XCOM E3 Previews are in!

[Bomb Bloke]

Not sure what to make of the "escalation" thing.

 

There's only two ways they can really do it; and that's to make everything more and more "difficult" until the player is either dead (which, as far as I can tell, will simply cause the player to reload an earlier savegame - what other choice will they have?), the player decides to evac (which is probably what you'll be doing in the early game, due to lack of ammo), or the player wins (which is presumably going to be possible once enough kit has been photogra-, er, I mean, researched).

 

The other way is to simply keep flooding the level with bad guys. This differs in that, while it will still be harder to stick around for extended periods of time, it shouldn't be impossible: For example, the player could simply hide in the shadows, taking photos of the increasingly huge aliens turning up around the place. Granted, odds are the camera will have a limited amount of film, but if the difficulty ramps up according to time spent in the area, then in theory you should be able to reserve the stuff for the more "interesting" sights that are bound to turn up later on.

 

To me it looks like they're going with the former option; you either leave when the massive obelisk turns up, or it'll either suck you in or vapourise you. Hopefully the game won't actually switch to a third person camera angle to demonstrate this as it does in the trailer.

 

There are problems with both avenues, of course. Force the player to leave and it'll feel scripted. Leave it up to the player to decide, based on their own abilities, and it'll become very difficult to balance the story with the gameplay - some players are obviously going to stick around longer then others, and some will absolutely refuse to leave until they see the entire place leveled, just because they can.

 

I have to wonder why so many of the site staff are so quick to defend a game we know so little about and that what we do know about it promises nothing from the old series except based on the vague words of a developer.

 

I hope we aren't seeing some of this.

 

As for my opinion, I have to agree with Matri.

Don't worry, we keep all of that sort of stuff securely behind closed doors.

 

If anything, I would consider lack of knowledge to be a good reason, in itself, for defense. Not really fair to trash a game based on conjecture, though I also maintain that it shouldn't be praised for anything we haven't yet seen in a trailer.

 

From what I read, the two people "defending" it are SV and myself, but if you read our posts carefully, they don't really defend XCOM, they say "Wow, looks nice, could be fun!, let's wait and see before we either call it crap or pure awesomeness".

*cough*:

 

This game will be awesome!

[Azrael Strife]

*cough*:

That was just some innocent optimist bursting after reading an interview

[Pete]

Jeez, I didn't even see Sluissa's suggestion that we might be being bribed to be positive. Do you really think this site is that big that they'd try and buy us off?

 

You seem to have us confused with those sites that always score bigger releases at 95% and over even when they're crap (throw in a recent example someone?)

[sluissa]

Pete, I suggest that because this site started out, oh so long ago, before it was known as StrategyCore, as an X-Com fan site. This is also one of the last places on the net with any significant concentration of hardcore X-Com fans.

 

I can see it happening as an attempt at damage control. Search for the inner core of the fan base, those that have put innumerable hours of work into the game, those that were even sought for advice when the owners of the X-Com games, without any source code to fall back on, wanted to release a windows compatible version. Yes, it's this site that has left their watermark on an officially released version of X-Com (The Steam one, if I remember correctly.) You find these people, and you do whatever you have to to get them to say good things to try to pacify the rabid fans. Words can do it, and might have, but money also talks.

 

Again, I'm not saying it looks like a bad game. It looks like it could be a good game based on the little we know, but I still see nothing X-Com related at all in the released footage. The interviews have been tight lipped, simply responding to questions about the change in setting with replies like "This is XCOM." and "We looked at the old game and pulled the parts we thought best personified 'XCOM'." This doesn't answer anything and reeks of memorized scripts and marketing designed to conceal and mislead.

 

I believe that if I was shown, even a glimpse, that this was set in the same universe as the rest of the series, I'd shut up and wait and see. I just have a problem with them having thrown out an entire, decently written and popular setting for something so completely different.

 

Are a few frames of footage of a sectoid really that much to ask?

