. exactly what the aliens are supposed to be doing.

Play on Impossible Ironman mode. That'll clear this feeling up right away.

[GloatingSwine]

I'd say that we don't know Grey Phoenix's motivations. They could be like that faction from Enemy Within that's just using circumstances for power. Hell they could be former Advent collaborators

It's likely Grey Phoenix won't be the only agitators you have to deal with. The game looks to be taking several cues from Apocalypse, and it may well also have multiple factions you have to deal with like that game did.

[Erloas]

Play on Impossible Ironman mode. That'll clear this feeling up right away.

"Play on a super hard difficulty" isn't really a good answer to "the game doesn't feel like the gameplay matches the story."
Lot of games have trouble with feeling like you're unstoppable, rather than that the enemy is actually challenging. But especially for a tactical combat game there are a lot of ways to make an enemy feel overwhelming and powerful. The game goes from too easy to at regular to painfully annoying at higher difficulty. But it isn't annoying in a "they're very tactically powerful and hard to beat" it is just "they've got really big numbers and one bad RNG is death."

[Grey_Wolf_c]

"Play on a super hard difficulty" isn't really a good answer to "the game doesn't feel like the gameplay matches the story."
Lot of games have trouble with feeling like you're unstoppable, rather than that the enemy is actually challenging. But especially for a tactical combat game there are a lot of ways to make an enemy feel overwhelming and powerful. The game goes from too easy to at regular to painfully annoying at higher difficulty. But it isn't annoying in a "they're very tactically powerful and hard to beat" it is just "they've got really big numbers and one bad RNG is death."

When one of the complaints is "Your soldiers are, compared to most aliens, absurdly hard to kill", then I'd say that playing in highest difficulty where getting hit with their laser is instant death is a decent match of gameplay and story.

Not that I agree with the original assessment, mind you, but if we agree that is a valid complaint, playing on a difficulty that eliminates it seems to be a reasonable answer to it.

Grey Wolf

[Erloas]

where getting hit with their laser is instant death is a decent match of gameplay and story.

But that is the problem part. That doesn't make the game better, especially not on a squad based tactical game. If it were a large scale strategy game like Starcraft, then that would be a reasonable method.

"One hit death" from virtually everything is not good design. It also stops making sense when you've gotten to later game where you have much of their technology.

It also doesn't "work" for the vast majority of players, so a game design where only a small sub-set of your playerbase sees the "real" game is just bad. So making a design that keeps them powerful, but not rocket-tag, is a better way to go. An initiative based system, rather than a "you go, I go" system also helps, since damage isn't so stacked, it spreads out a bit more and both sides have a chance to react to each other, which is key to tactics.

With so much of it though, it isn't really anything that can be fixed with one or two changes, it has to be a lot of changes, none necessarily being large on it's own, but how they work together.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

But that is the problem part.

Don't complain to me, then. Make your case to the person that made the argument. The closest I've come was bringing up Langrisser, which has none of those issues.

Grey Wolf

[warty goblin]

I wasn't even complaining folks. It was but an observation that there's a bit of a mismatch, which I find more amusing than anything. I mean I'd be very curious to play a game built around actually taking 10:1 losses on the regular, but that would probably turn out as some sort of moody rumination on guerrilla warfare, not a pop culture alien stompfest.

[Forum Explorer]

"Play on a super hard difficulty" isn't really a good answer to "the game doesn't feel like the gameplay matches the story."
Lot of games have trouble with feeling like you're unstoppable, rather than that the enemy is actually challenging. But especially for a tactical combat game there are a lot of ways to make an enemy feel overwhelming and powerful. The game goes from too easy to at regular to painfully annoying at higher difficulty. But it isn't annoying in a "they're very tactically powerful and hard to beat" it is just "they've got really big numbers and one bad RNG is death."

I'd say playing on the superhard difficulty does change the gameplay to match the story though. On impossible your guns and technology is inferior to the aliens. On impossible, your troops aren't more durable than the invading aliens. And on impossible you'll take lots of casualties. You'll also likely lose the campaign because it is really hard.

The game becomes a desperate race to reverse engineer the alien tech to give your troops a chance of victory. Of playing a desperate underdog trying to win against horrible odds.

Also I'd protest the 'they've got really big numbers' part. The HP adjustments are pretty small, usually just 1 or 2 more HP. But that's enough to actually increase the tactical challenge because now you can't depend on killing an alien in 1 shot. You almost always need 2 shots to kill pretty much everything. So no more running up beside the alien for the perfect flank and gunning it down.

Not going to argue the bad RNG is death though. Holy crap that can just brutalize you.

[BRC]

Re: Story and Gameplay Mismatch, I've never really gotten a sense from the tone of the games that you're supposed to be horribly outmatched. I've always gotten more of a "The Aliens are Scary, BUT THE ELITE MEN AND WOMEN OF XCOM ARE UP TO THE CHALLENGE!" feel from things.

maybe in Xcom Classic you had a bit more of that sensation, when you had a bigger starting squad of rookies who couldn't hit the broad side of a barn slowly crawling a massive farm map looking for the 3 sectoids that were wandering around, and sometimes a plasma bolt would just fly out of nowhere and one of your rookies would drop, but as of Firax-com, the vibe has pretty much always been "Elite Millitary Force Fighting Aliens".

