The spiritual succession of X-Com?

[Galdred]

Unrelated question, but does anyone know why the X-COM games aren't on GoG yet? I fortunately still have my old games, but I'd like to get a nice GoG installer for it as well.

I guess it has something to do with Firaxis having the rights and not bothering to put them on Gog (none of the civ can be bought there either).

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Openxcom is all I need right now and I'm looking forward to modders doing the same for Terror of the Deep.

This. One of the few games I'm looking forward to playing again is a non-messed up version of TFTD. Many dismiss it as an inferior clone to X-COM, but if you just untangle some of the mess (like the bugs in the research trees) and you've got a game that outcreeps X-COM by miles, IMO.

Chryssalids are scary? Try having a flying version of it with even more TUs. I'd be even more scared of Lobstermen if I didn't know their one weakness and that the game sometimes locks up into having NOTHING but Lobstermen running around, so I'm a seasoned lobster cook by now.

Fun fact: There's a monster in TFTD that's so rare to encounter that most players don't even know it exists: The Xarquid. There's a Codexer posting these days that has it as his avatar, but I had played (and completed) the game at least twice before I could even retrieve a corpse of one, I've never had a chance at a live recovery in the 20 years the game has been out.

 

[Matalarata]

The Xarquid

Shitcock! I had forgotten how I went all wtf? the first time I saw one, I was at my second or third campaign iirc.
Then I never encountered that thing again. Never.

You Sir deserve a brofist for unexpected epiphany. It's good to have that part of my brain back

 

[Average Manatee]

Good to see another poster who accepts the superiority of TFTD to X-Com.

I suspect it may be entirely by accident but nearly every change in TFTD was great from a balance perspective. Surely the incredible atmosphere and sound wasn't an accident though.

 

[Norfleet]

I'd be even more scared of Lobstermen if I didn't know their one weakness and that the game sometimes locks up into having NOTHING but Lobstermen running around, so I'm a seasoned lobster cook by now.

I seem to recall lobstermen had the same vulnerability as most other aliens, namely, they didn't stand up well to massed rocket (torpedo) barrages. Sure, they might manage to survive the first half a dozen, but you have many men, and many rockets, and they weren't exactly nimble. Since the weapons are AOE, and a few shots will probably miss anyway, all of his friends will die in the ensuing barrage as well. I have never met an X-Com alien I could not kill with more rockets. It annoys me that TFTD does not give you a surface version of those things for use in terror missions.

 

[Eyestabber]

Openxcom is all I need right now and I'm looking forward to modders doing the same for Terror of the Deep.

This. One of the few games I'm looking forward to playing again is a non-messed up version of TFTD. Many dismiss it as an inferior clone to X-COM, but if you just untangle some of the mess (like the bugs in the research trees) and you've got a game that outcreeps X-COM by miles, IMO.

Chryssalids are scary? Try having a flying version of it with even more TUs. I'd be even more scared of Lobstermen if I didn't know their one weakness and that the game sometimes locks up into having NOTHING but Lobstermen running around, so I'm a seasoned lobster cook by now.

Fun fact: There's a monster in TFTD that's so rare to encounter that most players don't even know it exists: The Xarquid. There's a Codexer posting these days that has it as his avatar, but I had played (and completed) the game at least twice before I could even retrieve a corpse of one, I've never had a chance at a live recovery in the 20 years the game has been out.

Terror missions on Cruise Ships are the main reason why everybody dismisses TFTD. Searching for hours after that ONE last alien was painfully boring.

 

[Lucky]

I guess it has something to do with Firaxis having the rights and not bothering to put them on Gog (none of the civ can be bought there either).

It's rather aggravating how those guys got to run away with X-COM, while Gollop and Co. got diddly squat. Giving an old classic more DRM than it had by putting it on steam, rather than GoG, just makes the whole thing even worse.

This. One of the few games I'm looking forward to playing again is a non-messed up version of TFTD. Many dismiss it as an inferior clone to X-COM, but if you just untangle some of the mess (like the bugs in the research trees) and you've got a game that outcreeps X-COM by miles, IMO.

Chryssalids are scary? Try having a flying version of it with even more TUs. I'd be even more scared of Lobstermen if I didn't know their one weakness and that the game sometimes locks up into having NOTHING but Lobstermen running around, so I'm a seasoned lobster cook by now.

Fun fact: There's a monster in TFTD that's so rare to encounter that most players don't even know it exists: The Xarquid. There's a Codexer posting these days that has it as his avatar, but I had played (and completed) the game at least twice before I could even retrieve a corpse of one, I've never had a chance at a live recovery in the 20 years the game has been out.

