Life is Strange is a pretty great title for how this wraps up.
Spoilery musings:
Max got super powers and her first real use of them was to save Chloe and she goes on to try and save everyone. Yet, Max hadn't seen Chloe for 5 years, hadn't made any real efforts to reconnect despite moving back to town, and in the course of a week (or a hundred years), fell in love with her. So of course the ending requires her to NOT use her powers to save someone she wouldn't have fallen in love with had she not had her powers. Heck, given the emotional distance that exists between the two, while Max would have been distraught over Chloe's death in the Prime universe, she wouldn't have the double whammy of losing so much and CHOOSING it. And man that throwaway line of bravado from Nathan about Chloe was such a blow.
@convox: Oh definitely, seeing the return of the Unseen in fairly identifiable forms (though I've liked the modern takes on the Marauder/Zentraedi Officer Pods) is a bash. I wish I could just buy a game for 60 bucks (or heck, putting my money where my mouth is, $100 dollars for expansions or DLC) and just play an indepth Mechwarrior game. Even better would be a Star Citizen type game where I could be a mech pilot, astro fighter jock, super spy, etc. for any faction. Ah to one day have a handy couple billion dollars I guess.
Battletech lore is deep. In many respects the political games and spycraft is more interesting than the stories featuring snarky mercenaries in 100 ton mechs being orbitally dropped onto targets. It is a setting where the phone company is easily the most scary entity. Religious fervor in keeping your own secrets and knowing everyone else's secrets can do a lot.
It started as a recreation of European history through the lens of 80's Americans (the Chinese and Russians exist as a barely functioning tiny nation, the Japanese are a powerful but ultimately hidebound empire, the Americans were left out to keep the audience from just picking them). It started well after the fall of Rome and quickly transitions to the the creation of the Holy Roman Empire and then advances in the Next Generation-type leap to the Mongol Invasion, Reformation and Renaissance.
It has since become a bit more sci-fi with the reliability of old sourcebooks being called into question because they are all written in universe and there are conspiracies on top of conspiracies.
EDIT - Also, if the "Return of an Icon" mechs look familiar, it's because they are designs they are from Robotech/Macross.
I'm OK with the concept of improving through science. More genetic diversity to draw from is likely to improve your chances on that (whatever improving might mean anyways). It's just the tired sci-fi trope of humans being especially special that gets tiresome. IE it's not just having 7 billion iterations to pick some weirdo combination of genes to add to an incalculable amount of variation in a pool of alien DNA from several different species, it's that humans alone have some specialness that makes the aliens better just because. I'd even accept that human DNA makes sense to add to your troops on Earth because humans are already adapted to living on Earth.
This is kinda what I'm hoping will occur in the mod scene. That and if they don't show up in the main game, turncoat aliens that are willing to help XCOM to overthrow the Ethereals.
I don't know how seriously I can take this game after reading Austin's twitter. Either I'm going to laugh or I'm going to put on my critical eyes and start breaking down the actual whys of the aliens making themselves more human by sexing them up and putting boobs on snakes and jetpacks on sweet abs.
My guess at the in universe explanation? PR to make the alien troops more acceptable and even alluring to the human population. It's clear that the aliens we met in XCOM were heavily modified. There is no expectation that the Sectoids (and certainly not the Snake men) looked the way they do in the game when their species were enslaved. My guess is that the Ethereals could trivially annihilate human civilization from orbit, but the real goal involves having an intact base to support some larger goal.
Of course it could just be that humans are so very special and so need to be kept alive and thus relatively happy so that they are still around for some nefarious purpose.
I have high hopes for more XCOM with the idea of taking some of the lessons learned from the previous games (foreign languages and accents as an example), but the mod tools are what I'm really interested in. I liked some of the things that Xenonauts was pulling for.
Ah Shattered Union. I really liked what it was going for even if the game itself was a bit soft. Though the recent California drought issues highlights one of the fallacies of thinking current cultural or population centers would logically be the power brokers following a collapse rather than the group that owns the water. The Pacifica faction as underdog tree hugging technophiles rather than brutal water overlords for the California and (to a lesser extent) Texas factions seemed to be a misfire, along with the Midwest group (what with its stealth bombers and nuclear silos).
In regards to that early access dilemma, I think Brad Muir had a good take on that on a UPF talking about the issue of a local maxima (which he almost defined in terms of calculus, but not quite) in early access/Kickstarter, where you might fashion your game idea to what is nominally being asked for now to sell it early, but which is actually a dead end in terms of what the game might potentially be if you didn't have to appease people today, probably in terms of stunted narratively, gameplay wise or mechanics.
I think Austin touched on this in terms of the early gameplay of Undertale not being an accurate (or particularly good) representation of what the game had to offer.
huser's comments