Like, the only YOU ARE HORRIBLY OUTMATCHED bit of the narrative is the idea that the conventional forces of Earth are horribly outmatched offscreen, which is why a team of four people armed with perfectly conventional weapons and technology have to get called up when an uncouth sectoid street gang takes over the 7-11. Otherwise, it's the same sleight-of-hand basically every video game (Exception power-trip games like the recent DOOM series) does, which is to present the enemy as a theoretically overwhelming force that just happens to only engage you in chunks you can reliably defeat without suffering permanent loss. Like, if ALL nine sectoids in the 7-11 fought you at once then you'd be overwhelmed, fortunately they hang around in groups of 3, so your 4-man team can always have a numerical advantage.

It's a much bigger mismatch in Xcom 2, where you're supposed to be a scrappy force of elite badass guerillas that wouldn't stand a chance if Advent was ever able to focus on you, and you kind of feel that sometimes, when the mission involves achieving some objective and evacuating in the face of escalating waves of endless reinforcements, but then just as often your objective is to clear the map of enemies, which kind of works against it.

But yeah, despite the memetic reputation for difficulty that presents XCOM as some sort of SUPER HARD GAME ONLY FOR ELITE TACTICAL GENIUSES! the tone and narrative of the game matches the gameplay pretty well.

[Rakaydos]

Spoiler: Harassment in the workplace.

Show

[MCerberus]

It was pointed out that Torque is a mini-snek from what we've seen of her in all the gameplay footage. I'm thinking that it's more of a "we resized everyone to make it look less weird" than it having any lore reason.

[Draconi Redfir]

perhaps she's related to the neo-vipers made by the Viper-king mating with regular vipers?


... man. must suck that the viper-king is gone now.

[LaZodiac]

It was pointed out that Torque is a mini-snek from what we've seen of her in all the gameplay footage. I'm thinking that it's more of a "we resized everyone to make it look less weird" than it having any lore reason.

Well, according to her bio she's an arctic born snake, who is for infiltration, so it would make sense for her to be smaller?

perhaps she's related to the neo-vipers made by the Viper-king mating with regular vipers?


... man. must suck that the viper-king is gone now.

That's entirely possible, actually. Do they ever give more lore to the Rulers other than "Viper-King ****s"?

Random aside while searching up this, I found someone who tried to edit Torque's bio to make her a man but they forgot to hit all the pronouns. Nerds are dumb.

[MCerberus]

That would make Toque an intermediate step between Thin Man and XCOM 2 viper, weird.

As per the Viper king they were really explicit about being the only one at the time he was released. Torque was born before Gatecrasher so the timelines wouldn't match up.

[Draconi Redfir]

h'uh.

wonder how the alien populations are going then. we've only seen one male viper, and one female berzerker. you think they have different reproductive abilities then we do? are they self-making clones somewhere? or are they just going to be the last generation of their kind, just living the best lives they can while they can?


i'm assuming hybrids are still fertile. they come in both male and female, and while made in vats, seem to be at least a good chunk human.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

wonder how the alien populations are going then. we've only seen one male viper, and one female berzerker. you think they have different reproductive abilities then we do?

Have you seen Jurassic Park? Alternatively, the defeated ships had non-combat population capable of reproduction. Just because front line troops are predominately one sex does not mean the species is.

Not that I think the game will even bother to acknowledge the issue, never mind answer it.

Grey Wolf

[Cikomyr2]

I like that the game acknowledge subtly that the sectoids, mutons, snakemen, etc.. Were all victims of the Etherials.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

I like that the game acknowledge subtly that the sectoids, mutons, snakemen, etc.. Were all victims of the Etherials.

That was already the case in XCOM 1, though - see the story mission which you walk though a "museum" of the races the Etherials have collected and "improved" in their quest to find the perfect balance of psionic powers and body strength.

If anything, I kinda missed that angle in XCOM 2.

Grey Wolf

[Draconi Redfir]

i'm not sure if it was in 1 or 2, but wasn't thee mention that muton's may have joined voluntarily? I recall something about tribal tattoos or something.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

i'm not sure if it was in 1 or 2, but wasn't thee mention that muton's may have joined voluntarily? I recall something about tribal tattoos or something.

I don't remember that at all, so it might be 2 - I've only played it through once, vs the half-dozen of 1.

Grey Wolf

[Draconi Redfir]

just looked through the wiki. closest i found was a mention of "ritualistic markings and some tattoos" which according to Valen, just hint at some tribalistic past. that's about it. a lot of stuff about them being genetically engineered for war though. so i'm probably in the wrong there.

[MCerberus]

Oh and I'd like to point out that Zerkers have been all-female since at least EU.
Truly the forgotten waifu.

[Draconi Redfir]

h'uh... did not know that. i learned today.

[Rodin]

If I remember my lore correctly the aliens were genetically modified/surgically modified all the way back in UFO Defense.

[GloatingSwine]

Yeah, the Sectoids were noted as being genetically modified, and both Floaters and Mutons were cybernetically enhanced.

It doesn't note anything special about Snakemen or Ethereals in that regard.

In XCOM2 the first encounter with a Muton it talks about how they've been changed in the years since the invasion (they're leaner and more agile).

So yes, much evidence of tinkering by the ethereals.

[huttj509]

In terms of setting expectations. given the price point and announcement shortly before release, if I get as much enjoyment out of this as I did from the Tactical Legacy Pack (that WotC dlc with the 4 mini-campaigns) I'll be WELL satisfied with my purchase. :-)

[Grey_Wolf_c]

FYI, if you are into this kind of thing, Christopher Odd has started publishing a Let's play of XCOPs. If nothing else, it is a good way of how the mechanics work beyond the hints in the trailer. Beware story spoilers, of course.

Grey Wolf