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Rob Zacny

Episode 343: XCOM 2

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Three Moves Ahead 343:

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XCOM 2

It's a full panel tonight as Rob, David Heron, Rowan Kaiser, and guest Jonathan Bolding discuss the newly released XCOM 2. XCOM: Enemy Unknown was a darling of the strategy game space, garnering rave reviews a strong following. XCOM 2 should be a slam dunk, right? ...right?

XCOM 2, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, XCOM: Enemy Within, Invisible, Inc., Darkest Dungeon

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Sounds like some audio that was meant to be cut is instead playing in the background, maybe the original recording. What I assume is the final cut (the polished-sounding version) is at normal volume, but quietly, in the background, some pre-show mic checks can be heard, leading up to the intro (repeated) at 00:59s. The problem persists for the entire duration of the episode. This is the iTunes version. Track doesn't seem to exist on Soundcloud yet.

 

edit: Actually, 3MA has had this problem before, though not this bad. On a couple of past episodes there have been short periods where it sounds like different speakers' audio tracks have gotten out of sync. There will be a period of a minute or two where they're talking over each other, answering questions before they're asked, etc. before it all snaps together again. I've done some podcast editing, so I understand how easy it is for mistakes like this to happen, especially with a complicated workflow. Keep doing what you're doing; the podcast is great!

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No, give it a little bit while I sort out re-uploading. I'll post again when I think I have it in order. What happened is that the Skype track we use to align the audio was left unmuted when I rendered the track.

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Okay, everything should be fixed. If you have a borked version of the show, delete and re-download. All future downloads will have the correct version. It may take a few minutes for iTunes to get the new, correct link in their feed, but on the Idle Thumbs site and my podcast feed I see it as fixed. Sorry for the confusion!

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Audio's good here. 

 

I'm a few minutes in. The argument being made that XCOM EU was some sort of paragon of identifiable strategic goals compared to XCOM 2 being a spaghetti mess is, not to be too hyperbolic, a hilarious heap of rose-tinted bullshit.

 

XCOM: EU didn't encourage experimentation and learning about the strategy layer, it demanded you know its systems or you would fail. It demanded multiple restarts from the average player to figure their base out. I'd put myself in that bucket, average at very best. It compounded that by not letting you pull through by being a brilliant tactician. You could perform flawlessly on missions, but if you didn't have your base figured out you'd lose as the planet started abandoning you. However, once you knew how the strategic layer worked, if you started getting good dice rolls on your missions you were set. I don't yet know if XCOM 2 will allow you to win by sheer force of tactical expertise, but so far I've managed to bumble through what feels like an awful lot more of the game strategically because I'm winning a guerilla ground war.

 

I love XCOM: EU, but the assertion that it onboarded you into understanding the strategic layer smoothly is the literal opposite of the experiences of me, everyone I know, and basically everyone online whose voices I heard who got their hands on the game. It was brutal because you didn't only have to play the game well, you had to play it RIGHT.

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Ahh yeah, great episode. The most fun epsiodes are the ones where everyone has a different view and has at it. A good spread of guests. I tend to find obtuse decisions and save scum promotions to be turn offs so might wait on this one a while. On the other hand I do like being forced to adapt strategy and have different macro strategies available. Is it possible to have one with out the other?

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The game is way more forgiving on the strategic layer than they make it sound. In my first game I had one full squad wipe and a couple more failed missions and didn't have the death spiral and later won the game. You just need to have a good grip on everything that's going on. They make the strategic layer sound like a mess but it is no more complicated than your most basic worker-placement board game.

Also the key to bringing rookies out to train and not getting creamed is giving them upgrades guns and experimental ammo/nades.

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I'm with Badfinger on this, there's a lot of misremembering what XCOM: EU was like on launch day, which is a typical issue with Firaxis games in general because of all the patches and expansions that fix a bunch of things over time. I don't want to defend XCOM 2 too much because there is no question that a lot of important stuff in the game is just not explained at all, and feels like playing a complicated board game whose rules you've only quickly skimmed over only to realize several turns later that there were all these important mechanics you completely neglected.

