Disapointed *spoilers*

[Obsidean]

What a disapointment. I feel like I wasted my time with this. This game literally has NO story, and nothing really driving it. I remember in X-Com, it had a long story, and throughout the game the story would be driven, with movies, lots to read, etc. In this game, the story moves through tiny little text boxes that open up once in a blue moon, with less than a paragraph of text telling you "Blah blah, we found a secret ship, we need to get it". Lame. Then after all the work, I beat the game, and I get greated with a lame ass 1 minute movie of some stupid kids reading a book and then looking up, THE END?

 

Give me a break. I had so much hope for this game, how could they go so wrong with it? The Real-Time system is ridiculous, making it frustrating to sepparate troups and monitor them sepparately. Not entering building, and not even destroyable terrain at the least takes away all the enjoyment of attacking downed UFO's by blowing off the walls, etc, etc. Literally no ambient sounds, or sounds whatsoever. X-Com had great ambient sounds, footsteps, doors opening/closing, Aliens breathing heavily. Aftermath is like playing a silent video, with brief annoying tabbering by troops using the same repeated tacky voices, and the brief sounds of gunfire.

 

And lets not even get into the ridiculous difficulty, and lack of feeling like your are gaining any actual edge or improvement through research against the Aliens. This game is simply a huge disapointment to me. And don't try to tell me this game isn't X-Com, that's bull, it's quite obvious this game is meant as an X-com clone, and it's whole creation from the very beginning was this. I just can't understand how they could get it wrong. I mean it's not like they even had the task of developing any new ideas or systems, as X-com created the basis and idea 10 years ago. How hard would it have been to just followed the same idea as the game that started it all, but simply intorduce the technology that has advanced over this time to it? These guys had everything at their finger tips, everything, yet they completely butchered the game and turned it into a bastardized version that couldn't hold a candle to the original. I guess I'll wait another 10 years.

 

In UFO Defense, X-COM was funded by the governments of the world, and if you failed to protect them well enough, they would decrease their funding and eventually ally with the aliens. It added a lot of depth to the game and forced you to think more seriously about your behavior. If you failed to actively combat the aliens in a certain country, or failed to adequately protect its citizens when the aliens raid a city, the government of that country would respond accordingly and hamper your ability to fight in the future. Aftermath has nothing of the sort. In X-COM Aliens built bases from which they would launch attacks, which you could raid. And their bases didn't have the same pathetic stock layouts as Aftermath's. When you raided an alien base in X-COM, it was full of alien shit you could blow up and/or steal for your own use. Another thing I believe I left out is that in Aftermath, when you're performing an extermination mission of any kind, you don't have to actually kill all of the aliens. I suspected this was true, but didn't have proof until I was in a mission where I hit my kill quota while there was still an additional alien in sight. I was allowed to end the mission without dealing with it. Isn't it a bit silly when your goal is to clear an area of an alien threat and you don't have to kill all of them? If you were going to set up a base of operations in a bunker full of aliens, would you leave any of them alive to surprise you later when you're on the toilet? In X-COM, when the aliens decide to raid one of your bases, they would send a UFO - which you could intercept and destroy, saving yourself the raid. Or you could shoot the incoming UFOs down with base defense batteries. Speaking of base raids, one aspect of Aftermath that is clearly ripped straight out of X-COM is force deployment during an alien raid. In X-COM, if the aliens managed to get a force to one of your bases and enter it, the facility's personnel would be the only people available to defend it. And they would be scattered randomly throughout the base, as if they'd been caught by surprise. Good for immersion, good for realism, good for tension because you have to fight alone or try to re-unite your squad while dealing with the incursion. Force deployment is also random in Aftermath. However, it makes very little sense. If a base is raided that has none of your armed personnel at it, shouldn't it be lost immediately? You can let an alien raid in Aftermath go unattended to for several days before you lose the base. Who's holding them off, scientists with clipboards? And why in Aftermath are forces randomly deployed to defend a base, when they arrived there by HELICOPTER? Shouldn't they all enter at the same point? X-COM may be ten years old, but its gameplay is very logical and detailed. If gameplay of that quality can be created with decade-old technology, Aftermath has no excuse for failing to equal it.

[Pete]

Firstly, I can see you feel strongly about your views, but I've had to edit your post for swearing - please try not to swear too much as this is a family forum I'm afraid.

