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Cats just don't love people like dogs do.

That's why I like cats better. After personal experience I find the leg humping quite disturbing. The way cats love people with the purring and even the bit where they leave behind parts of dead mice is prefereble to the damn humping.

PS. I'd never get either animal as a pet. but I prefere cats to dogs.

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Maybe he got abducted by aliens. He did seem to actually believe in them, maybe he got a little to nosey for his own good.

You've got it all wrong. Didn't you see the avatar? It is an alien come to spy on us. They haven't realized that this forum is about a fictional game and are busy compiling a list of future abduction runs to stop the resistance before the projected October "launch".

Galaxy Quest in reverse! GoodGuyEddy had it right.

Edited by Akavit
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It becomes far too hard to remain serious when people drop in post one enraged post and then leaves.

oh, you can all mock. You can go on with your lives. But no one seems to spare a thought for those poor souls* who suffer...

Spontaneous Posting Combustion!

You're just sitting starting to type a post. Everything is fine, but then you see something. Something that stuns you and makes you shake your head. Your fingers start race with a speed to match your growing rage and then...

[video=youtube;7HgMSKCfwvQ]

The police never connect these avoidable episodes with the forums these poor people were visiting.

So, the next time you're upset by a forum post, remember to stay calm and...Dogs cuter than Cats?! Are you freakin' nuts ?!!!!!!

GAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!

[video=youtube;7HgMSKCfwvQ]

*Handily the OP seemed very convinced that evidence had been found that souls live on, and not at the bottom of other shoes. So, it's not quite as big a disaster as it is for other SPC sufferers.

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...And I'm back.

I do apologize, I do not have all day to sit on a computer and post in forums. your instant gratification generation is amusing...

As to what I am, I am a grey, as visualized by Whitley Strieber after his numerous abductions in the 1980's. My image has been called one of the most haunting ever done of actual aliens, as it captures most closely what a grey looks like, the ones that abduct people from this planet, anyway. Now, what the strange Star Trek Next Generation bald-thingys are in THIS game that are supposed to be passing as greys, I have no idea.

Again, X-Com the original did greys better, short, GREY!!! little dudes with huge eyes.

The music needs to be amped up. Firaxis is using the original sound artist from Microprose who worked on the original X-Com. Against this you is dead meat on the table...

Blaster bombs blaster bombs... amusing how so many went off on me for my apparent capital crime contradiction.

Just make them prohibitively expensive and take a long time to build. I agree, in the original game they were totally unbalanced. In the final chapter of the game for example, I was regularly shooting down battleships with the drop ship, immediately landing on top of the crash, jetting jump troopers up onto the roof and drop-slamming 1 blaster bomb down on the roof to make a hole, and the next one straight in the hole. That pretty much wiped out half the enemy opposition right there.

As for the comments on a 'play the aliens' project game being unbalanced, this is easily handled by starting the aliens out with a few ships, and they have to do their own research and build bigger ships. They have to harvest food to feed their alien troops, and grow the troops, they have to accomplish various missions in order to be able to take on more ambitious missions, ect... and they also have severe limitations on building blaster bombs. It's easily done, it just requires intelligence.

The other reason I suggest this is that this game is going head to head with the Firaxis X-Com game, which, through some magic and alignment of the stars, appears on track to exactly ressurrect the very game I have been dreaming of since my 3 years of near constant playing of the original X-Com.

In short, this game is up against a much bigger studio and some very smart guys, who appear to be on track for doing it up RIGHT out of extreme miracles of god. So this game needs to set itself apart ASAP!

How does it do that? Well, a common strategy for Indie type games like this is to go open-source. Offer development up to the masses, and allow every Jolt-addicted manic in his mom's basement set out to tile every square inch of the earth, make battle packs for Russian soldiers, Japanese soldiers, civilians, what have you. Have them add new alien races and ships, weapons, what have you.

I'm happy to hear creative writing will be included in the final product. Thank you.

To the rest of the 8 year old trolls who let loose with their snickery attacks on me to somehow prove exactly what i just finished saying is so true in these forums, please, pass on the tenth jolt and heed your mother and get to bed.

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Oh, and yes, I do know what an Alpha is, thank you. This game plays better than a lot of Beta's I have driven, so hats off to the team, damn you I am addicted to your Alpha, and now that the save games are crashing at Aug 20, (I am assuming that is your way of stopping the demo, as I can't find the save game folder or figure out why it is exception crashing) I have to wait.

