I tried replaying it about 10 years ago but it’s got serious quality of life problems with the mission aspect of the game.
Particularly, it had no way to remember or save gear assignments between missions. So you would spend like 5 minutes at the start of every mission giving your guys the correct stuff for their stats. Every. Damn. Time.
The other thing that bugged me on missions was no keyboard shortcuts, particularly for moving the view up and down levels. You had to use the mouse to click a UI icon which was quite tedious.
Still fond memories, but a pity those aspects made it too tedious to replay for me.
The newer XCOM game fixed those aspects and allowed you to jump right into the action.
> Particularly, it had no way to remember or save gear assignments between missions.
OpenXcom has this, plus a lot of other improvements and bug-fixes. I'm no expert (played it and the original for a few hours each about a year ago) but my impression is that it manages to pull off nice QoL-improvements while staying faithful to the feel and gameplay of the original game.
I know that there are also some total conversion like Piratez XCOM.
I tried to love the firaxis XCOMs. They kind of scratch the same itch and I appreciate not to have to manage bullets in the inventory but some of the simplified mechanics just don't work that well.
Clusters of enemies in particular seems like very poor design to me. It has caused tons of issues in their 2 games, from encouraging turtling as a the main dominant strategy to forcing firaxis to add timers to try to force players out of the play style their game made dominant.
Xcom 2 is a disaster due to the arbitrary time (or turn, for the nitpickers) limits in all missions.
If you don't rush via the shortest path or if you do the unthinkable and explore the map a bit you'll run out of time and die.
And if you install a mod that removes the turn limits it becomes way too easy because it's balanced for rushing blindly ahead and it's like taking candy from a baby if you have time to scout and position yourself.
Chimera squad... what's chimera squad? Didn't look at anything after xcom 2.
To continue whining, the current Firaxis ruined Civilization as well. They tried to 'improve' religion and ended up adding another tactical layer. You're fighting the military war and the religious war. But with the military war you can make peace now and then, or simply not attack. The religious war never ends. Which means that every single turn you have to take care of umpteenth religious units making the game full of pointless busywork.
Chimera squad is the latest Xcom game. It's a bit simplified and you jump straight into position. It's nice to not have to spend 50 hours moving around but not everybody likes the change in gameplay.
Yes. If you want to have a quicker tactics game that's a tiny bit like some aspects of X-Com, then 'Into the Breach' is probably a better use of your time than Chimera Squad.
Chimera Squad is an OK game, and good if you like the (rebooted) X-Com universe.
I enjoyed xcom2 much more than the reboot. Constraints of all kinds ($$$ and other resources) made much more sense for a resistance fighter of a humanity that had lost the war. It added the sense of urgency and danger.
War of the Chosen fleshed out the turn limit mechanics quite a bit and made them more palatable.
I understand why they added the turn limits, but I think the execution could have been handled better.
'Invisible Inc.' did a much better job of getting you to hurry up.
Another interesting take on the squad level tactical game is Into the Breach. They solve the design problem of getting you to hurry up, by inverting the game compared to X-Com: in Into the Breach the player squad has to hold out for 4 turns per mission and hold of the aliens.
Heh. There's a textbook example on how you put time pressure on the player without something as peasant as turn limits in the original x-com.
Terror missions. Having to save your civilians (and trying to not get overwhelmed by chrysalids that spawn from the corpses) is excellent time pressure. Move or lose.
But whoever designed the "new" x-coms didn't notice that. The days of subtlety are gone.
Btw, the reason overwatch turtling is the preferred strategy in the "new" x-com 1 is because, especially in the beginning, being surprised costs too much. Another way to encourage the player to move faster would have been to give them more recovery options. Or even something as simple as more than two hitpoints for rookies.
Though the terror missions are still there in XCOM 2.
Regarding the overwatch turtling, another issue is the pod system, as the player will always meet a group of aliens, which, so activating a pod is more dangerous than just sighting an alien in the old game. But trying to play without the Overwatch crawl makes for an interesting challenge.
What do you need to explore the map for? (there might be mission in the WotC expansion where you might need to, but I think those don't have timers, I think)
I only play through XCOM 2 once (my laptop's too potato to stomach another time at minimum graphics and slowdowns), but I felt that the timers weren't so bad, it pushed to move fast (agressive scouting) and not waste any time (no more overwatch crawl). Though there are missions with no timers or some where you can stop the timer partway through, so it's not always like that.
Well, they had a free weekend once and in the very first mission I thought "let's see what's around this corner". There were no aliens, the landscape was pretty, but it meant I lost 2 turns and the mission. I promptly uninstalled it and bought it a couple years later when it was 90% off. Never bought any expansion.
Maybe you like crap like that but I find it insulting. See my other answer for how to push players to move fast without introducing arbitrary limits.
> Xcom 2 is a disaster due to the arbitrary time (or turn, for the nitpickers) limits in all missions.
You know, I hated it at first too but after a while I really began to appreciate how it changes the way you play the game. So I have to disagree there. Ditto the Alien Rulers.
XCOM2 is very moddable, so you can adjust your experience easily (for quality of life stuff, I can almost guarantee that there's already a mod to give you what you want).
Train Grisha Yakubik so his skills would overflow one-byte counter; he'd step very slowly, but hit alien two screens ahead in the eye before their first move.
Great write-up. X-COM really grabs you just the way the article says. The characters are pets and it hurts when they die. I will never forget when my college roommate threw his keyboard across the room after his elite squad got wiped out in Terror from the Deep (which was really, really hard to win). The fact that nobody can die in Chimera Squad is why Chimera Squad is not a real X-COM game.
Frozen Synapse is a simplified clone of Laser Squad Nemesis, which was done by... you guessed, the Gollops.
Sadly that game is no longer available. It was multiplayer only (it had some single player but it was an afterthought) and they've taken it down long ago.
I played Frozen Synapse a bit. I seem to remember there were some local multiplayer options?
Play by email would work ok for this kind of game. (But I don't think that was ever supported. Laser Squad Nemesis might have supported play-by-email, I'm not sure?)
I'm complaining about the time limit to send your turn in in multiplayer. I'm afraid I never played single player Frozen Synapse.
Laser Squad Nemesis (multiplayer, that game was never seriously single player) was so good that when I saw Frozen Synapse copied the simultaneous orders mechanic I jumped straight into the multiplayer and never looked back.
However instead of having 90 day games like in LSN you had like... 10 minutes per match? Felt too much like Starcraft.
My favorite game of all time is another one in the turn based tactical genre, Jagged Alliance 2. A game still under active fan development some 20+ years later with the excellent 1.13 mod.
Oh man I loved that game. It had so much personality...the characters and voices, the little web browser with PMC websites and gun stores, the email client, the sheer number of items, every little thing was so cool. I had no idea people were still working on it. Thanks for the reminder.
For those who haven't played it: Jagged Alliance 2 is the missing link between X-COM, Fallout and the most childish scriptwriting you've ever experienced.
Special shout-out to JA:DG's asymmetric multi-player missions. eg:
Team1 Goal: Take a picture of item on some desk (only one of your team has a camera), in a building guarded by NPC's.
Team2 Goal: Assassinate High Value Captive in that same building guarded by NPC's.
Neither team knew what the other's goal was, and a squad-wipe was basically a guaranteed win for your side.
It added a huge amount of uncertainty and variety to multiplayer games, as there was never an optimal strategy.
While squad-wipe was guaranteed to be a win, pursuing a squad-wipe was generally much more "expensive" of a victory than what your opponent might be shooting for (eg: eliminating or retrieving a single objective).
Other descriptions here, but I've surprisingly never found a comprehensive list of multiplayer objectives when I've gone looking for them. (I distinctly remember "eliminate merc, eliminate npc, explode item, picture item, rescue captive, rescue item, ...and much much more!")
