I'm almost 28 years old. It's 01:38 over here. I woke up ans literally can't go to sleep because of how excited I was to play XCOM 2. I wouldn't ever claim to be a 'proper' adult, but I'm this ridiculously enthusiastic about something like a 9 year old kid. And it is absolutely awesome.

How are you liking the game so far? Fun, obviously. But would you describe it as a step up from Enemy Unknown? What I've played so far has guaranteed I won't go back to sleep.

Well, so far, I'm having a lot of frame rate issues - even though I meet the recommended requirements :| I've turned some things down, but there's a lot of things that seem to cause frame rate dips.

I am not liking it at all, I am at work for another 5 hours.

I'm really digging it so far, but I'll chime in and agree with @beachthunder that the performance could be a bit better. I've had to turn down some settings it doesn't seem like I should need to, and even them I'm still hitting some occasional moments where it chugs a little bit.

Additionally, I have already hit a few bugs here and there that I hope won't pop up too frequently or will get ironed out in patches. I had to force kill the game at one point because I got stuck in the loadout screen and the game wouldn't let me exit back to the team deployment. I also had a sound effect get stuck looping over and over again. Nothing too severe, but still a bit of a nuisance.

The new "resistance" motif is a really nice twist on the last XCOM, and they've layered in far more cinematic moments to drive the narrative forward. The gameplay is still pretty similar to the last game, but it's been long enough since I played it that it's refreshing to be back in the thick of it. There does however seem to be a far wider array of options to consider as far as things like research, soldier loadouts, and what missions to actively pursue.

All the good stuff from EU/EW is even better, and all the stuff that was busted still feels kinda busted. I've got a 980 Ti, and even I'm hitting some fairly nasty framerate drops @1920x1200 with everything cranked up except for AA (turned that down to 2x) and SSAO, as TotalBiscuit said those were the biggest performance hogs. I've also had a number of glitches that were described in various reviews; can't get the perspective to switch to a roof or an interior without it bugging out like crazy sometimes (just like in EU), I've had half of the sounds stop working, and the general animation freezes are both persistent and annoying.

But I love killing aliens so goddamn much that I don't care.

@mirado: I hear rumors it's CPU bound. Curious what processor you have.

Wow this is a shame. XCOM was a technical mess on PC at launch, shame to hear they did it again with the poor optimization

. If you're gonna make it a PC exclusive at least get the PC version right.....

Posting this before it launches in North America makes me super depressed i'm going to sleep in 3 hours...

I'm loving it so far, what a game! I'm making some coffee right now and will probably end up playing all night.

@frytup Definitely not a CPU problem. I'm only averaging 40-50% CPU usage while at 100% GPU usage and my frame rate is all over the place.

I was able to get SLI partially working, but the cover indicator textures disappeared so I had to go back to single GPU. I was getting a stable 60 FPS on Maximum with two 980s :(

Curious to see how this runs on my (dated) machine. Guess we'll see in 15 minutes when it launches in the U.S.

hooray for launch day patches...

ADVENT Stun Lancers are GARBAGE! Early game enemies with Run'n'Gun and a special weapon effect that immediately knocks your guys out for the mission?! Screw you, Firaxis!

@lackingsaint: funny, I'm playing on commander and they've missed all of 4 times they've come at me. They don't get a second chance.

@ripelivejam: Well, I can forgive some dips here or there under 60fps. But even on the lowest of the lowest graphics settings I'm still getting a lot of frame rate drops. It seems that no matter what, the frame rate hits 7 when there's a big explosion on screen.

Playing XCOM 2, new X-Files on in the background...life is good.

Wow, I am REALLY not a fan of the changes they've made to turn progression. Let me get this straight, I can position my troops in concealment, and then instruct one of my guys to fire on the enemy from concealment and then not only is my entire squad magically revealed (even though that makes no sense), but EVERY SINGLE ENEMY left standing gets a full free turn during which they can attack and kill half the guys I snuck up on them with? How does that make sense at all? I have an entire squad of guys surrounding you and instead of just instructing everyone to fire at once, I have to either wait until your entire team shoots and kills half my guys or use overwatch and hope that you move to trigger my overwatch (completely with a bs aim penalty)? It was annoying enough in EU/EW when the enemy would get a free movement turn immediately upon discovery but now they can literally attack as well?