So, my constructive criticism is from the standpoint of someone who loves what you have done so far but if you just copy X-Com you will be soundly crushed by Firaxis. I don't want to see that happen as this project has real potential, and why not get gamers to buy BOTH titles and not compete?

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In short, this game is up against a much bigger studio and some very smart guys, who appear to be on track for doing it up RIGHT out of extreme miracles of god. So this game needs to set itself apart ASAP!

I'm not entirely sure how exactly Xenonauts is going against XCOM.. Xeno is a much more faithful to EU, while XCOM is going to a very different direction. It's already set itself apart by that alone.

Not to say XCOM is going to be bad or anything, but they are mechanically very different, and there is room for the both of them in the world.

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As for the comments on a 'play the aliens' project game being unbalanced, this is easily handled by starting the aliens out with a few ships, and they have to do their own research and build bigger ships. They have to harvest food to feed their alien troops, and grow the troops, they have to accomplish various missions in order to be able to take on more ambitious missions, ect... and they also have severe limitations on building blaster bombs. It's easily done, it just requires intelligence.

That sounds very much like a completly different game and not at all easy to do. Not only are the mechanisms new/different from the human side of the game it also seems to conflict (or at least difficult to interweave) with the existing lore of the game.

And how groundbattles are supposed to be spawned still hasn't been dealt with. The player side in your example (and the computer side of current gameplay) as aliens would still have as goal or be rewarded for avoiding all forms of groundbattle (except for the Xenonaut base assult). So what exactly would incite the player to allow his ships to be blown, up so that he can start a ground battle. Ground battles are the core of the game after all?

Edited by Gorlom
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Yeah it would be a completely different take on the game.

A lot of work as well but it could make an interesting mod.

All you would be doing was swapping the roles really.

It wouldn't make a lot of sense without coding support to adjust how the missions work and the devs have too much going on to worry about it for now.

Maybe later if Chris decides he wants to open up the missions more to modders.

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Again, X-Com the original did greys better, short, GREY!!! little dudes with huge eyes.

Yes, I miss the Sectoids too. The Caesians haven't got any of that recognition factor. Not only from their visual appearance, but the inklings of what they could be up to. Simply class design.

My best Caesian moment had they hunt down a number of rookies in an industrial map. It was a great mission and the way the AI played it came across as a cross between curiosity and clinical killing.

I don;t know if the devs feared using greys for legal reasons, but it's possible they just wanted to strike their own course. Semmingly at warp factor 3 for the Caesians :)

The music needs to be amped up.

I find bits of it are staying with me after playing, so it's quite atmospheric. Yes the original X-Com music I can still hum to myself.

Just make them prohibitively expensive and take a long time to build.

I think I posted this already, but they'd still be unbalanced even if they were expensive and if they did take a long time to build. You wouldn't need many of them after all. i think I said that if Xenonauts should get them, then the aliens should have something at least as powerful.

How long would you play if your Chinook kept getting blown out of the sky as it landed, and the survivors are picked off by seemingly arbitrary huge explosions before the end of the first turn?

While playing the aliens is beyond the scope of this game, it's always good to bat things back and forth. One thing your post shows, and I think is very important is that the aliens should always be that bit more advanced. Unless they are the last of their own race fleeing a cosmic nasty, they should have plenty of resources to improve when need be (unless specifically written in to the back story why not). So, while the humans need to spend time reverse engineering everything, the aliens can also adapt. In other words, there should always be clear daylight between the aliens and the Xenonauts.

Removing Blaster Bombs supports this, as it means that the humans can't kill large parts of the map. It also prevents the aliens ruining the gameplay by having something similar.

remember the shield the Skeletoids had in Apocalypse? Imagine them being able to withstand Blaster Bomb fire.

Removing Human Psionics also supports this point. It always gives the aliens a clear edge. Sure, humans may develop some resistance, but only in time to face more powerful aliens.

I think that the Xenonauts back story suggests that the alien craft aren't so hot in atmospheres, so there's a process of development going on there for them already. Converting larger craft, to form more deadly waves of attack.

this game is going head to head with the Firaxis X-Com game

i think the idea is that they are offering different game play experiences. I'm looking forward to both.. and more on Open Source X-Com too, which you may want to take a look at going by your comments above.

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Yeah, Xenonaut Kickstarter says that XCOM Enemy Unknown is more like progressive remake while Xenonauts is faithful remake, while Firaxis says that... XCOM Enemy Unknown is Reimagining while Xenonauts is remake, aka basically the same thing http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/05/05/firaxis-on-xcom-vs-xenonauts-optional-kill-cam/

So yeah, both of them claim they aren't competing with each other :P

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So, my constructive criticism is from the standpoint of someone who loves what you have done so far but if you just copy X-Com you will be soundly crushed by Firaxis.