I don't know if the author reads HN comments, but the story I heard about "Terror from the Deep" being so hard was because people were complaining that X-Com was too easy, due to an unfixed bug: Any time you loaded a save, the game reset to the easiest difficulty level.
Not only would people often not play in one sitting, but many strategy gamers aren't above save-scumming either. Result, a large fraction of game hours on X-Com were on the easiest difficulty level.
As far as I remember, the Amiga version did not have that bug. In fact some missions were quite hard at regular difficulty levels.
That changed once you had access to psionics and the blaster as weapon. It became a large shoot 'em up afterwards (probably not at higher difficulties).
IIRC there was still another bug, the first tier of armor (which was supposed to be basically a little bit better than paper) accidentally provided as much protection as the much more expensive power armor.
I would actually welcome the following variant of save-scumming:
You can plan all you like, ie save-scum. But you can't keep it. You can only make forward progress that counts, when you first disable your save-scum ability for a bit.
Of course, that only works for questions of probability, like hitting shots or not. It doesn't address that save-scumming also reveals information you are not supposed to have.
There's a middle ground for X-COM, called bronze-man-mode (in contrast to iron-man-mode). In bronze-man-mode you don't get to save-scum inside of missions. You can at most reload the whole mission to get another randomly generated one.
I used to play the original X-Com as as save-scummer when I was younger. I went back to replay a bit of the game via OpenXCom and stuck to a more 'mature' approach. The game was more fun that way.
I've played the first reboot in the ironman mode, and there's a point to avoiding save-scumming, but there's a point where I find it may actually make the game less enjoyable.
I found myself making every move so calculated (and seeing it as a massive mistake whenever I failed at that) that it actually took away some of the atmosphere of the game for me. I had too much of a motivation to make the game less exciting and to make it as little about chance as possible, and in a sense it began to feel like work rather than an atmospheric story.
It might be a bit different in the original since IMO it seems much more difficult to calculate your moves and their potential outcomes as accurately. But that also makes it even more brutal in the original. (Or maybe I'm just worse at playing it, but that's how it seems to me.)
This was such a passtime for me that 20 years later I remember the randomly-generated names of some individual soldiers who came through for me and turned a battle around when there seemed to be no hope.
Siegfried Krause, I applaud your sniper abilities to this day.
It was also interesting from a design perspective; the various parts of the game were all separate executables and I never did figure out how they all interacted (though clearly some people did, as evidenced by the excellent XComUtil which has proved difficult to track down lately!)
Well sure, when you put it that way it sounds simple! I was 12 or so, and I spent a few nights trying to figure out the "plain data file" before shrugging and going back to playing X-Com.
Gotta be honest, I installed the game tonight under DOSBox thinking I would give thirty-something, seasoned engineer me another crack at decoding the file format. But then, those UFOs kept landing and I mean, somebody had to do something about it. And then all of a sudden my kids were like "daddy where are you" and the file format (and UFOs) once again had to wait for another day...
Huh that explains it! I realised (somehow) that if I ctrl-q (or alt-f4) in a mission, it kicks you out to the Misson finished with the same results as your last completed mission.
I loved, loved X-COM. It had an ability to capture imagination in a way that few turn based strategy games do. The randomly generated soldier names still loom large as heroes in my mind. I was affected when they were killed in action.
"Bernard Dujardin", wherever you are, I salute you
I find this emotional attachment between a real human and a fictitious entity absolutely fascinating, unsettling, beautiful and creepy at the same time. This is pure fiction, generated by some C++ code written in Visual Studio and yet, we are attached to it like a real human. Same thing with fiction books. It’s just words being consumed by the brain but emotional impact is real. Then I question, isn’t all human to human interaction just data exchange through our “sensors” (sight, sound, touch, smell and taste)?
Slight nitpick: I am fairly sure the original X-COM was not written in C++ in Visual Studio.
No clue about the actual language it was written in, probably C or assembly. C++ is unlikely but possible.
But I am rather sure that the game was not written with Visual Studio.
Of course, your point still stands. As an addition to go even further back in time, I would add stories that people just tell to each other.
It's a great feature of humanity that we can communicate about situations that we weren't personally involved in. Emotional attachment is then just a general feature of how mammalian brains seem to work.
The names dripping so heavily with national cliches, but they all throwing their skills in a single jar (and their limbs) because humanity vs aliens, it was truly impressive.
And the multitude of viable tactics and strategies... a friend of mine was systematically playing for earliest Mars victory, he ended up never shooting at scout UFO to lure in bigger targets. "If they don't set up a base by $date I won't be able to beat my record of $otherdate". Pretty sure that approach wasn't consciously designed into the game, but it worked out because the inner logic was sufficiently complete (even if perhaps not actually sound, he ended up doing some pretty radical strategical hacks)
It did get slightly comical when one of them died (or you started another game from the beginning) and you had the second or third guy with the exact same name down the road, though.
But it's true, you did grow attached.
Since in some sense the nature of the game is also that your soldiers will die -- and sometimes a lot of them -- because of a small mistake or just due bad luck, that creates a weird dichotomy where you're tempted to care on one hand and to see them as expendable and replaceable on the other hand at the same time.
Also, the atmosphere of night missions in particular where shots might come out of the dark at any point, and you might not really even see where they came from, made for a surprisingly engaging and even scary experience.
The weird, ominous music was probably a part of that.
I've heard others not find it that way, though, so maybe it's a matter of imagination and how prone to getting immersed you are.
I remember it was a big enough of a dilemma to me that I had to decide at the beginning of the game whether I was going to frequently save or not for that entire run.
Now I figure it's most fun not to re-do and deal with the drama, but I do bring some red-shirts with me now.
The reboots are a bit of a different beast, but they really lean into the soldier attachment thing. You can deeply customize your soldiers, and in XCOM2 they even gain visible scars (!) and emotional wounds (!!) and form bonds with other soldiers based on their experiences.
It's all bait, of course. Because they are gonna die. A lot. A rather deliciously sadistic design choice, encouraging you to form attachments like that. =)
My general rule of thumb in XCOM is that rookies are lower than dog crap. Not even human. You do not rename rookies because rookies don't even deserve a name in the first place, much less a new name. If there was an in-game mess hall I wouldn't even let them eat with the other soldiers. If they somehow survive a few drops... well, then we can talk lol.
With the recent Firaxis XCom, a common recommendation going around was to rename your soldiers with your closest friends names, for an additional layer of attachment with them.
One of my favourite things about XCOM was the destructible scenery. The isometric building design (on the procedurally generated maps) was superb, and you could blast holes in it to make your own routes through the map. Likewise the design of the larger UFOs themselves was so exciting - not to mention the variety of scenery a UFO might land in.
Don't forget the damage dealt to UFOs when they were shot down. Sometimes there was but a single alien with what amounts to a few tiles of scrap left from the encounter with my vigilant fighters. Talking about immersion.
One of the fatal flaws that made the reboot X-COM worse than the original was the inability to control the environment. Shots could no longer be aimed at scenery, and stray shots that hit the walls anyway proved that said walls were made out of cardboard. Even a pistol round could break an undamaged wall!
This made hiding behind corners much less useful: if you're suddenly flanked, you have a great risk of losing your cover entirely, no matter how strong the wall looked.
Not being able to create own passages or drop floors from under aliens are just nasty consequences of that.
The second flaw was that the enemy did not just seek you out, they always knew where you were, making it impossible to sneak up on them. I get the need to shorten the battles, but catching enemies unaware was my favorite tactic to survive despite technical disadvantage.
You can still catch enemies unaware. In fact, enemies in the reboots only become aware of you when you are within visible range of their pod (ie group).
The pod system is at the heart of the reboots. High level play involves exploiting it to the hilt.
I generally liked the rebooted X-COM2 (rebooted X-COM, only so-so), but this pod system is very unfortunate. Wandering aliens on the map in the original were way better.
I like the rebooted X-com series but in my opinion this "pod" system really kills the atmosphere of the original game. No more shots from the dark, no more searching for enemies, and no more throwing grenades blindly in hope of taking some aliens out.
