Milestone 2 Impressions/review

[Hayung]

Finished up the 200 days of Milestone 2 on Soldier difficulty. 

The difficulty level was too easy for me, and that might affect some of my impressions but I've tried to consider that in my feedback. 

Overall

The game feels too much like a game right now. The tempo, pace and challenge are all too proportional to the players progress. Combined with the world and player assets feeling somewhat uneventful or missing something charactful. Being largely a backdrop for the game mechanics. Its a minor thing and possibly aesthetic, but the bright and clean aesthetics of both your troops and the battlescapes also add to that lack of character feeling (I do like the artwork though).

It may be player preference, but little details and mechanics which exist not solely for the gameplay or balance can add a lot to the atmosphere and immersiveness. Things like OG Xcom's black market finance system, or new xcom's battlefields feeling like you're dropping into an existing fight with carnage all about.

Further to that, xenonauts 2 rarely hits that feeling of fighting against an unknown threat of superior technology. Even higher difficulties look to ramp up the challenge with ever larger hoards of aliens. It often feels like you're going toe to toe with the aliens, and with a modest amount of research and retroengineering are quickly deploying equally effective, if not more effective weaponry and tactics. Which is incongruent with the lore which tries to paint xenonauts as an underground force, operating on the skin of its boots. 

On to more specific points.

Strategy Layer
I think the pacing and interaction on the strategy layer is too sparse. 
UFO wave system leads to periods of intense activity followed by long periods of lulls. I think the lulls could be good to give the player breathing room but because finances are tied to UFO missions and monthly funding and there isn't a lot of player actions to take and these periods become fairly dull. The loop goes a little like this;

- Player gets mission, gets resources and sells to fund engineering or basebuilding. Wait.

- Monthly funding comes, engineering or basebuilding options are chosen. Wait. 

I also think the alien actions feel very gamey at the moment. it very much feels like the UFOs appear, and fly around waiting to be shot down. There doesn't appear to be any real agenda to what they are doing, other than gradually spawning larger and larger UFOs for the player to interact with. Not only that, but there is almost never a UFO spawn before the player can realistically engage with it. For me this detracts from the idea of an unknown threat, or superior technology and agenda. The lack of landed UFOs also misses a unique opportunistic risk/reward aspect of other titles. 

Basebuilding, radar coverage and funding/panic models leads to a very one dimensional approach to gameplay. The very limited resources means every base build must absolutely maximise radar coverage and there is no compensation for choosing objectively worse or interesting locations. Leading to 2-3 bases along the equator or thereabouts every game. 

This might be a soldier difficulty, but I also never really felt the need to consider where my base was going other than getting coverage of funding zones. There wasn't any particular area where the aliens seemed to focus that might force me to react with a base - the lack of conflict hotspots make the battle feel global but also removes player interaction with the game state. It feels like as long as you don't make dumb base location choices, you'll largely pick up most UFOs and if you have good enough aircraft you will shoot them down. 

Finally, Aliens don't seem to react to your actions in a noticeable fashion - like moving operations or actively reacting to xeno actions. I got 1 base attack for each base in my playthrough, no more and it seemed to occur as a random chance when a wave was spawned. 

Air Combat

Aircombat feels OK. I don't crave a super complex air combat system for the game. It does seem a little too easy for human aircraft to shoot down UFOs with conventional weapons and UFO weapons feel very underwhelming. UFOs actions are simplistic and unresponsive to xenonaut aircraft - they don't speed up or try to reach unassailable altitudes. Different UFO behaviors could add a lot of spice to the air game. 

I do think that the choices for equipping fighters could be refined to provide more tactical decisions - such as torpedos/missiles leaving less loot from tactical missions or even outright destroying the UFO. Cannons could provide reliable crash sites but carry much higher risk to the fighter from UFO weaponry. 

There airgame balance to date has felt a bit binary - either too punishing with aircraft repair times and costs or too easy with even destroyed craft and pilots just being rebuild in a matter of days. 

I appreciate this is a bit of a WIP area and might expect more polish. 

Tactical Combat

The core tactical combat feels very good. But the gameplay loop gets very repetitive. I didn't find the need to change loadouts much, or adjust strategies for different aliens. Civilians just feel like extra meatshields to reveal alien positions. 
Missions felt identical, a crash site, alien base or terror site all felt exactly the same - deploy from dropship, find and destroy X number of aliens. This is both an atmospheric as well as gameplay observation. 
A suggestion would be to have a crash site/terror mission feel like a warzone with damage and active combatants on both sides that the xenonauts are dropping in to clean up. A landing would be more like the pristine mission we have right now and alien bases should be dark, alien and terrifying. 