I'm actually as hyped for it as I would be for a new X-COM game by Gollop, because I have yet to really play it. Thing is, I bought both Enemy Unknown and Terror of the Deep at the same time, but got so absorbed by Enemy Unknown that I forgot I ever had TFTD. Then Apocalypse came out, which I mistook for being the actual sequel and played that for a long time. Whenever I heard about TFTD afterwards, I thought it was some sort of expansion pack that I'd missed out on. Until last year, when I happened to stumble across it while looking for my Enemy Unknown copy. Fantastic surprise that was. I've tested it a bit since then, but I'm holding off on playing it until the modded version is released. What I did see has gotten me really excited though. Amazing atmosphere.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

In a way, Apocalypse is the sequel to Enemy Unknown. The Gollop brothers did Enemy Unknown and Apocalypse, but they didn't do TFTD, that was an in-house team at MicroProse just trying to cash in on the phenomenon they had at their hands. They copied everything from Enemy Unknown, made some balance changes, added a few new things (shipping lane attacks) but otherwise just re-skinned and renamed everything. You can even connect monsters from the games, like Sectoids and Aquatoids and Mutons and Lobstermen.

Julian Gollop has been busy with Laser Squad: Nemesis and is now releasing a revamped version of his old hit Chaos. Personally I'd like to see him to a proper revamp of Lords of Chaos, a Lazer Squad-inspired game where you control a wizard who must use summoning spells to create his forces to battle other wizards and reach a portal in time. The bestiary in that game was MASSIVE, and almost every animal has a tactical purpose. Pixies were weak and pathetic, but were invisible, while lions were fast and powerful land-based monsters for the early game. Too much water to use a lion? Summon a crocodile instead. Rough terrain? Giant spiders were favourites of many players. If flight was an option then a pegasus was an awesome mount to have. The best thing about LoC was that your wizard improved in stats after completing each campaign. Sadly there were only three campaigns in the original (of which one was single-player and full of cheese) but there's also an expansion which adds two more, of which one is also a single-player cheesefest.

 

[Eyestabber]

Lucky

Battle Brothers is awesome, and it's good you brought it up. If I wrote any more good things about that game people would start saying I'm on the Dev's pocket. But the game doesn't remove research entirely, I remember the devs stating that artifacts would be researched, something like that.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

What most X-com competitors miss is truly destructible terrain and spreading fires. Which creates huge part of the atmosphere in battlescape. In original X-com you could dig through a hill with laser rifle if you really wanted to.
Later games by Mythos (Apocalypse, Magic and mayhem) also used the same mechanics with added building collapses.

Only competing games I know about that come even close in terrain deformations are Silent storms (don't remember if those had spreading fires).

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

nuXCOM has other problems (squad size, the way enemies spawn in levels, set piece campaign).

e. nuXCOM also doesn't track soldiers stamina, so no one ever faint from the smoke caused by said fires.

 

[Lucky]

In a way, Apocalypse is the sequel to Enemy Unknown. The Gollop brothers did Enemy Unknown and Apocalypse, but they didn't do TFTD, that was an in-house team at MicroProse just trying to cash in on the phenomenon they had at their hands. They copied everything from Enemy Unknown, made some balance changes, added a few new things (shipping lane attacks) but otherwise just re-skinned and renamed everything. You can even connect monsters from the games, like Sectoids and Aquatoids and Mutons and Lobstermen.

Julian Gollop has been busy with Laser Squad: Nemesis and is now releasing a revamped version of his old hit Chaos. Personally I'd like to see him to a proper revamp of Lords of Chaos, a Lazer Squad-inspired game where you control a wizard who must use summoning spells to create his forces to battle other wizards and reach a portal in time. The bestiary in that game was MASSIVE, and almost every animal has a tactical purpose. Pixies were weak and pathetic, but were invisible, while lions were fast and powerful land-based monsters for the early game. Too much water to use a lion? Summon a crocodile instead. Rough terrain? Giant spiders were favourites of many players. If flight was an option then a pegasus was an awesome mount to have. The best thing about LoC was that your wizard improved in stats after completing each campaign. Sadly there were only three campaigns in the original (of which one was single-player and full of cheese) but there's also an expansion which adds two more, of which one is also a single-player cheesefest.

I didn't know that. Good thing I didn't play it at the time then. A tweaked Enemy Unknown would have pissed me off as a sequel, after I had the original seared into my brain. However, by now a game that actually succesfully copies what the original did, with some good tweaks here and there, is already miles ahead of the competition. I haven't seen a game yet that scratches a similar itch, with challengers like the new XCOM being a tensionless drag and Xenonauts lacking soul.

What's this about Laser Squad Nemesis, though? I thought he'd finished that years ago and had set his sights fully on Chaos Reborn?

Lucky

Battle Brothers is awesome, and it's good you brought it up. If I wrote any more good things about that game people would start saying I'm on the Dev's pocket. But the game doesn't remove research entirely, I remember the devs stating that artifacts would be researched, something like that.

