Sno

So i'm not too far in, but i'm not sure how i feel about Dishonored so far. It seems to commit that sin of the designers building a whole bunch of really awesome tools into their game, and then giving you no reason to use any of them, and in actual fact punishing you for using them. If they wanted to encourage a stealthy gameplay style, they should not have focused so much on a ton of lethal combat abilities. Ostensibly this is supposed to be some morality system, i guess, but the choice is between experiencincing the full scope of gameplay potential and... not... It's more than that though, it's the post-mission status screens that berate you for killing people and not being stealthy, it's the achievements all only rewarding stealthy play, it's all of that. It's a big sandbox to be sure, but i feel like i have somebody looking over my shoulder telling me that i need to play a specific way. It is not like a Deus Ex because they have already made the choice for the player about how he should play, and it is not like Thief because the abilities are not all in service of that gameplay focus. It's somewhere inbetween and at conflict with itself. Edit: Holy shit Filk, check those spoilers. Gah.

It seems to be a combination of a lot of things. The longer you play, not necessarily based on your story progress, more difficult enemies will show up. Also, higher panic levels in the mission zone seem to lead to tougher opposition, while certain mission types are also definitely weighted to specific enemy types. Progress through the story will, at a few checkpoints, dramatically reduce the panic level and therefore the difficulty. Edit - Egh, i didn't see that Gwardinen has essentially given the same answer. How about i talk about my most recent classic ironman failure instead. Things were going along pretty swimmingly, i was happy with where i was at. Laser weapons and carapace armor and a bunch of foundry upgrades, good troops, a good rate of income with more than half of the nations under satellite coverage. I had lost some nations in some bad battles, so kind of on the edge, but things were getting better. I had a firm grip on things, i was going to make it! Then multiple abduction missions in a row, one of which popped up before my guys has even returned to the base from the previous mission, threw everything into chaos. Very bullshit. Even if you win those things with a flawless showing, you still accumulate more panic than you reduce. Lost a bunch of nations, landed me very close to the fail state. Then a terror mission comes up with very difficult ranking, but if i can get a decent rating on it i can restore everything to being in my favor. So i load up my best guys with my best equipment. I really had a pretty good game going, i was feeling confident i could do it. Maybe take some losses, but at least complete the mission. First thing i notice is that it's a small map, which is always a horrible, horrible situation. Then two turns in, three seperate groups of chrysalids have made themselves known. Then a group of floaters. Then a cyberdisc and its drone. My best guys though, with the best gear i could get them! So I'm doing fine up until my guys have to start taking turns to reload, and at that point i'm not doing enough combined damage to hold the enemies back. Cyberdisc comes flying in and splits my team in two. With reduced overwatch, two of my guys are killed by chrysalids that run in after having been skirting around the edge of the battle for a few turns. Then everybody else panics and dies. I think i had allowance for losing one more nation before the failstate, but with only rookies left and my remaining territories in high panic, it wasn't happening.

Realistic!

Did Giantbomb's DP Endurance Run explore the city at all? Like, to me, the most mechanically interesting thing about that game was that it's a huge open-world city with dozens of characters running errands on an actual real-time clock. Anyways, don't take me to be shitting on Deadly Premonition. I love that game. But it's a bad game. But it's awesome. But it's pretty bad. So many great ideas and characters, that great soundtrack, and executed like it was trapped in a late-Dreamcast/early-PS2 time vortex.

I'm not sure i would encourage everybody to play on classic, but i think most people should give Ironman a shot. A lot of the dynamics and difficult choices X-com excels in presenting don't really work when you can command time like a god. Taking control of the save system away from you is the only way you'll ever make a choice about retreating from a battle that has gone horribly wrong.

So i guess the first major DLC went up, apparently it's very nice and quite long. I'm feeling rather indifferent about it though, i think it's too soon for that kind of add-on when most people are still going through the main game.

The ceiling crawler or whatever it is, it's not even a difficult enemy, it just has a ludicrous amount of health.

I don't think a more accessible control scheme would really be fixing the problems that game had. Moreover, I'm not sure fixing the problems that game had would make it a better experience. I mean, people basically love it because it's a b-movie, it's a charming and lovable failure of a game. There's that one hallway enemy though, they should give that thing less health, because fuck that thing.

