Be Excellent To Each Other

I think you should keep an open mind and not have a knee-jerk reaction against them because they are different. They're clearly a key mechanic, and not one Firaxis have added lightly.

Agreed.

It's interesting in how it forces you to push. I have snipers who I position high on overwatch as my rangers dart forward.

I am absolutely terrible at this, and despite my best efforts never seem able to set up a successful concealment ambush.

I've had to drop difficulty down to Rookie - what the hell's happened to me?

I entirely take your point but it's hard to overstate how much I hate it when games force me forwards against my instincts and my preferred way of playing - I love taking my time and exploring everything and feeling as safe as possible, right from my very earliest experiences with the genre (and I'm going back to the Rebelstar/Laser Squad era on the ZX Spectrum here).

I remember playing through the original Command & Conquer on PC and discovering that the AI was too dumb to blast its way through walls I built as it didn't see them as 'hostile', as long as all the AI's units were also out of range of my base/units, so if I left it no route whatsoever into my base it would simply amass a huge force on my 'wall border' and do nothing with them indefinitely, which gave me infinite time to prepare the perfect base and force to annihilate the would-be invaders with zero casualties, even if it took until 3am in the morning to complete a single level (which it did, and absolutely brought my 486 DX-2 to its knees as I don't think the game engine was designed to cope with so much 'stuff' being active at once).

Same goes for all other RTS games and suchlike, I love to turtle down and do things on my own timetable, the levels I disliked the most in Dungeon Keeper 2 were the ones where I had aggressive dungeon breaches to deal with from very early on. (And the one single thing I'd identify as not liking about the Terran campaign on Starcraft 2 as opposed to the original, is the way Starcarft 2 is constantly nagging at you to 'GO HERE, DO THIS, TIME IS SHORT'.)

I appreciate this is very much a case of 'me not liking the mechanic of a turn timer' (or similar) rather than there being anything inherently wrong with the mechanic, but it is a consideration for me when it comes to X-Com 2. That said, when I buy the game (which I will) I'll most likely try it as Firaxis intended it to be to start with, but equally likely mod it out when I remember I do indeed really not like turn timers

I used to build a line of sandbags all the way to the enemy base and wall them in. Then build turrets in their base.

Hopefully someone will mod the aliens out for you, too.

The timers work well because they are entirely thematically consistent with the rest of XCOM. They require you to carefully gauge risk, and reward -- and then balance them against each other. It's just another layer on top of the eight or nine you are already juggling: you never have enough of anything to do everything, and this time around, even your time is (sometimes) constrained that way too.

I used to play XCOM very cautiously. Move one AP only, set overwatch, repeat. When I returned to XCOM to play Enemy Within, the new Meld mechanic forced me outside my comfort zone, and that's entirely in the spirit of the game. You're supposed to sweat a little, and agonise over tiny decisions with huge consequences.

Also the last mission I had had a 12-turn timer and I evac'd with 7 turns on the clock. One before that I finished on the very last turn, but only because I (deliberately) played it very safe at the end knowing I had time to reach the goal.

Rookie Bajirao Singham is "shaken" and has reduced Will. FFS XCOM, don't you know who this is?

It's also made him a Specialist which is also rubbish.

Now he's losing his MIND!

Why is there no head-poking gif for this? Someone that owns the DVD should fix that immediately.

Well, dropping difficulty down to Rookie has helped - although the complexity of the new Geoscape is going to take a bit of getting used to, seems like there's about three million different things I need to pay attention to this time around!

I think that's just unfamiliarity. Like, making contact with areas and building radio comms rooms is just like satellites in XCOM, but it took me a bit to realise that. (Also, my typical XCOM strategy is to rush satellites and I think I completely spannered that up this time.)

Does anyone else think the Dark Events are a lot like the You Can Choose Which Terrible Thing Will Happen But At Least One Will card mechanism in the XCOM board game?

Yeah, they totally are. But then, they seem to have ramped up massively the "We're going to give you a variety of options. We're not going to lie, they're all shit and are basically just there to highlight how hard a job you're going to have stopping the aliens this time, but

The timed missions (the ones that don't end in instant failure) particularly.

I quite like Kotaku's description of the game: “turn based grief simulator”.

also the line in their review...



Codex Aliens are the effing worst (so far).

i want to get this, but I have to finished the previous one...

http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/the-bril ... player-745

Vice love the time limits

I'm happy to be proven wrong in the fullness of time, but reading that piece (even though it was written in praise of the mechanic) - makes the whole 'hurry up' thing sound like something I'll really dislike.

I'd concur. I generally don't like being rushed in games anything.

Title of your sex tape.

Play different games that don't have time limits

Indeed.

Look at how much I've played XCOM 2.

I can't wait for them to mod Football Manager into an FPS.

Waiting for it cheap in a sale.

