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Thoughts & Lessons from X-COM: Enemy Unknown (by Firaxis)


Chris

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add the mod longwar from Nexus mods and Xcom-enemy unknown/within is a brand new game...

With that being said... I also LOVE Xenonauts :)

Longwars is well created mod, I enjoy it a lot.

Modding add versions and diversity to the games but people get blind sometimes and dont see the work behind it, specially what kind of ideas want to bring to the table.

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Nah people don't get blind just bold,convinced that if they are not playing game with mods,they honored devs by doing so.They think if someone (majority-or was it ?) does so they don't have respect toward dev's and they are "sacrilege" the game .... and go against devs original ideas (I am sick of this philosophy and I still can't swallow fact that same those people claim that mods "destroyed","killed" game.I mean how is that possible when mods are optional and the only thing,that keep game "alive")

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I still can't swallow fact that same those people claim that mods "destroyed","killed" game.I mean how is that possible when mods are optional and the only thing,that keep game "alive")

Some people fear that vanilla ice cream may no longer be sold at their favourite grocery shop if 3rd party strawberry and chocolate ice cream get too much of a market share.

I may be a little crazy but I have trouble understanding that much crazy.

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I honestly play almost all of my games with some sort of mods.

Generally speaking, the devs need to worry with more things than the gameplay itself. If the game become to difficulty or complex, it may no sell well even it became and excelent niche game. They have deadlines to follow and sponsors to satisfy and sometimes it leave them not much time to adjust the game on the way they want to. And of course, they have a budget to follow. Modders, on the other hand, have none of those issues and can do whatever they want to and take whatever time they want to.

I think the best time to start to play a game is exaclty in early-access, where you can take part of the development just like if it was a mod. Devs cant do much after the final release so you are stuck with it. I barely can think in any game that became a legend without mods... just XCom itself! Battlefield, Total War, Half-Life, Civilization, The Sims, Elder Scrolls, Mount & Blade, Jagged Alliance 2, Paradox games, Arma, almost any Star Wars game, GTA... they all really shines with mods. Honestly when I face a game without an active mod community my first thought is that game is not that fun and have limited potential.

Anyway, my favorite example is LOTR: Battle for Middle Earth 2. The vanilla game is so bad that it make you want to cry... I simply dont look like LOTR with all the vivid colours and Warcraft play style. It's just a bad game. Download some mods and... wow... wooow... WOOOOW!!! That's a LOTR game!

I honestly thinks the way to go nowadays for ANY game, indie or not, action based or RTS, is to be as much mod friendly it could. Paradox to me do a good work with it. Their vanilla games are very basic and almost generic, but they leave so much space for modders to work that even a bad vanilla game becomes a pearl in 6 months. It's almost like a custom game: buy the basic structure and finish it on the way you want to! And even with so many mods they still manages to release highly profitable DLCs... those guys in Paradox must be wizards of some kind!

Edited by Victor_Tadeu
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To op : I agree on nearly every tought/ I ecpecially agree that tight maps and the mob activation mechanics really detract from tactical gameplay, as you must be very wary in your flanking and other manoveares and the strategic lack of freedom feeling. Despite it all , thanks to imho mostly brillant tactical play, i do love Xcom EU and EW. Also makes me even more hopefull for my preordered Xenonauts as it seems we got similar tastes:)

@Victor_Tadeu Well im on the other side with modding. I nearly never play mods. My games are mostly strategies and i simply dont trust some unpaid, amateur guys to fiddle with the complex mechanics and test it well. Also often those modders leave their work unfinished. There are some exceptions like the long war mod for xcom which won me over, but i really need to learn a lot and trust the professionalism of a modder to try his work. With Xcom as example, i dont want to learn, after 5 hours of gameplay, that mutons elite in the mod are tottaly unbalanced (eaqsy or hard side) or of some other stuff that will ruin my fun.

Edited by FireStorm1010
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I tried X-COM again in the last couple of days (with mods). I prefer a few aspects of it but in general it lacks depth and often logic.

When it comes to Game Design, some aspects of it are quite an example of schizophrenic game design. I will here provide some example.

Strategic Choices

X-COM EW wants you to make tough choices (Skills, Abductions etc.) BUT they are actually limiting the options for the player more than they would have to (for example skill selection, if a player would have a bigger out of which to make multiple selections the number of possible combinations would be far bigger than with fixed opposed choices) or they even take away any influence from the player at all (e.g. randomized class selection.. who the heck had that idea??).

Battle Tactics

They obviously worked a lot to make combat flow naturally. 2 Aspects in which I find X-COM EW very good is the general speed in which the battles play out (input and resolution doesn't eat much time) and the most of time very well working cover system (but sometimes it has really weird glitches...).

The game wants us to fear the alien! But it does

1) let aliens sit around until we trigger them. The result is that a smart player will play around this mechanic, and ta-da, as a side-effect battles don't follow realistic principles at all. Soldiers stick in piles to keep the trigger range minimized, except spreading out and flanking.

2) Introduce an expansion with a gazillion new toys for us good guys. Now we puny humans can transform us into gigantic hulks of metal, go invisible in addition to Psionics. On the other side, the bad guys received 2 (!!) new units, of which 1 is practically worthless in most situations - which is also connected to the alien-trigger mechanic. The alien threat now looks even more miserable and sad than before the expansion.