I wouldn't worry about the doom ticker and satellite coverage until you've lost around half the map. I started my normal game without realizing the importance of satellites either, but once i shifted gears i got everything under control and managed to play through to the end of the game. Do what you can to mitigate the panic and hold it off as long as you can, but don't bail on your game because of it. The way there are so many events through which it can grow, and so few ways to reduce it, i'm pretty sure it's just going to end up being a mounting thing you cannot control. (There's a few checkpoints in the story that will dramatically reduce panic, so keep that in mind.) I mean, the point is, you can definitely do fine late-game with just a few of the continents backing you. (Well, i guess i don't know how harsh it is in classic, but considering that normal gets significantly easier as long as you hold your shit together, i'm reasonably sure classic gives you a lot of wiggle room late-game too.) I would say Asia and Africa are extremely valuable late-game.

And i just lost my ironman run, i mismanaged my research and didn't have the gear i needed when mutons started showing up. Lasers, but no armor. In the time it took to research that armor, i got hit with a string of difficult battles and it completely screwed up my campaign. A series of missions where i would without fail end up with like two groups of mutons and a group of floaters all coming down on me at once, one-shotting all of my guys. By the time i was reduced to rookies, i had an entire team panicking when the mutons showed up. Again. (Fucking Mutons.) I will say not to treat an individual mission failure like a game-ender, you can definitely recover from a bad situation. Fucking up at the strategic level is way more harmful than taking losses at the tactical level. There are some mission types with very manageable effects incurred from failure or a hasty retreat. UFO missions, for example, don't even appear to incur any serious penalties on failure. Letting one shoot down a satellite is very damaging, but once it's on the ground the outcome doesn't appear to matter much at all. (However, the big choose-one-of-three missions are always seriously bad to lose.) Also, if you use the retreat functionality, you have to get all your squad members on that spot in front the drop ship and then select the menu option, anybody left behind is lost. (Interestingly, gear left behind is also lost, whether on a dead soldier or a live troop.) Anyways, i definitely ended up in a spot where bailing on a bad mission was a pretty easy choice. Save your veterans or lose everything. You don't get any resources from any failed or fled mission, but i wasn't struggling with resources anyways, I lost entirely because i totally fucked up my research tree. (I think i'm going to try again, starting with Europe and moving into Asia, or vice versa.) I really enjoyed it though, i'm definitely going to give it another go. I'm feeling that classic/ironman draws a light on some of the things the game is strongest at. (Though i agree with the sentiment that AI difficulty and mechanical difficulty should maybe be different options.) Also, has anybody noticed that cover impairs your own aim as well? I noticed it a while ago, but i don't think anybody has mentioned it in relation to discussion concerning the cover system thus far. If you have an enemy standing out in the open and you're behind high cover, your own aim is impaired by 40%. Whoever's aim debuff is highest seems to be applied to both participants in a fire exchange. I ran into a few situations where it was better to just get out of cover against an unprotected enemy for that 100% aim, because if i missed, i was going to die anyways.

So i finished the game and started a classic ironman playthrough and i am very certain that the AI is much more aggressive about roaming the map, they don't seem as much to just be waiting around to be activated by the player's line of sight. Recruits also become a huge liability, so prone to panicking.

My best soldier is a psychic heavy named Cesar "Disco" Santiago, which i think is a pretty amazing name. X-Com's name generator is ace.

I think you've misattributed those quotes there, the formatting in Henroid's post is a little confusing though. Also, with the gambling comparison, I am reminded of this whole thing. I mean, but the thing is, it isn't just closely related, it is gambling. Minus the potential for monetary rewards. So it's arguably worse. Mass Effect 3 did this thing where you could pay into the game for a random chance at some multiplayer loot, i thought it was fucking reprehensible in a game that was already getting a retail 60 dollars from people, and it made me angry that the internet wasn't up in arms about it. (Too focused on the stupid damn ending.)

I've read some things where freemium developers talk about what a struggle it is to maintain a design mindset that doesn't mistreat free users. (On the premise that free users are evangelizing the game to their friends who in turn may be the kinds of people who do pay in.) At the time it seemed like a positive perspective on freemium design, trying to maintain a good experience for the free players, but now i'm realizing that i've seen scarcely few developers say anything about how they're treating their paying customers. Fuuuuck, what a harsh reality that is. I mean, it's the kind of thing i'm sure everybody suspected all along, that a lot of the people paying into freemium games are spending compulsively. However, faced with the reality of it, what responsibility is on the developer? (If there is even any at all.) I still find the whole freemium movement so distasteful, i hate what it's doing to gaming. (I will extend that hate to shitty DLC practices on retail games too, fuck that as well.) This forum seriously has the weirdest fucking word filter. Look at me, getting away with saying "fuck" so much, yet i can't say Lords Management.

