If you bought Elemental or pre-ordered Fallen Enchantress, you’ve been able to play the beta of Stardock’s fantasy strategy game for some time now. It’s been exciting stuff, with inventive twists that make it far more than just a fantasy skinned Civ. But since it’s been a beta, it necessarily involved that constant nagging sensation of “wait, is this the way it’s supposed to work?” or “will they change that?” or “well, I’m sure this will be different in the final version…”. Now that Stardock has announced an Official Release Date, that all changes on October 23.
Furthermore, we’ll finally get a look at what Stardock has in mind for Fallen Enchantress’ story-driven campaign mode. The Galactic Civilizations games similarly tried to spin out stories over successive scenarios, which always seemed odd to me in a richly detailed 4X game that will tell its own story anyway.
I can maybe learn to live with the missing hyphen in XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the latter day update of X-Com. Especially since developer Firaxis seems to have simultaneously nailed and updated what made X-Com great. I’ve also been playing a canny iPad clone of/homage to the original X-Com called Aliens vs Humans, which reminds me how slow and intentionally frustrating and meticulous and tense and even sadistically user-hostile X-Com was back in the day. Aliens vs Humans doesn’t shy away from any of this. But Firaxis clearly wants to present the X-Com fundamentals without alienating folks who weren’t dinking around with AUTOEXEC.BAT files and manuals and the punishing trial and error of choosing between progress and permadeath. The differences between X-Com and XCOM strike me as the difference between great movies in the 70s and great movies today. They did things back then that they just don’t do today. It’s the same with games, and that’s not a criticism so much as an observation.
But I do draw the line at the lack of a UFOpedia. What kind of X-Com merely has a “database”? “UFO Database”? Really, Firaxis? Fortunately, I’m playing on XCOM the PC, so surely a mod is on the way.
