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f13.net  |  f13.net General Forums  |  Gaming  |  Topic: XCOM 2 0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
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Author Topic: XCOM 2  (Read 178954 times)
Zetor
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Reply #560 on: April 30, 2020, 12:58:02 AM

Yeah, the Gears Tactics price tag is bananas. I guess it's $5 if you do the xbox subscription thing for a month, but still, that game needs to fill some serious shoes at that price point.

Since we're talking about other tactical games: there's also a game called 'Troubleshooter' that came out of early access this week. Apparently it's a very well-regarded superhero SRPG from Korea, halfway between Final Fantasy Tactics and XCOM. I picked it up at the 20% launch discount, especially since Chimera Squad just started dying on me (constant crashes at random spots, even after I rolled back my saves) and want to give the devs some time to get the bugs fixed.

And yeah, the last few years have been really good for tactical games and srpgs, especially in the indie scene. Voidspire Tactics / Alvora Tactics / Horizon's Gate, Fell Seal, Vigilantes, Invisible Inc, Telepath Tactics, Templar Battleforce, Into the Breach were all at least good, and some of them became real favorites for me (Voidspire Tactics and Invisible Inc in particular). Chimera Squad very strongly reminds me of Vigilantes, actually.

In actual Chimera Squad talk, I think some of the characters feel just a tiiiny bit overpowered. In particular, Claymore can murder entire rooms by himself, and Verge just doesn't die (after he unlocked a particular upgrade anyway) while having on-demand CC and/or multitarget damage that basically never fails. Melee heroes are a bit lackluster though... maybe it changes by endgame?
« Last Edit: April 30, 2020, 01:01:51 AM by Zetor »

Falconeer
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Reply #561 on: April 30, 2020, 02:43:29 AM

Troubleshooter is really good, I had it for quite some time and talked highly about it ever since, even here on f13. Now that it's finally out of Early Access I plan to dedicate some time to it, right after Xcom Chimera and Gears.

Gears Tactics keeps being awesome. Yesterday I had the first boss fight and it was intense and frankly a lot of fun. The worst part of the game is not the lack of strategic layer though, but its terrible inventory system. You get a lot of item drops for your characters, with different degrees of rarity and all sorts of random stats, and then it's a real chore to actually sort them out and give your A-team the best ones.

Other than that, this is a SOLID 9 out of 10.

Falconeer
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Reply #562 on: April 30, 2020, 02:49:30 AM

You make it sound awesome, but the $99 Aussie is pretty damn prohibitive. Worth spending the full price on? I have to choose between this and Doom Eternal at the same price. I picked up Chimera Squad on release and it would be interesting to see a bang-for-buck comparison.

Sorry, didn't see this one. It's impossible for me to think about the price as I have the Xbox Pass for lots of other reasons so this game feels completely free. Is it worth a full price north of $70 if you elect to buy it that way? Can't say, it's too subjective and not about the game quality but the value you give to your money. By my standards, and knowing what I know now, I would easily spend $50 on it. I wouldn't push for $70 because it just feels like a crazy price and with XCOM Chimera Squad out and so cheap I'd give Gears time to gain a discount and shave off $20 just by principle.

Threash
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Reply #563 on: April 30, 2020, 06:20:39 AM

Yeah, i downloaded xbox pass and for the 1 dollar I'm going to spend on it this is a great game. Not seeing a full price triple x release though, the quality is absolutely there but there's just not much else compared to a "forever" game like Xcom 2.

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HaemishM
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Reply #564 on: May 23, 2020, 12:49:01 PM

I've played Chimera Squad about 8 hours total and uninstalled.

