Firaxis making XCOM: Enemy Unknown

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Modders will fix it.

listenig to the devs in the vids makes me cringe. "people didn't like it when we took (camera) control from them in a Real time game, but now that we're in a TB game they'll totally love when we spam shitty cut scenes for every mundane shit your soldiers do..." no you fucktards, people still won't like you taking (camera) control from them when they're in a playing flow, this isn't a B-movie all about camera angles and lighting etc. it's about gameplay.

The Interview with Gollops also has some nice subtext there...

well it's just my taste, i hated it based on the vids that i saw. But it belongs to the "useless but not gamebreaking" next gen shit so long as it is toggleable once you get bored. other issues might be much more important, but i wanted to highlight how horribly out of touch with parts of their playerbase the devs really are.

I think a cool cam would be aproppriate for rare, GENUINELY COOL moments, like when a alien fires a blaster-bomb smack-dab into half of your team, insta-gibbing half of your squad, shrapneling a third and sending the remaining ones flying though the street until they slam into a brick wall, or when you collapse a entire building on top of some enemies, X-COM Apocalypse style.

BTW, they should take a look at Apoc in how to make more complex enviroments. I would love to have a X-COM style shootout in more diverse ambients, like, say, a Rich man's immense penthouse rooftop, a snowy and dark Antartic wasteland, poor and miserable slums in some third-world city, etc.

That kind of thing worked only in the first X-Com games. With a six-man squad, your alien would insta-gib three soldiers, shrapnel a fourth and send the remaining two flying. Not that impressive.

Here's hoping they add some variety into the mix, preferably heavily randomized. Slightly reduced map size can be forgiven as long as they're varied an not boring.
Can't really say too much because they've show us two r three maps only.

My greatest concern so far will be about the feeling of danger, you know that feeling you get when the alien pops up with a heavy plasma, and you know every hit will be lethal. so far, I'm getting mixed signals, on the one hand the ork did a 1hitko by bashing through the wall, but on the other, the aliens seem to unload lots of plasma to little actual effect. Since squad size is reduced, I understand that there will be less 1 hit kills, but hopefully the xenos will feel appropriateley threatening.

Yes, the current squad-limit is pure bullshit. No sane military would send only six men to deal with a alien terror attack as part of a rapid response specialist team.
The concept of X-COM ground troops is that they're the elite of Spec Ops reunited into a rapid-response team created to deal with alien attacks as fast as possible. That's why they use a Skyranger to go after the aliens instead of X-COM just para-dropping into the combat zone, if they dropped from parachutes half the X-COM squad would get raked with plasma fire before they touched the ground, and after that, the other half too. Its much smarter to simply send in a resilent VTOL craft. Also, parachuting means no heavy weaponry, which would be BAAAAD, especially with Cyberdiscs, Reapers and Chrysalids during Terror Missions. Sending fourteen guys makes sense, sending SIX or EIGHT people = Suicide. Don't forget that in the end-game X-COM can use the Avenger to send twenty-five people into a combat mission, thanks to technological advancement (which means that if they didn't do that before, there was some pratical reason), so its just a matter of outfitting some laser guns to cheat the 80-items limit and rake the enemy with lasers.

I don't think the limit is due to console limitations, consoles aren't that bad. Hell, the original X-COM was also launched for consoles, and I'm pretty sure it wans't dumbed down, though I never played it on them, of course.
I think its either dumbing down or Firaxis is too incompetent to make a decent engine. That is probrably the reason, see how CivIV ran like crap on launch.

This doesn't make any sense. If the game can handle more than 6 enemies, why couldn't it support more than 6 soldiers as well ? And it's not like the xbox is that weak and the game looks that great.

I don't think it's engine limitations or incompetence either.
It's probably due to gameplay considerations. We don't know much yet about how the whole game will pan out, but I guess they wanted to avoid too large, drawn out battles.
After all, if you can bring 20 soldiers, you need an appropriate number of enemies, too.
More soldiers does not automatically make the game more strategic, more interesting or more difficult (neither does less, admittedly), but I guess it's both easier to balance and playing faster.

4 soldiers only as start is my biggest worry. The game can't possibly be as lethal as the original with so few troops. In UFO you could expect to lose 1 or 2 soldiers per mission in the early game, so you brought enough guys that you could win anyway. In the remake losing 2 soldiers means half your strength is gone, you're well on the way to losing the fight. I get the feeling Firaxis expects you to complete most successful missions with zero losses

Well, not automatically but it is a sign. More pieces on the board, more permutations of moves possible, plus more overhead thinking required. So it is dumbing it down, starting with 4-man squad and unlock a 6-man squad through DLC or achievement or whatever the fuck.

