UFO: Afterlight announced!

[Slaughter]

In the "I almost had a heart attack!" department, ALTAR games just announced the sequel to UFO: Aftermath and UFO: Aftershock:

UFO: Afterlight (working title) is sequel to UFO: Aftermath and UFO: Aftershock series, which brings you completely new insight to story of Aftershock, this time from lonely human inhabitants on Mars.

• Game play highlights:
  
• combination of global strategy and tactical missions
  
• new strategic game with resources management and terraforming possible in later stage of the game
  
• advanced tactical portion of the game with possibility to enter buildings, different heights, destructible environment, thermo visions and more
  
• even stronger RPG elements, all your subjects are known by name, complex training system, special equipment and more
  
• completely new story building on the events from UFO: Aftershock
  
• large number of new technologies, weapons and equipment to develop
  
• completely new environments on a planet different from Earth
  
• more complex diplomacy option affecting the story
  
• aliens, drones and robots in your team
  
• new enemies and new alien races with variable weapons and battle tactics

Spotted at Blue's News and thanks to Olivier

 

[Avé]

I cant wait.

 

[Jinxed]

What about the combat system? Sticking to the crappy real time?

Never finished aftershock, I killed off the Warlogs in their ship and just had about enough of the real time combat. Not saying it was a bad game, but my interest trailed off to other things around the end of the game. I had the same thing with aftermath.

 

[Micmu]

And creative name.
I bet the next UFO will be called "Aftershave".

 

[Andyman Messiah]

That's a great title. "After the shock, after the light... after the shave. Let's go kill some aliens. Gilette smooth cheeks style." Developers can also put in the features-list that all models in the game are shaven. That's great PR.

 

[obediah]

Within the context of modern PC games, I got no real beef with aftershock. Sure it's RT and unfinished, but what isn't these days? The RT combat is at least tacticaly rich - to put it in VD terms - it's more chess than checkers. If everything was finished and bug-free it would be quite complex. The ease of modding is double-plus good as well.

What is disgusting is the product cycle we're seeing. "Our game will have feature set X". Then one day, "we have to release our game now or go out of business - the feature set is now x/2, oh and it's buggy." Then we get a patch for the bugs and a promise that the rest of the features will be in a sequel. Repeat. And repeat again. I hate the "blame everything on the publisher" whinging that goes on a lot here, but in this case I'd be inclined to believe it.

Oh well, as long as their games keep getting better, and my memories of X-Com keep getting fainter all should be well.

 

[Slaughter]

And creative name.
I bet the next UFO will be called "Aftershave".

About as creative as the comment... (must be the 10th time I read it)

@Jinxed: Yeah, I find it hard to believe they'll all of a sudden change the combat system. Just got to the WG ship myself, after some 150 tactical missions. Starting to get repetitive now. Game is too long because there is too little variation in the tactical missions.

@obediah: Yeah, it's too easy to just blame everything on the publisher. Don't think ALTAR did that though. They have been rather unlucky however, but I guess you have to include bad luck in your planning of game development.

 

[Section8]

I'd push for "Afterbirth", because everyone loves placenta.

 

[Circuitbreaker]

I would suggest they first ensure that UFO:Aftershock is less of a bug fest.

On the other hand, UFO:Aftershock, despite its flaws, is a huge improvement over its precedecessor, so maybe they can finally get things right with part 3.

 

[Slaughter]

I would suggest they first ensure that UFO:Aftershock is less of a bug fest.

Well, it's very much possible to start the development of a new game while squishing bugs in Aftershock. It's mostly the programmers that do the bug fixing in Aftershock, so the others are free to start making design documents. Not sure what ALTAR is doing, but it's very much possible.