[Bomb Bloke]

I can see it happening as an attempt at damage control. Search for the inner core of the fan base, those that have put innumerable hours of work into the game, those that were even sought for advice when the owners of the X-Com games, without any source code to fall back on, wanted to release a windows compatible version. Yes, it's this site that has left their watermark on an officially released version of X-Com (The Steam one, if I remember correctly.) You find these people, and you do whatever you have to to get them to say good things to try to pacify the rabid fans. Words can do it, and might have, but money also talks.

Long story short, we haven't been payed - or even asked - to do or say anything about this game. Or any other, for that matter. Pete pays for pretty much the entire site out of his own pocket, and no other staff members have earned anything out of it either.

 

Of course, I suppose it's possible that we're just being subtle about it...

 

Personally I've decided it probably won't be an "X-COM" game. There hasn't been any signs of tactical combat, and the strategic elements are still only in writing. One of the few things they have said is that they have little to no interest in the canon (though they've still being throwing out buzz-words like "Elerium", which will apparently still function in a way similar to that of the original games - though why the heck the blobs are dragging it around remains unknown).

 

But... the choice of new aliens is one of the few things that doesn't worry me. Discounting the spin-offs, Sectoids were only enemies in the very first X-COM game, which was called UFO: Enemy Unknown (... though granted they've been at least referred to in all titles thus far). Much of the fun during the first playthrough was in the fact that the enemy was unknown. I still remember seeing my first Chrysallid and thinking "that's a funny looking Sectoid"... I don't remember seeing my twentieth.

 

(No, the result of that initial encounter wasn't a zombie-fest. I used standard procedure for dealing with unrecognised threats - ie, a rocket - and left it to the scientists to worry about).

 

Anyway, I'm just rambling now, but the point I'm working around to is that sometimes originality is a good thing, if only because discovery = fun (heck, this is a large reason why people get addicted to certain games - an hour of repetition/grinding is "worth it" if only to see what the reward is). Granted, I don't want to see the new devs straying too far from the initial gameplay formulas (though I strongly suspect they will), and I'll be very surprised if they come up with something that'll still be fun on the n'th playthrough, but I find it difficult get worried about their choice of aliens.

 

(By the way, the first Windows version of UFO was made from the original source - but it didn't work "out of the box" with Vista onwards. Hence why the Steam release boots the original DOS game via DOSBox by default (though it does actually include the Windows version as well now). I think our "watermark" file has since been removed from the Steam release, not that we were technically responsible for it being there in the first place... )

[Pete]

What BB said

 

Although I do have my name in the credits in the UFO Aftermath manual though as does Slaughter - in fact I think he and Thorondor (IIRC) got credited in the UFO Aftershock manual as well. That wasn't a bribe either - just a thanks for covering the games.

 

I did get two copies of X-COM Enforcer - one signed and one to play. They don't technically have monetary value as the demand isn't exactly high - again, just a thanks for covering it.

 

The site is now in the position of being able to review games at no cost to the reviewers besides their time, unlike in the early days when we could only obviously write about games we'd bought, so there is some incentive I guess to writing reviews and previews, but even that's not as glamorous as it sounds as many previews are based on buggy pre-release builds and, similarly many just-released titles are sorely in need of patching in today's world where publishers frantically push devs too release on time and damn the players! Sorry, getting a bit irate at publishers there but it's true that too much of that goes on still It's also little compensation I guess for hours of research and writing - we're just ordinary nerds doing it for our own enjoyment

 

Aaaanyway, back to the topic.

[chiasaur11]

Couldn't a copy of Enforcer be considered an Anti-Bribe, and thus a sign of journalistic integrity?

 

It is Enforcer, after all.

[Thorondor]

@Pete: I was fortunate enough to get credited under 'Community Support' alongside Slaughter on all three of ALTAR's UFO:A[X] titles actually...

 

::

 

*bammff*

 

[Azrael Strife]

XCOM

One lives, one dies, you choose.

 

It's hard to think about strategy games as anything more than iconic abstractions, but 2K Marin's revival of the XCOM franchise gives a surprising depth to the series' iconic moments of choice. The game got a mostly skeptical reception from journalists at the show, but I thought it had one of the most interesting mechanical implementations of choice and morality into a game world where you shoot alien tar. Before you get to the shooter sequences, the game pays homage to the original with some minutes spent in a base doing research, arranging materials, managing team members, and making strategic choices on a map.