 

Secondly, I don't completely agree with you where the story is concerned. Much of it evolves through the research topics and not through the boxes that pop up on the main screen. You'll see a much deeper story involving Qports and what the Greys are ding here when researching a lot of the more major topics.

 

As for the ending... Ack, I spoiled it for myself by reading this post I'll have to comment on it when I've checked it out later today.

 

You *can* actually split your squad into three groups (it's in the manual somewhere) - don't know if you've tried it, but it can certainly be of some help when giving your snipers/medics and marksmen different orders in a mission etc.

 

I do mis the ambient sounds, but I don;t reemmber aliens doing heavy breathing in any X-COM game. They each had their own unique sounds though as I recall in Apocalypse.

 

My personal experience with the ridiculous difficulty is that if you're willing to alter your tactics as the game progresses, and carry different types of equipment into the missions, then the Reticulans can't block against your shots at all. Sure, tehy become crack shots, but wouldn't you expect them to be with their superior alien weaponery, fearlessness and desire to achieve their overall goals?

 

I found that in this game, there was a lot more careful thought going into my troop movement as I couldn't do the old X-COM "Let's group everyone together, run in and blast everything in sight" as it just gets you killed quicker in this game. In that sense, this game lends more realism - the battle hardened bad guys kick your ass, whilst what's left of humanity has a hard time as they can't hit anything.

 

As for leaving elements out that X-COM had... Infogrames (now Atari) have trodden heavily on anyone who's tried modding or touching X-COM, threatening lawsuits in a rather unfriendly way. If a small company like ALTAR had done the standard "You can have 8 bases, you can design them all yourself, you are playing in a world with a stable government who wants to back your little organisation will sell you arms and occasionally be over-run by alien influences" then I can quite honestly imagine that Infogrames would have jumped straight on ALTAR's back.

 

The tricky thing with these things is that you can borrow so many ideas, but then you have to make it noticeably different both to avoid lawsuits and to make the game stand well as a game in its own right.

 

it'sq uite obvious this game is meant as an X-com clone, and it's whole creation from the very beginning was this.

As for this statement, have you actually been following the game since the development was started? Of course it's a lot like X-COM - It was originally titled "The Dreamland Chronicles: Freedom Ridge" and being produced by Julian Gollop (the father of X-COM), then his company got poorly treated by some big company, the game got shelved indefinitely and ALTAR expressed an interest in redeveloping it along their ideas. Now, they're great fans of X-COM and Jaged Alliance and a whole host of other strategy games, and they had input from the fans from day one.

 

Since we were told by Julian (when the game was "Dreamland") what was going to be in it, and then when ALTAR had to change the title and 99% of the source code that had been developed thus far, what has arrived here is not a surprise in the least for me. We were told from day one that we wouldn't be able to go into buildings or blow the heck out of everything on the map, so try not to be overly disappointed or surprised.

 

How hard would it have been to just followed the same idea as the game that started it all, but simply intorduce the technology that has advanced over this time to it?

Again, copyright. If Infogrames/Atari wish to get off their backsides and develop an X-COM game like this, then I welcome this, but they're sitting on goldmines and trashing series' that they didn't start (Master of Orion 3... buggiest game I've ever seen) whilst flinging lawsuits left, right and centre. I dislike their company, and have seen how they treat customers and people who wish to help the games that they've inherited when buying out other companies, however that's just my opinion. If they ever want to try and persuade me otherwise, then they've got my e-mail address from the hundreds of unanswered customer support/feedback e-mails I've sent over the years.

 

I agree that the extermination missions should have to make you kill evrything, and I didn't understand how we could take alien spacecraft back for study with aliens on board... perhaps we booted up the door locks like in Jurassic Park? The Retribution mission was most amusing as whilst six of my squad paid for the outcome with their lives, the last man ran through the objective room, picked up the box, got shot at by four aliens and completed the mission. I doubt that he could have fended off four aliens as competently as he did simply on his own, and I didn't see why teh exterior of that mission had to be identical to the alien base layouts, but hey?! I wanted to carry on with the story so I suspended disbelief a bit more than usual.