I'm pretty excited for Battle Brothers, but I'm still holding my breath until Early Access is over. I trust the devs, but not the steam crowd with their inane suggestions. They've done a great job of not letting that influence the game so far, but there's still about eleven months to go. They do read the Codex thread and sser works with them, so their feedback doesn't just consist of steam, though.,

It's not exactly the same as research. From what I understood, it's more like you finance the research of a scholar to help narrow down the location of an artefact. You'll still have to find and get it yourself, so it's more like the scholar provides you with clues.

 

[Eyestabber]

It's not exactly the same as research. From what I understood, it's more like you finance the research of a scholar to help narrow down the location of an artefact. You'll still have to find and get it yourself, so it's more like the scholar provides you with clues.

This is both cool and original. I'm glad to know they have feedback to balance out popalmole suggestions from some steam users.

 

[Average Manatee]

nuXCOM has destructible terrain and spreading fire, but no building collapse.

Problem is it has no real effective means to create the destruction. You'll have like 2 rockets per mission and save them for direct hits on aliens 95% of the time. Nothing like having a dedicate demolition specialist carrying 10 High Explosives, or having a stack of Rockets in the skyranger and a dedicate thrower to resupply your rocketeer so they can fire every turn. I guess it's more "balanced" this way.

 

[k0syak]

I'd be even more scared of Lobstermen if I didn't know their one weakness and that the game sometimes locks up into having NOTHING but Lobstermen running around, so I'm a seasoned lobster cook by now.

I seem to recall lobstermen had the same vulnerability as most other aliens, namely, they didn't stand up well to massed rocket (torpedo) barrages. Sure, they might manage to survive the first half a dozen, but you have many men, and many rockets, and they weren't exactly nimble. Since the weapons are AOE, and a few shots will probably miss anyway, all of his friends will die in the ensuing barrage as well. I have never met an X-Com alien I could not kill with more rockets. It annoys me that TFTD does not give you a surface version of those things for use in terror missions.

I remember them being vulnerable to drills

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Precisely. Lobstermen can survive a DIRECT HIT from the Blaster launcher (or whatever its TFTD equivalent was called again) but they take double damage from melee weapons. IIRC even the smallest drill (Vibro-blade) all but guarantees a Lobsterman kill.

I bought the X-Com: Unknown Terror compilation pack in 1996, just before X-Com Apocalypse was released. It's a big-ass box that weighs almost 2 kilos because it not only contains both X-Com and TFTD, but also their respective strategy guides. It was there that I first saw the resist charts for the Lobstermen - scary shit.

 

[Average Manatee]

Stun Launchers work too. Almost always an instant down, and its an insanely accurate weapon. Have to drop a grenade or wait around with a drill to finish them off though.

 

[Eyestabber]

I remember muttons not being to keen on dying with the first plasma shot either. Major difference was that TFTD Sonic Canon had no auto shot, unlike our good old heavy plasma.

 

[Average Manatee]

I consider lack of auto shot on alien weaponry to be a good thing. Much less shots coming at you. An alien who has spent half his TUs coming at you and can fire 1 snap shot is probably not going to kill anyone if they have armor. An alien firing an auto shot is probably deadly. It especially helped tanks, who ate autoshots constantly.

 

[Average Manatee]

I considering blowing up cover to be direct hits. When I think environmental destruction I think leveling buildings before you even see the aliens. Blowing up a bench in a park with an alien behind it ain't no fucking environmental destruction.

Long war does let you do more but it also adds more aliens so you need to save more of the explosives for them. And I already posted some of my gripes with long war.

 

[rezaf]

Isn't it quite telling that a thread supposed for discussions about X-Coms spiritual ancestry ends up discussing the merits of the original games again?

For me, no game since truly managed to capture that same spark that the old original trilogy captured, especially Enemy Unknown.
Even the copycat games fail to do so - mostly due to relatively bad production values and/or seemingly minor design decisions. The only exception is OpenXCom, and it's a 1:1 remake with some UI improvements.

Firaxis' XCOM is fun in the (very) short term and has solid moment-to-moment gameplay (except for the free alien moves), but lags any kind of long-term-legs for me.
Xenonauts was okayish, but does the "clone the original game slavishly and still end up falling short in various areas" thing. As did UFO:Extratrerrestrial before it in a more pronounced fashion.
Altar's UFO trilogy didn't really have all that much in common with X-Com, imo, except the aliens angle.

The only really major game in the genre that built upon X-Com/JA's foundation and that keeps popping up in my mind when thinking about this is Silent Storm.
It was fantastic in X-Com that you could create your own entrance to buildings (and later UFOs), that you could scorch a barnyard or level a hill. There were no real physics yet - Apocalypse at least made some steps into that direction and you got collapsing floors when their supports had been blown away - but it was a start.
For some reason, all pseudo-remakes have struglled with this bit, most offering only a extremely basic level of destructibility.