I would say the more direct successor to the original X-Com is the excellent Silent Storm game (with Sentinels add-on).
Destructible environment and the off-screen action in terror missions. You'd never be able to save them all (attacked civilians), but where your team did stumble into an instance of the aliens grinding through a bunch of still-alive civilians they made a difference far more palpable than any sequence of artfully scripted set-pieces could ever achieve.
This was the most disappointing things about the new xcom games. They got great reviews but to me the world seemed so much like a theme park without it.
I loved the original X-Com, but I couldn't get into the new ones. My biggest issue with the original game is that as soon as one alien sees you, all aliens sees you starting to mindcontrol your entire team which easily spirals out of control. Luckily, modern reimplementations such as OpenXcom allow you to disable it and require line of sight checks before MC attempts.
We got the Prima Games strategy guide which was superb in that explained every single mechanic of the game.
After reading it my brother worked out how and then made a super bad ass psy team.
The key understanding is that there is a base psy attribute for characters which can never change and then another one which can improve through experience.
So your previously best characters probably land up having terrible base psy stat, so you need to abandon them ultimately unfortunately.
So he made lots of psy labs to find the strong soldiers. Then started getting them to skill up psy skill on missions.
Once they could mind control then it was to skill them up in other regards like accuracy and reactions. You would mind control aliens, have them drop their weapons then end your turn with them facing away from your guys ready to shoot them. During the aliens turn they would start walking and then get shot by the reacting “rookie” 3 blocks away. The rookies accuracy and reaction improved quickly.
If I recall he managed to complete the final mission in like 3 turns per part by mind controlling the first alien he could see, then using that to find the next alien to mind control and so on.
I grew up playing Rebelstar 2, and Chaos, his other amazing game... part of my early programming experience was making a map editor for R2 and making new monsters for Chaos!
I spent hours playing a similar game on the Speccy that I've never been able to track down. Turn based with graphics that looked like Lords of Chaos, except you controlled an army of wizards and soldiers against invading swamp/rock monsters.
The one distinguishing feature I remember is that you had to aim ranged weapons manually, a bit like a golf game with a rotating direction arrow where you have to press stop at the right time.
I still remember playing night time missions up late in a darkened room, hearing the soft padding of those alien footsteps, somewhere out beyond the limits of vision in the darkened fields...
Great article, and a very fair review of a wonderful game with very sharp edges.
I will say, the best part of the Firaxis reboot of X-Com is that it perfectly captured the fun that I _remembered_ from the original game. It captured this so well that I remember thinking it was literally the same game with new graphics.
Then I went back and replayed the original... and remembered how hard and clunky it actually was :)
But still one of my all time favorites, along with another Microprose title of the same era, Master of Orion.
I did not play the original Master of Orion, but absolutely loved the second part.
I started focussing on science (namely Psilons) and only later developed a taste for trying out other strategies/races. I often played multiplayer with friends too, and really liked the laid back atmosphere enabled by turn based strategy.
Please go ahead and play the first Master of Orion. It's by far my favourite of the pair. (Make sure you get the latest community patches.)
The genius of the first MoO was that it really paired down the tedious busy work. And the tech system works a charm, it's cleverly randomised in a way that's not really possible with the more prevalent DAG based tech trees.
I once played a multiplayer game in MOO2 with a couple of friends. I went for industry, my one friend went for science, and another wiped the floor with us with his low-tech rock eating silicoids who mated at an insane speeds and colonized every shitty planet and had a huge output everywhere.
A solid article. I'd disagree with the "single play through" and "pointless starting weapons" comments though. For me it was multiple play throughs learning about what worked and what didn't. This for me was actually a thing that kept me coming back. Trying out new tactics, base locations and equipment to see what worked. All the while trying to balance the budget and keep the squad alive long enough to level up. A truly great game. Played the newer versions on Xbox 360 and mobile, and whilst fun, they had removed far too many features to keep me engaged for more than a few hours. OpenXcom is a much better offering, especially on mobile.
Totally agree! I played it endless times when I was young, and I was able to complete it (by destroying the mars base) only recently playing on dosbox!
The recent reboot is just a tactical console game. It was fun for a while but I get bored quickly.
Also X-Com Apocalypse is not on par with the original, but still quite enjoyable with the realtime combat mode.
Apocalypse was the biggest disappointment in my (gaming) life :(
Horrible graphics, different (but not good) gameplay, and worst of all it didn't "feel" like it was the same world of XCOM. All of this is subjective, of course.
If you want to play the classic X-COM today, make sure to grab the latest community patches.
I really liked the old X-COM games and had anticipated that I would not like the reboot very much.
However, while I wouldn't want to miss the originals for the reboot, the reboots are done very solidly and in most instances I even find myself agreeing with the streamlining the new authors chose.
If you want a tactical squad-level game that goes beyond what the original X-COM did, I suggest having a look at Frozen Synapse. Frozen Synapse has much fewer elements than X-COM, but its major innovation is that each turn both you and your opponent plan your turns concurrently at your leisure and then the turn plays out over 5 seconds in continuous time.
In contrast, I always felt the serialising that X-COM enforced to be an artificial limitation.
There was also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Squad_Nemesis which was also simultaneous turn based. I don't like the puzzle aspect of FS since it's deterministic. It is all hard edges, hit or miss. Maybe if I spent more time with it it might me different.
At the core, Frozen Synapse is a sophisticated version of Rock, Paper, Scissors. Yes, once both players made their choices the game plays out deterministically, but basic game theory tells you that randomising your strategy is the way to win.
Since you don't know exactly what your opponents are planning, you can't solve your turn like a deterministic puzzle.
I do admit there are some puzzle like aspects. Eg I often picked two or three plans that I thought my opponents are likely to choose, and tried to work out a plan of my own that would counter all three of them.
> I always felt the serialising that X-COM enforced to be an artificial limitation.
I was about to argue that it might have been a technical limitation too, but Dune II, the first real-time strategy game, came out two years before X-COM so technically that can't be quite right.
On the other hand, it also requires a certain set of programmer skills and specialized knowledge of how to simulate such systems, and opens up a combinatorial explosion of scenarios that can be much harder to design around if you also want to include lots of complex possibilities. Serialized turn-based design is much easier by comparison.
Yes, I think it's not so much a programming limitation per se, but a game design limitation. It's a much tougher nut to crack how to present the choices available to the player in a sensible and understandable way.
Notice how Frozen Synapse is otherwise a much simpler game with fewer elements than even just in the tactical mode of the original X-Com.
It's fair to say that, going further back in computer game history, something being possible didn't mean it was possible for you.
Programming expertise and information was a lot less accessible and evenly distributed.
You couldn't just "hire a graphics person", because no one knew what the hell that was. You hired a smart computer person / artist, and hoped they could learn everything. One reason the history of early games companies has so much "and then we hired this person named X, who had no training, but turned into one of the world's best Y's."
What I am saying is that just implementing a very crude version would have been doable in the early 90s.
What was much harder was to come up with a way to present the information and make the planning intuitive and fun. Including the programming aspects of that.
Really enjoyed both X-COM and also highly recommend Frozen Synapse. Great take on turn-based tactics... really liked how I didn't really know what would happen after setting up my moves!
> However, while I wouldn't want to miss the originals for the reboot, the reboots are done very solidly
Much like you, I'm a diehard X-COM fan and anticipated the XCOM reboot wouldn't please me, and again like you I was pleasantly surprised.
I think the biggest improvement is the streamlining of TUs from the original (which was always a bit messy) into the actions of the reboot.
> In contrast, I always felt the serialising that X-COM enforced to be an artificial limitation.
I disagree about this. I like turn-based games; they feel more cerebral and less twitchy than RTS'es. I can play XCOM while eating a sandwich or drinking coffee, while I can't play an RTS that way.