 

As for random scattering of men when defending a base... I suspect the majority of base missions were intended to start *after* most poeple had researched inter-base transporters, hence the reason why they're randomly positioned, as you're using a ripped-off alien technology that you're not sure how to use to get your men from base to base instantly. I should imagine they were a bit rushed when they discovered that they wanted to be teleported half-way around the world

 

Sure, teh above is only speculation, but if you use your imagine to fill in the blanks (as with any game) then you can draw your own conclusion. As for "where is the Chinook?" I'm guessing that every base had one, as I can't see them developing the teleportation device in a bearely effective manner and then even wanting to think about teleporting an entire Chinook

 

Now... I'm off to try and get to the end of the last mission (Reticulans rushing me... didn't see that coming could be that they're a bit cocky with their infinitely superior technology eh?).

[Skeelo]

I agree with most of ur points(which are some what harsh at times) except for the turn base/real time system which i personaly think is a better system but that is just personal preference and not a fault of the game.

It seems like alot of ur disapointment comes from the fact that ufo:a is not x-com4, I know what ur thinking, here we go someone else is gonna say it was never meant to be an xcom game! but it wasent. Just because it has some of the same features as xcom it doesnt mean it is xcom. That logic can be applied to almost all fps and rts games. Does that mean that ravenshield is a poor copy of ghost recon, they both use team of soldiers u select ur weapons go on missions and kill terrorists!

No they both different games based on the same theme.

U should judge UFO:A on its own merits as a stand alone game and not as a sequal to xcom.

[Smurf]

I agree with nearly all the points that Obsidean made. Although I think that the story is reasonable just very poorly presented.

 

I imagine that someone spent a long time thinking about the name and presentation of the game and that someone wasn't the one who'd have to pick up the pieces afterwards.

 

While 'UFO'!='X-COM'; in a lot of people's minds they're pretty much interchangeable, especially when the game style is very similiar and the packaging is designed to highlight that (yeah I know the old one about judging books..).

 

As most people don't have a mental database of games names against developers it's almost guaranteed that we're are going to confuse the two and expect bigger and better than X-COM, and why shouldn't we? Like Obsidean said, it's been a few years.

 

When I first realised that it wasn't the same and was actually a step backwards (from my point of view) I was dissapointed and it's difficult to enjoy a game after you get hit by a big initial dissapointment as you just keep finding faults with it rather than positives and let's face it ALTAR haven't helped themselves by making that bit easy.

 

Personally I think that 'Daisy Sees the City: From Close Up' would have been a better title to avoid that situation, although I would have still bought it after seeing the feature list on the back. I just wouldn't have expected as much from it.

 

It's difficult for me to believe that it's not an intentional spin put on the title by their marketing guys. But then so what if it is, they did their jobs, and I was sold to. Next time I'll know better.

 

I didn't appreciate the influence that Atari had on the situation until now. That's interesting..although somewhat annoying.

[Pete]

As most people don't have a mental database of games names against developers it's almost guaranteed that we're are going to confuse the two and expect bigger and better than X-COM, and why shouldn't we? Like Obsidean said, it's been a few years.

That's a more than fair comment and I'll bear it in mind with future posts. I guess running the biggest X-COM fansite and running the first Aftermath fan site kinda makes you forget that there are things that not everybody knows

 

It's just my guess (and possibly a wild one) that the title was reached at logically. The UFO's arrive, wreak havoc and you play in the aftermath. There's still a possibility that this was the line of thought, though I agree much confusion could have been avoided by calling it "Alien Aftermath" (possibly a title that Fox would have stamped on) or "Invasion: Aftermath" (which could have been a little vague, but nonetheless solve a few problems, but there's only so many things you can call a game to say "hey, it's got aliens in it and it's set in the aftermath of a brutal invasion", so I can forgive them for choosing the title that caused the most confusion.

 

Whilst this may have cut down on a lot of people expecting it to be a sequel, I can't help but wonder if thos people would have then seen the screenshots and then thought it anyway. I guess we'll never know on that one. I can only assume that now ALTAR and Cenega have named their game "UFO Aftermath", the next title will logically be called "UFO... something" simply as a means to identify a series.

 

I didn't appreciate the influence that Atari had on the situation until now. That's interesting..although somewhat annoying.

If you think of them as Infogrames still, you find yourself feeling sorry for Atari. That's what I'd rather be doing

 

Basically, Infogrames threatened a bunch of guys making an X-COM mod for Half-Life with a lawsuit if they didn't cease making it. I found it a bit lame as Infogrames only sell X-COM Enforcer at the moment, so the only thing they could have been afraid of was that more people would prefer the Half Life mod It' not like sales of Enforcer would have been affected at all...

