New gameplay footage

True enough. Especially the first iteration of The Bureau could have been great, if it wasn't burdened by XCOM's heritage. I love X-Files-style secret alien invasions. Yet as it stands, I don't think The Bureau in its current iteration is necessarily unworthy of XCOM's heritage either. For one, it's way too soon to condemn it so completely, as some seem to do.

2K Marin tries hard to capture the mechanical soul of the turnbased games, and translate it into a 3rd person action experience. Yes - the resulting gameplay looks similar to Mass Effect, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. I for one love Mass Effect, and plenty seem to have latched-on to Mass Effect's gameplay mechanics to the point of making ME3's coop, which is soley driven by its mechanical rather than narrative hooks, a longterm success for Bioware.

It's not that hard for me to imagine a true-to-XCOM action gameplay experience, using Mass Effect as a stepping stone. More granular and precise squad mechanics. More interesting and diverse powers. Larger squads. More interesting squadmate customization and more intricate equipment management. Perma-death. In my imagination - by adding the hooks of the turnbased game to Mass Effect-like action mechanics, I end up with a compelling and distinctly XCOM-feeling gameplay experience. At least that's how the inner eye of an optimist sees it.

Of course Bioware did a killer job with its gunplay in ME3, and is commonly quite underrated and underappreciated in that regard. It remains to be seen if 2K Marin can craft a similarly rewarding shooting experience. I sure hope so. I enjoy good games.

Probably, I'm going to go a step further, all those people bitching in 2010 and 2011 going "oh, it's not XCOM! it's not like the old ones!" and then going on to describe a game that wasn't remotely similar to the original XCOM, have never played the XCOM game before.

Whatever, as a guy that bought XCOM: Enforcer at retail, i'm willing to give anything with "XCOM" a chance, still saying the 2010 version was the most interesting though.

Why do people hate TPS's more then any other game genre? I've never understood that.

I do think that the new gameplay is closer to what I think of with XCOM. However, I don't think that it needs to be. It looks like something I'd like to play, maybe even more so than what they were showing a couple of years ago. I'd still like to see that version though. Maybe if this does well they could do a Blood Dragon/Case Zero type downloadable title with that original smaller, suburban horror-style FPS that they had.

@live2brighteous:

I thought people hated FPS's more than any other game genre...or maybe it's JRPG's...just different strokes for different folks.

Agreed! Controls look tighter and I very much appreciate the larger focus on your squadmates rather than them simply being canon fodder.

Serious business.

Anyway, I think this game seems bad. And I'm someone who can really appreciate a mediocre third-person cover-based shooter.

oh wow Morgan Gray, i remember him from the Dark Void days

I want a new Brothers in Arms. Set in the Saints Row world.

I'm willing more to bet that the people complaining now are the ones that were excited to see an XCOM-themed FPS and chiding the long-time strategy fans for not keeping an open mind. Now it's a third-person game with strategic elements and plays nothing like an FPS, meaning that fans of the FPS concept are now the ones left out in the cold. The turn-based fans got their game in Enemy Unknown, and now people willing to accept real-time combat with some thematic XCOM strategy elements get to try something new.

But I guess the FPS crowd can always play Syndicate.

Yesyesyesyesyesyesyes.

I knew you'd come around.

I agree it doesn't have to play like XCOM, which is just as well because it certainly doesn't look like it's going to. They might be taking a few more ingredients from XCOM now, but gameplay is the meal you make out of those ingredients, and that meal still isn't going to be XCOM, it looks like it's going to be Mass Effect (the weaker part of Mass Effect at that). I have no idea how they interpreted the response to their first iteration as 'make it play like Mass Effect' but here we are.

I think most of the people who had a problem with the first iteration (which was mostly related to misuse of the XCOM name, rather than what they actually showed) have now been sated by getting a 'proper' XCOM game and probably don't care passionately about this one way or the other. Personally I think they'd have been better off sticking with their first version and fleshing that out. It may not have had any business being called XCOM, but at least it looked like it had some kind of identity of its own. The management/strategy side of things is gonna have to be pretty impressive here if they don't want people to dismiss it as just another by-the-numbers cover shooter.

The player directly controls the action of his character. Time, for the most parts, keeps flowing naturally. That's the extent of the differences between the turnbased and the action-oriented iterations of the modern XCOM games on the surface level. The player still sends his squadmates from cover to cover. Still decides on what special abilities and equipment are to be used. Still manages customization. Still suffers agonizing perma death in the case of misjudgment and failure.

