Wouldn't more personality have been nice?

[rezaf]

One can think several things about the fact that you can only have a maximum of seven active soldiers, and personally, I never had a reserve of more than twelve people, not all of which were actually fit for combat against those aliens with "heroic" in all stats, but anyway, does somebody agree with me that, with such a limited pool of troops, it would've been a nice idea to give the individual soldiers a lot more personality, kinda like in "Jagged Alliance"?

Unique speech samples, a little background story in the records, maybe even character interactions, like JA and Baldur's Gate had them, a couple of "unique" chars, like the greys you could rescue, stuff like that could have made the playing experience a lot more rewarding, IMHO.

What do you think?

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rezaf

[Slaughter]

I agree with you. As a matter of fact this was metioned at the official boards a long time ago. Sadly ALTAR did not have the time needed to implement it...but it sure would have been great!

[rezaf]

That's a pity to hear. Odd. The longer I'm here, the more I keep hearing this, that, and this, and these were planned, but Altar had no time to implement them.

I reckon their short development time in total was due to financial reasons, but I wonder whether it was a wise decision. Sure, this way development costs were rather low, which still involves a LOT of money, but sales will also be rather low, and deservingly so, with the mediocre product that has been delivered.

Oh well, I guess it was a "me too", a lot of developers and / or publishers seem to act similar these days.

*shrug*

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rezaf

[Slaughter]

Most reviews think this is a bit more than a medicore product. And our poll also suggests that many players think so. This game isn't all that it could have been, but it a large step in the right direction in my opinion.

 

The feature you mention would have been nice, but it's not very important. The typical role-player may care about it, but the more action minded players don't care much. And X-Com did not have this feature at all, so most X-Com fans isn't going to miss it either. It would have been nice, but they can't have everything in a game.

 

As for sales, this game had sold more in preorders before it was released than Cenega expected it to sell in it's lifetime. And I think the next incarnation of UFO will be near perfect, if we get one. Think this one is great too, but not perfect, that's for sure.

[rezaf]

Just for the records, I don't desperately miss this feature. Not at all. It's just, in UFO:AM, there's almost NO area where there's not something missing to make the game great. Like they say, the gap between a good and a very good game is much bigger than the gap between a bad and a good game. And the gap between very good and excellent is even further. I don't wanna spam these forums with my views, as I feel many people have different thoughts, and every right to have them. Check the thread about 7x% ish reviews for UFO:AM for a few more details.

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rezaf

[daishiw]

Personality is great, so great in fact that I always have to dismiss a certain soldier-girl because her "distinctive" voice causes stabbing pains in my ears !

[Bastiaan]

I am glad after years of waiting, someone stood up and said, remember UFO? I wan't too make a cool game like that, and now it's finished and I have lots of fun, I was waiting since Apocalypse for a game like this,

and ok, it wasn't made by a large western game company wich can affort itself beautifull movies, graphics never seen before, etc.

but I am glad Altar did it, and although some stuff didn't make it in the game, that is not bad, I am sure for all games in the world lots of things were cut out because of lack of time, or because it just couldn't be done,

ALTAR hooray!

[Skeelo]

daishiw, yes that voice is very distinctive and i also "dismissed" her during a mission with an M4 but in the end i turned off all the voices. They just get annoying when seven people chirp up with some comment when they've done something or have nothing to do. So it would have been no big loss if there was no voice "acting" at all!

[rezaf]

At times, my team of seven people consisted of a whole 2 different voice samples. Getting a few more voice actors to talk the five different sentences used (are there even that much?) would have been money well spent, IMO. But with the characterless characters , I don't really care that much.

 

Oh, I'm also glad someone picked up the idea behind X-COM after all these years. I'm just not too happy with the way it turned out. Especially after the long wait, having something that was not merely pretty good, but VERY good or even excellent, allowing it to live up to the original, would have been more statisfying.

But if you love the game the way it is, fine, I wish I could, too. But I can't.

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rezaf

[Pete]

Cross your fingers for an excellent sequel then rezaf

[rezaf]

Sir yes sir.

Though I fear the game might not sell well enough to warrant a sequel - given all the little shortcomings, and even if it does, Altar's take on reviving X-COM seems to differ a lot from what I would prefer, so even if a sequel is made, I wonder if I would like it much more.

No point in discussing that at this point in time, though, let alone in this thread

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rezaf

[daishiw]

sifn't get some technical minded peeps to start digging into the game and do a Xcom total conversion + rebalancing.

 

Rebalancing:

- simplify the research tree (i.e. cut out the "enhanced" crap and the alien/human variants of each type of weapon.)

- rebalance armour types and reduce their number (i.e. no "enhanced" crap and rebalance the armour types so that each is actually worth using depending on the situation - e.g. light, medium, heavy armour in warcraft 3, so that it makes sense to have some people wearing different armour types so they can specialise in taking out certain aliens).

- rebalance psi

 

Extra stuff (more difficult to add):

- more custom missions (maybe a few missions where you fight humans allied with the aliens? would be surprising to come up against some dudes with powerful assault rifles that do hard damage)

- modify geoscape somehow to bring in an actual strategy element. at the moment even with the delegate command the missions get boring and repetitive very fast, most of the time it doesn't really matter if you can take the next territory or not, it only gets hard if you are unlucky and biomass is eating your bases while your other borders are full of alien bases.

 

Maybe someone could add a fixed layout of alien bases and forces, and some way of making the AI reinforce itself throughout its territories. So it becomes more like a war - e.g. you take out one alien base in a region so the AI brings reinforcements into nearby bases and they become harder take.

 

Then you would need to find a base with say an Alien General and kill him so make the bases become easier to take again, or encircle the territories with your own bases or something.

 

At the moment the aliens really don't threaten your territories much except with the Battleship attacks, and even if you lose a base to one of those you generally have plenty more and the non-existent AI doesn't capitalise on it and start attacking other bases, it all just seems to be random attacks.

[rezaf]

An X-COM total conversion is impossible to do. Let's assume it should stick to real-time combat, taking out the problem of how to change that into turn-based, there still are far too many issues to properly mod UFO:AM into anything even remotely similar to X-COM. Like Altar keep saying, this is a different game.

Compared to the decade-old X-COM, AM lacks a couple of tactical elements, such as height levels, the ability to blow away parts of the terrain and/or walls etc.

Also, on geoscape level, there's no funding, no base design, ...

Summed up, it's impossible. Especially since Altar promised to release modding tools, but those are not to allow you to actually do very much, i.e. rebalance weapons or enemies, maybe even create new ones, much later MAYBE a map editor, that's about all they mentioned. Granted, maybe they'll surprise us all with more than that, but I have my doubts it will be enough to recreate anything like X-COM.

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rezaf

[Azxel]

personalities? sounds good, what about adding some character in too?

 

having a bunch female soldeirs walk out on you in the middle of battle cos she's having PMS, a clumsy guy that keeps tripping and accidently shooting his team mates, or perhaps even some romance between soldiers... hahaha