The thing is this game isn't just a copy of X-Com (the original) though it often seems so to people not familiar with details.

It has expanded air combat, cover system, more weapon types , suppression system, friendly npc soldiers on some maps (not much but helps immersion), new aliens with different abilities...

It caters to old school gamers but also adds some new stuff of its own and is very different from the Firaxis remake so there's no reason it shouldn't stand well on its own imo. Maybe it doesn't have everything you want c'est la vie I suppose.

The music needs to be amped up. Firaxis is using the original sound artist from Microprose who worked on the original X-Com. Against this you is dead meat on the table...

It's comments like this that make people react poorly at you. It makes it sound like you're more interested in insults than genuine feedback. Almost everyone reported liking the music, it's tense, has that "crawls under your skin" tone and captures the atmosphere well overall. Aleksei may not have worked on the original but he's good at his job.

As for the comments on a 'play the aliens' project game being unbalanced, this is easily handled by starting the aliens out with a few ships, and they have to do their own research and build bigger ships...

There's nothing inherently wrong with the "play as aliens" idea except that's it's a whole new game. Maybe someone will make this one day (the "two sides" project?) the same way someone will maybe make a Call of Duty game where you play as a German but this simply is not that game. It can't be done with a few adjustments, it's a whole new project.

Now, what the strange Star Trek Next Generation bald-thingys are in THIS game that are supposed to be passing as greys, I have no idea.

Hey, I'm not a grey!

Seriously now. They are called Caesans and they're not passing as greys since they're not greys but merely inspired by them. They're different and have their own look. Here's the concept art:

caesan.jpg

Again, sorry you don't like it.

Edited by Jean-Luc
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I'd say two games are better than one, and much better than none at all.

There are far too many fps and mmo today.

Firaxis XCom and Xenonauts will be two different games, so someone will like both, someone will like only one, someone else will not like any of them.

I have not tried Firaxis XCom yet. On the other hand, I've played a bit with Xenonauts and I like what they did with a very small indie startup and limited funding.

As for the music, Xenonauts is way better than the original XCom. I'm not saying the original game was bad, just very repetitive. And in the end it got boring. I usually turned it off while playing the original game.

And rest assured that I played a lot with the original XCom. I still have the original box and floppy disks... I mean, it's so old that the game shop where I bought it does not exist any more...

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Just in case people skip it, I posted as final post on last page that both Firaxis and Goldhawk don't intend to compete with each other and both have same ideas about what XCOM Enemy Unknown is and what Xenonauts is.

Anyway, I post this from another thread:

"UFO: Extraterrestrials failed because it didn't have its own good parts, its good parts were copied from another game.

UFO: Alien Invasion is good example of that done right. Its another fan remake of original game, just like Xenonauts, but while it has core features from original game same, it has enough new features/changes to feel like its own game. It doesn't feel like its copy of XCOM, it feels like its part of same "subgenre" as XCOM. Thats what I meant. UFO Extraterrestrials doesn't feel like its own game, it feels like copy of xcom instead of just being part of the same genre. Xenonauts is doing it right by taking core features from original game, but changing some things for sake of balance or for better. "

Note: When I say UFO: Extraterrestrial failed, I mean that its just 7/10 game instead of being great game. I don't mean it did badly or isn't worth playing, just that its not great game.

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They don't look much less like "greys" than anyone else's ideas.

Google grey alien and just see how many variations there are.

The main difference I would say between the Xenonaut Ceasans and the traditional little grey alien is that they wear clothes.

Bit of make-up and some fancy clothes make all the difference when you are going out terrorising the town.

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UFO: Extraterrestrial failed, I mean that its just 7/10

:) I guess your expectation threshold is a heck of a lot higher than mine. Semantic Stalker. that's me. Sorry.

On the greys thingy, a lot of early abduction scenarios had their aliens in all in one jump suits.

i think the abductees thought about what annoyed them most in life. One of the things they came up with was that putting lots of clothes on was a pain. Surely, an advanced civilisation didn't have to bother with all that?