It was ok. At its heart, it's more X-Com but there feels like a lot of inconsistencies with the package. The first tutorial mission starts with those nice, comic book ink drawing with neon color style character designs rather than the typical X-Com fully-rendered cinematics. Then right in the middle of it, we get the typical cinematics. The constant switch between the two art styles was jarring and ended up feeling half-assed, like they were trying to do the full X-Com experience but ran out of time or money and just said fuck it, we'll do line-drawings. They tried to make the characters you are given have actual stories or something but these stories didn't seem to have arcs, it was just "quirky computer geek" and "used to be an alien torturer" with nothing done to pay that off. And since you can't just create your own team members and add to the squads as resources dictate, the game felt very restrictive in the strategic layer, like there were only certain paths you could take. This would be fine, as something like Phoenix Point can illustrate just how having a metric fuckton of options doesn't necessarily make for a more interesting game, but it just wasn't clicking with me. I actually missed the injury/death/replacement/training cycle from regular X-Com. Breaking missions up into smaller micro-encounters with breach mode as the intervals didn't really work for me. Breach mode was sort of interesting and it definitely was a way to remove the "creep along until you discover another scripted pod of baddies" style of gameplay that is normal X-Com, but it made the maps and level design seem really tiny by comparison. The permadeath thing was mixed bag as well. While I didn't mind that I'd keep the same characters, what ends up causing is that you have to redo missions over and over again if you fail. Most times that's not a big deal, because the missions are so small and the difficulty isn't so great that you can replay it and succeed after only one or two retries. However, in the big story missions, not only do you not get to sub in androids in between breach modes (which makes the androids fucking useless because I so rarely used them in the regular missions because the difficulty wasn't that great), but you have to replay portions over and over again if you fail. And boy did I fail. I think I went through one part of an encounter 10 times without success because I couldn't put enough damage on the guys that were running to get to the objective because I started after breaching so far from them. I'd rather have the option of losing a guy than having to replay the same stretch of 15-minute gameplay that amounts to weasel-wrassling in a burlap sack over and over again.

For the $10 I paid, it was fine, but I won't be finishing it.

Fabricated
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Reply #565 on: May 27, 2020, 07:46:30 AM

I need to install it still since I got it for $10.

Basically I don't think there's a good way to fix the X-COM style of gameplay to both prevent stuff like overwatch creeping while also letting people play how they want to play. The timers in X-COM2 were more annoying than fun. War of the Chosen kinda made some things better and some things worse- the chosen I think added an element of challenge that couldn't be solved with overwatch spam but it was kinda clumsily laid over top the base gameplay. It's clear they just mitigated the base systems of X-COM2 with War of the Chosen to avoid overwhelming the player- the Avatar progress meter literally means nothing in WOTC even under the worst circumstances.

And in the end they actually made the mid->late game snowball effect worse. Once you got some special units, a couple of the super mobs down for their busted-ass armors, and have teched up into mid-game stuff- you're borderline unstoppable. Once you hit about 2 Chosen down and are into endgame you'll have 2+ unstoppable god squads decked out. Between research breakthrough faction projects, special units, the boss armors, the super good chosen weapons, fully upgraded SPARKs and Psi Operatives the last mission could be an entire squad of avatars and you could still one-round half of them.

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Khaldun
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Reply #566 on: May 27, 2020, 11:57:07 AM

I don't really mind that: it feels satisfying. Think about how it would feel if the squads you've carefully nurtured and protected and gotten really attached to were suddenly being mowed down all over again by some late-game threat. You'd either have to essentially start over again and spend ages levelling up a new squad or you'd have to do one of those horrible save-scum replays of the same mission a million times until you manage to pull off the impossible. There's just not much they can do inside that paradigm to ratchet up the challenge continuously all the way to the final mission. All turn-based squad games with fixed maps or even a small subset of procedurally-generally layouts are going to basically be about doping out the location of enemies unless the enemies are also mobile and able to move/overwatch/plan like you do (which I think takes a big leap in the AI).
Sky
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Reply #567 on: May 27, 2020, 01:42:10 PM

The lack of challenging yet fallible and fun AI in gaming still appalls me.

But I've been beating that drum since before f13 was a thing.
Sir T
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Reply #568 on: May 28, 2020, 05:27:56 AM

Most people don't want challenging AI. They just want it to struggle a bit.

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Khaldun
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Reply #569 on: May 30, 2020, 08:05:54 AM

I'd love AI that had personality. Civ VI failed for a lot of reasons for me, but one of them was that the game is trying to give the rulers much more personality, to align their strategic behavior with their diplomatic preferences and attitudes. And it just isn't there at all. I'd love an AI that is obsessed with particular kinds of land, or that tries a crazy rear-guard invasion, or that is fiercely loyal to an ally even when it's a mistake to do so. But in almost any game, you pretty quickly dope out what the AI's basic behavior is and see that it tries to provide a challenge with a basic routine and usually some sort of cheating. I can think of a really small handful of games where the AI has personality and is therefore unpredictable in a way. Imagine if X-Com 2 had three variable tactical AI routines that randomized at the beginning of a map--cautious, aggressive rush, and tricky/trapping (weak cluster deliberately throws grenade at car in opposite direction of player to aggro strong cluster, etc.) I dunno. I know this is super-hard to do but it would be a major attraction to me if a game was like this.
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