XCOM: Enemy Unknown

[Foxstab]

You're going into a different discussion here, but I like to indulge.

Producing content was slow and hard

Producing content NOW is slow and hard - which sprung an entire industry around simplifying it.
Back then, not so much. No modularity. No reuseable assets. Games weren't as lengthy, either. All was done by a high margin with hardcoding.

A lot of indie development is comparatively very fast nowadays, since they don't go for the complicated way of doing things and scale of triple-A and they get to enjoy the tools and framework environment that were established due to the triple-A's needs which expedites things.

and games where still very influenced by the arcade saloon games, where hard death penalty as part of the business model. Finnally, nobody knows better.

That is true. A lot of the need to embroid difficulty and the need to render player death stemmed from the need to make them pop coins.

On the other hand, if it wasn't then there'd be no threat and then there'd be no challenge.
Unless you're making a puzzle game, I guess?

Besides, a lot of players learned to play the game well and so ever needed very few coins.
It was infact a sort of emergent Challenger Event with many to see how far you can get on just one life.

Now we have games where the player can create a big investment, perhaps months of playing the same character.

You have (had) death penalties, corpse runs, respawn, respawn-timers, and otherwise.

Death is still there, it just hasn't got any sting or real purpose and feels vacant and unneeded. And instead of limited lives you have an infinite amount.

Old gamers where stuck in something like playing level 1 paladin again and again. We can have more meaningful experiences and long terms implications. The old tired game over screen can rest in peace.

Actually old gamers that played RPG games (ala telnet MUDs and the first CRPGs/GMUDs) or the first graphical command-prompt adventures (I always fondly remember that one scene from the movie BIG for actually showing video games as an OK past time for "adults" or anyone, even if sublime and possibly unintentional) had a developing characters.

To to mention non-video games -- board games -- that people played from before.

The reason you had a non-changing character, or limited linear development one (R-Type, Prince of Persia), is because it was simply what fit the game's needs.
There's no reason to have a mage character that can level to 20 with world-twisting magic in a RAMBO/GIJOE game.

That it is very mainstream nowadays is simply a result of more focus in gaming towards throwing boons to the player to keep them going or the shift in focus towards more sandbox style gaming which necessitates development of character to keep certain player interest on-going.

[krise madsen]

I honestly don't understand why X-COM still has this reputation of being a hard game. OK, so maybe the difficulty scale went from 3-8 rather than 1-5, but on easy level it really wasn't all that difficult. I'm really horrible at games, and that includes X-COM: I couldn't figure out to fight at night so I avoided it altogether, I never learned how to use smoke grenades, I was poor at researching in the proper order and was always short on state-of-the-art gear, and I generally didn't figure to equip my troops according to their skills. Yet I beat the game several times (on easy level). The only truly "difficult" thing about X-COM was that you had to learn that taking a hit once in a while was all part of the game.

[Foxstab]

I honestly don't understand why X-COM still has this reputation of being a hard game.

It's not a hard game so much that the tactical aspects...well, soldiers die that easily and the chance of killing an alien isn't that simple until you get the super soldiers.

Basically, the hardship lies within that your pieces are easily removed off the board while the enemies' are very hard to.
In addition, you're required to get acquainted with the complicated system that game works by in order to exploit it in your favour.
As well as use tactical thinking, which for today's console generation might as well be like taking a politician and asking him to pass a course in applied mathematics.

All of the aforementioned combined creates a rather difficult scenario.

Especially when you add morale (the players') onto it, losing a mission after another after years of being conditioned to easy games where he could possibly only win (or at least not die a lot and that if he keep brute-force bashing against hurdles he always progress), would dissuade most players from trying such a game.

[Jinsai]

X-COM is hard because:
- it requires patience. Acting hastily in nearly any part of a mission often has catastrophic consequences...including the very ends of maps when you're down to 1 last alien.
- it requires understanding lots of mechanics (line of fire, ammo types, lighting, etc.) and you must constantly weigh those things
- Chance plays a role, so every fight has risk
- the difficulty stays pretty consistent, there's hardly ever a point where you don't have to act carefully and thoughtfully

On top of all that, the game is really unforgiving if you don't keep all that in mind - you can all but lose the game in the first hour if you do things wrong.