 

There are a lot of things about the satellite game from EU that were really unclear. Like you need satellite uplinks to launch satellites, but not to build them. And considering the time it would take to perform both those actions you could be playing the game in an extremely inefficient manner. There was also the issue that a lot of important economic resources could only be viewed in the black market screen. That later got fixed in an update, but the original EU experience was rough.

 

Another example of the rose tinted glasses: the tutorial in EU also forced you to get squad members killed. Firaxis seems to really want to telegraph to players that you should expect soldiers to die, so they force that in the tutorial even if it is sub-optimal play.

 

I also think rookies are way less useless in XCOM 2 compared to XCOM 1 just because when you upgrade your guns and armor, everyone gets that gear. In XCOM:EU I found until fairly late in the game I wouldn't have the resources to kit out everyone in my squad, and so the rookies would get the short end of the stick and be stuck with the crappy gear. That's a huge improvement in my opinion.

 

My experience with the strategic layer was a lot like Rob's when I first started playing the game. But now I'm realizing that it is pretty clear that a lot of designers that have worked with GMT games have been working with Firaxis because the strategy layer feels an awful lot like one of the COIN games. And crucially with those games there's a lot of randomness in them because of the card driven nature of the events that happen in the game, and they give you a lot of options about what kinds of resources and advantages you want to pursue, but you do need to figure that out quickly because you probably don't want to waste your time pursuing all those advantages in lieu of pursuing your actual objectives. And similarly there are a couple of different approaches you can take to reach your victory condition even if they aren't telegraphed in discrete types like in a game of Civ.

 

Dave Heron's point that this is a messier design is correct, but I don't think that's a bad thing in this case. That's what most fans wanted: a game that wasn't as pristine and smooth, a game that was a lot fiddlier in a lot of ways (and thus more amenable to modding), and a game with a lot more randomness to it. Firaxis delivered. If they sort out the performance issues for the game in my mind this is clearly the best version of XCOM to play.

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I love XCOM: EU, but the assertion that it onboarded you into understanding the strategic layer smoothly is the literal opposite of the experiences of me, everyone I know, and basically everyone online whose voices I heard who got their hands on the game. It was brutal because you didn't only have to play the game well, you had to play it RIGHT.

 

I agree emphatically. Despite what Rob and Dave say in the episode, the only "simple" decisions for a new player in XCOM: Enemy Unknown are how many satellites to build, where to launch them, and whether you got your base build order right. At any difficulty beyond Easy, a failure to answer those questions correctly means a dead game walking, except you don't know it until the enemy's power curve had outpaced yours or you'd lost too many continents to continue. For all of XCOM 2's egregious failures to explain its basic systems, which you can see me complaining about in the game's thread on this forum, the Avatar Project is infinitely more forgiving than the continents' approval from the first XCOM. A lost continent is lost for good, but even when the Avatar Project is on countdown, barring a total failure to contact territories where retaliatory missions can be taken (as explained by tooltip), you can always recover from any level of mistake, failure, or inaction in XCOM 2. I personally took two months to actually act against the Avatar Project and I'm set to win my first campaign in the next few days.

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This episode felt a bit strange to listen to.  I agree XCOM 2 doesn't adequately explain things (waypoints and los markers should have been in the tutorial specifically).  However my main complaints have nothing to do with the strategic layer of the game, which is mostly enjoyable.  I feel that the addition of concealment is kind of half baked.  In the later stages of the campaign I would frequently kill entire groups of aliens before they got a chance to act.  While that is satisfying once, it quickly becomes monotonous as every battle ends up playing out exactly the same.  It doesn't help that certain class combinations seem ridiculously powerful and a lot of the level up perk choices are basically no brainers.  I don't think I'm alone in this either as I've read multiple comments on other sites saying that people weren't aware of what attacks some of the later aliens used, simply because it becomes too easy to kill them before they are able to respond.

Also as an aside I miss MECs and I really dislike that they reduced them to what amounts to an extra grenade.

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Have to agree with the excellent posts by Badfinger and Sclpls.

One of the panellists shares my view in that there was "one path to victory" in the original game but what Xcom2 offers is huge variety and choice.

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Good episode!