 

Fox, from what I have seen, jumps on anything vaguely Aliens related as soon as they hear about it. Infogrames seem to work the same wy, but at least Fox keep on producing games, and therefore have a reason to stop projects that might affect their sales, where as Infogrames just throw their lawyers around to protect... nothing.

 

You can draw your own conclusions about Infogrames/Atari, but I suspect that parts of this game had to be quite different in style to prevent some trouble. After all, ALTAR is a small development company and Infogrames spans the globe. Small companies disappear every day, so it's best to err on teh side of caution

[rezaf]

Well, I think it would've been kinda hard for Infrogatari to jump on Altar as long as they named everything differently and provided they didn't copy 1:1, but I'm not an expert on this.

Anyway, I could've lived with a different storyline, if it had at least made some kind of sense, not this patchworked thingy Altar gave us. Well, I can live with that one, too, but I certainly won't have fond memories of it.

There are just too many things that don't have an obvious relation to each other in Aftermath, that appearently are a bunch of "wouldn't it be cool if we had"s glued together in a hurry.

For example, Altar could've scrapped the "classical" alien alltogether, and have us fight biomass mutants throughout the whole game.

How about a storyline like the following:

Spores pollute the atmosphere, and people are dying from it in vast numbers.

While Earth's population is rioting, fearing they'll all die, the gouvernments are busy keeping up a minimum level of law and order, with an increasing number of rioters and mutants. Despite all problems, a small group of scientists and soldiers are assembled to form a special force to try and deal with the threat.

In the beginning, they face only slightly mutated humans and animals, and they can even develop cures for those. However, creatures which have had the infection for a longer time change beyond recognition (though not as odd as the mutants in the real UFO Aftermath), and end up participating in some kind of entity, similar to the public conscience of an ant hill. Similar to the leaf-cutter ants, they begin cultivating some kind of fungus on earth: the biomass.

As the story unfolds, the player learns more and more about this, and slowly develops countermeasures against the infective spores and the biomass itself.

In the end, researchers find out the biomass has developed kind of a "central nerve system" itself, and that, would it be destroyed, earth could be rid of all biomass once and for all. -> The End.

See? Coming up with that took me mere minutes, and personally, I think such story would've made much more sense than the hybrid-one Altar came up with.

Whatever, I'll just sell off my copy of UFO on EBay and be done with it. No way I'm putting it next to the grand X-Com games on my shelf.

_________

rezaf

[Obsidean]

The excuse this game isn't X-Com, and that there is a copy right does not cut it for me, because that's bull. How many games can you name me that has the same idea of the Geoscape, the interception of UFO craft, the research, and development, the arming screens etc of squads, EVEN DOWN TO THE VERY LAST MISSION of building a space craft to attack the Alien home installation is RIPPED straight out of X-Com. X-Com had the exact same idea and final mission as Aftermath copied, only a little different. So don't tell me this game isn't X-Com. That's not an excuse. A game that is trying to mimic another game 10 years old, and resulting being less in depth and less od quality than the one that started it all just isn't acceptable. If this game was trying to improve upon X-Com, it didn't come close. And as for copyrighting, that's balony. Already half of this game is a complete copy of X-com, yet you're going to tell me in-depth systems for example making your actions have results on funding and country support, or having a more engrossing and better presented storyline, having destroyable terrain, morale, better tactical system, sounds etc, etc would result in legal action? That's ridiculous, you can't copyright or own the idea of something such as this.

 

This is why I see this game as more of the Poor and Lazy Man's version of X-Com. Now I will say again, this is not a bad game, but it simply does not do anything in terms of improving or at the least equaling even slightly, the original X-Com. And that is a disapointment.

[Pete]

I can get really picky if I want about your first statement and say Terror From The Deep. The original game designers didn't want that as a sequel, but as Microprose was publishing the game, they said tough and brought out Terror From The Deep the year after. Therefore, that's the first rip-off with an X-COM label slapped on it in an attempt to make it all better. It's also got exactly the same plot as the first one.

