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Anti-psi?


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Edit: And why do I keep thinking your username is Thor?

Indeed that is so. Might be due to his avatar too (which looks like a 'Thor' somehow...)

My psi-powers have begun their slow erosion of your mind, obviously.

But yeah, I'm Tor. :D

I made the avatar on some "manga yourself nao" thing on deviant art I think. It was the first thing I found on my drive to use.

I'm not saying "yay drugs" but it could be cool if you could put men on a drug, so as long as they was on it they had more bravery, but suffered some negative effect. Having drugs in the inventory would be very fiddly and silly I agree.

Edited by IceVamp
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As someone who loved the Psi game in the original, can someone point me to the post explaining the rationale for removing it?

I understand that it was OP in a big way, but at the same time, immensely satisfying once you discovered it. After being so terribly brutalized for so long by the aliens, and then experiencing the terror of your own guys turning on you, it was great to be gathering up the aliens and lining them up outside the UFO for execution! You could say it trivialized the rest of the game, but in the funnest possible way. Its one of my favorite XCom memories.

I built a whole base dedicated to psi evaluation.

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Chris talks about it earlier in the thread, but essentially, the psi powers in X-COM gave you the ability to mop the floor with the aliens wherever you found them, thus removing most of the tension and feeling of an uphill struggle from the game.

By removing psi powers for humans, he aims to keep the player feeling that they're balancing on the razor's edge between being overwhelmed and succeeding right up till the end of the game.

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As making a game is always an unbelievably huge project, I can understand the temptation to go for the simple solution. I'd sure hate to see human psionics go away though. In my view, the problem in the original game was due to the guaranteed risk-free nature of psi-combat.

For one thing, all of the aliens were psionically weak, even if they had psionic ability themselves. If I remember correctly(couple years since I checked), mind-probing revealed that alien stats were all static according to rank rather than randomized like the human recruits. I don't think the devs realized that their game was so awsomely open ended that players could create psi-evaluation centers that sacked 90 percent of the recruits who weren't psionic super-heavyweights.

The things I really liked that I wish could be preserved:

1. PAYBACK.

2. For new players, discovering that you could actually harness this power. I don't think I did until my third game or so. Definately one of the top epiphanies of my gaming career.

3. I loved building a dedicated base for evaluation purposes. It made me feel like I was really in charge of an international orginization. I liked dedicated purpose bases in general. It was always pure chaos when my evaluation base was attacked, because I never gave them quite enough gear to handle that, so I had 30 unarmored rookies scavenging weapons from the dead. FUN.

4. The touching moment when, sitting down with the commander of my forces, bravest, strongest man among men that humanity could muster, and telling him that I have to let him go for the unforseeable reason that his psionic profile did not meet minimum requirements and that I didn't want to see the aliens tear his mind to shreds...

Isn't there any way we can keep this? What if psionic combat wasn't a guaranteed win, and that engaging in psionic combat could risk a reversal or revealed your position? What if it appeared later in game, requiring more various research steps to acquire? What if the last enemy base had a new, previously unseen in the game, psionic proof alien race? There's gotta be a million ways to solve the problems in a fun way without simply removing it.

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The psi abilities were the weakest part of the original game for me.

I hated having to mess around finding out who could be trusted to go into a fight.

That was boring yet seemed like the only way to safely go on missions, that made it feel like a compulsory chore.

The whole idea of humans developing strong mental powers overnight didn't sit well with me either.

I like the idea of the aliens having access to powers we can't match.

Having to use technology to work around and try to overcome their superiority appeals to me more than just adding psionics to the human side.

Maybe if Chris does decide to do Xenonauts 2: The Earthlings Strike Back then humans may have had time to develop their own brand of psi powers.

If not I imagine someone will mod the abilities over to the human troopers soon enough.

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I wouldn't really miss psi powers, to be honest. I'm hardly an X-COM veteran, so my word on this doesn't count for much, but I found having to grind psychic powers rather tedious. It was fun once you were able to MC aliens and run them over the map, but I realized that the end result of doing so was that none of my core troopers were ever exposed to enemy fire; they could just park in the Skyranger and shoot out mind-blasts to their heart's content without every coming under fire. Where's the fun in that?

I wouldn't necessarily mind psionic powers if they required direct LoS and had limited range, but the X-COM psionics were just way too powerful.

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Chris did make a mention about teleportation, but not sure if that's a psychic power (I think so). Or if you can do anything to stop the aliens doing it besides artistically eviscerating them.

Kine shields/AT Fields maybe? That'd be interesting.

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