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I am trying to offer suggestions that will set this game apart from the other and hopefully, make it a cult hit. One way you do that is to do some search on the last 100 years of UFO contact (it likely goes back 1000's of years but we can just allude to that)

I won't go into details, a little eye candy to get you started and in the right frame of mind:

[video=dailymotion;x8s579]http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8s579_historic-ufo-over-mexico-city-augus_tech

Video was taken over Mexico City, Aug 6, 1997. A local tv reporter began investigating this case... as an aside, the largest ufo flap in history is just ending in Mexico. I ran from 1993 to early 2000's, involved perhaps millions of witnesses, hundreds of videos, and ufo's that apparently wanted to been, flying loops around military aircraft during airshows in front of hundres of witnesses with camcorders.

Investigation on this case revealed people on the ground below it observed it and experienced health affects, some serious and permanent. Different angles confirm it (so this not a digital mock up photoshop job.

This is an Atmospheric Exploration Vehicle, AEV for short, and it was in some sort of trouble engine wise as you can see from the wobbling. After it stabilized it quickly 'went elsewhere'. Now whether it entered warp drive (unlikely) shifted dimension, or went invisible, I don't know. The eyewitness who saw the end of it's run said that it simply vanished into a cloud of violet haze. Object was 40-60 feet in diameter, 12-16 feet thick at the thickest point.

This is the clearest video we have so far of what you call 'ufo's.

Leverage images like this in the game. The original owners of this photo have never come forward. They work in a secure government building and likely fear for their jobs.

If you want this game to stand out, THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE. Draw on the mythos and try to get it right! Talk about the Corona, New Mexico incident, not the Iceland incident!

If you want to learn what happened in Corona, read MAJESTIC by Strieber. In short, two AEV's, ran into problems in a bad lightning storm and may have collided, or been hit by lightning and collided. One broke up in the air and those pieces scattered all over the Roswell ranch. That crew ejected but all died on impact, perhaps too low for their ejection systems to handle. The Corona craft attempted an emergency crash landing. Some of the crew survived but only one was still conscious when a group of locals, out rock hunting from a local school, came across them. As they attempted to communicate with the terrified and injured alien crew, who was likely a grey, the military showed up, surrounded them with trucks and troops, and began ordering them out of the area and threatening them that their entire families would die if they talked about this (lovely US government you have there).

The debris was cleaned up and heavy cranes were brought in to recover the craft. The bodies were shipped to a local mortuary to make some sense of them, and special hermetically sealed coffins were acquired to store the bodies.

The one alien, quickly labelled 'ebe' for 'extrabiological entity' was taken to Right-Patterson for interrogation. The government back then was super jittery, they were in the beginning of a nuclear cold war and they were paranoid as hell (well, not much has changed) so they didn't exactly treat this guy like royalty, they treated him like a cold war spy who had infiltrated their airspace.

After some time they allowed him access to some of his gear they recovered from his ship, and he was able to help them build a subspace transmitter (very star trek - able to send signals faster than the speed of light over vast distances). He used this device to contact his homeworld, located in the Zeta Reticuli system, and tell them he was ok and had established contact with the humans.

The humans put together a team which I am sure you are all aware of, called MJ-12, to coordinate and analyze alien contact on earth. One member, Dr. Vannevar Bush, was against the government secrecy of this, and so he was eventually murdered.

The Los Alamos facility that had just developed the atomic bombs was also used heavily at that time as it was the most secure place on earth.

Through a series of communications it was decided that the aliens would come back to earth and land. They would get their crewmember back and they would take some air force personnel, specially trained and chosen, to go back with them for an exchange project. They would leave behind a dude too so we got somebody to study and talk to as well (and kind of like insurance... who knows what they were going to 'do' to those volunteers...)

So the events in Close Encounters of the Third Kind are pretty close to reality. This event did not take place at Devil's Tower it took place at White Sands Missile Range,New Mexico.

So again, there is a wealth of stuff out there to draw on.

If you want this game to stand out and become a cult classic, DRAW ON IT!!! Make it the ultimate x-files UFO cover-up reality game! Have secret files revealed you get to see after various research. Show the Majestic-12 papers. Show the best UFO videos and images. Include Men in Black.

Include a shadowy US Government program to work with the aliens and trade them unwilling citizens for horrific experiments in exchange for high tech. X-Com exposes this in the game, goes after them, attacks the research facility, killing humans and aliens together, and exposes it all, overthrowing some of the current world governments in the process, as part of the game.

There are also multiple species of aliens, some working together, some sworn enemies of each other. UFO battles occur regularly in our orbit and solar system. There is a large alien base on the moon, primarily a mining operation. We are being culled and our resources plundered at will right now by several hostile or uncaring alien races. Some are actively trying to help us, others really don't care.

Weave this all together into a story fabric that works for the game. This is how you achieve a cult following.

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