> I can play XCOM while eating a sandwich or drinking coffee, while I can't play an RTS that way.
To be clear, Frozen Synapse is also a turn-based strategy game. You can enjoy your sandwich or coffee while playing. The difference it's you and your opponent plan your turn simultaneously. But you are still fundamentally planning a turn.
The aspect I enjoy about the mechanic is it leaves a lot more uncertainty in the air when planning in the turn. I still have to take into account the uncertainty about the opponent's actions while planning my turn.
Yes, Frozen Synapse pays explicit Homage to Laser Squad Nemesis. I think it's quite a bit more polished though, because it's deliberately more streamlined.
If I remember right, LSN still had tiles (and thus probably discrete units of time)?
Frozen Synapse, for better or worse, goes for a much more continuous approach. Making for a very different feeling game.
It's interesting to me that what you're describing has basically been codified into the game design of "rouge lites" like Enter the Gungeon, Binding of Isaac, and now Hades...bunch more, Mana Quest, Spelunky...it's a whole game mechanic now
There's a massive modding community built around the new ones, which only really has any worth because people love replaying it, which the author must know of.
I think he's slightly guilty of simply listing his own preference there, rather than reporting reality.
To be honest, I can't even remember why the aliens invaded. I can remember the research progression, and the excitement of starting the game from scratch again and going up against the aliens with automatic weapons instead of late game plasma blasters.
So the author and I had very different experiences.
I'd disagree with the "single play through" and
"pointless starting weapons" comments though. For
me it was multiple play throughs learning about
what worked and what didn't. This for me was actually
a thing that kept me coming back.
Absolutely! Without cheating and looking at FAQs, it's essentially impossible to win your first playthrough... or your second, or third. It's not fair. But it makes you keep coming back. And when you finally learn to beat those bastards it's just exhilarating! In retrospect, I'm not sure how it manages to hook us. But it does. For me, perhaps it was the (intentionally) pulpy 90s-style, X-Files-style, paranoiac alien invasion/infiltration plot.
In many ways we could say X-COM broke so many rules of game design. By any conventional standards it's way too hard at the beginning and you'll generally be way too overpowered at the end, if you've got the flying armor suits and such. But that is part of its unique charm, intentional or not.
Played the newer versions on Xbox 360 and mobile,
and whilst fun, they had removed far too many features
to keep me engaged for more than a few hours.
I thought the 2012 reboot was just good. Like you said, I think it removed a little too much of what made X-COM.... X-COM, though there was certainly much I loved.
For me, though? XCOM2, and particularly the "War of the Chosen" expansion, actually do surpass the originals.
OpenXcom is a much better offering, especially on mobile.
I've been putting it off for years. I need to dive into that.
> Without cheating and looking at FAQs, it's essentially impossible to win your first playthrough
Personally I don't recall any big problems on my first playthrough. The biggest obstacle was understanding that we need to capture a live enemy commander to progress further. Other than that, things were pretty ok, considering that difficulty glitch.
Funny thing was that I've figured out that the game has TANKS only on 3rd game. Before that, what did those "HWP" mean was rather unclear.
At a minimum... there's no way to know that the alien base invasions are a thing, and unless you've laid out your bases in order to facilitate their defense -- setting up chokepoints and such -- they are easy pickings for the aliens. That's something you could get right by luck the first time... but there's no reason to lay your base out in such a way unless you know about it.
It's also difficult to know things like which weapons you can manufacture for strong financial returns. The midgame is tough unless you stumble upon this.
Also, just in general, winning strategies to beat the aliens aren't that easy to come by. Takes a fair amount of experimentation and heavy soldier losses. It's really tough to progress if you lose a lot of soldiers and/or drop ships.
And on your first play through it's also not clear what timetable you're working with and how fast the alien threats ramp up. Some of that is tied to your progression and some isn't IIRC.
Aside from the base layout thing, savescumming can definitely help obviously. =)
Of course, I know there were revisions made between the Euro, US, and Playstation versions. I think there were some difficulty tweaks. Not sure. So perhaps we had different experiences in that regard.
This is the precise moment that pulled me out of the article and I left lol. The optimal starting strategy is to put avalanche missles on your fighters and the cannon is useless? That is objectively untrue!
The optimal starting strategy is TWO cannons. Avalanche missles are objectively wrong. They destroy small craft leaving you with no easy early ground missions. The cannons are more than capable of taking down a tiny or small craft and make sure it’s not destroyed in the process.
> “We were very excited, so we signed a contract to do Diablo,” remembers Brevik. The studio then had to figure out what, exactly, this turn-based isometric game it had been thinking about for so long would actually look like -- and how it would be angled and rendered on-screen. “This was not easy back then...I kind of took a screengrab of X-Com, and we just took that, and put it right into Diablo,” said Brevik. “So the actual tile-square basis -- the same shape and size -- is exactly the same in X-Com and Diablo.” So in a sense, says Brevik, the look and technology of Diablo is all based directly on a screenshot of X-Com.
So, x-com heavily influenced Diablo. In retrospect it makes sense - X-com tile based world, and lightning was pretty unique.
One of the best strategies ever for me together with Sim City (2000) and Transport Tycoon, was much less of fan of Dune 2 or C&C or Commando, so this was pretty much only strategy with actual fight and not just construction, which could capture my interest supported with popular TV show X-Files at times.
I loved this game so much growing up, and this was a great article about it. It captured all the things I loved, and covered a lot of history I never knew.
One thing that caught my eye was the author’s complaint about no in-game exposition or tutorials at the start of the game. It seems silly in 2020, but in 1994 it was common for games to come with a reasonably lengthy manual printed on dead trees that explained all those things—or else there were printed strategy guides and magazines that talked about clever tricks. I read a borrowed copy of that book cover to cover before I even had a computer to actually run the game on. I still have a copy in my garage.
My first copy was pirated on 3.5” floppy disks from the school computer lab. Eventually I bought a copy to get the manual. Later on I bought a copy to get it on CD. Eventually I bought another copy to get the whole original collection on CD. And last year I played the reboots which got me nostalgic enough to buy the original and apocalypse on steam.
I had X-COM:enemy unknown [ufo defense] for the PlayStation, the manual for that thing was huge. It had a tutorial in it that walked you through a mission as well as told you how all the buildings worked (even the ones unlocked later in the game like the psylab).
I do miss the days where you'd get a physical manual. Nowadays you just get a slip of paper with an advertisement and a registration page. Saying that though, with live updates a lot of manuals would be out of date after a few years. I dont think the tome that is the world of warcraft manual is relevant to the modern game. Though maybe for classic.
Even greater than UFO Defense, in my opinion, was its expansion - Terror From the Deep.
It truly taught me that our oceans are so close, yet much farther than outer space can ever be. Looking at that lone blue globe in space always makes me feel so insignificant, so meaningless. Space is vast, but empty, and sterile. Down the abyss, not even light can shine to bless and purify.
The greatest contributor to that is certainly its soundtrack. With its unnerving, relentless low horns; harps hitting on the same two or three notes; there's a feeling of utter despair, hopelessness. A sense of doom, as aquanauts armed with teeny darts and harpoons grunt through the deaths of their colleagues, outmatched by opponents so unfairly superior, in the harshest environment on Earth. They couldn't have done a better job.
I have been working on a new "HD" soundtrack for TFTD that I plan to release as a mod for OpenXCOM (this article is great timing!). I am not finished yet, but you can listen to some of the tracks already (and download them if you wish):
> The greatest contributor to that feeling is certainly the music.
If you are ever startled by a mobile phone nearby ringing with the menacing gmbigmar.mid buildup, please say hello, it's probably mine.
I found TFTD a bit too much work-like in some missions (finding that last panicked Gray on a freighter...), but they sure earned an entire spot in gaming history only for their audio.
OpenXCOM and OpenXCE fix almost all of TFTD's problems with tons of quality-of-life improvement, like the "bug hunt" mode which reveals the location of those pesky aliens when a play drags too long. Give it a spin if you didn't already!