Aliens and alien weapons on the whole feel too weak. The use of magnetic weapons for early aliens working alongside cleaners is great, but the full escalation to a range of more devastating weapons should be apparent, possibly alongside the appearance of a more warlike class. It wasn't long into my playthrough that I felt totally comfortable with 2-3 xenonauts operating together could happily handle 1-2 aliens, and while increasing the number of aliens will alter that, it feeds into my overarching feeling of fighting an equal or inferior enemy. 

Aliens combat, other than a planned AI change, could use another pass on numbers v power. I think individual aliens should be less in number but more difficult to tackle. Human tactics like flashbang and smoke should initially have only mild success vs aliens, which could be improved with autopsies and interrogations. There is also an opportunity here to have aliens with differing levels of susceptibility to flashbangs, smoke, armour pen, thermal damage etc. This could be a mix of species or technology. I feel like the fidelity of the 3D tactical map and ability to zoom is underutilised by having most UI relevant elements text only. The appearance of the models is almost secondary - some minor variation between classes exist but its largely superficial. 

Alien classes should also be unknown until interrogations are complete - even the simple addition of naming the units during tactical battle I feel removes a lot of the mystery of the early game. 

Night missions are a real missed opportunity. I think there is a chance to make some very atmospheric missions at night. Or even strategic opportunities - maybe sebillians are terrible at range at night and have less TU. But during the day are terrifying opponents due to increased TU and resilience. 

Smoke grenades and flashbangs are far too reliable a disabling mechanism and combined with shields currently feel like a crutch. Doesn't matter what alien you encounter, the approach is flashbang and shoot, if you can't kill, smoke and close distance, kill or stun if possible. I find this adds a lot to the repetitiveness of the battles, with only cyberdrones and servitors requiring a slightly different strategy - although ironically for cyberdrones it's the same strategy, but with extra steps. 

I can't shake the feeling the game wanted that RNG - shit goes bad feeling of OG xcom but then at the same time introduced very reliable mechanics in throwing. Which to add a minor pet peeve, I find shooting accurately much easier than throwing something to the right spot further than a couple metres away so the accuracy and reliability that xenonauts throw items right out the gate is a little jarring. 

This also removes much of the desire for explosives. Given grenades often wouldn't kill things, it was preferable to use smoke and flashbangs which were very reliable protection from retaliation. 

Positives

This is all to say that I've found the game really enjoyable and compelling. The story framework is there and the art and graphics so far are fantastic (I just want more!). 

I love the armour and weapon design and just hope either later on or via mods we can customise it just a bit. 

The core gameplay loop is good, only compromised by how often you go through said loop. 

The cleaners are a great addition with some cool missions and a great way to slowly transition to alien invasion. More hinted interaction between the two would be nifty.

Edited December 19, 2023 by Hayung
Updated wording

[Vitruviansquid]

22 minutes ago, Hayung said:

Missions felt identical, a crash site, alien base or terror site all felt exactly the same - deploy from dropship, find and destroy X number of aliens. This is both an atmospheric as well as gameplay observation. 

This might seem unintuitive after the big milestone patch added a bunch of Cleaner missions with alternate goals and conditions, but I feel it's correct. After you wipe out the Cleaners, you stop having all the neat alternate missions beside abductions popping up once in awhile.

Alien missions could do with a pass with a mind toward "Cleanerization" - giving them more different missions with different character. Perhaps developers could sit down and consider "what are some different reactions alien crew might have if the ship they're in gets shot down?" Maybe sometimes the aliens spread out on the map as they currently do and you have the standard mission, but sometimes, aliens try to self-destruct their downed ship and the players have to get to the ship and disable its self-destruct to extract its loot. Maybe sometimes, the aliens call for backup during your mission.

 

29 minutes ago, Hayung said:

Alien classes should also be unknown until interrogations are complete - even the simple addition of naming the units during tactical battle I feel removes a lot of the mystery of the early game. 

I think more could be done with alien classes as a whole. Right now, an alien scientist is just a weak alien soldier. An alien engineer is just a weak alien soldier. And so on. I think there should be strategic consequences for interrogating aliens who have different roles. Techs can definitely be locked behind interrogation of the relevant alien expert on the subject.

