Same here. I'm even about to finish my unfinished campaign in the fucking vanilla Enemy Within. Because I looked at some gameplay videos and remembered that in reality I only stopped playing it because I was busy with work! Official melee units... And dat snake ass!
xcom2 director gave long war praise. said vanilla hard iron man was a 20 hour long tutorial for long war.
Maybe they wanted to make it like Long War but they couldn't because marketing dept., investors etc. Who knows?
I think it also had partly to do with the cross platforming. because building for one platform is cheaper then multiple. also hardware differences. and modding. consoles can't exactly support modding. also one platform allows putting all staff on just the one platform you don't have to split staff. right?
xcom enemy within impossible iron man mode is the canon ending. and apparently bradford (central) is coming back.
Multiple platforms really sucks. Every one has special quirks that you have to take into account and you need things like not one set of LOD levels for each asset but you need like one set of LOD levels per asset per platform. And even then like you said, consoles have zero support for modding and they have incredibly limited memory so it's actually difficult to have a lot of things going on anyhow. Look at games like GTA, notice how it's actually difficult to have like 10 cars in? Or the Sims games that were on consoles, you could barely have like 4 rooms filled in and consoles were already struggling with memory. And about those quirks, yup. You need to have the game working flawlessly on every platform. It's one thing to go 100% on one platform and then later port to another, working on all platforms is just horrible. And then there are things like "oh, but the console players don't want a game that lasts 10+ hours, they need to win during the second day of playing!" "you have to give them some ultimate weapon with which they can beat the crap out of everyone" etc. Actually, I'm really hard myself on a lot of these big developers but to be honest many of them are way past my skills and expertise. They've just got that shit sandwich they need to take a bite of that is known as corporate overwatch. They get the marketing department that constantly tries to fuck up the game and then there's all the others like investors and finance that keep them working with one hand behind their backs etc. Couple of times I've seen some of the original designs and plans for some AAA games and they're often incredibly bold and innovative. Then they have to fight that design through a gauntlet of corporate managers and such, people in suits. While for them the problem is not about having lots of artists and plenty of time to put into the game, it's actually about protecting what is good about the game and their design against the managers and such. And at the end of day there's a lot of money at stake and a lot of cooks making a single soup, they can't go about turning a big ship too sharply after they've set sail. It's very different world to that of a two man indie group that can go after a year about changing the whole fricking genre of their game because it feels like the right thing to do. Two separate dimensions really, each with their own difficulties. It's damn hard for anyone to get a game right. For the record I'm really excited about XCOM2 and I really love the TB combat system they made for XCOM. Real innovation there.
another stereotype of the yellow ranger I forgot about (or never paid attention to) was how the zord (or whatever they are called) the sabertooth cat kept breaking down alluding to the stereotype that asians are bad drivers.
I think this is the first time I don't have something negative to say about a game I hear about for the first time.
sectoid and viper article sectoids have human dna integrated now thus larger as well as stronger physically and mentally. can mind control now and reanimate dead troops (xcom and their own forces). viper is spiritual successor to snakemen from the original ufo defense. and true form of the thin men from enemy unknown. can drag xcom troops out of cover and constrict troops. also has a plasma weapon. basically in the early stages they will be mini bosses almost.
I think the sectoids were. it may have been roughly even though. but in xcom 2 you run into both the sectoid and viper almost from the start (i think you might be fighting humans who serve the aliens as well but haven't actually seen anything saying that). and apparently the sectoids will be using psi powers almost from the start. so it sounds like it will be insane difficulty from the beginning. which makes sense since xcom is no longer a military organization
the sectoids were weak, but they could still be a useful support troop in the later game, the thin men in the late game were simply cannon fodder, once you invest in the right tech their most annoying feature, the venom spit, becomes literally nothing more than a bonus smoke grenade. The sectoids on the other hand can make the more powerful units even -more- powerful and harder to kill, as well as the random havoc created by psi panic.
I like how this setting resembles that of UFO Aftermath and it's sequels. They weren't that great as games, not bad either, just you could see through that they had like several times had to quit working on it, change name, change everything etc. What was cool was the idea that the first wave of aliens had pretty much decimated most of mankind. Of course in those games you were originally fighting against all sorts of abominations rising from the biomass the aliens were spreading and you'd have to fight the biomass from consuming the planet etc. But I like this idea "the aliens won". It's a nice change and it better explains having a singular base and only a handful of units. From the first XCOM games there's always that very minor conflict in the story about "we're being invaded by aliens, we're going to give you umm.. this basement, handful of unemployed doctors and a couple of military cast outs.. and your budget will be half of an elementary school's budget". Just saying that it feels more fitting in the resistance scenario, though in Apocalypse for instance the police did try to help you with their police cruisers and so. They just weren't up for it. And that's pretty much the unspoken premise behind XCOM games anyway - that the normal military units are so woefully underequipped that the aliens simply wipe the floor with them and at times even with the XCOM's elite experimental forces.