And when it comes to this, Silent Storm was a true revelation. As in X-Com, you could finish an entire run through the game without ever really encountering a situation where destructible terrain played an important role, but when such situation arose, it was incredibly memorable. Accidentally blowing up a gastank in a buildings basement and have the remains of both your and the enemy soldiers from the house rain down around your men on the other end of the map, or being trapped in a house with your last soldier and desperately trying to keep him safe by firing bursts through the wooden floor/roof based on the sound of enemies' footsteps or spending half an hour battling a couple of baddies holed up in a bunker, slowly eating away at it's walls with heavy machine guns, to finally finish the last with a headshot through a hole in the wall and having the building look like swiss cheese in the aftermath, this was just special. And another thing that hasn't been offered by any game in the genre since.
I'm jealous of the guys in a parallel universe that got to see X-Com made with this engine (the original pitch for it to the publisher was actually a rudimentary X-Com clone).

Silent Storm is now old enough to be considered a classic itself, and I'm struggling to come up with a memorable entry in the genre since that really took the genre forward but didn't hijack it into RtWP territory.
XCOM comes closest, as there were some nice ideas therein, but they removed steamlined so much ... talk about throwing out the baby with the bathing water.

 

[sser]

Silent Storm has some of the best gameplay of any turn-based tactics game, but I don't consider it a 'spiritual' anything to X-Com. Most games circling the 'spirit' of X-Com are directly derivative of the game itself: Xenonauts, XCOM, X-Com: Apocalypse, etc. Laser Squad Nemesis is the only one that kinda breaks away, but that game is also developed by Gollop so... The problem is few-fold: the genre wasn't popular for a long stretch of time and arguably still isn't, though the resources required to get into it have lowered; X-Com is very difficult to emulate, spiritually or directly, as the above games demonstrate; graphically, things like destructible terrain have gotten even more difficult as time has passed, and games that do it well like Silent Storm never caught on making the investment seem questionable; X-Com has a lot of things going for it that are difficult to capture, the sort of intangible stuff that has it burned into people's memories.

 

[Ninjerk]

Koei strategy games with the regional and tactical layers?

 

[rezaf]

Silent Storm has some of the best gameplay of any turn-based tactics game, but I don't consider it a 'spiritual' anything to X-Com.

That's why I avoided using that term.
A spiritual successor as I understand it is usually a clone with some aspects altered (often removed), so it's kinda weird that the OP excluded those from the discussion.

I don't really buy into your angle that stuff like this has become that much harder to do (well), but in the end, I think we arrive at the same point anyhow: It's pretty risky to try, since you never know how far you'll really get and how well the game will be received in the end. You MIGHT release the next X-Com that ends up being a revered, genre defined classic for decades to come. Or you might end up releasing the next, I dunno, Cops 2170, a mediocre game ultimately forgotten. If you want a good shot at making money, there are other, better genre picks. And even if you pick this genre, you cut features like crazy to try to capture as much of the potential audience as possible with as little work as possible.

Tis just the nature of capitalism. Even indie darling Notch, who now has enough money to fill a money bin 'ala Scrooge McDuck, went for "villa with pool and hookers" instead of "fund promising indie games for all eternity".
The nature of men.

 

[Eyestabber]

A spiritual successor as I understand it is usually a clone with some aspects altered (often removed), so it's kinda weird that the OP excluded those from the discussion.

You are correct, but the term "clone" would result into a lot of stuff I already know about (Long War, Xenonauts and so on), whereas "spiritual successor" allows people to get more creative. Higher chance for me to find "new" cool stuff to play next that way. :D

I don't really buy into your angle that stuff like this has become that much harder to do (well), but in the end, I think we arrive at the same point anyhow: It's pretty risky to try, since you never know how far you'll really get and how well the game will be received in the end. You MIGHT release the next X-Com that ends up being a revered, genre defined classic for decades to come. Or you might end up releasing the next, I dunno, Cops 2170, a mediocre game ultimately forgotten. If you want a good shot at making money, there are other, better genre picks. And even if you pick this genre, you cut features like crazy to try to capture as much of the potential audience as possible with as little work as possible.

The main problem is that "replayability" is not financially rewarded. Not, at least, in a distinguishable way. So you end up with a lot of games that are meant to be played only once. You COULD make an heir to XCOM's throne, but that would involve a team of talented developers, working a LONG development cycle and taking a lot of risky decisions all of which end up working out in the end. But half-assing is cheaper and safer. Having a financially successful masterpiece is prefectly possible, but that would entail high investment on a high risk-very high reward scenario. Low investment for a low risk-medium-high reward is MUCH more likely to keep a company afloat in the long run.