alienfood

Sentelin, quite so. I may be getting my versions mixed up, and I don't recall playing IV much. V was all about zooming in and out on an actual globe that really added nothing. I was more if a III fan, playing the English, with their men-o-war, on island maps.

When it is time for a follow-on project, Goldhawk could do worse than remember that the X-COM example is one of a deeply satisfying game-play and replayability that appears to be the philosophical recipe for Xenonauts. In particular, I have always loved the strategical/tactical interplay, but duplicating this in other genres might be tricky without leaving users with a TFTD-reroll feeling. For instance, I see the amount of resources that have been invested in the "modernized vintage 2D look" for Xenonauts. It looks great, although one must be careful to distinguish the actual gameplay elements that make X-COM so appealing. X-COM's five-generation-old graphics are mostly irrelevant, they neither add nor detract or rather they do not distract from the phenomenal gameplay. In any case graphics date themselves naturally very quickly whether one is aiming for a vintage look or no. You can still play Civ-III and enjoy it. Every screen seems to connect with and impact everything else in meaningful and self-consistent ways. That is depth. The fancy 3D graphics added in subsequent versions added little that does not already scream "2007", while the loss of depth hurts. Now they are all old-fashioned, I would rather play Civ-III than the newer ones. One more thing: take a look at what OpenXCom is doing with Android support. They are doing great work over there, it turns out that X-COM-type games (turn-based, episodic, rapid startup and save) are a great fit for android devices. it may be that your next game takes the multi-level strategic/tactical idea to android and scores another hit.

If you are a fan of the original XCOM then there is little to dislike about openxcom. It reads the same art definitions in the same files as XCOM. The runtime executable is obviously new, which is mostly good and occasionally still a work-in-progress: - Many XCOM known bugs like the difficulty bug are fixed. - Some XCOM known exploits are also fixed - There are some very nice playability enhancements, e.g. remembering your loadout - There are some very nice GUI enhancements, e.g. radar range circles, additional options on dialogs - Various GUI filter options and screen size options (e.g. bigger than 800x600) There are a few bugs but it looks to me like bug traffic is tailing off. I'd say the biggest outstanding issues are balance issues for all the possible difficulty levels for all the scenarios. Also, the AI is completely different, so the aliens won't necessarily do the things you might previously have seen XCOM do. My experience is that this is a very playable game and a well-supported forum. It is a great complement to Xenonauts.

That's the other thing the interwebs is good for - beating you to your best lines.

You should crowd-source your research tree techno babble. If there is one thing the interwebs is good for, it is semi-plausible BS.

Thanks for the review, from an unimpeachable X-COM veteran. I bought the game but did not get beyond the Steam install and got my money refunded. Although I didn't get to play the game, the "dumbing down" of the strategy layer, single base, small squad size, and static maps, resonate with me because they are all important differences from the original. Add to this the heavily cover-based tactics, and the MMO-like pulling groups of mobs, and I feel that the game is not what I was looking for. You are correct that the legion of hard-core X-COM fans are not impressed with a game you can play with your thumbs. We are asking for surprisingly little. We have jumped through hoops to replay our 20 year old game, with stupefyingly ancient graphics, because actual game-play has never been surpassed. Firaxis could have taken the existing source and/or data files, ported to win32, added very little content, done some graphics rescaling to support a larger viewport, and included the game as a free extra with their new EU. That would have captured all those legions of fans, including me, and put you out of business. But Firaxis has moved on and created a new game with, it is said, wider appeal. It does not appear to me that folks will be playing the new game 20 years from now, but they may still be playing the old game, 40 years old by then. So there is plenty of room, even among people who are enjoying EU, for a true remake of the consensus best-game-of-all-time. So Xenonauts is actually in a good place, which convinced me to spring for the pre-order. Thanks for your hard work, and may many, many people reward you with a measly $20.

I'm grateful to Chris for "opening the kimono" about development details. He could just as easily said nothing, and avoided the debate and the barbs. What I see are the standard kinds of issues inherent to putting partial work up for playtesting. The alternatives are to not release partial work, or invest more resources in testing instead of development. However, the current approach will result in a much superior game, because nothing improves software so much as actually using it. And since it transfers a portion of the test burden to early access users, Chris apparently feels like he owes them a detailed status of what is going on internally. Bravo.