[Chris]

9 hours ago, Hayung said:

Finished up the 200 days of Milestone 2 on Soldier difficulty. 

The difficulty level was too easy for me, and that might affect some of my impressions but I've tried to consider that in my feedback. 

Overall

The game feels too much like a game right now. The tempo, pace and challenge are all too proportional to the players progress. Combined with the world and player assets feeling very sterile and largely a backdrop for the game mechanics. Its a minor thing and possibly aesthetic, but the bright and clean aesthetics of both your troops and the battlescapes also add to that sterile feeling. 

It may be player preference, but little details and mechanics which exist not solely for the gameplay or balance can add a lot to the atmosphere and immersiveness. Things like OG Xcom's black market finance system, or new xcom's battlefields feeling like you're dropping into an existing fight with carnage all about.

Further to that, xenonauts 2 rarely hits that feeling of fighting against an unknown threat of superior technology. Even higher difficulties look to ramp up the challenge with ever larger hoards of aliens. It often feels like you're going toe to toe with the aliens, and with a modest amount of research and retroengineering are quickly deploying equally effective, if not more effective weaponry and tactics. Which is incongruent with the lore which tries to paint xenonauts as an underground force, operating on the skin of its boots. 

On to more specific points.

Strategy Layer
I think the pacing and interaction on the strategy layer is too sparse. 
UFO wave system leads to periods of intense activity followed by long periods of lulls. I think the lulls could be good to give the player breathing room but because finances are tied to UFO missions and monthly funding and there isn't a lot of player actions to take and these periods become fairly dull. The loop goes a little like this;

- Player gets mission, gets resources and sells to fund engineering or basebuilding. Wait.

- Monthly funding comes, engineering or basebuilding options are chosen. Wait. 

I also think the alien actions feel very gamey at the moment. it very much feels like the UFOs appear, and fly around waiting to be shot down. There doesn't appear to be any real agenda to what they are doing, other than gradually spawning larger and larger UFOs for the player to interact with. Not only that, but there is almost never a UFO spawn before the player can realistically engage with it. For me this detracts from the idea of an unknown threat, or superior technology and agenda. The lack of landed UFOs also misses a unique opportunistic risk/reward aspect of other titles. 

Basebuilding, radar coverage and funding/panic models leads to a very one dimensional approach to gameplay. The very limited resources means every base build must absolutely maximise radar coverage and there is no compensation for choosing objectively worse or interesting locations. Leading to 2-3 bases along the equator or thereabouts every game. 

This might be a soldier difficulty, but I also never really felt the need to consider where my base was going other than getting coverage of funding zones. There wasn't any particular area where the aliens seemed to focus that might force me to react with a base - the lack of conflict hotspots make the battle feel global but also removes player interaction with the game state. It feels like as long as you don't make dumb base location choices, you'll largely pick up most UFOs and if you have good enough aircraft you will shoot them down. 

Finally, Aliens don't seem to react to your actions in a noticeable fashion - like moving operations or actively reacting to xeno actions. I got 1 base attack for each base in my playthrough, no more and it seemed to occur as a random chance when a wave was spawned. 

Air Combat

Aircombat feels OK. I don't crave a super complex air combat system for the game. It does seem a little too easy for human aircraft to shoot down UFOs with conventional weapons and UFO weapons feel very underwhelming. UFOs actions are simplistic and unresponsive to xenonaut aircraft - they don't speed up or try to reach unassailable altitudes. Different UFO behaviors could add a lot of spice to the air game. 

I do think that the choices for equipping fighters could be refined to provide more tactical decisions - such as torpedos/missiles leaving less loot from tactical missions or even outright destroying the UFO. Cannons could provide reliable crash sites but carry much higher risk to the fighter from UFO weaponry. 

There airgame balance to date has felt a bit binary - either too punishing with aircraft repair times and costs or too easy with even destroyed craft and pilots just being rebuild in a matter of days. 

I appreciate this is a bit of a WIP area and might expect more polish. 

Tactical Combat

The core tactical combat feels very good. But the gameplay loop gets very repetitive. I didn't find the need to change loadouts much, or adjust strategies for different aliens. Civilians just feel like extra meatshields to reveal alien positions. 
Missions felt identical, a crash site, alien base or terror site all felt exactly the same - deploy from dropship, find and destroy X number of aliens. This is both an atmospheric as well as gameplay observation. 
A suggestion would be to have a crash site/terror mission feel like a warzone with damage and active combatants on both sides that the xenonauts are dropping in to clean up. A landing would be more like the pristine mission we have right now and alien bases should be dark, alien and terrifying. 

