mrmud

Thats a pretty interesting conclusion you have there that seems to be very much at odds with everything that I think as well as what I have heard from others. If anything I almost felt some kind of sensory overload in the start, I had to explore everything and I felt it was incredible. In stark contrast to that comes the hyper violence as soon as the fair sequence ends. This, not the slow start and world building, is what seems to put most non gamers off the game.

I beat it on 1999 but I don't know how it compares since It was my first run. I don't know if I would recomend it as there are some sections that became a bit frustrating for me to get past (section with the handyman before Daisy & Fink for example. I don't know how many times I had to watch that undertow vigor animation due to reloading). Other than that I think it is an incredible game, probably the best in several years. The story has so many layers to it that once you finish you will spend hours if not days just thinking about it all.

I agree the timing could have been better, but the response has still been pretty good. They're already 76% of the way to their funding goal, they'll reach it easily, and both TToN ans SotA end this week. Hopefully this means that they'll have good steady funding throughout the next couple of weeks and a great big surge for their final few days, assuming no other big time project launches around that time to take attention away from them. I still think they can double their funding goal. We can only speculate as to what they could have gotten had their timing been perfect. I'm guessing 1.25 million-ish. The big difference between this and the other high profile kickstarters is that they don't seem to be loosing steam as quickly. They are making like 1/3rd - 1/2 their first day pledges every day. Compared to torment and eternity who were down to less than 1/10 at this point.

I'm really suprised that there is so little activity on the backing when it is less than 30 hours left. By this time PE had spiked its pledges to a much, much greater degree than Torment is. Right now it actually looks like they wont break 4 million.

Michel pactor made a top of the head estimation on todays joystiq podcast where he estimated three mil each for sp and the next saints row

The walking dead with the runner up being journey. Xcom was a big dissapointment

I think The Witcher 2 is great, don't listen to the haters.

Finished the final episode of The Walking Dead. It has some issues with its mechanics but despite that it is probably my favourite game this year.

Ap did a couple of thigs really well but none of that matters much when the game mechanics and moment to moment design is so poor. I think ots fine to appreciate AP for what it tries to do while at the same time realising that the game is not very good

Another game that did this poorly is diablo 3 where 100 % of your power comes from your gear

No I am talking about the bug that makes enemies spawn randomly inside your sight radius and sometimes inside your squad. This is something that seemingly can happen on any mission. For me it has happened on UFO missions and enemies have ranged from Cyberdisks to Sectopods. This is not a scripted event that is preceded by the base saying that "enemies are closing in" like on the bomb and protect vip missions. This is a bug and a damn dangerous one.

Its a real bitch until you get squad sight, after that they level faster than anything else because they will be racking up kills at the safe distances.

Strange, I had to pull them out of the eval in order to re-equip. Anyway the equipping system is really dumb in that they don't automatically pool any resources that are not in your currently selected squad. As for myself I am stopping playing until they fix the alien spawn bug where enemies spawn on top of your troops. Today a Sectopod decided to spawn inside my squad, luckily I had sniper coverage from two double tap snipers to take it down quickly but I know that sooner or later this bug is going to get me killed (not to mention prevent me from wanting to start a game on classic).

500 If you ask me why, I might have a hard time justifying it...

Whats with cyberdisk and entourage teleporting into fights from no where? I had a tough fight (because I did not realise that putting people in psy eval does not unequip them and subsequently I was down 3 sets of armors/plasma rifles) with a muton berserker all up in my face when suddenly a a cyberdisk spawns right on top of my squad.

They still have to put in sufficient detail in the high resolution textures to prevent them from looking flat. That means additional man hours. Not to mention the fact that they are painting on top of the 3d mesh.

You have to keep in mind though that PE will be a 3-3.5 million dollar game. This is not alot. Especially considering that they are already forced to render at a significantly higher resolution than in the IE games, putting a greater strain on art resources.

Nexus seemed really cool, but I could never understand what it wanted me to do. I got crushed just a few missions into the campaign and never figured out how to proceed because the game never helped me understand its systems.

Yea, I agree with this. However it would work better if there was a difficulty between normal and classic. As it is right now on normal it is way to easy for me. I have lost one mid rank soldier including when I played through the alien base. That means that I don't really fear for my guys that much. The only time I had a bit of a scare was when my Assault Colonel (my first Col) was going to stun the sectoid commander in the base and ended up being shot twice in the back (double tap) by my mindcontrolled Colonel Sniper. Luckily she never critted and I survived with 2 hp. On Classic I feel that I loose my guys to early to actually form an attachment to them.

Lost my first guy on normal ironman today to a group of 3 mutons bum rushing me inside a UFO. As a comparison, when I pulled out of classic ironman I had lost 10 guys in 5 missions.

I took some screenshots of instances where I should have been in LOS but was not. But I dont know where XCOM stores the screenshots and trying to paste it from memory into GIMP didnt work.

It's a balance thing, but not at all an accessibility thing (since it's entirely arbitrary). Well, some stuff like the SCOPE and nano-fiber vest doesn't even have an analogue to the original game. I think it does partly have to do with accessability. The original was a very complex game with complex inventory management (in particular for a this style of game). Each character could have multiple weapons, grenades, flares, ammo clips. They had mag and grenade slots on various pouch slots as well as able to stash things in their backpack (all of which required different number of time units to use). This game has tried to remove all of this in order to make the game more accessible and this is why you have to choose between having 1 grenade or 1 scope. It makes no tactical sense, but it is "easy". What I meant by feeling like you were in charge of an actual organisation instead of playing a game has nothing to do with there being different types of items in the games. Done right, complexity breeds versimilitude and the original had lots of it. Anyway, I restarted again. This time on normal and the game feels much more "fair" this way. The problem? Now its to easy. Where last time I had ten dead squaddies, now I have zero. I wish there could be a happy medium inbetween those two difficulty levels.

It is one of many things in this game that screams "we made this mechanic for balance and accessability purposes". The result is something where it much more feels like you are playing a slightly bland game instead of like the original where you feel like you are in control of this alien fighting organization.

Sight distance is one major thing. Seemingly being able to shoot through terrain another. I had one of my squaddies being shot through what seemed to be a hill. It was probably a valid shot but the long range combined with the terrain between and how cover is unintuative made me very suprised when a unit I thought was safe ended up dying to it. The third is that I cant seem to figure out when I actually flank or even am able to shoot an alien before I move. Having some indicator that showed what terrain you can see and what terrain you would be able to see when you move somewhere would make wonders. I also don't understand why my units wont always reaction fire on enemies that should clearly be in line of sight when they are on overwatch. I think you can only go down in difficulty not up. At least I could not switch to Impossible from Classic.

Because supposedly on normal it gets really, really easy at the end. So easy that it becomes unfun to play. But then again, this is totally unfun so maybe you have a point...