Rock, Paper, Shotgun

25/09/2012 at 00:29 amblingalong says:

I think this is going to be a really fun game. A great game, even. But there is a lot to be legitimately unhappy about.

I got into X-COM relatively late, by reading a famous LP from Fishman on the Penny Arcade forums (if you haven’t read it, go. Go now). Reading that LP, I’m struck by how many great moments there were that the new version won’t allow.

There is a huge amount of complexity which has been removed. For example, the original had an master alien AI which would do things like send out scouts, and then a landing party, and then set up a base (which you could find by tracking alien supply ships, among other ways). You could interrupt this process at several stages- in the air, on the ground, shooting downs scouts, shooting down the landing ships, attacking the base. This simply isn’t possible in the new version, due to non-randomized maps; at best, players will quickly become accustomed to the alien base layouts (how many can there be, after all?). I think it’s more likely this type of system is gone entirely, in favor of the special, cinematic missions the design team put in. Incidentally, this also applies to defending your own base- as pretty as the ‘ant farm’ may be, you will never again see a battleship with the ‘snakeman retribution mission’ and cower, hoping it flies past you. Even if you hated the base battles, this type of grand geoscape strategy is essentially gone, because so much of it was predicated on being able to generate a map for nearly any scenario.

The non-randomized maps have more consequences. Lets say you shoot down seven alien battleships in the desert. Or fifteen scouts. Unless we really believe that the game is going to come with hundreds (thousands?) of maps, either there will be a) rapid repetition or b) you will no longer get a map appropriate to the type of ship you shot down, in the geographic area it landed. After all, how many ‘mutton scout ships in a desert biome’ maps could they have shipped with? Or, again, the designers will have neutered that system, and largely replaced it with the ‘alert on the geoscape’ where you’ll get a pop up that a certain country needs help; the logic of each mission being tied to a UFO which has deorbited is gone (we can see this from the number of maps with no UFO on them at all).

These silly choices continue because you only have one Skyranger. I could deal with having only one base, but being limited to one team rips out a huge part of the original, where you could start to react to global events much more effectively as you built up your army. Instead, you’ll get a ‘save LA, or save Tokyo’ pop-up in mission control regardless of your choices so far. This also forces you to adhere to the developer’s timeline, because eventually the panic level will simply increase everywhere.

To be blunt, this is a smaller game, with less to do. The designers have taken far more direct control of your gameplay experience- what the maps look like, which missions pop up when, what your choices are, how you construct your base and your army- and as a result, tamed X-COM and made it safe. There will be no LPs in twenty years, as there are of the original, because people will know all the maps, have played the ‘special missions’ a dozen times, and called it quits. This may be an awesomely fun game, but so much of what made the Fishman LP- and the first game itself- so amazing is gone.