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.
Well, if you remember the last mission of Enemy Unknown and what the Uber Ethereal was saying;
It turns out that the reason so many weird, distinct alien races are utilized by the Ethereals is because they're all slave races, each failing in different areas to serve as their 'perfect warriors'. They would challenge a race to defeat them, and each time they would fail definitively, and as a result they would just be absorbed into the Ethereal Empire as workers and soldiers. As it turns out, humans - with our potential for incredible will, tactical intelligence, utilizing of technology, and so on - are those perfect warriors the Ethereals were searching for. I think, despite the fact that the humans lost in XCOM 2's narrative, the Ethereals probably recognize that genetically there are some aspects of humanity very much worth passing on so, as a result, a lot of the forces in XCOM 2 are aliens spliced with human DNA to create that 'perfect middleground'.
@zevvion: Well like I said before, I've played the game for over a hundred hours, so certainly I have experienced all of the bullshit you've listed experiencing, and I agree that it's super frustrating! But it about levels out because it was only pretty rarely that something frustrating happened that I didn't know in my heart was kind of my fault ("I guess I expected the cover to be destroyed just because the edge of my grenade hit it..." "I guess I was counting on a 70% shot to save my soldier..."). I seriously doubt that I 'got very lucky' for 100 straight hours of game-time.
But yeah, I really dunno what to tell you other than I'm sorry your luck went so hard against you. If in over forty hours, you NEVER had a grenade destroy cover, and you NEVER had a rocket hit where you wanted it to hit, and all the other constant mishaps that you say happened to you... yeah, that really does suck. I almost wish you'd recorded all of it just so I could witness that horror first-hand.
While all those early skills are a nice start, I got nearly wiped because all of my team kept missing enemies that stood right in front of them. 60 to 80 percent change and still misses, my squadsight Sniper only got one kill through out the whole mission. While Enemies have the advantage of hitting more, get a free movement when discovered etc. Even when I put my dudes on Overwatch to intercept any incoming enemies, they miss.
I'm all for challenging game mods and rogue-like wipes and what not, but dragging a level out just because nobody can hit a still object in front of them is really grating my patience.
Sounds like you got dealt a real bad hand, and I'm sorry to hear about that. All I will say is that Long War doesn't secretly change the percentage chance of hitting the shot from the one you see on-screen; if you miss an 80% shot, that was simply you getting unlucky and missing an 80% shot. I'm not sure what the developers could possibly do to prevent that, other than make 80% shots hit 100% of the time.
For those who want to play some XCOM leading up to this, one of the highest quality mods ever just hit 1.0 for Enemy Unknown. It's called Long War, and has been pretty much consuming my life for the past month.
I've tried that last night but all the fun is sucked out of it because your team spends 5 turns missing every soot while the enemy regenerates health.
I'm right there with you. Even the description of the mod on Nexus makes it seem like the guys who made it are complete douchebags. They're all like, if you don't think this game is balanced then you're just a casual who sucks at the game.
One of the biggest problems with Long War is how unbalanced the progression is. A game of Enemy Unknown takes roughly 8-16 hours to complete. In Long War, after 8 hours you're still rocking either ballistic weapons or paper armor. Meanwhile, enemy troops are upped significantly. After 15 hours I didn't appear to be anywhere close to unlocking any genetic ability or building a MEC.
After much criticism, they added a Second Wave option that makes the game shorter (basically the inverse of Marathon in vanilla) which was good, and then what do they say about that? 'If you don't want to play the true Long War experience try turning this option on for the more casual experience'. Ugh. Just filthy.
It doesn't help that the game is also actually unbalanced. Many items that can be build are straight up useless. Some of the new skills are also literally useless because of other changes they made to the game.
I may not have played the latest build, but back when I still played it, my run that took like 40+ hours was wasted because none of my troops had the psionic gift. They changed it to be more random, and removed the code that forced psionics to be discovered on a soldier if it takes too long. So... I never got one. Tested everyone I could and no one had it. Unable to finish the game. Outstanding balance indeed.
The things they did to the tactical play is also mind numbingly boring. They added damage reduction on top of decreased chances to hit, while increasing the chances of the Aliens. Then in the ReadMe, explaining how it promoted you to play more tactically. In reality, in boils down to 'Hunker Down, then steady someone's weapon, take that 30% shot and hope for the best'. Because you can't move up or flank, because the first step you take in a level uncovers 3 pods of 4 aliens each, surrounding you.
I started a new game of Long War a couple months later and will admit I had a good time with it, until I realized I had just gotten lucky. I mostly uncovered only 2 pods at once, was hitting a good amount of 30-40% shots and the Aliens did a pretty good job of missing me consistently. After a while, luck turned. Uncovered 3 pods surrounding me again, Interceptors never, ever, ever shot anything down in the early game which made me have no materials to research better Interceptor weapons which made me hopelessly outmatched against other UFO attacks; and the wheel kept spinning.
I uninstalled it and played Enemy Within and had a blast. It really says something that Normal Long War feels a lot easier than vanilla Classic/Impossible, yet I fail it anyway. Random bullshit failing you missions is not fun.