Personally, I love it, but if *I* were designing a game with commercial aspirations in 2012, I'd definitely ease players into things a bit more.

[Nesrie]

X-COM is hard because:
- it requires patience. Acting hastily in nearly any part of a mission often has catastrophic consequences...including the very ends of maps when you're down to 1 last alien.
- it requires understanding lots of mechanics (line of fire, ammo types, lighting, etc.) and you must constantly weigh those things
- Chance plays a role, so every fight has risk
- the difficulty stays pretty consistent, there's hardly ever a point where you don't have to act carefully and thoughtfully

On top of all that, the game is really unforgiving if you don't keep all that in mind - you can all but lose the game in the first hour if you do things wrong.

Personally, I love it, but if *I* were designing a game with commercial aspirations in 2012, I'd definitely ease players into things a bit more.

I always thought one of the reasons X-Com was hard is because early decisions can screw you later in the game, and you won't exactly know that until later in the game... like the base designs as someone mentioned earlier.

There shoudl be a way to keep a game challenging without stepping over the line to making it just punishing. I have fond memories of the game like a lot of people, but there is also a long list of things I would want to change.

[Sarkus]

Personally, I love it, but if *I* were designing a game with commercial aspirations in 2012, I'd definitely ease players into things a bit more.

I hope they don't go too far in this direction, or at least if they do they make sure the difficulty levels scale up pretty quickly. There had better be a setting where I can lose my entire squad pretty fast.

[Robert Sharp]

I agree with you, Sarkus, but that sure doesn't seem to fit today's gaming culture. I bet it gets changed, at least to some degree.

[krayzkrok]

I don't have a problem with it having a smoother difficulty curve for new players, just as long as there's also an "X-Com" difficulty level which throws you in at the deep end.

[Disconnected]

I don't have a problem with it having a smoother difficulty curve for new players, just as long as there's also an "X-Com" difficulty level which throws you in at the deep end.

I hope they don't do it like UFO: Aftermath. In that game you kind of were expected to lose maybe 10-15 guys over the course of the campaign. Guys you meticulously leveled and trained, and who weren't readily replaceable.

Which meant it sucked when you played the first story mission - typically 10+ missions into the campaign - and suddenly discovered that your guys weren't immortal. And it sucked when a Firetick alien popped out from behind some obstacle 10ft away from your team that the game had, up until that point, taught you to keep tightly clustered, and burned every last guy to a crisp within half a second.

It wasn't anything you couldn't recover from. But it sucked. Because every time something like that happened, it felt like someone had suddenly changed the rules of the game without telling you. It was never "Aaaahhh Nooooo!", it was always "WTF, this is just silly".

Unfortunately I can't readily imagine how to have TPK be something that actually happens, without also having troops that are just as expendable as in the old X-Coms. Or without having it feel stupid like in Aftermath.

...

X-Com difficulty... I'll be the first to congratulate EU on doing a great job of making the player feel like he's losing when he's actually winning. But seriously, EU wasn't a difficult game. It was just great at pretending to be.

Even if you completely screw up your research on veteran difficulty, it's still a cakewalk. Unless you conveniently forget to defend your base(s), or something similarly suicidal (I'm not even sure aliens do base invasions on veteran, now I think about it).

If you, dear reader, is one of the "oh iz soo tuff" crowd, I dare you to install EU, patch it up and have a go at veteran. I suspect everyone can beat it without resorting to save games, on their first try. Just mind that a campaign may take as much as 24 hours ('ish) if you really-really screw up your research.

TFTD I'll grant is pretty difficult on not-beginner settings. But the whole point of TFTD is that it's a tighter, more unforgiving and smarter EU campaign. With sucky hide-an-alien added, unfortunately. But apart from that it's EU++.

[Dawn Falcon]

If you, dear reader, is one of the "oh iz soo tuff" crowd, I dare you to install EU, patch it up and have a go at veteran.