I maintain that the latest The Bureau footage looks like it will play like an XCOM game. It will be the action-oriented take on the formula. It is playing like XCOM as an action-game. It's not playing like a classic turnbased XCOM tactical game, for the aforementioned reasons. Inherently an action game cannot play exactly like a turnbased game. However, you allege that it doesn't play like a XCOM game at all. I do disagree with that notion. I think it can play like a XCOM game, just not a turnbased one. On a surface level, it certainly seems like 2K Marine has the player ponder the same actions as in Firaxis' turnbased iteration - just through the lense of an action game.

Therefor The Bureau can play like a XCOM game without actually playing like a XCOM game - because one XCOM game is action-oriented, whilst the other is turnbased. It's just two different takes on the same game. Both aspire to be a XCOM game. The turnbased one succeeded for the most parts, whilst 2K Marine's take still has to prove its mettle. I merely fight the predominant prejudice of The Bureau inherently being incapable of being a XCOM game. From what I've seen, such a failure cannot be decisively concluded. It's still very much up in the air.

Because there was like one good one (Gears) and then it seemed like every other game for the next 5 years had to be a shit copy of it until everybody was sick of it. For every Gears there were a hundred Dark Sectors. Then they started ruining perfectly good existing franchises by turning them into shitty cover-shooters as well.

Unless there is some other significant dimension to add flavour to a game, cover-based shooting (against AI at least) is super mind-numbing after a few minutes. 'Hide behind cover, be in ~no danger, shoot enemies in the head' just isn't an interesting enough mechanic to carry a whole game by itself, but it seemed to take the industry forever to actually appreciate that.

It can still work as one mechanic in a more complex game, I just don't think you really want to be asking the player to do it for more than 15-20 minutes at a stretch.

I really like Mass Effect, so I think this looks pretty rad. I like the way it seems now much more than the earlier demos. I've never gotten around to Enemy Unknown, so this seems like a perfect introduction.

@seppli: "Inherently an action game cannot play exactly like a turnbased game. However, you allege that it doesn't play like a XCOM game. I do disagree with that notion. I think it can play like a XCOM game, just not a turnbased one."

This is like arguing that if all you change about Chess is to make it real-time instead of turn-based, then as long as you're still using the same board and pieces it can still 'play like Chess'. I guarantee you that whatever you're playing in real-time with that chess board and chess pieces it won't play anything like Chess. Changing the fundamental structure of a game from turn-based to real-time is kind of a huge deal in terms of the effect that will have on gameplay.

What you're really saying is 'it has stuff an XCOM game has'.

This looks really cool, though I hope they make good of it. The required walking scene and corridor-shaped levels give a bad sign. It'll be even better if they have co-op like Mass Effect 3 did too!

Still seems interesting to me. But I say that as someone who has little interest in playing turn based XCOM, and likes Mass Effect a lot.

@jimbo: Isn't that exactly what you do in a FPS though... just without the dynamic cover?

@jimbo: Isn't that exactly what you do in a FPS though... just without the dynamic cover?

It looks like a nice middle-ground between XCOM: Enemy Unknown and Mass Effect games.

I wanted to play Enemy Unknown but I SUCK at strategy games. Maybe this is my way in.

@live2brighteous: There's usually a greater sense of danger for the player in FPS. You typically have to make yourself vulnerable to engage the enemy or even just to see what's going on. Cover TPS is often guilty of making the whole thing very safe for the player.

More new info:

So it seems that a bunch of other sites got some hands-on time with it and most folks seem pretty positive. Wonder if GB went...was anyone inexplicably missing recently?

I never heard of XCOM until people started bitching about how XCOM wasn't XCOM. I was actually looking forward to the XCOM fps because everything about it looked cool, maybe not XCOM, but cool. I played Enemy Unknown and loved it, but I liked the way the original 2010 version of the FPS looked too. I don't see why there can't be room for both aesthetics and gameplay styles in the same franchise. I'm really bummed to hear them say "We scrapped investigation in favor of more kicking ass." Also bummed that they took out the abstract aliens and shit.

But don't get me wrong. I think The Bureau looks sweet as well. As much as I liked the aesthetic of the 2010 version, the combat didn't look too special once all out fights broke out. I think The Bureau looks more interesting in that respect.

Dave?

:(

Dave's not missing, he's exactly where he needs to be at any given moment in time, like Gordon Freeman

Huh, so i'm kind of late to this party. Saw the new footage only just now. Sorry.

One thing I have to say is I am surprised at how blatantly they steered the game into trying to ape the new X-com. Not only the icons and UI elements such as grenades for both arc and area, cover shields and types. But also enemies, where before they had their own completely separate and different aliens now we see straight up sectoids and outsiders from the turn based game. The environments likewise changed to be closer to the recent X-com release, going with a slightly more cartoon/exaggerated/colorful style.

I expect that a meeting happened after the new X-com game was so successful and it went something like this: "Change your game to be more like that."

Not saying it's a bad or a good thing, just super obvious that that's what happened.