I keep a stack of in-progress games nearby to kind of torment me into finishing them. You know, right? So that when i actually have time to play something, i don't end up just forgetting about the thing i've barely touched and end up just sitting around feeling bored and wasting time on the internet. My Steam comment though, the one everybody was mocking. Isn't it a thing? The particular case of Steam is that it has made a lot of giant, ambitious projects completely disposable in the general mindset of the people who are the intended audience. I mean, i guess it's the devaluing games argument. Or maybe not, but still something along those lines.

Agh! Ok, this makes way more sense. Also, the character sheet that you can bring up that lists off all the ailments and buffs your character is experiencing lists low cover as a 20% defense buff, and high cover as 40%. Who can say what that actually amounts to, though. There's something else going on too, i think being in cover negatively impacts your own aim as well?

I'm curious, can you retreat in this X-com game? Is that what the square outside the troop ship is for? I wonder what the result would be for just bailing on an untenable situation, cutting your losses and running so you can save your veterans. Would that be a viable strategic choice? Taking the hit from whatever negative there would be for failing the mission, but saving your veterans? The cover system in this game though, i've been trying to sort out what's going on, but it ocassionally still defies my expectations of how it should work. As a general rule though, half-height cover can be freely fired over and is purely an accuracy debuff against enemies, it will not block fire. (Except for when it does.) Full cover will block weapons and can only be fired around from corners, and... sometimes corners don't seem to block fire? Hit/miss checks and projectile accuracy seem to throw all kinds of weird curveballs at you. Also, psi-troops are awesome.

So Code of Princess is a pretty fantastic game if anybody is looking for a fun, technical brawler. I really hope people check this game out. Super solid game with a simple, flexible combo mechanic that has tons of potential for ridiculous juggles. Unfortunately, the framerate in this really struggles when the 3D is turned on, and the game looks kind of muddy and shitty in 2D. (I think the 3D helps its detailed character sprites stand out against the generally ugly environments.) I'd also like to be able to say whether or not the fairly extensive online feature set is any good, but nobody is playing this game online. Full versus and co-op modes though.

I'm pretty sure this game is like the original in the sense that you can have close to a 100% aim rating, but you still have the big wildcard of the projectile possibly impacting on something between you and the target. The cover system muddies things significantly, it's not always clear if a piece of cover will be treated as a solid entity for a projectile to impact against, or if the projectile will phase through it for the hit/miss check. As for the smaller squads, i don't know how i feel about it. I think it both makes it a more tactical game, and makes you more subject to the whims of the RNG god.

Well, there is at least one trick you can use to sneak up on enemies. The snipers can get a device that can be used twice per mission to reveal an area in the fog of war beyond line of sight, which you can then combine with longer-range weapons to get a jump on enemies. Attacking them will trigger their free movement if they aren't instantly killed, but having three enemies grouped tightly together is a nice target for a heavy's rocket launcher.

Gears of War just popped into mind as a game that goes to great lengths to represent all of your equipment on the character model, with proper animations for switching weapons and everything.

*Gonna just delete this.* Edit: Whoa, i posted this in the completely wrong thread.

I don't really mind the free movement thing so much, i've found that i've been able to control it just by making sure my guys are always covered by eachother's overwatch states. The AI is definitely aware of when you are in overwatch, and the degree to which you can have overlapping overwatch seems to cause most of the smarter enemies to retreat into cover rather than attack. (Though the more aggressive enemies, like the chrysalids, will still just barrel towards you.) The issue i actually have with that stuff is that it becomes evident that the enemies aren't doing anything at all until you stumble into them and trigger their free movement. It completely changes the tenor of the scouting phase in a battle, there's absolutely no risk of an enemy coming and finding you first. You can basically take as long as you want to carefully explore, since there's no time pressure, so to speak. (Well, terror missions seem to function differently, and those are by far the most challenging missions in the game.) Anyways, I'm just playing through on normal. Things were going poorly for me early on, but around the time i took out the first major alien base i put into motion a plan to get things on track and have generally been pretty much on top of things. (Terror missions seem to be the only thing i still lose guys to, the only real setbacks i've had.) I've been trying to avoid save scumming things, but i find that temptation is too great when i feel like it's a mistake -I- made. I want to give the ironman mode a shot just to have that rule enforced.

So just out of curiosity, what difficulty is everybody playing on and have you been finding it challenging?

Don't be silly, Ghouls & Ghosts is way harder.