You've argued that the developers have given off this snobbish elitist attitude or treated Not-So-Long-War/Dynamic War like a 'casual mode' before, but I still can't find any sources to back that up. Even on their FAQ, they seem perfectly fine with people modifying the game to suit their playstyles/how long they want to play. I've interacted with a few of them through the XCOM Subreddit, and none seem like the kind of 'hardcore gamer' 'complete douchebags' you're portraying them at all.
As far as the Psionic Gift thing... how long ago did you play? Because for years now, it has been standard in Long War that you can re-test soldiers and eventually they may have 'the gift'. It's only the Vanilla game which has a predefined notion of "This soldier is gifted", "This soldier is not gifted". It's literally impossible for you not to have a soldier end up with the gift eventually in LW, unless they've all got like 5 Will.
Again, you really aren't supposed to sit in cover and exchange shots. I've played Long War for over a hundred hours and honestly if I'm in a predicament where I'm not at least working towards breaking an exchanging-fire situation, I'm already screwing myself over. Flanking, ambushing, cover destruction, ground advantages, that's what the game was intended for. The Scout class STARTS with Lightning Reflexes, so you can break enemy overwatches safely. The Sniper class STARTS with Squadsight so you can line up a better shot from a safe distance. The Engineer STARTS with extra grenades and extra throwing distance for destroying cover. Gunners get Suppression which also breaks enemy overwatch. Rocketeers are BUILT for cover destruction, Assaults are BUILT for sprinting over for an enemy flank. I totally get the impulse to just sit in cover and keep banging your head against a wall with shitty odds, but the mod is absolutely NOT designed to incentivise that.
Obviously it seems the game just kind of left a sour taste in your mouth, so I get that and I'm sorry it wasn't your thing. But it seems like you're giving kind of an unfair impression in a few ways.
XCOM 2 retains the aspect that I hate about new XCOM by far: the idle enemies "activate" as an isolated group and instantly get a free turn, making them more like monsters in a board game than an enemy team hunting you down. The two-action-point system and the hard binary of being in cover or not makes this reboot even more like a board game than an actual computer game. I've put many more hours into Xenonauts (a Kickstarted spiritual successor) than 2012's XCOM: Enemy Unknown.
But they aren't hunting you down in XCOM 2. They're government workers doing regular patrols, and you're ambushing them. To me it seems far less video-gamey if I'm ambushing groups and they're scrambling for cover when I start taking shot at them, rather than them just standing there as I start unloading on their team. Besides, if they didn't get to have that 'scramble' mechanic they'd likely be moving through cover anyway since it's be more of a priority; is it more 'immersive' if a police patrol is defensively darting through cover even when they don't realise there's a threat?
For those who want to play some XCOM leading up to this, one of the highest quality mods ever just hit 1.0 for Enemy Unknown. It's called Long War, and has been pretty much consuming my life for the past month.
I've tried that last night but all the fun is sucked out of it because your team spends 5 turns missing every soot while the enemy regenerates health.
It's a super complex mod with a lot of new options, so it definitely takes more than a couple hours to get used to. For instance, they give you extra inventory-space at the very start for a reason; grenades are great for destroying enemy cover, battle scanners are great for setting up ambushes. It's not regular XCOM, they want you to use everything at your disposal to take down enemies instead of just exchanging shots from heavy cover.
It sounds like you might've been on a strategic down-spiral at this point anyhow? The only alien with regenerating health in the early-game is the Outsider, and you should only see a maybe a handful of those in the first few hours.
I don't think I've ever been this excited for a game. I'm intentionally avoiding pre-release content, and STILL my life is falling apart from how much i'm anticipating it.
Man, I did not understand that reasoning for cutting The Beginner's Guide at all! Great podcast overall, but "Maybe if it was Best Writing, but not Best Story"? So the actual quality of the writing of a game can be discounted but not, as was previously mentioned with Her Story, a gameplay gimmick which is largely used to disguise the weak plot? I mean I loved Her Story, but that is a well-told episode of NCIS, while The Beginner's Guide is an absolutely breathtaking examination of the human psyche as it reflects on game design. In less than two hours, it terms you more about vanity, ego, and the creative mind than most games could ever hope to tell you about their Cool Alien Race Lore. If nothing else, that line from Austin is a really strong argument for changing the category's name from Best Story, because that reasoning is like discounting 12 Angry Men from Best Screenplay because the narrative was too simple.
Obviously it's all kind of subjective and I totally get The Beginner's Guide just not hitting anyone particularly hard, but that reasoning felt a little weak to me. Apologies if this comes across as confrontational of course, not forgetting this is all just yelling about video games.
@sinjunb: The trouble is those Contracts can often stretch anywhere from half an hour to several, and it's never fun to approach quest-branches super-incrementally so that by the time you're at the end you forgot how it started. The big thing with the Witcher is it really isn't that it doesn't really feel designed for someone to hop in, fuck around in the open world and then hop out. Like, you can root out some okay gear or blow up some monster nests if you want, but the things that make that game great require at least a couple hours of your day.
LackingSaint's comments