The Exquisite Corps: XCOM: Enemy Within - Part 18

People like Dan are the reason games hold your hand so much. Developers know how much some players gloss over important stuff.

My only hope at this point is that it's not Dan's turn when the final mission of the game comes up. Or, at the very least, all 3 of them get to be in the room for the finale.

Before the Goddess of the Hunt would permit Great Agamemnon to go to war against Mighty Troy, She demanded of him a blood sacrifice. Without the death of this innocent, this woman whom had laid her trust in him, Agamemnon could never prevail against the high walls of Ilium. With her murder, the High King proved true the curse of the house of Atreus, and had his war and earned his ignoble death. He slew her without thought.

Abby, time to pull a Clytemnestra and avenge Gita. Time to retire the last Ryckert.

i feel like the sooner people accept dan is using randy quaid's character from ID4 as a spirit guide, the more fun we'll all have.

I am looking forward to Abby's response to her soldier's being fired. I fully condone sending the abomination on suicide missions. Or if you really want to get deep, I think you can break soldier's by getting them repeatedly wounded until they turn into useless cowards. Unless they added that in 2.

That was a Ryckert-ass ending

Excellent work as always Dan, entertaining as well as badass

Two magnificent clangers 10 mins in.

Wow. Not even in a mission yet and he's already lost 6 days on a project and "fired' someone...

*edit*

Oh god, 2 people.....

FWIW, I think it is dumb to have that Dismiss button there in the first place. That's poor design. However, HOLY BALLS, DAN! Read and take your time, duder. My anxiety was through the roof for most of that video.

@roskey316: To be fair, they tried to keep all the "modify/review soldier settings" buttons on one menu, which includes the dismiss soldier button, and it does say in big red text that it will permanently dismiss them. I do think "dismiss" is a poor word choice, since in a military context it means to leave an area, not leave the service. The button should probably read "discharge soldier."

@bisonhero: Yeah, I would agree with that.

why in the world did the mind controlled mech not shoot?

I swear, Dan's going to turn up at XCOM HQ one week to find the door locked and all the lights turned off.

I mean, in Dan's defense, dismissing people on the mission prep thing should not be an option at all, I can see how that'd be misleading(specially for someone that hasn't played in a long time and is recording a video), you should only be able to do that from the barracks, period; Very weird design choice.

This was the most Dan episode.

My fave sequence was ...

Can't wait for the debrief.

Vinny didn't catch it, and this isn't the only game where they can't read UI text very well. I think the East studio just isn't an ideal setup for UI-heavy KB/M PC games.

Did he really just dishonorably discharge Donna Tello AND Gita Jackson because he didn't read a huge red warning... twice?

Pound for pound they're not that much better at XCOM than Beast though! They're better at base and team management but they're far too cautious in combat, and they make small mistakes like Beast too. Not knocking either though; both these series are so good.

@theflamingo352: I actively try not to get riled up by stuff. It's easy! I'm watching people play a game. Zero stakes.

But I'm not gonna lie; The dismisals stung. Damn. No wonder so many humans were collaborators. Ten bucks says Gita went straight from XCOM hq to the nearest Exalt recruitment center.

Gita: After all I've done! INGRATES!!!

5 minutes in and Dan already has me pulling out my hair

I fear that while the missions are going well, the way they are playing the meta base stuff is going to end up catching up on them. The aliens will just get to far ahead.

MendoZAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

They don't mistakes that are easily avoided by reading huge text windows in red, though. They also listen to chat comments that correct them when they make mistakes as well. For example, there was one point where they couldn't figure out why units weren't able to climb ladders, so they looked to chat for help instead of blaming the game for being "broken"

This is why Dan's turns are the most entertaining

ELERIUM GENERATORS SON!

*Dan picks generic power stations

NOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

@fedallah: This deserves applause fo the deepest of cuts. Well played.

Ooof.... this is rough. hahaha.

Lol i cant wait till they give dabe ryckert gene mods, and make him incapable of testing for the psychic shit.

What part of "Permanently dismiss this soldier from service" do they not understand? I was able to get past the fact that Dan never actually clicked on the Power Generator and wasted time and money by destroying the Uplink. Why in god's name didn't Vinny tell him to build the the elerium generator. I died a lot inside, but I was still in the fight. But the dismissal of Donna Tello and Gita Jackson was too much. I had to take a break from the video 15 minutes in. Do your brain a favor and skip this one.