Aliens and alien weapons on the whole feel too weak. The use of magnetic weapons for early aliens working alongside cleaners is great, but the full escalation to a range of more devastating weapons should be apparent, possibly alongside the appearance of a more warlike class. It wasn't long into my playthrough that I felt totally comfortable with 2-3 xenonauts operating together could happily handle 1-2 aliens, and while increasing the number of aliens will alter that, it feeds into my overarching feeling of fighting an equal or inferior enemy. 

Aliens combat, other than a planned AI change, could use another pass on numbers v power. I think individual aliens should be less in number but more difficult to tackle. Human tactics like flashbang and smoke should initially have only mild success vs aliens, which could be improved with autopsies and interrogations. There is also an opportunity here to have aliens with differing levels of susceptibility to flashbangs, smoke, armour pen, thermal damage etc. This could be a mix of species or technology. I feel like the fidelity of the 3D tactical map and ability to zoom is underutilised by having most UI relevant elements text only. The appearance of the models is almost secondary - some minor variation between classes exist but its largely superficial. 

Alien classes should also be unknown until interrogations are complete - even the simple addition of naming the units during tactical battle I feel removes a lot of the mystery of the early game. 

Night missions are a real missed opportunity. I think there is a chance to make some very atmospheric missions at night. Or even strategic opportunities - maybe sebillians are terrible at range at night and have less TU. But during the day are terrifying opponents due to increased TU and resilience. 

Smoke grenades and flashbangs are far too reliable a disabling mechanism and combined with shields currently feel like a crutch. Doesn't matter what alien you encounter, the approach is flashbang and shoot, if you can't kill, smoke and close distance, kill or stun if possible. I find this adds a lot to the repetitiveness of the battles, with only cyberdrones and servitors requiring a slightly different strategy - although ironically for cyberdrones it's the same strategy, but with extra steps. 

I can't shake the feeling the game wanted that RNG - shit goes bad feeling of OG xcom but then at the same time introduced very reliable mechanics in throwing. Which as a minor pet peeve, I find shooting accurately much easier than throwing something to the right spot further than a couple metres away so the accuracy and reliability that xenonauts throw items right out the gate is a little jarring. 

This also removes much of the desire for explosives. Given grenades often wouldn't kill things, it was preferable to use smoke and flashbangs which were very reliable protection from retaliation. 

Positives

This is all to say that I've found the game really enjoyable and compelling. The story framework is there and the art and graphics so far are fantastic (I just want more!). 

I love the armour and weapon design and just hope either later on or via mods we can customise it just a bit. 

The core gameplay loop is good, only compromised by how often you go through said loop. 

The cleaners are a great addition with some cool missions and a great way to slowly transition to alien invasion. More hinted interaction between the two would be nifty.

Thanks for all the feedback, I appreciate you taking the time to write it all out. We're on our Christmas holidays now but we'll be back at work at the start of January and I'll look through this again then.

Glad you enjoyed the game overall

[Pietje666]

@Vitruviansquid you meant like UFO:EU? Every role had their own technology category. 

[Dren608]

On 12/19/2023 at 10:51 AM, Chris said:

Thanks for all the feedback, I appreciate you taking the time to write it all out. We're on our Christmas holidays now but we'll be back at work at the start of January and I'll look through this again then.

Glad you enjoyed the game overall

To add to the above, one thing I find sort of underwhelming is my operations officer, and lack of a chief of engineering. The later one might be too late to implement, but a chief engineer giving you some "color" or description of what he is doing might be a bit more immersive. 

The one I'd like to throw out there is the operations officer, she is there already but really doesn't do much. If during those "stretches" of time passing on the global stage, she could have "missions", more like strategic decisions - example might be, An influencial official in a region would help reduce panic if given a certain amount of alien tech/corpses. Stuff like that. Maybe she sends a delegation to negotiate such a deal that later generates an Extract mission (because they failed, etc.). The idea is to give the player a more "lived in" scenario, where stuff is going on all around the world besides the "main event".

I don't know the code or structure so maybe this is prohibitive, but would (especially if randomly generated every game) the player more choices and fell more involved in the entire planetary crisis.

Just my 2 cents worth. So far it is still fun to play, just feels like there is so much more that can be done with it.