I hope the future direction of this game goes back to its roots. The X-COM2 DLC which introduces alien combatants to your team as players always seemed deeply misguided to me. To me the point of XCOM is about humanity confronting those aspects it finds unacceptable to its condition, I’ve never taken it literally about aliens vs. humans, so the othering of a race of aliens is not a concern for me. What I care about are non-fictional people, their nations and their cultures. So the DLC where aliens were part of your team seemed like such a misguided venture to me. It seemed like something someone might come up with in a thoughtless effort to be inclusive of diversity. But what does that even mean in this case? So, yeah I hope XCOM reexamines it point, or someone else should create a better IP.
> It seemed like something someone might come up with in a thoughtless effort to be inclusive of diversity.
The more obvious explanation is that having alien members in your squad opens up new gameplay opportunities.
Your comment seems like a caricature of a right wing person who thinks everything they don’t like is “DEI/woke”. It’s like you need the world to be black and white and when it isn’t it upsets your world view?
The plots to XCOM were never very strong: it was the gameplay that set them apart. Gollup’s earlier games (the subject of the article) developed turn-based, grid-constrained tactical simulation out of board games; plot was just polish added to that. Using roughly the same mechanics, you command a death squad on search-and-destroy missions, terrorists doing direct action against the government, and, in Chimera Squad, cops. The story is just window dressing for the mechanics.
> the DLC where aliens were part of your team seemed like such a misguided venture to me. It seemed like something someone might come up with in a thoughtless effort to be inclusive of diversity. But what does that even mean in this case?
If I live a million years I will never understand the paranoia over the ‘threat’ of inclusivity / diversity.
"Obviously X-COM also faced this problem. One of the biggest complaints is when an enemy is right next to a player and they’ve got an 85 per cent chance to hit and they miss. ‘That’s absolutely ridiculous!’ People ragequit and never play again. It’s an issue they partly solved in XCOM 2, and we had another mode in Chaos Reborn. It’s a rather sobering lesson in game design and how people manage random factors."
People frequently do not understand the statistics underlying real world dynamics, embrace oversimplified world models, and going against that has them discouraged? That is one strong re-expression of the satanic attitude.
From cinematography, two big examples "that may have people leave the theater, then":
-- in Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, the Sheriff (Gene Hackman) re-telling the story of English Bob:
> You see, the night that Corky walked into the Blue Bottle, and before he knows what's happening, Bob here takes a shot at him! And he misses, 'cause he's so damn drunk. Now that bullet whizzing by panicked old Corky, and he did the wrong thing. He went for his gun in such a hurry that he shot his own damn toe off. Meantime Bob here, he's aiming real good, and he squeezes off another, but he misses, because he's still so damn drunk, and he hits this thousand-dollar mirror up over the bar. And now, the Duck of Death is as good as dead. Because Corky does it right. He aims real careful, no hurry... [...] BAM! That Walker Colt blew up in his hand, which was a failing common to that model. You see, if Corky had had two guns instead of just a big dick, he would have been there right to the end to defend himself. [...] Well, old Bob wasn't gonna wait for Corky to grow a new hand. No, he just walked over there real slow - 'cause he was drunk - and shot him right through the liver
-- the scene in Vince Gilligan's El Camino, in which a bunch of gunners is so hijacked by the unpreparedness to the havoc that most bullets end on the scenery.
Not documentaries, but statistically relevant like the ten "black" in sequence at the roulette, frequent as the wheel is having well over a thousand spins.
Wow, I didn’t know Laser Squad was done by the same guy (and his brother, full indie-style, it turns out) — I remember playing that game on Spectrum in 1992 or so, and it was absolutely next level, no other game came close at that time.
X-Com was amazing, and Xcom2 also pretty good. I just checked, and there is an amazing mod and very active community around LwotC (Long war of the Chosen), with tons of fixed bugs and improvements, a decade or so after the game was released. [0]
I am surprised Firaxis didn't work on an X-Com 3. I would guess the fan base is still huge.
I'm getting old and I don't play videogames anymore, but if I have a month of free time imprisoned in a cell with nothing else to do, I'd give xcom2 with LwotC a go. (and Master of Magic, and Master of Orion 2, etc).
As an old Spectrum head I was obsessed with JG’s output back in the day. Chaos may have looked awful but it was so much fun. I still have core memories from that, Rebelstar Raiders and Laser Squad. (Beating people online is one thing, beating your friends when you’re hot-seating in the same house is something else.) Ironically never played XCom, but I have a lot of hours on Magic and Mayhem (which had the executable… Chaos.exe)
I've never played the original X-COM, though I played the two Firaxis games to death. I have 132.2 hours on X-COM: Enemy Unkown (the Firaxis game) and 327.5 hours on XCOM2, both of which seem like an undercount (especially the first one).
I thought I had the original game in my GOG account but it turns out I only have a clone (Xenonauts). I haven't played it at all and I bet I wouldn't have played the original XCOM either if it was in my GOG account.
The reason? I'm sad to admit that but it's the graphics. I can sometimes play older games, e.g. arcade games from the '80s or '90s, but I really struggle with most older graphics games. That makes me sad because there are some real gems that are now older than 20-30 years and I'd really like to be able to enjoy them, but I can't.
