Par'Gellen

It holds your hand through the entire game and gives you very few options to choose from when doing... hell... pretty much everything! You can't level up your soldiers the way you want. The skill perks? pfffft... lame. Hell you can't even choose which class they are. You can't equip your soldiers the way you want. Why can't I give a heavy a sniper rifle if I want to? Why do they have to choose between a vest and a grenade?! That doesn't even start to make any sense! Ridiculous. You have almost no choice in building your base other than where to plop the next square. Seriously what's the point of even thinking about that? It never gets attacked so why does it matter? The adjacency bonuses? What a joke. They could have automated that entire mechanic and it would be virtually the same just with less clicking. You can't even interact with the game world the way you want. Yes I'm talking about free fire. No I'm not talking about using my heavy's single rocket or some other soldier's single grenade. That's just idiotic. In my opinion they really wouldn't have to remove much from the game other than the cutscenes and some blatantly obvious clicking to make it virtually "Click Go and watch it all happen, maybe you win maybe you don't, then read the credits." I never said TBS's should be sandbox games. Wow LOL! Talk about reading your own lines into my post and then twisting it into a defense for your own point of view... I mentioned those games as examples of wildly popular games that understand the fundamentals of freedom in gaming. Designing ANY KIND OF GAME and placing it on rails by taking away basic choices the way XCOM: EU does is simply unacceptable to me. It gives me the impression the devs (or their management *cough* jerk that tricked me into buying it on YouTube... you know who you are) are either incredibly unfocused or extremely lazy. Feel free to misunderstand and/or misinterpret anything I said above. You can even twist my words some more to try to convince us we should like a terribly designed game. It makes no difference to me as I'm unsubscribing from this thread now since I can't be arsed to explain all this again and again and again to everyone and their brother who dislike having to think while playing games. Have fun! Toodles...

I think most of it is cutscene nonsense and dancing aliens (seriously). Sums up exactly how I feel about it too. It got very boring to me very fast as well. Not much freedom. Felt kind of like I was watching an interactive movie. Oddly some people consider that a good thing. Those people baffle me. It's like it was only half-designed then rushed out unfinished. Yeah this is probably one of my biggest gripes. I don't think they really meant for the aliens to have any brains. They just seem to be pretty pictures that jump up and dance for you when you find them and then you get to throw your single grenade at them (lol fail!). Very poorly designed. My favorite was when you are in the big UFO's and the camera keeps getting stuck in the ceiling. Good times... They didn't want the players to have to think about anything. Hell they even give you a guy to run the whole show and just keep you updated once in a while. It's not like you are in command or anything... Oh wait... Again, no thinking required. This was unfortunately by design. They actually had a better one originally and scrapped it for one that wouldn't "intimidate" the playerbase (ROFLMAO! *facepalm*). Amen.

This man speaks truth and I'm proud to (virtually) know him Nobody (at least nobody I know) likes to play a game on rails. Ever wonder why games like Grand Theft Auto, Fallout (all of them), and Oblivion/Skyrim are so popular? It's because they give the player some tools and a world to use them in and leave the details of what they actually do up to them. It's called freedom and its importance in gaming to serious gamers cannot be overstated. Now, if all someone wants to do is play a few minutes before work, or they don't really get into the games they play that much then that's fine and XCOM: EU should be perfect for them. Personally I require a bit more meat on my plate and I also want to be able to eat it with my bare hands if I feel like it. I don't need the waiter standing over me explaining how to use the utensils and then forcing me to only use them with my feet for no apparent reason. Sure I'd have to put a LOT more thought into eating that way but who the hell wants to do it like that?! Do the other games I mentioned above (or even the original X-COM) have problems? Of course they do. Would I care if you pointed them all out in some kind of weird list? Not one whit. Why? Because even with their issues they still give me enough freedom to have fun the way I want to. This isn't rocket surgery...

Which is also kind of silly.