Without the whole 'hurry up' thing so firmly embedded, it'd quite likely have been a Day One purchase for me.

Press caps lock to cut loading times by up to 30 seconds

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016- ... -in-xcom-2

Disk transfer rates are higher in uppercase

Caps lock is cruise control for cool.

bUT yOU sTILL hAVE to sTEER

Just fought through my first Avenger Defense mission.

Cor blimey, a bit tough, eh? 27 out of 32 aliens killed before I made it back to the landing pad.

1 soldier killed, 7 gravely wounded.

I get the feeling that the agonising wait period of having to ignore missions in order to get my squad back to full health has basically put me in an unwinnable game state :/

If you look at the Steam and Metacritic negative user reviews, many of which are clearly written by people who aren't:

1) Imbeciles
2) Just hating on the game for the sake of it

and are:

1) Measured and considered opinions of the game and how it works
2) A serious critique of the new 'hurry up' mechanics

The same themes come through time and time again, too much RNG, not enough chance to act strategically, run 'n gun required, bugs, glitches, magical enemies, obvious optimal strategy etc etc.

Current split on Metacritic for users is 134 negative, 65 mixed, 331 positive. Steam shows a better split for positive, 5019 versus 1717 - but the negatives do bring up all those same criticisms again and again.

Eurogamer reports that Firaxis are working on a patch for various issues, mods can perhaps take care of the timers and suchlike, although one of the reviews suggests that the game is only difficult because of the timers forcing you into 'rush' style tactics, remove that and it actually becomes very easy.

http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/xcom- ... t=negative

http://store.steampowered.com/app/26850 ... views_hash

Which is basically what XCOM:EU was.

Then, once all the players had exhausted every possible way of playing that, and had min-maxed it to shit, they asked for - nay, demanded - procedural maps, turn limits to add tension (the first workings of which were added in Enemy Within.), and more depth to the Geoscape.

So Firaxis do this, and everyone moans.

To be fair, if you add timers because a bunch of players say 'we want it to be more stressful', the absolute very first thing you add is an option to turn off the timers. Because then everyone's happy, surely?

True enough.

Wait. Weren't you spunking all over Dead Rising back in the day?

Which only rushes you if you let it.

It's the definitive example of a videogame with a timer. It's literally all timers all the way down.

But what's under the timers?

But the penalty for missing them was slight.

Can the same be said for this?

Umm, it meant you couldn't actually get the proper endings.

The timings to get that were more than generous. No rushing required. Generally you were having to occupy time.

Escapist review not exactly in full-bummage mode.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/ ... M-2-Review

Go on, buy it. The whole forum is getting hot and sweaty in anticipation of you not really liking it but playing it obsessively...

That's kind of his job, though.

But sometimes he well bums things though.

Mostly though he just slags the shit out of decent games. Which is totally fine, he's doing it to be entertaining and happily I watch every video he puts out, but if you're going to look to him for balanced criticism then you're going to have a bad time.

Pedant note: The Escapist is the website, the video series is Zero Punctuation. The Escapist does other genuine serious reviews like their actual XCOM 2 one here.

RE: fixed link; that link is genuinely the URL for the second page of their review so it's a bit weird it doesn't work. Though linking to the first page makes more sense anyway so it's not a problem in this case.

You put "here" as the URL and the URL as the text to display.

Sounds to me like Bamba will be the first to get captured by the aliens and CONVERTED, so watch out for him looking at you a bit funny.

Also I do know how ZERO PUNCTUATION works (apart from, like, getting the name right), and I've been watching him for years, so whilst I appreciate he does do 'comedy slagging off' a lot of the time, you can still basically determine if a game is a 'thumbs up' or a 'thumbs down' - and in X-Com2's case, it feels very much like the latter.

Ah. I managed to confuse myself somehow as I was going in to edit the link to point to the first page of the review probably right after you'd fixed it and though it was the ".2" that was the problem. Or something, I dunno, I was doing that and trying to book a holiday and trying to convince four of my colleagues that making a change to our release for this weekend was probably a bad idea as I'm not around tomorrow to test it (translation: I'm trying to book a holiday and this looks like you might want me to do some work this afternoon so could you just fuck off?).

And yet the game has received almost universal acclaim elsewhere, despite the bugs and crashes (ironically, none of which I've suffered from)

After I completed XCOM, I didn't really fancy going back to it (and still haven't, not even Enemy Within) but I can easily see myself replaying XCOM2 - the skill trees add to the possibilities for replays, and subtle changes to things like grenades and rockets make the game so much more enjoyable than it's predecessor it's unreal.

It's almost like it's…

…wait for it…

…CONFIRMATION BIAS!

XCOM Not the Latest is now out on vita.

Annoyingly I'm about 7 hours into a new campaign on Enemy Within on my PC, so any portable XCOMmage is going to have to wait.