suicide mission

[garyg]

I am always disappointed  by the ending of Xeno and I hope Xeno 2 does not have any suicide missions. You work hard to build your team only to have them all killed at the end mission. Even trying the alternate method by destroying the pods gives you  only a very small chance of any survival. This leaves me with a very unsatified feeling and little desire to finish the end mission. Hopefully other players feel the same way.

[Chris]

I'd be interested in hearing other people's opinions on this too, actually, because I'm in the middle of designing the first draft of the final mission for X2. I'm currently planning on using a variant of the "do you risk the main objective to give your soldiers a chance of escape?" choice that you had in X1 because I personally thought it worked quite well.

How many people finished the final mission, and what choices did they make and how many survivors did they have? I thought a decently-equipped team could probably grab both side-objectives on the way to the High Praetor and still win without too much difficulty, allowing most of your squad to survive.

I remember someone saying they stunned and captured the High Praetor (which I'd never even considered as a possibility) and another guy racking up over 1000 Reaper kills in the final mission so I assumed it was pretty manageable.

[Max_Caine]

I finished the last level quite handily. I took mostly Predators, with as many particle cannons as I could carry and heavy MAG for the rest. After an opening salvo of singularity-powered mass destruction, I carved through the defences like a knife through butter and kept the pace up. You didn't need to be subtle, you just needed to blast through everything as quickly as possible and you could do that quite easily with endgame content. Operation Endgame was for me less a test of skill and more a demonstration of technological brutality. I'd like X2's Op: Endgame to have some level of skill, something that requires a little forethought that I can't just DAKKADAKKADAKKA my way through. 

 

EDIT: It helped a lot that the map design was basically a tube. Area-effect weapons love long tubes which cram all the defenders into smaller spaces, especially particle weapons and fusion grenades. 

[Decius]

I don't think I ever completed the final mission with no losses.

What might be an interesting compromise is if there was a mission AFTER the world is saved that was either an exfiltration or extraction of the squad that won the day, or possibly a series of missions that determine how badly the death throes/disorganized remnants damage Earth in a margin-of-victory sequence. It would be a moderate departure from form to have substantial elements of the game occur after the boss fight, but there are already plenty of examples of escape sequences.

[TrashMan]

On ‎9‎/‎9‎/‎2019 at 4:48 AM, garyg said:

I am always disappointed  by the ending of Xeno and I hope Xeno 2 does not have any suicide missions. You work hard to build your team only to have them all killed at the end mission. Even trying the alternate method by destroying the pods gives you  only a very small chance of any survival. This leaves me with a very unsatified feeling and little desire to finish the end mission. Hopefully other players feel the same way.

Suicide mission?

I recall killing every alien and retreating without any casualties.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8EmBjDl_Pw

 

 

[Coffee Potato]

I liked the ending personally. Tried the stun thing on round 2, and sure enough, the Mega Praetor just kinda went poof. It would be hilarious to have a variant of the PS1 game win cinematic, except with them waving around Praetor arms or something as a joke ending. 

It might be a fun idea to add in a thing where if you survive a certain amount of rounds, and have the planes available, the ground crew could somehow say something like "with the Praetor gone, the ship has stopped moving", which could then be followed up in a few rounds with "We are firing the [yada yada science gun]", which could then result in a hold getting blown out, which could then be docked by the landing ship in order to escape. 

Dunno how possible that is, but sounds pretty cool in by head brain thing.

[Pave]

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Aye I personally had no losses either during the final mission in Xenonauts (1), sharing a similar story with Max_Caine for one.

Yes, by many respect the ending might have been "bland" and such.
But for me it was still more "realistic" than the ending of the "Xcom - Enemy Unknown / Within (2012)" which was far too over dramatic in my opinion.

And as a saying goes: "Destination is just an end of an journey."
And I certainly enjoyed most of the journey I had with Xenonauts back then, which certainly wants me to eventually replay the game with more mods and other enhancements
(( which I certainly cannot say the same about the "Xcom (2012) since the "base" is fundamentally not good at for me no mod cannot make that game any better for me )).

((( I mean, it's kinda like say "One Piece":
Luffy had a choice get a direct-map to Raftel (island) from Silvers Rayleigh. But this offer was denied with the exclamation "No fun in that!"
A decade ago this series could have ended pretty much right there. )))

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Edited September 12, 2019 by Pave

[garyg]

If I may insert my opinion here again, and this is just my opinion of course. I just finished another run through of Xeno and again when approching the end mission was not motivated to continue.  Yes, there are some of you guys that are so good at the game that you can end with no casualities.  I' m very happy for you. But there are others of us who can enjoy the game in spite of not being the 'best of the best'.  Ending with one survivor is not really winning except for the overall story line and I am more interested in my  team, who I trained with great difficulty. Killing the boss is too easy and the other option is too hard. (for me, that is. I don't expect you experts to understand)  I would be happier with a role of honor for the heroes instead of a line of corpses. There is no glory in body bags.