 

If you played the original X-Com you'll be familiar with the moment of staring at a map and choosing which mission to accept, but the ability of actually moving through missions in first person adds a sense of emotional viscera to the tough decisions. It forces players to consider the consequences of choosing to save neighborhood A over neighborhood B in terms of front lawns, toys, and screaming women flailing in a slimy alien clutch.

 

In the demo shown, players were presented with two calls of help described by a dispatcher working in your base. You can consider missions on humanitarian terms but they come with practical considerations. As the demo guide choose one mission to help a family in a residential area who'd reported an attack the dispatcher reminded players that there weren't many research points to be had by taking the mission. It's an old moral trap, do you abandon a cause to save an individual, or are you willing to sacrifice the individual for the good of the larger cause? As familiar as it might be, it's a terrific moment because there has never been, nor will ever be, a right answer. It's a sort of Kobiyashi Maru test for players who want to do the right thing at all times. Being able to follow that eternal question from the strategic view of the map all the way down to the first person view of individual people overcome by the amorphous menace is one of the most exciting game structures I saw at E3.

 

https://pc.ign.com/articles/110/1101174p2.html

[Bomb Bloke]

If you played the original X-Com you'll be familiar with the moment of staring at a map and choosing which mission to accept

... Well, yes, even if the answer is typically "all of them"... I mean, you're controlling a combat force tasked with taking out an alien menace, after all. It's not like you're short on soldiers, or transport vehicles for that matter.

 

(I still haven't quite worked out if the "supreme leader of XCOM", Agent Carter, is expected to be present as a front line soldier in each and every mission his teams attend. Which, again, makes me think "one man army").

 

But even in those minutely rare cases when you have to let one slide, it wouldn't be the attack on an urban area. If you allow such a thing to go through unopposed, you're penalised heavily; the downside is that you're walking into a large group of heavily armed aliens.

 

Two ways of doing morale choices in games:

 

One is to make them difficulty-based. This is how BioShock tells you it's gonna be - be good and you'll suffer reduced rewards.

 

The other is to make them pointless. This is how BioShock is. Good or bad, long before the end of the game you'll've "maxed out" every power worth getting. (I'd say that makes it too easy, but really it's the whole "you instantly respawn when killed for no price" thing that does that).

 

Seriously, there has to be a penalty for not attending the "save people" missions. Otherwise people will do a few of them regardless, but soon enough they'll decide that saving nameless/faceless NPCs is a waste of time.

 

(For the record, my attitude towards civilians in the original game is that of complete indifference - only time I pay them any attention is when they're blocking a narrow walkway. A few shots sorts that out nicely. )

 

In short, I expect this will affect the story.

[Gimli]

Most civies die on me on the very first turn in terror missions anyway. If I see I don't stand a chance, I'll just take out the ones I can before I abort.

[chiasaur11]

Could work if the reward for sving civvies is a very natural funding boost.

 

(And I sometimes had to miss missions. Only one skyranger at the beginning of the game and that)

[Matri]

That reminds me, any word on launching interception missions to shoot down UFOs and then sending recovery missions?

[Pete]

I would imagine that if these guys weren't just leaking in from an alien dimension that they'll be holding off UFOs til later in the game. What I've seen so far seems to be pointing more in the mystery and intrigue direction (what are they and where are they coming from), and UFOs, if they're in it or not, too early on would possibly take some of that away. That's just my personal take on it.

 

That's not to say there wouldn't be anything in the sky to take a shot at. I would imagine things escalate as the game progresses so there's nothing stopping the armed forces having a go at some point I have these visions of tanks and jets ineffectually converging on those obelisk thingummes

[Matri]

You do realize that those obelisk thingy, and by extension the ring thingy, is made up of the black slime blobs.