I still wouldn't call it "dumbed down" yet, with little or no actual info of how the game really plays.
It might be an indicative of dumbed down gameplay, but just the same it can be a simple design-decision to choose small squads over big ones, without necessarily sacrificing complexity much.

Btw. I have rarely used much more than 8 soldiers in the original X-COM, but admittedly have never played on the highest difficulty.

Yes, I agree. UFO Afterxxx series used 6-person squads exclusively and there was still plenty of room for tactics, especially as maps were quite small most of the time. Still, having more pieces on the board gives you more options - if nothing else then to overwhelm the enemy through numbers. I consistently used as large squads as possible in X-Com and TFTD.

You can't be serious, nigga. 1 or 2? But yes, it seems they expect you to have zero losses, which is TOTAL BULLSHIT and seriously fuck the feeling. Those early game missions where ten guys on your side die in a mission set the mood for the rest of the game. The moment I knew this game was going to be awesome was the moment I got my first classic "Blaster Bomb in middle of entire squad upon leaving skyranger" moment. I saw a button to escape and escape I did, like a girl. Its not X-COM if you're not doing teeth-clenching missions with ridiculous ammounts of casualities, makes X-COM seems EXTREME, which they are.

It was standard for each mission to include at least 25%-50% KIA. Then there's the "happy times", IE, the time that starts from the all-out outfitting of lasers and armor to troops and ends the moment Snakemen and Mutons start showing up en masse, though which Floaters, Sectoids and Cyberdiscs can easily be taken down with lasers and personnal armor, then the meat grinder returns and only stops with flying armor, psionics and blaster bombs.

Whoa

The fuck

Oh my...

You have no honour. Like a woman.
DO IT FAGGOT!!!!!

Modern games have lost the magic of failing.

Fucking up and being wiped out were a part of the magic in the original X-Com. This worked because it was easy and quick to get back in the game. There were no tutorials, no cinematics and no fixed missions.

The bigger scale helped you to get in the role of a detached commander. Your troops are just numbers, you don't have the luxury of growing emotionally attached to them. Soldiers die and there is always more fodder waiting in the queue. Seeing your squads wiped out was a great motivator for making you tackle the initial learning curve.

New X-Com with the small scale, fewer troops with more RPG elements works against this fundamental principle. There more time you have to spend nurturing your squad, the less willing you will be to let them die. I'm also willing to bet that the "classic" difficulty of the new game will be about as hard as normal in the original. Hand-holding and low difficulty will be the final nail in the coffin, as the large part of the terror of the X-Com was the fact that not only the enemy was unknown - but you as a player were in the dark as well.

I remember that during my last play-through, I have lost 108 men in 9 months. I had several missions with TPK. Sometimes I had to send 4 man teams because of the attrition.

Anyway, I'm seriously disappointed about the direction the Fireaxis game is going. I knew that the interviews were sounding just too good.

You're regularly losing more than that taking on the small and medium UFO's that show up at the start? L2P nub.
Attacking anything bigger than a medium UFO before you have armor is just suicide, you're better off leaving them alone.

Where did you get that information ? That would probably explain why GTA IV, a action game where you can have a hundred actors at once in the screen, in a aprox 10 km long map, ran like shit on PCs yet ran smoothly in the consoles, right ?

Where's the fun in that? I think the best map I ever played was a Terror Mission right off the bat with Snakemen and Chryssalids. No armour, basic weaponry, just few auto-cannons, one rocket launcher and a bunch of high-explosives. I even won at the end, though the map was completely levelled and my last two survivors killed the final Chryssalid with pistols as I had ran out of all other ammunition. :p

My biggest fear isn't really the squad limit, it's that the levels may end up being too small.

My biggest fear is that this remake so far sounds so full of suck, it will flop and will seal the deal for publishers in reinforcing the idea that Turn-Based = NO GO.

yeah. Leaves us in a dilemma, buy the thing with all its next gen crap --> and send a message to publishers that it's okay to turn these classics into generic next gen crap or; not buy it --> they'll never try turn based again. Shitty biowarian choice here.

I like that analogy.

Mang, you just don't get it. We only get Real Time games with crowds because of the technological limitations. Turn-based with few characters is the bleeding edge right now. Look at NASA, they send so few people up into space and even when send anyone up there, they don't put a dozen or so people all at once. No sirree, they have to send them in small amounts. Now ask yourself why. The answer is obvious. The Turn-Based game is an elusive concept and the computing power required by one is remarkably high. That is why.

It's like sex. You can hire prostitutes for sex and save on time and money constraints of sex that comes with an emotional relationship. But the latter is still the real deal and you can only have so much of it.

TIME UNITS WERE A GREAT RISK REWARD MECHANIC SO WE DUMBED THEM DOWN!

Bullshit PR talk is getting on my nerves.