Proper-veteran, or bugged-veteran? (The non-CE DOS version sets itself to beginner after the first mission) :P

[Disconnected]

Proper-veteran, or bugged-veteran? (The non-CE DOS version sets itself to beginner after the first mission) :P

Patched up = proper.

[Dawn Falcon]

Fair enough :)

I do remember that bug though...my friends and I knew something was up. Especially when TFTD came out and the harder modes were, well, HARDER.

[spiffy]

I think it's important story pacing to have your squad so ill-fitted and vulnerable in the early stages. It makes getting laser rifles and armor so intoxicating a few assaults in. Same for those early city invasions, feeling so impotent and guilty when you know you can't go in without having your whole operation crippled.

Maybe there could be a game warning that you're going to be losing dudes left and right in the early game, and let the player know you should only give your soldiers custom names until you develop power armor...

[Disconnected]

Fair enough :)

I do remember that bug though...my friends and I knew something was up. Especially when TFTD came out and the harder modes were, well, HARDER.

There's that, but TFTD is a much more difficult game. All the stats are better tuned than in EU, the AI is noticeably smarter and deploys more insidiously than in EU, and the aliens escalate faster. And, of course, you have to deal with above/below equipment, larger levels with more aliens, and terror maps that are designed to be full of deathtraps.

On top of that comes that TFTDs difficulty levels are more severe than X-Coms. I don't think beginner difficulty is affected, but the modifiers of the other difficulty settings are all significantly increased in TFTD. Maybe by 20% or so on experienced, and by something like 50% on superhuman.

Point being, if you come from genuinely veteran EU to genuinely veteran TFTD, you're still in for a pretty drastic change in difficulty.

[rezaf]

I would't be surprised at all if there was simply no way to get your soldiers killed. Well, maybe if you lose them all in a mission, but even that would surprise me.

Like Robert Sharp noted in his remark about "gaming culture", I don't think the console crowd would look kindly on this being even possible.

I also think it doesn't fit so well into the small-squad concept.

Also, about the difficulty of the original games - if you played carefully and allowed yourself loading a quicksave every now and then, it wasn't that difficult at all.
It had a great feeling of progression, early on you had to play very careful, or level half the map with rocket launchers and incendiary grenades, and even then some enemies were hard to deal with. You had to bring a lot of soldiers and sometimes accept losses (or reload constantly). But as the game went on, you developed lasers, plasma, flying armor and eventually blaster bombs, and then it was payback time - at least to a degree.
Depending on your luck, PSI could really suck again, but essentially, even the endgame had you feeling pretty badass and dishing out lots of damage.
I thought it was a great thing that XCom didn't have linear difficulty progression like most games, but instead almost the opposite.
_____
rezaf

[Strato]

On top of that comes that TFTDs difficulty levels are more severe than X-Coms. I don't think beginner difficulty is affected, but the modifiers of the other difficulty settings are all significantly increased in TFTD. Maybe by 20% or so on experienced, and by something like 50% on superhuman.

I think you are on to something there. Maybe it was because when I played TFTD it was straight after EU and I grew accustomed to having super soldiers. However, I certainly remember the early missions in TFTD, the basic downed UFO missions being filled with WTF!!! Abort moments going toe to toe against the simpler aliens. The aliens seemed to be more spread out on the map, more loose with flinging grenades around (how does one throw a grenade underwater anyway). I guess there wasn't as much in the way of cover either.

[krayzkrok]

Well you are all a lot better at EU than I ever was then. Despite playing it for what seems like months (it was probably weeks) I never managed to beat the game. That's probably why I kept coming back to it. I seem to remember always having my funding withdrawn and the program cancelled, usually after losing a couple of terror missions in a row. It's been a while. Did the European version (UFO: EU) have the same difficulty bug as the US version? Because the former is the one I played.

[ElGuapo]

So you actually got the "mutants roam the planet" end screen? I did that a few times by saving and then ignoring everything that happened, closing every alert for a few months. Even then, the first month's report would come back negative, the second month people would start to withdraw, and then the third month they would all leave.