As a diehard fan of the series, I'm shocked! TFTD was such a major letdown to me after the predecessor, and I believe even Mr. Gollop doesn't have a high opinion of it. I'm also shocked to see the author of the linked article laud it as better than the original. I've honestly not heard that expressed by other XCOM fans.
It, bizarrely, leans heavily into its predecessor's flaws instead of fixing them or at least steering around them.
- The much more cramped battlefield areas (namely, ships) expose the very frustrating shooting/projectile mechanics. you can understand squaddies missing an easy shot in the heat of the moment. fine! understandable! but in cramped areas they make even more exasperating mistakes -- if a guy is standing next to a doorway for cover, i might expect him to miss his shot... but i do not expect him to empty half his clip directly into the door frame six inches from his face
- grenade tossing in cramped areas is essentially just a great way to frag yourself and your squadmates. dear lord. grenades are really only useful in the early game, mostly, but TFTD doesn't even let you have that!
- some weapons only work underwater, some only work in air! adding to the already mind-numbing micromanagement of equipment, not to mention the punishing difficulty
- perhaps my memory fails me here, but I remember distinctly less destructible environments, which added so much fun to the original. can't find a way into the house? Blow a wall open! But, also, watch out for collapses! So much fun and so unique at the time.
More importantly, regardless of which series entries we like the best... nice to see a fellow X-Com fan -- and so many others on here! Cheers!
Of course it's a matter of personal taste. But disclaimer, TFTD was indeed my first entry to the series. And yes, I hate the ship as well.
The atmosphere is absolutely terrifying. It really made me clutch for the life of my soldiers as if it was mine. It was unfair, but not without reason, as even today our submarine warfare would pale against T'Leth. So close yet so powerless.
The superb work on the graphics brings me deep into the abyss. Just look at how well the battle maps fade into the darkness. The various aliens are actually scary for once, and their shared past with the human species is realistic yet particularly disturbing. We all came from those same oceans, after all.
I already spoke about the music, but it really seals the deal.
I know this might sound it's all about the assets and the mood. But the game was already quite good, and TFTD gave that engine the content it deserved.
I will hazard a rough comparison – UFO Defense feels more like Starship Trooper, while TFTD is more like Alien. Intimate and downright scary.
To a certain extent yes, but TFTD is objectively even buggier than the original. IIRC it is even possible to put the original game into an unwinnable state by simply researching things in an unintended order. Fortunately OpenXCom[0] fixed this.
> The atmosphere is absolutely terrifying. It really made me clutch for the life of my soldiers as if it was mine. It was unfair, but not without reason
I feel that way about the original X-COM ;)
TFTD crossed the line into unfair, in my opinion. And buggy, too!
I didn't find TFTD to be scarier than X-Com/UFO Defense! Not arguing; just funny how different people have subjective experiences.
I think the game you played first will be scarier. Once you've played one, the other one is obviously just a bit of a re-skin, and just doesn't have quite the same fear factor. =)
The problem with TFTD was that it crossed the time-reward curve threshold for many missions. The feedback that led to TFTD being so difficult was also related to the bug in the original that screwed up difficulty even if you played on Superhuman. So many players got the impression that XCOM was too easy and asked for a harder game
> some weapons only work underwater, some only work in air! adding to the already mind-numbing micromanagement of equipment, not to mention the punishing difficulty
This is Terror from the Deep's biggest fail, in my opinion. Environment specific weapons added nothing to the game but more micromanagement.
If I remember correctly, TftD was bugged as hell, too.
I absolutely love the original X-COM and think it's one of the best -- if not THE best -- games from my youth.
I don't think Jimmy Maher, author of the linked article, said he preferred TFTD.
"Unfortunately, Terror from the Deep does little to correct the original’s problems; if anything, it makes them worse. Most notably, it’s an even more difficult game than its predecessor, a decision that’s hard to understand on any level. Was anyone really complaining that X-COM was too easy? All in all, Terror from the Deep is exactly the unimaginative quickie sequel which the Gollops weren’t excited about having to make.
Nevertheless, it’s arguably the best of the _post-original_, pre-reboot generation of X-COM games."
- weird research paths. It was possible to ruin your game by doing the wrong research in wrong order. Also, you need a lot of luck to get some techs, e.g. to get early armor you need to kill a Deep One, which usually are only found in the beginning of the game and near the end of it. Similarly to get a vibroblade which is very useful against Lobstermen, you need to kill a Calcinite, which is a very rare spawn in the game.
- maps are too big. I like the variety, but the maps are just too big. Also they consist of tight tunnels providing perfect shooting gallery opportunities for the aliens
- tentaculats are badly balanced. I fear no lobstermen disruptors, I fear no tasoth mind control, but a one or two tentaculats can destroy your team in a single round. And they can fly across half the map to get you.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 241 ms ] threadhttps://store.steampowered.com/app/223830/Xenonauts/
I tried replaying it about 10 years ago but it’s got serious quality of life problems with the mission aspect of the game.
Particularly, it had no way to remember or save gear assignments between missions. So you would spend like 5 minutes at the start of every mission giving your guys the correct stuff for their stats. Every. Damn. Time.
The other thing that bugged me on missions was no keyboard shortcuts, particularly for moving the view up and down levels. You had to use the mouse to click a UI icon which was quite tedious.
Still fond memories, but a pity those aspects made it too tedious to replay for me.
The newer XCOM game fixed those aspects and allowed you to jump right into the action.
OpenXcom has this, plus a lot of other improvements and bug-fixes. I'm no expert (played it and the original for a few hours each about a year ago) but my impression is that it manages to pull off nice QoL-improvements while staying faithful to the feel and gameplay of the original game.
I know that there are also some total conversion like Piratez XCOM.
I tried to love the firaxis XCOMs. They kind of scratch the same itch and I appreciate not to have to manage bullets in the inventory but some of the simplified mechanics just don't work that well.
Clusters of enemies in particular seems like very poor design to me. It has caused tons of issues in their 2 games, from encouraging turtling as a the main dominant strategy to forcing firaxis to add timers to try to force players out of the play style their game made dominant.
So many hours spent recruiting newbies, training them up, building equipment, researching tech then hunting down and killing alien scum!
If you don't rush via the shortest path or if you do the unthinkable and explore the map a bit you'll run out of time and die.
And if you install a mod that removes the turn limits it becomes way too easy because it's balanced for rushing blindly ahead and it's like taking candy from a baby if you have time to scout and position yourself.
Chimera squad... what's chimera squad? Didn't look at anything after xcom 2.
To continue whining, the current Firaxis ruined Civilization as well. They tried to 'improve' religion and ended up adding another tactical layer. You're fighting the military war and the religious war. But with the military war you can make peace now and then, or simply not attack. The religious war never ends. Which means that every single turn you have to take care of umpteenth religious units making the game full of pointless busywork.
Do NOT buy it though, the game is buggy as fuck.
Chimera Squad is an OK game, and good if you like the (rebooted) X-Com universe.
Ie we have Michelin starred street food stalls in Singapore.
Very affordable, like Into the Breach, but also limited choice. Many of them don't serve any drinks at all. You get drinks at a different stall.
I understand why they added the turn limits, but I think the execution could have been handled better.
'Invisible Inc.' did a much better job of getting you to hurry up.
Another interesting take on the squad level tactical game is Into the Breach. They solve the design problem of getting you to hurry up, by inverting the game compared to X-Com: in Into the Breach the player squad has to hold out for 4 turns per mission and hold of the aliens.
Terror missions. Having to save your civilians (and trying to not get overwhelmed by chrysalids that spawn from the corpses) is excellent time pressure. Move or lose.
But whoever designed the "new" x-coms didn't notice that. The days of subtlety are gone.
Btw, the reason overwatch turtling is the preferred strategy in the "new" x-com 1 is because, especially in the beginning, being surprised costs too much. Another way to encourage the player to move faster would have been to give them more recovery options. Or even something as simple as more than two hitpoints for rookies.