Edited September 12, 2019 by garyg

[Decius]

What use is it for a man to save the whole world, if he dies doing so?

[Max_Caine]

"I offer neither pay, nor quarters, nor food; I offer only hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles, and death. Let him who loves his country with his heart, and not merely his lips, follow me." - Giuseppe Garibaldi

 

"I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country." - Nathan Hale
 

"Out of every one hundred men, ten shouldn't even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior, and he will bring the others back." - Heraclitus

 

"Live for something rather than die for nothing." - George S. Patton Jr.

 

 

[TrashMan]

On ‎9‎/‎13‎/‎2019 at 1:09 AM, garyg said:

Ending with one survivor is not really winning

 

Saving the earth is not winning? What is?

It is the final mission, it's supposed to be hard. What exactly do you want? Having the cake and eating it too?

[Coffee Potato]

7 hours ago, TrashMan said:

 

Saving the earth is not winning? What is?

It is the final mission, it's supposed to be hard. What exactly do you want? Having the cake and eating it too?

I would totally be down for them pulling an Ogre Battle, and having the aliens offer a truce to the winning party with cakes for everyone. 

[Chris]

On 9/13/2019 at 12:09 AM, garyg said:

If I may insert my opinion here again, and this is just my opinion of course. I just finished another run through of Xeno and again when approching the end mission was not motivated to continue.  Yes, there are some of you guys that are so good at the game that you can end with no casualities.  I' m very happy for you. But there are others of us who can enjoy the game in spite of not being the 'best of the best'.  Ending with one survivor is not really winning except for the overall story line and I am more interested in my  team, who I trained with great difficulty. Killing the boss is too easy and the other option is too hard. (for me, that is. I don't expect you experts to understand)  I would be happier with a role of honor for the heroes instead of a line of corpses. There is no glory in body bags.

From my point of view the problem is that we need to make the final mission a bit of a challenge otherwise it's a bad ending to the game. Nobody likes to play a game and then just steamroll the final mission without facing any sort of resistance from the final boss. I don't think changing the setup of the final mission would change that too much though; we'd just remove the "bad" ending and then you wouldn't be able to finish it at all.

I guess the real discussion should therefore be about difficulty settings. What difficulty setting are you playing on, garyg? The problem might actually be that the final mission isn't very much easier on Normal or Easy difficulty compared to Veteran or Insane difficulty. The final mission was balanced on Veteran difficulty so I wouldn't be surprised if it was a bit too difficult on Normal.

[garyg]

5 hours ago, Chris said:

From my point of view the problem is that we need to make the final mission a bit of a challenge otherwise it's a bad ending to the game. Nobody likes to play a game and then just steamroll the final mission without facing any sort of resistance from the final boss. I don't think changing the setup of the final mission would change that too much though; we'd just remove the "bad" ending and then you wouldn't be able to finish it at all.

I guess the real discussion should therefore be about difficulty settings. What difficulty setting are you playing on, garyg? The problem might actually be that the final mission isn't very much easier on Normal or Easy difficulty compared to Veteran or Insane difficulty. The final mission was balanced on Veteran difficulty so I wouldn't be surprised if it was a bit too difficult on Normal.

I have been playing on 'normal' difficulty, assuming that was the difficulty the game was set up for, a balanced playthrough.  The word normal led me to believe that I was playing on the diffficulty the designers intended for a balanced game.  Thank you Chris, good luck on the decisions you have to make.

[Chris]

55 minutes ago, garyg said:

I have been playing on 'normal' difficulty, assuming that was the difficulty the game was set up for, a balanced playthrough.  The word normal led me to believe that I was playing on the diffficulty the designers intended for a balanced game.  Thank you Chris, good luck on the decisions you have to make.

Yeah, that's probably it then. All the difficulty settings are intended to be a balanced experience for people of the corresponding level of experience, but as the dev team and most of the people who comment on our forums / play the game during development have spent a lot of time playing the game most of the feedback we get is about the harder difficulty settings.

I think all the aliens in the final mission have less HP on Normal than they do in Veteran, but that might be it - maybe it would have been a good idea to increase the number of turns before the Reapers start appearing on the easier settings too. I'll note that down for something to consider for the X2 final mission anyway.

[chiroho]

From my recollection, and it's been a while, I was able to finish the final mission without any casualties - though the first time through was definitely not easy. And even with all the reapers spawning, so long as you're out of their sight range they won't attack anyway. So just make sure everyone is up near the final room and the reapers cannot see you and hence don't attack. I think the only problem I had was that when fighting the High Praetor I had a shot miss and hit the door behind it, resulting in the door to the exit not being able to be opened when I finally killed the High Praetor and hence dooming everyone on the mission. So if you can ensure that there isn't something finicky like that in order to actually make it out of the mission this time around that would be great.