I could write page after page about this game, but I'm not in the mood to :(

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To op : I agree on nearly every tought/ I ecpecially agree that tight maps and the mob activation mechanics really detract from tactical gameplay, as you must be very wary in your flanking and other manoveares and the strategic lack of freedom feeling. Despite it all , thanks to imho mostly brillant tactical play, i do love Xcom EU and EW. Also makes me even more hopefull for my preordered Xenonauts as it seems we got similar tastes:)

@Victor_Tadeu Well im on the other side with modding. I nearly never play mods. My games are mostly strategies and i simply dont trust some unpaid, amateur guys to fiddle with the complex mechanics and test it well. Also often those modders leave their work unfinished. There are some exceptions like the long war mod for xcom which won me over, but i really need to learn a lot and trust the professionalism of a modder to try his work. With Xcom as example, i dont want to learn, after 5 hours of gameplay, that mutons elite in the mod are tottaly unbalanced (eaqsy or hard side) or of some other stuff that will ruin my fun.

Dude your completly wrong about modding, people that put their work to bring diversity to a game have different motivation, even more powerfull than money, Pasion.

By this obsolete and reckless state of mind your losing the oportunity to share. Not all modding is about make projectiles more bigger abuse for some mechanic.

In this forum are great modders and mappers, with your actitud and ignorance you'r devaluating his work, reducing interest of other players and even worst, you critic the game because you feel that lacks of deep tactical freedom, but at the same time your avoiding the diversity to emerge.

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Dude your completly wrong about modding, people that put their work to bring diversity to a game have different motivation, even more powerfull than money, Pasion.

By this obsolete and reckless state of mind your losing the oportunity to share. Not all modding is about make projectiles more bigger abuse for some mechanic.

In this forum are great modders and mappers, with your actitud and ignorance you'r devaluating his work, reducing interest of other players and even worst, you critic the game because you feel that lacks of deep tactical freedom, but at the same time your avoiding the diversity to emerge.

Well i do appreciate their work and that they want to do it for free, but personally , as said, i wont risk trying them unless in rare cases, i just have to little time. Its just my personal opinion, no offense intended.

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Well i do appreciate their work and that they want to do it for free, but personally , as said, i wont risk trying them unless in rare cases, i just have to little time. Its just my personal opinion, no offense intended.

Did you know that this community have a modder that professional in game design?, not referring to myself, Im specialist on game statistics.

You'll be surprised if you test some thing that you can find made by modders and mappers, specially Kabill, Max_Caine and Skitso.

Maybe some day you were open minded enough to give it a try ;)

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Well i do appreciate their work and that they want to do it for free, but personally , as said, i wont risk trying them unless in rare cases, i just have to little time. Its just my personal opinion, no offense intended.

Made me chuckle.

Considering that this is the bosses first game, you surely won't risk using the vanilla balance.

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Did you know that this community have a modder that professional in game design?, not referring to myself, Im specialist on game statistics.

You'll be surprised if you test some thing that you can find made by modders and mappers, specially Kabill, Max_Caine and Skitso.

Maybe some day you were open minded enough to give it a try ;)

Do you guys even read what i write or are just happy to bash? I wrote i have played some mods and found them very good like long war in xcom.So i know some of them are very good.

I also played the much advertised Darth war mod for Total war Empire, and with all respect to the author, i tought the vanilla was better.

Its not a question of open mindness, more of amount of time and how you want to spend it.If i had a lot of free time im sure i would be more willign to try more mods.Each to his own i guess. Just wrote my posts to point out for some of us mods and mod supprt isnt really important.

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Made me chuckle.

Considering that this is the bosses first game, you surely won't risk using the vanilla balance.

Well if you read my prev posts and tried to understand , you wouldnt have a reason to chuckle. I wrote i trust much more payed proffesionals then amateurs, that was my main point.

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Amateurs created DayZ and Jagged Alliance 2 v1.13. Professionals created Spore, the Carrier Command relaunch, Outpost, the Thief relaunch, X-Rebirth, Godus... =)

That doesn't mean that all professionally produced games are bad and all mods are good though. The average product quality of something that has had $1,000,000 spent on it is going to be higher than something that has had $10 spent on it even if there are exceptions to the rule.

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Yes, but more often than not a mod will not be as good as a professionally-created game. If you have limited gaming time, spending it playing professionally produced games is likely to give you a higher overall standard of experience than playing mods will.

That's the point Firestorm was making. He wasn't saying all mods are worse than professionally-produced games (there are many exceptions), just that they are more likely to be...although I think you already knew that.

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Hmm let's see ....Did you guys tried Nehrim - At Fate's Edge mod for Oblivion ?That's total conversion mod which is on it's own game for it self (it use Oblivion engine but have nothing to do with Oblivion),made by "amateurs".And it's high quality product which probably surpass Oblivion itself (not only my words nor opinion) and they are making sequel which again use Skyrim engine but .... do you get my point ?You don't have to trust any mod but being so close minded to think of every team or person who is making mod as " amateurs" is absurd and I don't get it.

Edited by Sentelin
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