@nevergameover: there is no aim penalty from concealment, and if your entire squad is in over watch and you let them discover you, it's the normal spot and move instead of their whole turn (provided they don't discover you from a flanking position )

@asilentprotagonist: Well this might come as a shock to you but the most performance demanding games are the PC exclusives. They are actually designed to use the power of PCs.

A consoleport you can usually power through with a deacent PC no matter how bad the port is. They are at their core optimized for slow consoles and low graphic settings.

@ethanielrain: if you put on the band XX in the background you've got yourself a triple x rating.

@frytup said:

4790K. I think I should be good for just about any game out there.

Don't leave your guys out of cover when you trigger the ambush. They put in a fix to allow the enemies to shoot if they see an uncovered or flanked trooper to stop people from deliberately leaving one man out there, waiting for the troops to patrol into him, all of your overwatches fire, and THEN you get another turn. As long as you trigger your overwatch ambushes from cover, they just run and try to hide like normal.

@bombedyermom: @mirado:

So what you are telling me is that I need to allow the enemy to discover me to break concealment, rather than just shooting them in the head from concealment like literally any armed forced unit would? If I have an entire squad surrounding them, with everyone in cover and out of their sight radius. I put everyone in overwatch and then I shoot one of them which breaks concealment, and suddenly, they ALL get a free attack turn. That makes absolutely no sense.

While it's true the game is not well optimized, I can't help but mention it really isn't that bad? Like, at all? I get frame rate dips in the transition scenes mostly. I don't think I've had it happen in an actual mission yet. Not saying it's okay to ship an unoptimized game, but saying it's a 'shame' or whatever feels rather hyperbolic. It's completely playable in every way.

So far, Commander seems on par with Classic. Except it's harder because of turn timers. Vipers are dicks. They get another move after licking your face out of cover. Acid grenades seem incredibly awesome though.

@nevergameover: No, you're doing it correctly. You don't get the normal accuracy penalty when overwatching from concealment, and you should be able to gun down most of a pod (if not the whole thing) with that tactic.

Think about it this way; normally, without concealment, the enemy immediately goes into cover on the turn that you discover them. With concealment, you get a chance to kill them before they can get to any cover. That means you have far higher accuracy by overwatching and ambushing than just discovering a pod, and then taking your turn.

If you really don't like it, just fire with one guy and don't overwatch the rest. Now it's the same as it normally is, and your free to take the rest of your turn firing at enemies in cover, instead of mowing them down before they have a chance to get there.

I can't even launch it, it opens for like a second then crashes. I hope they sort this stuff out soon because I was really looking forward to it.

It runs at like 20-30 fps on the lowest settings for me, I am super tired of busted ass PC games.

@zevvion: Acid grenades for life. I also enjoy Viper rounds as ammo types are also applied to the sharpshooter's pistol, meaning you can fire off a free poison round (doing extra damage + the damage over time), and then snipe someone else, who also gets poisoned.

DOTSs! DOTSs! More DOTs!

It's pretty bad. I can only run the game on high and am averaging around 45 FPS...on a GTX 980. That's the average, I get dips down below 30 on some maps depending on what is going on. I rarely see 60 FPS. The frame rate is even worse at base sometimes. And I can't find an SLI compatibility bit that works yet.

That's on a 980. One of the top GPUs one can even own. I'm putting up with it because I think the game is great overall, but the performance sucks.

Drop MSAA to FXAA seems to solve most of people's performance issues. I think Firaxis is doing some funky stuff, and the MSAA seems to exacerbate the situation.

Also I'm a bit disappointed that they really haven't polished any of the previous jank. Also floor/ceilings seem completely broken, while shooting angles from roofs feel super weird. I can over-watch an alien through an intact floor then a window, but I can't shoot an alien 3-4 tiles away from the roof's edge?

I don't mind the constant 8 turn timers so far, means you need to plan ahead. But if the entire game has these timers, then I can see it getting annoying. In all honesty the turn timers so far feel like a band-aid for the dumb A.I in EU. They want to stop you from setting up an ambush in a super safe area and baiting the AI. Although with concealment I just sneak up as close as possible to the objective, in a defensive position, throw out grenades and basically the aliens have no cover. Once you wreck the cover I find the AI just freaks out and they run off in random directions like headless chickens.