Dan! Vinny! Nooooo! You've got to read the descriptions! Shen! Say something! Central! Disagree with this course of action! Donna Tello can't go back to the Sewers, they're full of Chryssalids! Gita could've been saved if she'd been given her usual undercover duties last week over Don bloody Rickles, currently in Nigeria and on the precipice of a diplomatic incident of his own making!

After I finished exclaiming "Dan! No!" several times at my laptop, I made a cup of tea - during the consumption of which, I decided...actually...I'm fine with this. This is the kind of ridiculous story - albeit, unintended in its approach - that comes out of games like this. I've been watching for nineteen straight episodes now; even with my investment in these characters, there's something wonderful about administrative errors and Don Rickles being notable events on the road to the apocalypse. If the Corps' efforts to end the alien invasion are for nought, I can't think of - or surely anticipate - a more entertaining way to go down in flames.

And not to dismiss my point about reading the bloody text or the investment of the other Commanders and viewers in saying so, either - just that I don't think it's the end of the world. Except in 'XCOM', in which it's now more likely to be the end of the world.

Thank you, Commanders Ryckert and Caravella. And to Vinny, see you next week!

EDIT: And now I'm back to "Dan! No!" You've got to have more patience! Look before you leap!

I agree with this completely. At what point during the load up sequence would a person ever want to discharge a soldier permanently? For that matter, I fail to understand why you'd ever want to dismiss a soldier at all.. but definitely only from the barracks out of mission makes sense...

OH MY GOD WHAT WAS THAT WITH DONNA TELLO AND GITA? ARE YOU SERIOUS?

I thought my head would explode. How did Vinny not say anything? It really makes me wonder how much any of them actually like this game to be so utterly oblivious to something not even strategy or gameplay-related. "CLEAR SOLDIER" is right there on the squad screen, where it should be, and it's not like this is the first time anyone's tried to swap out a soldier.

It's not a GBeast setup problem. It's always been like this with every GB production (almost 10 years, 5 different studios and multiple people); the only one who stops and try to understand better mechanics or read is usually Jeff. The other just go full speed because they find it boring (see here Abby; they still have no idea how EXALT works because skip skip skip), have very bad memory (by their own admission) or are anxious that stopping to read would make boring content, ending up in situations where they actually create boring/frustrating content and waste an enormous amount of time because they cannot understand a mechanic/find a solution since they skipped the part where the game explained it (Brad expressed this feeling once, and incidentally you can find a lot of egregious examples of this in some videos with him in the driving spot). It's really nothing new with GB; if this was a platformer/shooter/light mechanics game you wouldn't notice; with this type of games it just becomes more apparent.

I am a huge fan of Dan but this was terrible. I can't tell if it was a work or a shoot or whatever but he just didn't use any strategy and didn't think anything out. As a huge fan of the series this was very hard to watch.

is it too late to cancel this entire series and start over?

Holy shit, Dan!

Also, why the hell is that option there? Is there ever a reason to dismiss a soldier?

@villo: If they have undesirable attributes you might want to trash them.

I made sure to watch the video before wandering into the comments section.

Oh well. Shit happens. He passed the mission.

I thought Vinny was supposed to check and balance. He just watched as Dan dismissed a soldier without a thought or word. I am disappointed Vincent.

The RNG Gods demanded tribute for the amazing incredible luck that occurred during the mission. A small tribute really considering Dan was very close to disaster.

did they decide they weren't doing bad enough or making this feature hard enough or something

Dan CAN'T be this stupid. He has to be playing the heel for fun and laughing about it with the rest of the guys.

Still 100x better than any Abby episode, despite me pulling my hair out.

Alex will save us.

I laughed uncontrollably as Dan DELETES MULTIPLE SOLDIERS PERMANENTLY

Should it? Why can't we just let them play the way they want and have fun? Everyone needs to chill a bit. Make a drinking game out of this series, if that will help. Think how drunk we'd be if we took a shot everytime they find out they can't fire a rocket launcher after moving.

General Patton of xcom over here.

In the entirety of Exquisite Corps there has never been such reckless menuing and gameplay

Oh man, that was wild. I was stressing out like crazy!