[ccarter1024]

Well all I can say is this...I am not overly impressed. The game itself looks interesting for a FPS, but to give it the name XCOM is just a slap in the face. You might as well just call it Alien Hunter or something. I will admit that I am like just about every other diehard X-COM fan out there....I essentially want a revamp on the old with all updated graphics and such. But, to be honest, we all know that will never happen. EVER. Still I will reserve my total judgement on the game until I actually see the released product. Who knows, I might actually enjoy it. But it is a pure slap in the face to not have any cannon in the game and call it XCOM. It will not be X-COM and it never will be. Seems to me that 2K is doing what a lot of companies are doing these days. Taking the name of a previously successful title, pull one or two things from it so it looks familiar and then changing the entire aspect of the game from content to playablilty and still calling it their own. Give me a break. I just get fired up to see one of the best games of all time thrown in the mud because the owner of the IP doesn't get it or just doesn't care.

[Space Voyager]

Don't forget to watch Gamespot's interview with Martin Slater, the head of 2K Marin.

 

I just can't NOT get hyped.

[Matri]

Still promising a lot without promising anything. All I'm still hearing is Daikatana-level hype. They're just repeating the same script over & over & over & over again.

 

Also, Tommz7070 from the comments is pretty obviously a paid shill.

[ccarter1024]

Well after looking at the interview I am only slightly more impressed. What he said sounds interesting but we are all (I think) looking at this game as a revamp of the old one. This is just not the case with this game. They have taken a perfectly perfect TBS game and turned it into yer another FPS (I will let you guess at what the S stands for). I am not by any means saying outright that this is going to be a terrible game. It still looks pretty interesting. If you like FPS. The whole core of the argument (I think) is that they should not be calling this game XCOM. Yes it has aliens, yes it supposedly has some sort of combat unit (didn't know the FBI trained their agents like that back in the 50's), yes it has research (if you want to call it that), BUT, is it X-COM? Absolutely 100% NO!!!! X-COM is and will always be TBS, research, base building, interceptions, recovery and terror attacks and last but certainly not least, all about the aliens. You know the ones I mean. Sectoids, floaters, reapers, snakemen, crysallids, etc. Not some damn black goo that makes me think of the alien virus in X-Files. Like I have said before you can call the game whatever u like and say that you were heavily inspired by the X-COM franchise and that would be fine. At least then we would know that you are at least telling the truth. But to say that this is another X-COM is purely laughable. I am sorry for the rant but I just cannot handle someone muddying the good name of X-COM.

[Pete]

I had a big reply planned but trimed it down to these main points:

1. They called it XCOM. Nothing anyone says or does will make it otherwise. Period. Everyone here could boycott the game if they chose to do so and it wouldn't stop it being released or, probably, selling more copies than every other X-COM game combined (the buying force is strong with console owners and the original games really didn't shift a lot of copies).
   
2. We don't yet know enough to know if it will be good or bad, just enough to know that there are many X-COM fans among us and the wider population who disagree with the direction it's taken. That doesn't yet make it universally good or bad, although the RP/FPS gameplay style has already turned off many people who wanted something closer to the original.
   
3. What we know is that the aliens will be new, it has RP/FPS elements, an unknown degree of squad management and base building, a research and development element and it's set before the original X-COM title. What we've seen is about 30 seconds of gameplay, some cinematic elements, a handful of screenshots and not a lot else. If I hazarded a guess, I'd say we've seen around-or-less-than 1% of the game.
   

If you really feel strongly about it not being XCOM or not being worthy of the XCOM name then please email 2K or send them a message on Twitter or Facebook (links at the bottom of the page) where it will do more good than posting it here.

 

Seriously, I truly understand that many people aren't happy with it, but I don't want threads to descend into ranting. I'd personally rather they don't descend into worshipping either at the other end of the scale.

 

I'm not trying to censor people, I've not closed the thread, I've tried to be impartial in this post, but these arguments (rants, strong views, whatever you want to call them) are getting us nowhere and all the while the world moves on and a game will be released at the end whether some of us want it to or not.

 

Can we agree to disagree, move on, pretend it's called "FBI vs The Blob" or something and leave the rants behind? Please? Pretty please?

[ccarter1024]

Point taken Pete. Sorry for the rant. I did email 2K Marin about it, I know they will look at it as just another disgruntled gamer. So be it. I am not trying to blast 2K at all (well maybe just a little). I was just a little miffed by the fact that...well you know my opinion from my previous two posts. I have said all that I needed to be said. And like I said before, I am not saying that this game is going to be terrible. It might quite good in fact. I hope it is good and I am proven wrong. It will not be the first time I have eaten crow and it certainly won't be the last. I will try and keep an open mind about the game. Again, sorry for the rant. Didn't mean to flame. I hope we hear good news in the future about the game. I will gladly cook up the crow myself.