I know I'll enjoy playing through XCOM-2 but the lack of fixes to basic jank kinda has me wondering if they spent too much time on eye candy, and not enough time refining the core gameplay. Off to play more XCOM!

@beaudacious: At least they fixed shooting people directly below you from a rooftop. The rest of it is just as busted as before, though, with a bunch of cool new broken things added on:

1. I've blown up the roof that an enemy was standing on, only to have him levitate in place. That's bad news if you were relying on the fall damage for a kill.
2. Troopers will only use certain items that require you to get into melee range from one certain tile. No matter how many waypoints I set before it, if you have to dash to get someone into melee range to use the Skulljack, they'll only do it from one angle. That's bad when that spot is, say, on fire. Or covered in acid. Or poison.
3. If you have to save and reload (say, because the UI stopped responding), sometimes parts of building will just magically reappear intact. That's bad If you were hoping to utilize that new entryway you just made for whatever reason.
4. Seeing your troops walk around the various rooms in your base is pretty cool. Seeing your troopers' disembodied heads float around your base is hilarious.

Got up to the first time advent attack a "settlement" or whatever, framerate drops to 30, central won't shut up about it's a massacre, and every time you spot some enemies in this level they get a free turn to hide. I was doing fine up until this point but there were just sectoids everywhere and those cocks with the batons or whatever and they have so much health. I'll probably wait for a performance patch before I play again because that framerate, eeeurghh.

Anyone else notice how much of a hard time your XCOM troops have with busting glass using the butts of their rifles?

@mike: I love it when they try to bust up those laser windows. Just the idea that they've been conditioned to the point of swinging their rifle into the open air, meeting no resistance, and carrying on anyway.

I always hated the rescue civilian missions, but now having civilians morph into weird shit with a shit ton of health is stepping over the line. I think people can accept RNG but having a close range enemy just spawn with a ton of health, when wounded soldiers take fucking forever to heal is just lazy design. They keep taking concealment away from me, even though I'm a gorilla force. The further I get the less and less I like the changes. It seams so arbitrary where every move just becomes a roll of the dice, they should of added a fail state on movement to top of the cake.

I guess this just means I need to be super conservative with story progression and just grind out better armor and weapons.

@mirado: Earlier I had a guy try to hit the corner of a concrete building to shoot through it. There was no glass anywhere nearby.

In other news, I may have completely blown my first playthrough by not researching Resistance Comms early enough. I put myself in a position where I had to build some power first, now I've got 28 more days left to excavate enough space and the Avatar Project is already at 9. Oh well.

On the bright side, I LOVE the Advanced Warfare Center. I've got a Specialist with Shredder and two other troops with Implacable. Those random skills can lead to some really overpowered characters if you get lucky.

@mike: There's zero communication about the Avatar project before hand. In EU at least there was a 100% clearly laid out end game fail state.

@beaudacious: It didn't come right out and say that you lose the game if that meter fills up, but I figured it out as soon as the whole thing was presented. It's really my fault for not figuring out earlier that Resistance Communications is the new Satellite Uplink.

I'm not surprised that I'm not doing well on my first playthrough. It took me a few tries before I beat EU, I didn't expect this game to be any different.

@mike: Yeah the AWC is outstanding.

As for the Avatar project, you aren't as screwed as you think. (Spoilers for the mechanics but nothing plot related) when it fills up you get a 20 day countdown. Assaulting an enemy facility removes all of the Avatar progress it’s developed, and completing story objectives also chips down the progress bar significantly. As long as you do at least one thing to knock the bar down, you get a reprieve as the countdown timer will eventually reset back to 20 days.

Stalling the project to gear up your troops seems to be perfectly valid.

Well I booted up the game "just to see how it ran" for a few minutes.

It's now 3 hours later.

I'm really liking the effort they're taking on the narrative so far in this one. Central carrying over from XCOM:EU was a really cool touch.

Gameplay so far is, it's XCOM and I really like it. I don't mind the missions with a time limit on them - they're making me change up my tactics. I almost see it (in a weird way) as a Dark Souls to Bloodborne transition. Dark Souls was really geared towards taking, using your shield and being defensive. Bloodborne was more about being mobile and making more intelligent first strikes. Xcom seems to be similar in that regard.