I guess there must be some additional penalty for failing missions. I remember they scored you every time, I wonder if someone has poked around behind the scenes for fail states? Maybe if you got -1000 points two months in a row or something along those lines.

[Dawn Falcon]

Failing missions is a major negative, yes.

Two months of really bad score (how bad depends on the difficulty level) and you lose.

[Disconnected]

Because the former is the one I played.

It did, yes.

Exactly how massive attrition you can deal with, depends on how much money you're making. But if you're not losing around 2-4 guys per mission, you need to increase the difficulty a step. And if you can't afford that kind of attrition, you need to rethink how to make money. There's a great, big black market out there.

Most of the really horribad mission-wipe stuff happens the first time you meet The New Nasty, like the first time you meet a large UFO and lose all your fighters, the first time you kill a disk with the six guys you've got hiding out in a gas station, or the first time one of your bases gets invaded and you realise every single weapon you have is either in lying on the floor of your troop transport currently on mission, or in storage at some other base.

The thing is, you're meant to suffer that kind of setbacks in EU. As long as you're playing on veteran or lower, recovering from the repeat disasters is no problem at all. But you obviously have to try for it to happen. If you simply give up whenever something goes utterly, horribly wrong, you'll never win a EU campaign. Because stuff is meant to go utterly, horribly wrong sometimes. The whole game is designed around that idea.

- I still get near-wipes (and the fortunately rare total wipe) every so often when I play TFTD. Not so much because stuff takes me by surprise anymore, but because sometimes an alien with a grenade or worse is in exactly the right sport. And much more often, because I forget to check TUs before I start trying to ferry around primed explosives. I think my record is killing 7 troopers and 1 tank with a single critical TU-attention failure. Yeah, the other examples I mentioned come from my X-Com campaigns as well, and none of them were game over moments.

[Arbit]

EU was a hard game when it first came out. I think people are too familiar with the game to realize how many pitfalls they avoid without even knowing it. We all know which techs are the first to go for, we know how to get the hyperwave decoder (had to have a friend tell me back then), we all know how to prep for psionics, we all know enemy damage weaknesses, we all know to set up workshops and spew out profitable weapons. A lot of people didn't, and they didn't have the internet as a resource to find out. Most people were doing individual research, which is time consuming. Not to mention battlescape tactics (how to corner, how to avoid reaction fire with snipers) are probably second nature to most people here but not 100% obvious to a newcomer.

I was pretty bad when I was younger. I definitely saw the game over screen more than a few times when a friend pushed me to play ironman style on one of the harder difficulty levels.

[André Costa]

And when you did alright, the aliens would get annoyed and invade you. Base defense, wtf!!? ;_;

[krise madsen]

Still, I managed to win the game (on easy) despite really poor research/manufacturing/base design management. If I hadn't reloaded when missions went horribly wrong I'd probably have lost though.

[Pogo]

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/featur...ize-x-com.aspx

Interview with Jake Solomon, lead designer on X-Com.

Here's some insight on the squad and permadeath mechanics (around 11:00)

We want to give the player complete control, because there are very high stakes in combat.

Morale plays in, you take a rookie out there and he faces off against an alien, you could lose that rookie, he could completely panic, lose his shit and throw a grenade and everything goes to hell.

On top of that the most important element is that your soldiers can die in combat, and there's no handwaving, we don't do any hand-holding, when your soldier dies it's permanent, so the player has high stakes and that's the reason we give them complete control, the reason the game is turn-based... the stakes are incredibly high, there are real consequences there.

So while some of you armchair designer chucklefucks keep bringing up camera angles or small squad size or the loss of TUs, this guy has said more insightful commentary on the core of X-Com in 18 minutes than anyone else on this forum. He gets it, and that makes me happy.

Here's more on TU's (12:30 mark) slightly paraphrased due to my not typing at talking speed:

There are high costs associated with taking the right actions... in the original the TUs worked as a design mechanic because you had this resource, had to manage it well... what we've done is kept that same concept and simplified it so that the player is only able to do a certain number of things per turn... you can move and take an action or move really far, and we found that the trade-off is still there, the player still has to manage their actions and be careful of where they move... and so we get the same mechanic without taking up as much of the player's headspace...