Regarding the overwatch turtling, another issue is the pod system, as the player will always meet a group of aliens, which, so activating a pod is more dangerous than just sighting an alien in the old game. But trying to play without the Overwatch crawl makes for an interesting challenge.
I only play through XCOM 2 once (my laptop's too potato to stomach another time at minimum graphics and slowdowns), but I felt that the timers weren't so bad, it pushed to move fast (agressive scouting) and not waste any time (no more overwatch crawl). Though there are missions with no timers or some where you can stop the timer partway through, so it's not always like that.
Maybe you like crap like that but I find it insulting. See my other answer for how to push players to move fast without introducing arbitrary limits.
You know, I hated it at first too but after a while I really began to appreciate how it changes the way you play the game. So I have to disagree there. Ditto the Alien Rulers.
Haven't yet acknowledged Chimera Squad existance yet :-P
Chimera Squad was fun for $10.
Nothing wrong with exploring different genres, though.
The biggest difference is probably that after all players have planned their turns, they are executed simultaneously.
Sadly that game is no longer available. It was multiplayer only (it had some single player but it was an afterthought) and they've taken it down long ago.
Play by email would work ok for this kind of game. (But I don't think that was ever supported. Laser Squad Nemesis might have supported play-by-email, I'm not sure?)
Plus you could spend a day setting up your turn in a rated game against a good opponent, so who cared how the turns arrived.
Frozen Synapse decided to go with a time limit for turns... same mistake as xcom 2.
Also compare the 'turn limits' in Into the Breach that are very well done: you have to hold out for four turns in all missions.
Laser Squad Nemesis (multiplayer, that game was never seriously single player) was so good that when I saw Frozen Synapse copied the simultaneous orders mechanic I jumped straight into the multiplayer and never looked back.
However instead of having 90 day games like in LSN you had like... 10 minutes per match? Felt too much like Starcraft.
My memory is a bit hazy. I mostly played with a friend, and only a few times on random internet matches.
Maybe once my son is old enough I'll play with him (hopefully it will still be available in another 10 years).
I might have to break that one out again.. you say is has a big community dev going?
Team1 Goal: Take a picture of item on some desk (only one of your team has a camera), in a building guarded by NPC's.
Team2 Goal: Assassinate High Value Captive in that same building guarded by NPC's.
Neither team knew what the other's goal was, and a squad-wipe was basically a guaranteed win for your side.
It added a huge amount of uncertainty and variety to multiplayer games, as there was never an optimal strategy.
While squad-wipe was guaranteed to be a win, pursuing a squad-wipe was generally much more "expensive" of a victory than what your opponent might be shooting for (eg: eliminating or retrieving a single objective).
Other descriptions here, but I've surprisingly never found a comprehensive list of multiplayer objectives when I've gone looking for them. (I distinctly remember "eliminate merc, eliminate npc, explode item, picture item, rescue captive, rescue item, ...and much much more!")
https://steamcommunity.com/app/283270/discussions/0/55875425... https://steamcommunity.com/app/283270/discussions/0/55875425...
Not only would people often not play in one sitting, but many strategy gamers aren't above save-scumming either. Result, a large fraction of game hours on X-Com were on the easiest difficulty level.
That changed once you had access to psionics and the blaster as weapon. It became a large shoot 'em up afterwards (probably not at higher difficulties).
You can plan all you like, ie save-scum. But you can't keep it. You can only make forward progress that counts, when you first disable your save-scum ability for a bit.
Of course, that only works for questions of probability, like hitting shots or not. It doesn't address that save-scumming also reveals information you are not supposed to have.
There's a middle ground for X-COM, called bronze-man-mode (in contrast to iron-man-mode). In bronze-man-mode you don't get to save-scum inside of missions. You can at most reload the whole mission to get another randomly generated one.
I used to play the original X-Com as as save-scummer when I was younger. I went back to replay a bit of the game via OpenXCom and stuck to a more 'mature' approach. The game was more fun that way.
I found myself making every move so calculated (and seeing it as a massive mistake whenever I failed at that) that it actually took away some of the atmosphere of the game for me. I had too much of a motivation to make the game less exciting and to make it as little about chance as possible, and in a sense it began to feel like work rather than an atmospheric story.
It might be a bit different in the original since IMO it seems much more difficult to calculate your moves and their potential outcomes as accurately. But that also makes it even more brutal in the original. (Or maybe I'm just worse at playing it, but that's how it seems to me.)
The first reboot is susceptible to overwatch crawl. And if playing in Iron Man mode that's what you (or me) might end up doing automatically.
They tried to fix that in the DLC and in XCom 2. With mixed success.
The original also had that problem: if you waited for long enough (35 rounds or something) the aliens would come rushing towards you.
This was such a passtime for me that 20 years later I remember the randomly-generated names of some individual soldiers who came through for me and turned a battle around when there seemed to be no hope.
Siegfried Krause, I applaud your sniper abilities to this day.
(I'm assuming they were binary. I really can't remember what they were.)
"Bernard Dujardin", wherever you are, I salute you
No clue about the actual language it was written in, probably C or assembly. C++ is unlikely but possible.
But I am rather sure that the game was not written with Visual Studio.
Of course, your point still stands. As an addition to go even further back in time, I would add stories that people just tell to each other.
It's a great feature of humanity that we can communicate about situations that we weren't personally involved in. Emotional attachment is then just a general feature of how mammalian brains seem to work.
The two separate executables (it had one for the geoscape and one for the tactical battles) displayed the DOS4GW banner at startup if i remember well.
And the multitude of viable tactics and strategies... a friend of mine was systematically playing for earliest Mars victory, he ended up never shooting at scout UFO to lure in bigger targets. "If they don't set up a base by $date I won't be able to beat my record of $otherdate". Pretty sure that approach wasn't consciously designed into the game, but it worked out because the inner logic was sufficiently complete (even if perhaps not actually sound, he ended up doing some pretty radical strategical hacks)
But it's true, you did grow attached.
Since in some sense the nature of the game is also that your soldiers will die -- and sometimes a lot of them -- because of a small mistake or just due bad luck, that creates a weird dichotomy where you're tempted to care on one hand and to see them as expendable and replaceable on the other hand at the same time.
Also, the atmosphere of night missions in particular where shots might come out of the dark at any point, and you might not really even see where they came from, made for a surprisingly engaging and even scary experience.
The weird, ominous music was probably a part of that.
I've heard others not find it that way, though, so maybe it's a matter of imagination and how prone to getting immersed you are.
Now I figure it's most fun not to re-do and deal with the drama, but I do bring some red-shirts with me now.
It's all bait, of course. Because they are gonna die. A lot. A rather deliciously sadistic design choice, encouraging you to form attachments like that. =)
My general rule of thumb in XCOM is that rookies are lower than dog crap. Not even human. You do not rename rookies because rookies don't even deserve a name in the first place, much less a new name. If there was an in-game mess hall I wouldn't even let them eat with the other soldiers. If they somehow survive a few drops... well, then we can talk lol.
It was so far ahead of its time in that regard.
Sometimes I waited for the day to start a mission, even if this could means that the aliens could escape
This made hiding behind corners much less useful: if you're suddenly flanked, you have a great risk of losing your cover entirely, no matter how strong the wall looked.
Not being able to create own passages or drop floors from under aliens are just nasty consequences of that.
The second flaw was that the enemy did not just seek you out, they always knew where you were, making it impossible to sneak up on them. I get the need to shorten the battles, but catching enemies unaware was my favorite tactic to survive despite technical disadvantage.
The pod system is at the heart of the reboots. High level play involves exploiting it to the hilt.
To get the beat on an alien pod, you need to use some kind of stealth-ing mechanic.
Otherwise, it's mostly about guessing where they are, and trapping them with overwatch.