I am though looking forward to controller support. My TV is next to my PC so that would be nice. Plus even playing EU on PC I preferred the feel of the controller for it.

@mike: I have a 980 too and I'm running it at 50-60. Only framedrops I get are mostly in the transition sequences. Not too much during the actual mission.

@mike: I just meant they could of mentioned the avatar project from the start, so that bar would be present right away. I'm actually doing really well : D. Two Grenadiers, a Ranger with SMG and blade focus, and a sharpshooteris pretty good. Haven't had to scum yet other then my UI disappearing on a turn, and no deaths past the second mission! Last few missions have been clean sweeps to! That blade really does turn those sectoids into mince meat.

@mirado: Oh good to know! Getting some gear always made things a bit smoother.

@beaudacious: The next level of weapons turns your troops into the embodiment of death. Everything gets better, including some of your skills (shredder grenadiers now break two points of armor, for example), and that combined with some of the special ammo types means that as long as I only pop one pod at a time, nothing makes it to the next turn. It's still XCOM, so a series of misses remains a problem, but I'm worried that I'm already feeling the snowball.

@mirado: I definitely reached a point in EU where I was pretty much untouchable. Hopefully its not as drastic here in this case.

@mirado: I'd suggest bumping the difficulty up a notch, I'm finding it a wicked challenge

Anyone else getting a hitching problem during cutscenes?

Edit: Okay, apparently I'm not the only one with problems.

What difficulty are you playing on? I'm on Commander and while it's not hard, I do have to be tactical at least. It's a good difficulty for the first time through if you're experienced with XCOM. I hope Legend won't be too much of a step up like Impossible was to Classic though.

I must say that although i have always loved the x-com games I am not really a Ironman kind of a gamer. Meaning that I will reload a game if my people start dying during a mission.

XCOM 2 feels like it would be hell to play it on Ironman mode and on higher difficulties (playing it on veteran setting since i have played x-com games before). But the game throws enemies that can mind control you right from the start making even missions rated easy feel like they should have been rated a bit higher when it comes to difficulty.

Think my biggest complaint is that your people are pretty bad in the beginning and tend to miss a lot. They also have very few abilities or equipment to handle these encounters smoothly. Cover in this game also means little when enemies can just shoot at you through floors.

Still having a lot of fun playing this game but it would have been nice to make the start a bit easier for players like us who maybe havent touched an xcom game in months or years. It takes a while to get familiar with the battle and the game throws you a curveball right at the beginning.

Also the tutorial completely forgets to show the player how the squad can go to the roof of buildings (had to look at the keybindings to figure out how to move between the ground level and the roofs/ f and c keys).

@rethla: Normally, I'd say you're right, but this game doesn't seem to be pushing the power of PC's very much to me. It's a pretty average looking game and people are having performance problems.

It might be because I'm still fairly early on, but I can't help but think that the choice of setting was a mistake. It's just way too familiar. It's still the same geoscape, soldiers look the same, many of the same enemies, same guns (even the tier 2 ones look really similar), same missions etc etc. It feels like I'm playing an extensive add-on to EU/EW, not a new game.

While I'm probably of the minority, my favorite of the old games was always Apocalypse, and it was because it was so different. Sure, some people probably didn't like the gameplay changes, but the setting and where it went was so cool and interesting. I even enjoyed UFO: Afterlight quite a lot purely because of it's different style and setting.

Other than that though, it's pretty much still the same game. Which is good, but I'm quickly realizing I still have XCOM fatigue. And it still suffers from the same sight and cover bullshit (not to mention the performance issues).

Oh, also, I've had some real fucked up things happening with the new map generation system. One mission I ran into two groups of aliens that were literally standing on top of each other (making for a 7 enemy encounter), another had two aliens trapped outside a window on top of the first floor awnings.

I'm waiting a while before getting it. It was either get this or the Witness, and the technical issues kind of swayed towards the Witness for now. Down the road I'll get it for sure, but I can wait. XCOM2 always looked very similar to the original game to me, and the difficulty changes didn't sound too encouraging. I like a good challenge but I don't want to feel like I'm getting completely creamed from the word go. Also I guess I'm in the minority that thinks the entire concept of "humanity lost, now we're a small guerilla force that has to take the planet back" is completely ridiculous and makes no sense.