 

That was being very picky and I apologise, but Microprose ripped off an idea when the original developers wanted to develop Apocalypse as the true sequel to the game. Many people weren't happy as a game that had 95% of the same elements had just been coloured in slightly better and made twice as long and four times harder in an attempt to give people what they wanted. Sure, I liked it, but that's not the point. If we were given an exact copy, then there'd be complaints from the fans of X-COM even if it did look great. Apocalypse - the proper sequel to the first X-COM game took a beating much similar to the beating Aftermath is getting as a lot of people didn't like the changes and forever compared games. Apocalypse only just gets away from the Geoscape from the original X-COM by being set in a city.

 

There are only so many ways you could make a game of this type, and it'd be kinda hard to do it without a globe, interceptions of UFO's and squads of guys running about in tactical missions shooting aliens for one final goal.

 

There are limitations with what you can do - you can't sit tehre as a developer of a first game in a possible series and say "Let's leave it open-ended so it expands in a sequel" as it may turn out to be crap and then the game would make less sense than some poeple already think it does.

 

I don't remember too much about the bit with the Retribution, but I was under the impression that you'd merely stolen the spaceship after cleaning out its innards as you'd previously done with so many other UFO's in the game. I may be wrong on that one though... I got confused with the black cube thingy I picked up and was in a hurry to go to the moon and do the (solid) last mission.

 

Back to copyright - I just don't think Infogrames would have been happy if ALTAR had used too much stuff from the first X-COM game and I can see why a small developer might not wish to go down that route and cross swords with a company a couple of hundred times bigger with what some of us have already seen to be a very active legal department.

 

Anyway, copyright argument aside, the devs wanted to do it in an X-COM style but with their own twist on the story and its elements. If you don't like it, then that's fine. It's not meant to be 100% the same is what I guess I'm trying to point out but it's not meant to be totally different either. That's why I try not to compare them too much.

 

And back up to rezaf's post - people like shooting aliens. Shooting people still recognisable as people can make people kinda uneasy in strategy gaming. I felt a little disgusted that some fo the transgenants in this game had humans inside of them - made the game much darker for me.

 

Naturally it's up to everyone what they thought of the game, but the arguments here are geting kind of pointless as they're mostly based on opinion and conjecture.

[rezaf]

Lol, Pete, you hit exactly the core of what I was trying to say.

I'm under the impression the dudes at Altar were like "People like shooting aliens, so, even if they don't fit into our storyline at all, let's have them anyway".

Which is bad.

And I didn't say all mutants should be still recognizable as what they were, but in my book, most trangenants in UFO:AM just don't make any kind of sense. Neither as failed, nor as successful experiments.

But that's probably just me.

________

rezaf

[Pete]

Aye, it's one of these personal opinion arguments that no two people will ever agree 100% on

 

If you think something was bad or could have been better or have lots of suggestions and are willing to wait for a sequel, then I'm happy to start up a list of suggestions closer to the time

 

As for transgentants not making all that much sense - the last mission... need I say more? I didn't recognise any human or animal body parts in them. Looked like extras out of the classic film "Eight Legged Freaks"

 

I just think that people would have been bored if it was *just* transgenants.

 

Perhaps someone will mod this game into a game of the film "28 Days Later" which wouldn't take too much of a leap. Kinda had a similar atmosphere for me, though I'm not about to start comparing films and games, as that opens up a whole world of arguments by itself

[rezaf]

Hehe, I agree with you 100% that we can't agree 100% .... err ... anyway

 

And I don't want to state all things that I consider could've been done better in a way or two, nor do I want to convince you of my views. They're just that: my view, nothing more.

Additionally, I think it's all pretty obvious, when browsing these boards I think a LOT of people have opinions quite similar to my own.

_______

rezaf

[Pete]

Yup, and there's a lot of people closer to my line of thinking... and some in the middle. Always the way eh?!

[rezaf]

Err ... which is?

______

rezaf

[Pete]

Mine? I'm kind of a in the "it's a good game" group leaning slightly towards the middle of the road for one or two reasons.

 

Going to play it through again on hard setting to make up my mind and look out for stuff that I didn't get a chance to see/research/try out the first time through.

[rezaf]

Oh, I also think it's a good game. Just not VERY good, let alone excellent.

Like I said in the 7x% thread, this is about how I would rate it.

______

rezaf

[Pete]

It's just one of those games where I'm not too sure until a second time through. To be honest, the X-COM games required a few restarts with me before I really got into them.

 

Most games seem to Perhaps it's just me