I would say the more direct successor to the original X-Com is the excellent Silent Storm game (with Sentinels add-on).
[0]: http://seravy.x10.mx/CasterofMagic/CASTEROFMAGIC.HTML
[1]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1250690/Master_of_Magic_C...
This specific reference baffles me. Anyone cares to elaborate/clarify?
(I guess when you grow up somewhere other than the US, there's a chance these things happen).
After reading it my brother worked out how and then made a super bad ass psy team.
The key understanding is that there is a base psy attribute for characters which can never change and then another one which can improve through experience.
So your previously best characters probably land up having terrible base psy stat, so you need to abandon them ultimately unfortunately.
So he made lots of psy labs to find the strong soldiers. Then started getting them to skill up psy skill on missions.
Once they could mind control then it was to skill them up in other regards like accuracy and reactions. You would mind control aliens, have them drop their weapons then end your turn with them facing away from your guys ready to shoot them. During the aliens turn they would start walking and then get shot by the reacting “rookie” 3 blocks away. The rookies accuracy and reaction improved quickly.
If I recall he managed to complete the final mission in like 3 turns per part by mind controlling the first alien he could see, then using that to find the next alien to mind control and so on.
Must have spent endless hours playing all Laser Squad versions on the Speccy and it was only natural to jump into X-COM.
Although the ones that moved away from the Rebelstar Raiders/Laser Squad initial concept are not worthy to me.
Lots of complexity and subtly in the battles but just one off scenarios, I had no desire for base building on long term character development.
The one distinguishing feature I remember is that you had to aim ranged weapons manually, a bit like a golf game with a rotating direction arrow where you have to press stop at the right time.
I will say, the best part of the Firaxis reboot of X-Com is that it perfectly captured the fun that I _remembered_ from the original game. It captured this so well that I remember thinking it was literally the same game with new graphics.
Then I went back and replayed the original... and remembered how hard and clunky it actually was :)
But still one of my all time favorites, along with another Microprose title of the same era, Master of Orion.
I started focussing on science (namely Psilons) and only later developed a taste for trying out other strategies/races. I often played multiplayer with friends too, and really liked the laid back atmosphere enabled by turn based strategy.
The genius of the first MoO was that it really paired down the tedious busy work. And the tech system works a charm, it's cleverly randomised in a way that's not really possible with the more prevalent DAG based tech trees.
The recent reboot is just a tactical console game. It was fun for a while but I get bored quickly.
Also X-Com Apocalypse is not on par with the original, but still quite enjoyable with the realtime combat mode.
Horrible graphics, different (but not good) gameplay, and worst of all it didn't "feel" like it was the same world of XCOM. All of this is subjective, of course.
What part of that do you disagree with? He didn't say that everybody only played it through a single time. You don't need to argue against a strawman.
I really liked the old X-COM games and had anticipated that I would not like the reboot very much.
However, while I wouldn't want to miss the originals for the reboot, the reboots are done very solidly and in most instances I even find myself agreeing with the streamlining the new authors chose.
If you want a tactical squad-level game that goes beyond what the original X-COM did, I suggest having a look at Frozen Synapse. Frozen Synapse has much fewer elements than X-COM, but its major innovation is that each turn both you and your opponent plan your turns concurrently at your leisure and then the turn plays out over 5 seconds in continuous time.
In contrast, I always felt the serialising that X-COM enforced to be an artificial limitation.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_(game_theory)#Pure_an... for randomised strategies
Since you don't know exactly what your opponents are planning, you can't solve your turn like a deterministic puzzle.
I do admit there are some puzzle like aspects. Eg I often picked two or three plans that I thought my opponents are likely to choose, and tried to work out a plan of my own that would counter all three of them.
I was about to argue that it might have been a technical limitation too, but Dune II, the first real-time strategy game, came out two years before X-COM so technically that can't be quite right.
On the other hand, it also requires a certain set of programmer skills and specialized knowledge of how to simulate such systems, and opens up a combinatorial explosion of scenarios that can be much harder to design around if you also want to include lots of complex possibilities. Serialized turn-based design is much easier by comparison.
Notice how Frozen Synapse is otherwise a much simpler game with fewer elements than even just in the tactical mode of the original X-Com.
Programming expertise and information was a lot less accessible and evenly distributed.
You couldn't just "hire a graphics person", because no one knew what the hell that was. You hired a smart computer person / artist, and hoped they could learn everything. One reason the history of early games companies has so much "and then we hired this person named X, who had no training, but turned into one of the world's best Y's."
What I am saying is that just implementing a very crude version would have been doable in the early 90s.
What was much harder was to come up with a way to present the information and make the planning intuitive and fun. Including the programming aspects of that.
Much like you, I'm a diehard X-COM fan and anticipated the XCOM reboot wouldn't please me, and again like you I was pleasantly surprised.
I think the biggest improvement is the streamlining of TUs from the original (which was always a bit messy) into the actions of the reboot.
> In contrast, I always felt the serialising that X-COM enforced to be an artificial limitation.
I disagree about this. I like turn-based games; they feel more cerebral and less twitchy than RTS'es. I can play XCOM while eating a sandwich or drinking coffee, while I can't play an RTS that way.
To be clear, Frozen Synapse is also a turn-based strategy game. You can enjoy your sandwich or coffee while playing. The difference it's you and your opponent plan your turn simultaneously. But you are still fundamentally planning a turn.
The aspect I enjoy about the mechanic is it leaves a lot more uncertainty in the air when planning in the turn. I still have to take into account the uncertainty about the opponent's actions while planning my turn.
I should be ashamed: I own Frozen Synapse, but I think I've never played it. Yet another impulse buy :(
If I remember right, LSN still had tiles (and thus probably discrete units of time)?
Frozen Synapse, for better or worse, goes for a much more continuous approach. Making for a very different feeling game.
I think he's slightly guilty of simply listing his own preference there, rather than reporting reality.
To be honest, I can't even remember why the aliens invaded. I can remember the research progression, and the excitement of starting the game from scratch again and going up against the aliens with automatic weapons instead of late game plasma blasters.
So the author and I had very different experiences.
In many ways we could say X-COM broke so many rules of game design. By any conventional standards it's way too hard at the beginning and you'll generally be way too overpowered at the end, if you've got the flying armor suits and such. But that is part of its unique charm, intentional or not.
I thought the 2012 reboot was just good. Like you said, I think it removed a little too much of what made X-COM.... X-COM, though there was certainly much I loved.For me, though? XCOM2, and particularly the "War of the Chosen" expansion, actually do surpass the originals.
I've been putting it off for years. I need to dive into that.Personally I don't recall any big problems on my first playthrough. The biggest obstacle was understanding that we need to capture a live enemy commander to progress further. Other than that, things were pretty ok, considering that difficulty glitch.
Funny thing was that I've figured out that the game has TANKS only on 3rd game. Before that, what did those "HWP" mean was rather unclear.
At a minimum... there's no way to know that the alien base invasions are a thing, and unless you've laid out your bases in order to facilitate their defense -- setting up chokepoints and such -- they are easy pickings for the aliens. That's something you could get right by luck the first time... but there's no reason to lay your base out in such a way unless you know about it.
It's also difficult to know things like which weapons you can manufacture for strong financial returns. The midgame is tough unless you stumble upon this.
Also, just in general, winning strategies to beat the aliens aren't that easy to come by. Takes a fair amount of experimentation and heavy soldier losses. It's really tough to progress if you lose a lot of soldiers and/or drop ships.
And on your first play through it's also not clear what timetable you're working with and how fast the alien threats ramp up. Some of that is tied to your progression and some isn't IIRC.
Aside from the base layout thing, savescumming can definitely help obviously. =)
Of course, I know there were revisions made between the Euro, US, and Playstation versions. I think there were some difficulty tweaks. Not sure. So perhaps we had different experiences in that regard.