We've tried TUs, we've tried everything, we asked if we could improve on this, we compared our play experiences, and which one is more fun and not overwhelming, and we preferred this new system. I think it's just an updated way for the player to have resources that reflect their abilities and their moves... without requiring the player to constantly be monitoring a number that they may not entirely understand.

Exactly.

And on challenge:

Challenge is something we embrace, and we're not afraid of giving the player a challenge because we give them complete control... these are the rules of the game, you set your guys up however you want, whatever abilities you want, and that way it's fair, the player understands when something happens, those high stakes, your achievements are real because the consequences are real, you've earned it.

He also mentions a comeback of challenge in games, and explicitly mentions Dwarf Fortress.

[Tim James]

I'm now moving toward the position that most modern game designers in charge of these remakes (or sequel overhauls) "get" a lot of key things about the originals. They're not idiots, they're not corporate bean counters, and they're not brazenly trying to dumb things down. Most of them respect or love the franchises they've been given and they're sensitive to the modern balancing act.

I tried to think of a few series that have dealt with this. I don't want to steer the conversation toward other games by naming examples, but it's a useful exercise. Sometimes the problem isn't the core, it's that they fuck up something completely unrelated. (On the flip side, sometimes they pull out some awesome shit that didn't exist in the first game.) Sometimes they get most of the core and end up with a good game, but it's lacking a certain something to make it a classic. Maybe they took some things out and forgot to replace it with other compelling mechanics. It's tough to make a classic in any case though, so you can't really blame them.

It's good they're saying the right things here. Permanence and challenge are obviously required themes. Now let's see if they create a great game, whether they cater to our personal (eccentric) preferences or not.

[Jinsai]

I hope they don't go too far in this direction, or at least if they do they make sure the difficulty levels scale up pretty quickly. There had better be a setting where I can lose my entire squad pretty fast.

My intent here was that the first few missions shouldn't have EVERYTHING at stake. For example, it's possible to lose your troop transport, all of your weapons and/or ammo, and troops during your FIRST mission.

This is not only a huge setback, it keeps you from playing the tactical part of the game until you generate enough cash to move on. And that's just not FUN (for most non-QT3-level gamers).

So again, if I were working on this as a mass-market title, I'd start with a tutorial level. Or a series of fights with progressively greater stakes. For example, make the first fight 2 soldiers vs. one wounded alien, with no transport required, and with the load-out predetermined.

[Staff Sergeant]

So while some of you armchair designer chucklefucks keep bringing up camera angles or small squad size or the loss of TUs, this guy has said more insightful commentary on the core of X-Com in 18 minutes than anyone else on this forum. He gets it, and that makes me happy.

A) There's no need to call people with opposing opinions to you "chucklefucks".

B) Nothing you quoted seemed particularly "insightful" to me. Wooooo he realizes what the basic fun aspects of XCOM were, thank jesus. As Tim says, let's just wait and see if they can actually deliver.

[Pogo]

B) Nothing you quoted seemed particularly "insightful" to me. Wooooo he realizes what the basic fun aspects of XCOM were, thank jesus. As Tim says, let's just wait and see if they can actually deliver.

This is shallow as shit commentary to be putting out when you haven't bothered to actually watch the video.

[Staff Sergeant]

I don't watch developer commentaries. Who gives a shit what they say? Even if it isn't blatant lies things often change before release, sometimes beyond their control due to external factors. Peter Molyneux made me long ago not trust a single word that a developer says before their game comes out. I have not made any judgement whatsoever on this game and I won't until it releases and I can play a demo or read reviews.

You on the other hand are exhibiting the classic behavior of a raving fanboi. Wait until the game comes out and is either kick-ass or shitty before you start throwing around random condescending bullshit.

[Pogo]

I'm sorry Molyneux ruined commentaries for you. Not every designer promises the world.