There's a time to play, and a time to admire graphics, I guess. Oh Ecclesiastes, you were so right.
I recently played through 'Aliens: Dark Descent' which manages to feel like a X-COM game, but real time. It felt like the natural next step for tactic strategy games and was instantly hoked -- I can't imagine returning to the turn-based roll-of-a-dice luck systems after that.
"random-number stuff was really too brutal for a lot of players to handle" -- I never finished XCOM 2 specifically for that reason. I think, having not come from a background of table top RPG's, it just didn't click.
Enjoy their quote midway through about how pointlessly miserly the Spectrum Holobyte people were about development. Made me bleak laugh a little.
> suddenly we really had to finish it by end of March, and they required us to work in-house in Chipping Sodbury seven days a week, 10 hours a day for several months. They didn’t give us any extra resources. In fact, we had to beg them to give us a more powerful computer to use, because my brother’s computer couldn’t handle it! My computer was having serious overheating problems. I had to remove the case and it crashed occasionally. They begrudged us one new computer for Nick and they stuck us in this tiny little room.
The Magic and Mayhem quote's pretty funny too about game dev, still seems to be the same.
> They said RPGs don’t sell, which was, of course, complete rubbish. They wanted to make it much more RTS-focused, partly because of Command & Conquer, which was very popular at the time. (...) We started to make it before Diablo came out, and it was also before Baldur’s Gate, which was the real milestone in RPGs.
And naturally the demise of Nintendo
> my boss was opposed to doing a sequel. He said the 3DS was dead and that we had to go with the PS Vita
3DS sells 76 million, PS Vita ... 10. Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars even sold "acceptably". 340,000 according to the data available.[1] Not exactly Mario Kart 7 or Pokemon, still acceptable for a third party.
It was an enjoyable read at least. Lots of standard horrible practices in the game development community, and some actually surprising ones. Such as, "they didn't even hire the X-COM people to work on any of the X-COM sequels?"
21 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 59.8 ms ] threadThe more obvious explanation is that having alien members in your squad opens up new gameplay opportunities.
Your comment seems like a caricature of a right wing person who thinks everything they don’t like is “DEI/woke”. It’s like you need the world to be black and white and when it isn’t it upsets your world view?
Fighting campy superhero bosses just kinda made everything less tense (and frankly, the random spawns got kinda annoying).
If I live a million years I will never understand the paranoia over the ‘threat’ of inclusivity / diversity.
From cinematography, two big examples "that may have people leave the theater, then":
-- in Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, the Sheriff (Gene Hackman) re-telling the story of English Bob:
> You see, the night that Corky walked into the Blue Bottle, and before he knows what's happening, Bob here takes a shot at him! And he misses, 'cause he's so damn drunk. Now that bullet whizzing by panicked old Corky, and he did the wrong thing. He went for his gun in such a hurry that he shot his own damn toe off. Meantime Bob here, he's aiming real good, and he squeezes off another, but he misses, because he's still so damn drunk, and he hits this thousand-dollar mirror up over the bar. And now, the Duck of Death is as good as dead. Because Corky does it right. He aims real careful, no hurry... [...] BAM! That Walker Colt blew up in his hand, which was a failing common to that model. You see, if Corky had had two guns instead of just a big dick, he would have been there right to the end to defend himself. [...] Well, old Bob wasn't gonna wait for Corky to grow a new hand. No, he just walked over there real slow - 'cause he was drunk - and shot him right through the liver
-- the scene in Vince Gilligan's El Camino, in which a bunch of gunners is so hijacked by the unpreparedness to the havoc that most bullets end on the scenery.
Not documentaries, but statistically relevant like the ten "black" in sequence at the roulette, frequent as the wheel is having well over a thousand spins.
I am surprised Firaxis didn't work on an X-Com 3. I would guess the fan base is still huge.
I'm getting old and I don't play videogames anymore, but if I have a month of free time imprisoned in a cell with nothing else to do, I'd give xcom2 with LwotC a go. (and Master of Magic, and Master of Orion 2, etc).
[0]: https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/Long_War_of_the_Chosen
Although later creations were more popular it's that first one that really stands in my memory 40+ years later.
I guess it might be time to fire up an emulator and play again, as I do every couple of years:
https://torinak.com/qaop/play/chaos
I thought I had the original game in my GOG account but it turns out I only have a clone (Xenonauts). I haven't played it at all and I bet I wouldn't have played the original XCOM either if it was in my GOG account.
The reason? I'm sad to admit that but it's the graphics. I can sometimes play older games, e.g. arcade games from the '80s or '90s, but I really struggle with most older graphics games. That makes me sad because there are some real gems that are now older than 20-30 years and I'd really like to be able to enjoy them, but I can't.
There's a time to play, and a time to admire graphics, I guess. Oh Ecclesiastes, you were so right.
The first X-COM felt like those, afterwards not so much.
"random-number stuff was really too brutal for a lot of players to handle" -- I never finished XCOM 2 specifically for that reason. I think, having not come from a background of table top RPG's, it just didn't click.
[1] https://www.vgchartz.com/game/47651/tom-clancys-ghost-recon-...
It was an enjoyable read at least. Lots of standard horrible practices in the game development community, and some actually surprising ones. Such as, "they didn't even hire the X-COM people to work on any of the X-COM sequels?"