The optimal starting strategy is TWO cannons. Avalanche missles are objectively wrong. They destroy small craft leaving you with no easy early ground missions. The cannons are more than capable of taking down a tiny or small craft and make sure it’s not destroyed in the process.
"Hey rookie, go look around that corner and see what's there!" was one of my main techniques for keeping the leveled-up guys safe... sorry new guy :-)
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/268507/20_years_later_Da...
> “We were very excited, so we signed a contract to do Diablo,” remembers Brevik. The studio then had to figure out what, exactly, this turn-based isometric game it had been thinking about for so long would actually look like -- and how it would be angled and rendered on-screen. “This was not easy back then...I kind of took a screengrab of X-Com, and we just took that, and put it right into Diablo,” said Brevik. “So the actual tile-square basis -- the same shape and size -- is exactly the same in X-Com and Diablo.” So in a sense, says Brevik, the look and technology of Diablo is all based directly on a screenshot of X-Com.
So, x-com heavily influenced Diablo. In retrospect it makes sense - X-com tile based world, and lightning was pretty unique.
One thing that caught my eye was the author’s complaint about no in-game exposition or tutorials at the start of the game. It seems silly in 2020, but in 1994 it was common for games to come with a reasonably lengthy manual printed on dead trees that explained all those things—or else there were printed strategy guides and magazines that talked about clever tricks. I read a borrowed copy of that book cover to cover before I even had a computer to actually run the game on. I still have a copy in my garage.
My first copy was pirated on 3.5” floppy disks from the school computer lab. Eventually I bought a copy to get the manual. Later on I bought a copy to get it on CD. Eventually I bought another copy to get the whole original collection on CD. And last year I played the reboots which got me nostalgic enough to buy the original and apocalypse on steam.
Good times. :-)
I do miss the days where you'd get a physical manual. Nowadays you just get a slip of paper with an advertisement and a registration page. Saying that though, with live updates a lot of manuals would be out of date after a few years. I dont think the tome that is the world of warcraft manual is relevant to the modern game. Though maybe for classic.
It truly taught me that our oceans are so close, yet much farther than outer space can ever be. Looking at that lone blue globe in space always makes me feel so insignificant, so meaningless. Space is vast, but empty, and sterile. Down the abyss, not even light can shine to bless and purify.
The greatest contributor to that is certainly its soundtrack. With its unnerving, relentless low horns; harps hitting on the same two or three notes; there's a feeling of utter despair, hopelessness. A sense of doom, as aquanauts armed with teeny darts and harpoons grunt through the deaths of their colleagues, outmatched by opponents so unfairly superior, in the harshest environment on Earth. They couldn't have done a better job.
I have been working on a new "HD" soundtrack for TFTD that I plan to release as a mod for OpenXCOM (this article is great timing!). I am not finished yet, but you can listen to some of the tracks already (and download them if you wish):
• Geoscape 1: https://clyp.it/b3wf24qt?token=1171341361084200df1e81a5699dd...
• Geoscape 2: https://clyp.it/4qog1dq1?token=91b0b871435a3beac898f96cec945...
• Geoscape 3: https://clyp.it/cr2uakoj?token=f1e0cda592185ae0152d47bf70a9d...
• Geoscape 4: https://clyp.it/cf0c5xbx?token=4557e7bd10b693695f04085eeed9b...
• Geoscape 6: https://clyp.it/gyspu3ry?token=502115f5d9c7c0f0b5f844aa63ef6...
Or follow updates on the mod page: https://openxcom.mod.io/orchestra-from-the-deep
Enjoy, and let me know, shall you try them in OpenXCOM!
If you are ever startled by a mobile phone nearby ringing with the menacing gmbigmar.mid buildup, please say hello, it's probably mine.
I found TFTD a bit too much work-like in some missions (finding that last panicked Gray on a freighter...), but they sure earned an entire spot in gaming history only for their audio.
It, bizarrely, leans heavily into its predecessor's flaws instead of fixing them or at least steering around them.
- The much more cramped battlefield areas (namely, ships) expose the very frustrating shooting/projectile mechanics. you can understand squaddies missing an easy shot in the heat of the moment. fine! understandable! but in cramped areas they make even more exasperating mistakes -- if a guy is standing next to a doorway for cover, i might expect him to miss his shot... but i do not expect him to empty half his clip directly into the door frame six inches from his face
- grenade tossing in cramped areas is essentially just a great way to frag yourself and your squadmates. dear lord. grenades are really only useful in the early game, mostly, but TFTD doesn't even let you have that!
- some weapons only work underwater, some only work in air! adding to the already mind-numbing micromanagement of equipment, not to mention the punishing difficulty
- perhaps my memory fails me here, but I remember distinctly less destructible environments, which added so much fun to the original. can't find a way into the house? Blow a wall open! But, also, watch out for collapses! So much fun and so unique at the time.
More importantly, regardless of which series entries we like the best... nice to see a fellow X-Com fan -- and so many others on here! Cheers!
But I'd really like to hear the case in favor of TFTD. I might go so far as to call it objectively worse!
The atmosphere is absolutely terrifying. It really made me clutch for the life of my soldiers as if it was mine. It was unfair, but not without reason, as even today our submarine warfare would pale against T'Leth. So close yet so powerless.
The superb work on the graphics brings me deep into the abyss. Just look at how well the battle maps fade into the darkness. The various aliens are actually scary for once, and their shared past with the human species is realistic yet particularly disturbing. We all came from those same oceans, after all.
I already spoke about the music, but it really seals the deal.
I know this might sound it's all about the assets and the mood. But the game was already quite good, and TFTD gave that engine the content it deserved.
I will hazard a rough comparison – UFO Defense feels more like Starship Trooper, while TFTD is more like Alien. Intimate and downright scary.
To a certain extent yes, but TFTD is objectively even buggier than the original. IIRC it is even possible to put the original game into an unwinnable state by simply researching things in an unintended order. Fortunately OpenXCom[0] fixed this.
[0] https://openxcom.org
I feel that way about the original X-COM ;)
TFTD crossed the line into unfair, in my opinion. And buggy, too!
I think the game you played first will be scarier. Once you've played one, the other one is obviously just a bit of a re-skin, and just doesn't have quite the same fear factor. =)
https://youtu.be/WziO005uM3g
The problem with TFTD was that it crossed the time-reward curve threshold for many missions. The feedback that led to TFTD being so difficult was also related to the bug in the original that screwed up difficulty even if you played on Superhuman. So many players got the impression that XCOM was too easy and asked for a harder game
This is Terror from the Deep's biggest fail, in my opinion. Environment specific weapons added nothing to the game but more micromanagement.
If I remember correctly, TftD was bugged as hell, too.
I absolutely love the original X-COM and think it's one of the best -- if not THE best -- games from my youth.
"Unfortunately, Terror from the Deep does little to correct the original’s problems; if anything, it makes them worse. Most notably, it’s an even more difficult game than its predecessor, a decision that’s hard to understand on any level. Was anyone really complaining that X-COM was too easy? All in all, Terror from the Deep is exactly the unimaginative quickie sequel which the Gollops weren’t excited about having to make.
Nevertheless, it’s arguably the best of the _post-original_, pre-reboot generation of X-COM games."
Emphasis added
- weird research paths. It was possible to ruin your game by doing the wrong research in wrong order. Also, you need a lot of luck to get some techs, e.g. to get early armor you need to kill a Deep One, which usually are only found in the beginning of the game and near the end of it. Similarly to get a vibroblade which is very useful against Lobstermen, you need to kill a Calcinite, which is a very rare spawn in the game.
- maps are too big. I like the variety, but the maps are just too big. Also they consist of tight tunnels providing perfect shooting gallery opportunities for the aliens
- tentaculats are badly balanced. I fear no lobstermen disruptors, I fear no tasoth mind control, but a one or two tentaculats can destroy your team in a single round. And they can fly across half the map to get you.
I believe the correct link is: https://openxcom.mod.io/orchestra-of-the-deep