metalangel wrote:
I had to turn the constant cutscenes for every little action off, so that just moving my soldiers up was bearable.
This was annoying, but thankfully it is easily turned off and a lot of the cutscenes are just there for the tutorial.
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They seem able to move huge distances per turn, you don't need to set a direction for them to watch.
Which makes more sense, IMO. I never really thought about it, but in the original game you had to move out of cover, turn around, and then move back into cover. Doesn't it make far more sense that your soldiers are autonomous enough to, you know, keep looking around themselves in the middle of a battlefield?
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Because there's no time units, they move a set distance per turn (and the additional distance if they 'dash' and then can't fire) whereas you could set time units aside for different types of fire in the old games.
Yeah, you could, but nobody ever did. Auto-shot was always by far the best type of fire to use, so everyone just used that. They've reduced that down to just setting your soldier on Overwatch now, which works provided you have at least one action left (so, in effect, the same as reserving TUs)
It remains to be seen if soldiers can move further as they "level up" (for lack of a better phrase) as in the original, but I'd be surprised if they can't.
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The interface is clunky, with the needing to hit Tab to change between soldiers (what? Even the original let us click to select) and then numeric keys to selection an action and then space to engage that action.
Bad demo syndrome. You can click your soldiers to select them, and you can click aliens to shoot them too. You can use the mouse for everything, the numeric keys are just shortcuts - which IMO is a step up from the original, where you had to click everything.
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Because you don't really do much during the demo, I'm not sure how important setting your guys up for Overwatch or Hunker Down is because it really didn't matter at all.
Yup, bad demo. Overwatch is essentially reaction fire, so is very important. Hunker Down I've not really tried, for much the same reason. From what I gather, if you hunker down behind full cover, you become impossible to hit, whereas normally even full cover still gives the enemy a chance to hit.
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Six soldiers is only sufficient because the map seems so small.
See, I thought the second demo mission was comparable in size to normal UFO missions, it just feels more "cramped" because there's not endless fields of cabbages and stuff.
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The German scientist lady's accent seems to be all over the place... being from the French part of Germany, but educated in London?
Amusingly enough, in the German version of the demo, the dialogue is the same. So the guy at the start saying "Hilfe..." still prompts German voices to say "What's he saying?" "Help me" in German
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Likewise, the cutscenes? Fuck off. Dropping cringeworthy quips and cliched lines, the more realistic graphics begin to work against the game when you wonder why they have advanced looking armour from the beginning but don't bother with helmets.
Yeah, this does look odd but I guess having no armour at all would be weirder these days.
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This is all the more galling that they were 'our best squad' and you couldn't have killed them faster if they'd shot themselves.
Yeah, this really annoyed me. I'm pretty sure the original plan for the demo was that you'd take control of a squad of non X-COM units, from the German police or something, and watch them get slaughtered.
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Aliens attack China and the US simultaneously, but because we only have one Skyranger, that's all, sorry, one of you will have to die. We can't send my first squad on the Skyranger to the more distant China while we ask the US military to provide an aircraft (or hell, book our guys onto a private jet, private helicopter, even a fucking Delta flight) to travel the three pixels on the map between our SEKRIT BACE and Chicago?
I'm not 100% sure, but I think this is just part of the tutorial. You're right in that there's only one Skyranger (as far as I know) but I'm pretty sure you can leave other attack sites on the geoscape and go to them after you've been to another. You can have multiple interception craft, so I imagine you can tell an interceptor to patrol over an attack site to shoot it down if it takes off etc.
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I had two main bases covering North America and Europe, with two more under construction in Asia and South America.
As you know, you only get the one main base now but it gives you global reach for troop transporting so is less of an issue.
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Listening posts (long range radar and elevator only) were in place to cover the gaps in detection while I researched the alien psionic commuications.
You'll still be able to do this, but they're satellites now instead of bases.
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In other words, I was in charge of a huge, globe-spanning organization that I had built, nurtured and controlled. 18 years later, it's a barely-glorified boardgame of cutscenes, scripted events and other artificial limitations because they've decided that this generation's teenagers are too stupid to appreciate the same complex games that we did.
Bad demo syndrome. Have you seen any of the gameplay videos that look at it in depth?
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This game gets funding for AAA production values but none of the depth, personalization or freedom that makes the great games that have so many ways to play, things to discover, years of fun in them. Meanwhile,
Xenonauts struggles along and until recently couldn't even afford to put sprites in to represent female soldiers.
I've backed Xenonauts on Kickstarter, but I'm still looking forward to OpenXcom more than that.