XCOM Developer Diary Part I

This looks fucking awesome. Hey whiners: if you want to play the original XCOM, go play the original XCOM. It still exists, despite the horrible sacrilege that is this reboot.

You would think the dev team fucked your girlfriends or something with the way you're all carrying on.

As much as it pains me to see developers have zero faith in the tense tactical gameplay which defined the real X-COM games, I have to admit that this reboot looks far more imaginative, clever and ambitious than, say, what Bethesda did with (or, rather, to) Fallout or even how Irrational utilized the System Shock legacy.

It's weird I can see the cool game in this. A first person re imagining of X-COM, you pull in all the cool stuff about not knowing exactly what your fighting and developing a team and the equipment you take and you could have yourself a cool game. Unfortunately they seem to be missing the point slightly, they've played mass effect and thought that you need to know every detail of every character and that wasn't the cool bit of X-COM. It was always the stories that you came up with yourself due to the decisions you've made.

I probably won't buy it but I do see what they're going for.

As soon as he said "put together by an idiosyncratic thinker" I knew what type of narrative it was going for.

@mlarrabee said:

This is to X-COM what BioShock is to System Shock.

You are beeing too generous there...

Bioshock at least managed to stay in the same genre and deliver somewhat similiar gameplay while actually feeling fresh/different.

But this?

The original never had been an FPS to beginn with, that's not THAT bad. Because when they first showed it they at least delivered some interesting enemy designs and talked about interesting gameplay mechanics.

I believe at that point quite a few fans of the original gave the game still a chance. But since then more and more gameplay of the game has been shown and by now it just looks like "Mass Effect in First Person set in the 60's" with tons of bipedal enemies and cover based shooting. So even the original creative spin that made it unique seems gone now.

That's neither fresh nor original... compared to that you could consider a Bioshock the official System Shock 3 and that's a generous thing to say because imho Bioshock had been a dissapointment to system shock fans.

@Nethlem: I think that most people who read my original comment misinterpret it, because they consider BioShock and System Shock to be at least slightly similar.

What I had hoped to convey was the complete disconnect between the two. In my mind, BioShock and System Shock could not be farther from each other. The only reason I knew that one was the spiritual successor of the other was because I was told so. In the same way, the only connection between the original X-COM games and the reboot is the name.

That is why I have ignored the attempted link between them, because it is much easier to accept this game when I examine it for what it is, rather than what it will never be: a proper sequel to X-COM.

I would stop bringing up X-COM so much to avoid more anger.