[Pete]

No problem and apologies if I was a little blunt. It was more a point to everyone to try and get the thread back on some sort of track

 

And if it turns out to be good or bad in my opinion, I will be among those who publically point out it's merits and/or flaws in the form of an in-depth review*.

 

As in, I'll finish the game or get as far as I can before reviewing it, unlike most other "reviews" that tend to spring up on release day praising games based on an hour or day's play whether they're good or bad

[Gimli]

But... the choice of new aliens is one of the few things that doesn't worry me. Discounting the spin-offs, Sectoids were only enemies in the very first X-COM game, which was called UFO: Enemy Unknown (... though granted they've been at least referred to in all titles thus far). Much of the fun during the first playthrough was in the fact that the enemy was unknown. I still remember seeing my first Chrysallid and thinking "that's a funny looking Sectoid"... I don't remember seeing my twentieth.

 

(No, the result of that initial encounter wasn't a zombie-fest. I used standard procedure for dealing with unrecognised threats - ie, a rocket - and left it to the scientists to worry about).

 

Anyway, I'm just rambling now, but the point I'm working around to is that sometimes originality is a good thing, if only because discovery = fun (heck, this is a large reason why people get addicted to certain games - an hour of repetition/grinding is "worth it" if only to see what the reward is). Granted, I don't want to see the new devs straying too far from the initial gameplay formulas (though I strongly suspect they will), and I'll be very surprised if they come up with something that'll still be fun on the n'th playthrough, but I find it difficult get worried about their choice of aliens.

 

I've been thinking about what you said here for the past few days. This is something I haven't thought about previously and something that would definitely need to be taken into account when making a new X-COM game. There is a problem though. The aliens remain an unknown only until you beat the game for the first time. But one of the reasons that X-COM is so great is its replayability. Even though you know all about the aliens and the tech tree and so on, it still remains fun because the game offers enough randomness to make you feel like you're walking into the unknown every time you play the game and on every mission. Yet the first contact with a new alien can be very memorable if done right and that is important, too. On the other hand, some familiarity is expected in a sequel (it's hard to say how much though).

Maybe another way to do it would be to have a few familiar aliens (e.g. Sectoids, Mutons, Ethereals and Chryssalids) along with some new ones. On top of that, you could give a new spin to the existing ones (check the Chryssalid hybrids in that Dave Ellis interview) which may be interesting in its own right because you feel secure when you see the old aliens but then the game surprises you when you see they changed. Then again, changes are tricky things, not everyone will like them.

Personally, I could go with that, but I could go with an entirely new cast. Having all the same aliens would be a bad idea as you pointed out.

[FullAuto]

selling more copies than every other X-COM game combined

 

Not picking on you Pete, this is a personal bugbear of mine:

 

Has anyone ever seen any actual sales figures? I mean, from a reliable source?

 

EU must have been some kind of success, because TFTD was a very quick sequel indeed. EU itself was on shelves, selling, for years, IIRC (and is still a viable enough prospect that it's being sold through digital distribtution). It was successful enough to get a console port, for God's sake (as did TFTD, incidentally). I know it didn't make or break any records, but I'm a bit tired of seeing people who were involved with X-Com go "Oh, it did okay." It did okay?

 

If you worked out the size of the market then, and the size of the market now, and had some info on how much it sold, I think we'd probably find it did very bloody well indeed.

 

Going to have a pill and a lie down in a cool dark room now, bye.

[Gimli]

Unfortunately, we don't have any solid facts here. Dave Ellis believes none of the games ever sold more than 250 000 (Civ 2 sold 2 million I think). There's an article on Edge's web site that claims 600 000 for UFO Defense. I asked one of the editors about it and it looks like it was a bit of a misprint, because the article on the web site is actually a copy from the magazine where it was stated 600,00. He assumed it was missing a 0 rather than having a misplaced comma. Our only real chance would be finding someone who was higher up in Microprose.