Personally I do not consider being given fewer options akin to being made to think more. Fewer options limit you. More options do not. Silly limits like only being able to carry one grenade just make the game less enjoyable to me and break any kind of immersion that I may have been feeling. Boo to silly limits! BOOO! Edit: Thinking more with fewer options is more strategic than tactical I think. Like the difference between playing chess and actually being on the battlefield fighting.

ROFL! I think I woke the wife laughing at that! +1 to you sir!

YAY! I get to use a toothbrush this time! Wait... is it mine?

Well that's what they get for naming it XCOM They knew what they were doing. They fooled me and that's not easy to do (when I'm sober).

Tuna can burn you if you put a lot of hot sauce on it... Or light it, your house, or yourself on fire before you eat it. True story.

We only pick on you 'cause we love you! *hugs* *flowers* *runs away giggling and dancing*

From orbit? It's the only way to be sure...

Whoopsie! My bad!

Welcome aboard Tunza! Glad you joined us in the barrel Scoot over HWP! Ow! Hey Gorlam that's my foot!

I think the term for this kind of trolling is "hit and run". Judging by his other comments he seems to fire off things that will rile people up then vanish from the conversation after a post or two. These kinds of trolls are rarer than your typical internet lunatic who usually needs to see and be involved in the ruckus they've created. Instead these types are content to just sit back and imagine the flaming hate that is flying around because of what they did. Whether or not this actually happens is usually irrelevant to them. They feed themselves with their own imagination so feeding them or not in the thread doesn't usually matter. Oddly the Eve Online forums seem to be a magnet for these types of trolls. I'm a member of dozens of forums (some I keep up with regularly like this one, others not so much) and have to say I've rarely seen the kind of insanity that pvp internet spaceships can bring out in people. It really should be the focus of an official psychological study!

Sorry... I must have missed something. I was under the impression (by the quote) that he meant the only difference between higher and lower difficulties was the number of aliens and their patrols. That is not the case. Obviously I missed something.

Mental... image.... smashing......... brain..........................*gurk*

Actually I saw the aliens making much more accurate shots (hit me almost every time on impossible) and from much longer range (sometimes I can't even see them).

Eerily fitting lol!

Chris, I'm extremely new here but also wanted to chime in. Don't pay any attention to the OP. I think you guys are doing a great thing with Xenonauts and want you to take as long as you need to make it a great game. I've done game development (doing a bit right now actually) and completely understand how complicated things can become and how much time it can take to sort it out. Nothing is ever as simple as it seems on paper. I am behind you 100%! Xenonauts F@#% YEAH! *does Bill & Ted's air guitar*

This is an extreme but I think it illustrates the issue between "depth" vs. "no depth". At least for me. Lets say I made a game. When you start it up you are presented with two buttons "Win" and "Lose". The importance associated with those two buttons would be colossal in terms of winning or losing the game. This is a situation in which you have more importance and much less depth. Now XCOM: EU isn't that extreme by a long shot BUT it isn't very deep either. I lost several games even when I was on Normal difficulty because I tried to think outside of the box. As soon as I tried to do something creative (within the very limited options present) the game would punish me for it severely. In the end I just took the ridiculously obvious paths (often times what I was directly being told to do) and the game became a cakewalk. I used that strategy to beat Normal and got all the way to psionics on Classic before it became too boring to continue playing. I'm not a big fan of "fewer options that are more important" because to me in the end it all just feels like the imaginary game I mentioned in the first paragraph. I want to think about things! I want to be at work and have a sudden realization that there is a different way to try something in the game and rush home at the end of the day to see what happens. That just isn't possible in XCOM: EU. Without a plethora of options it's just an interactive movie and that's not for me...

Hell I still think Fallout Tactics has good graphics... I'm so old...

Welcome aboard svidangel!

Ben Franklin vs. Mothra. I'd watch it. Forgot where I was going with this... Time for bed!

I agree. It is kind of cool but not really something that I can get into. I played some just to see what it was like but I doubt I'll be doing it again.

I name my guys things like "Mr. Giggles" and "Peanut".