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mrmud

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Posts posted by mrmud

  1. I had the interesting experience of guiding a complete nongamer, i.e. as far away from games as you can get, through an hour of BI on xbox. Well, she had trouble moving and looking around at the same time so we only got as far as the Fair in Columbia, but I thought:

     

    (1) If you're going to have a really long intro before anything happens, then your opening plot better be really interesting. There is no opening plot up to that point.

    (2) Columbia looks pretty, though textures are washed out in a way that even the nongamer could tell.

    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.

  2. Anyone tried the 1999 mode yet? How does it compare to Hard?

    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.

  3.  

    Yeah, they could hardly be better on the saying the right thing and showing the right things front. OTOH their timing is atrocious which is almost certainly the reason for the rather more tepid response than they deserve.

    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.

  4. @ Hurlshot -

    In some missions, particularly escort ones, aliens will seem to come from no where sometimes, jumping out of thin air.

    if you have some crew on overwatch they usually get blasted.

    And the game gives you a turn to react before the newly-appeared aliens get one.

    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.

  5. One question though, how do people level up their snipers? They should be extremely deadly, but mine just don't feel that way. I guess it could be because I suck at getting elevation (because always when I try to get a sweet spot, there are always aliens there waiting to kill me, so I'm cautious these days)

    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.

  6. Yeah you should be able to, from the Barracks menu.

    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).

  7. I lost my top sniper to a cyberdisc today :(

     

    This game can be pretty tricky even on normal, especially with the tougher enemies.

    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.

  8. A great thing about what I'm suggesting is that it wouldn't take up much extra time at all. It'd mean some additional rendering time, but the great thing about rendering is that it can be done over night, and without anyone attending to it. They's simply need to tell their machine to render it at a sufficiently high resolution, then leave it for the time it takes it to do so.

    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.

  9. Something this game *really* succeeds in (which they talked a lot about in marketing) is really you bonding with those special soldiers that survive for long. My kick-ass Sniper (nicknamed Garotte) has saved many a mission at this point. Latest being a terror mission where she grappled up onto a roof and then just dominated the battlefield from up there. One of the best "oh ****" moments was when a Chrysalid climbed up there and stood on elevated ground (on one of those air vent duct things) right above her. It was a pretty terrifying image but luckily the Chrysalid had been hurt before so my kick-ass Sniper just pulled out her pistol and shot that fool down.

     

    I think I may be falling in love with Garotte.

     

    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.

  10. 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.

  11. Then you can up it to Classic I suppose (difficulty isn't static).

     

     

    EDIT: What other LOS issues are you having? I do find that there are issues with knowing how far a guy can see in the distance (this exists in most games of this nature I find).

     

    Fire off some pics maybe and describe where you're having issues? Most of my LOS issues came from not entirely understanding cover, but I seem to have figured that out now.

    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. :(

  12. we made this mechanic for balance and accessability purposes

     

    It's a balance thing, but not at all an accessibility thing (since it's entirely arbitrary).

     

    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.

     

    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.

  13. One thing that bothers me - Why do I have to choose between a nano-fiber vest and a grenade/medkit/stunner? How does that make inventory sense? Oh, and the same thing with the scope. It goes on the weapon for goodness sake!

    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.

  14. 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.

  15. Why don't you ratchet the difficulty down a notch? I've been playing in normal and I'm not having any of those frustrations. Overwatch has also worked pretty well for me.

    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...

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