 

While I do agree with some points made about confusion and lack of explanation of certain elements, I think, much like it was said in the show toward the end, that despite that, all the new stuff the game does make it worth and much better and the most issues could be simple solved by small adjustments.

 

The most curious thing is how compared to Beyond Earth and its last expasion, XCOM 2 not only does really try new things (even if some of them might need adjustments or clarifications)  but it is rich in flavor and design, while Beyond Earth don´t tried new things (it just follow civ 5)  and it design is very dry.

 

I too agree a lot with Badinger and Sclps.

 

In the original game (94) strategy layer was really not informative about the sudden difficult spike you could reach nor informed on what you actually need to do, it was very easy to suddenly find yourself facing sectopods, etherals and other stuff early on, with no way to fight back, let alone know that you need to capture a alien with psi power to have acess to them (even if you know isn´t likely the have the right chance to catch on, when I played I was luckly that the last sectoid attacking my base was the one with psi powers and the situation allowed me to try catch him). The newer XCOM campaign was good but very linear and mostly times you are always doing the same things, XCOM 2  is way more flexible, either in ways to win and how to recover, combining a bit of the 94 xcom random elements and the more linear of on the first one done by firaxis.

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Funny how you guys mention Civilization 5 Brave New World multiple victory conditions as an example of additional content being important. 

 

Because BNW is a great example of additional content for content sake. And one of those unnecessary things not affecting anything and just being there is XCOM squad. It's an updated paratrooper unit, but it's so late in tech tree you won't see it in action unless this is your goal. No succesful strategy is ever concerned with existence of this unit. And there's other stuff as well, of course, like Archaelogy and other late-game prolonging stuff.

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Wow, I just got to the end, where Dave calls XCOM 2 a "bad game" that he plays because he's "dumb" and "flawed." That is, uh...

 

Honestly, as I said in another thread, there are some Three Moves Ahead episodes, especially ones where Rob as host really doesn't take to a game, that are classic examples of missing the forest for the trees, as one or more panelists get totally lost down the hole of listing every single little way that the game doesn't work for them, without putting forward a coherent critique of the game as a work or letting other panelists add their two cents in any other way than asking them, "How could this specific design choice possibly be defensible?" The last episode like that, at least the last one that was as bad as this, was Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion, but here it's made egregiously worse by all hosts (except Rowan, by turns) totally forgetting how it was to play the 2012 game at launch. Seriously, "There was a right answer to this mission and I just didn't get it" was one of the things said about XCOM 2 in contrast to Enemy Unknown, minutes before and after copping to "move forward in a loose cluster and end every turn in overwatch" being the only way to play Enemy Unknown well.

 

Dissonant criticism like that is what makes this such an odd episode to listen to... Between them, Rob and Dave's perennial complaints are "there are too many choices in XCOM 2"  and "there is a correct choice in XCOM 2," both of which are legacies of how the punishing linearity of the first game taught its players to play more than the actual reality of the sequel's broader design. As Jonathan points out, there is a tangible split on the strategic layer between running an area-control take-every-mission strategy and running a leaner use-last-mission's-rewards-to-equip-the-next strategy, and I've seen players succeed with both. On the tactical level, there are very few instances of lemon choices among soldier skills (every class has a dichotomy that allows for specialization in one or a mix of both: sniper/gunslinger, infiltrator/assassin, support/demolitionist, healer/debuffer). I've been looking, because the game didn't grab me immediately, but I haven't been able to find a way that the game doesn't empower players infinitely more than the first game. The only problem, and I grant that it's a big problem, is that it does a spectacularly poor job of explaining the size and shape of the decision space: that the strategic layer has these nodes for resources, missions, and area control that you can ignore or exploit in accordance with a non-totalizing strategy; that some missions can be blitzed rather than requiring scorched earth; that the Avatar Project is as easy to roll back as completing a single story mission successfully and therefore that squad wipes don't put you behind a power curve in the same ways as in the first game.

 

Really, the biggest flaw of XCOM 2 is that it doesn't explain how it's different from XCOM: Enemy Unknown, which leaves proponents of the first game to assume that it's trying to be like Enemy Unknown and just doing a bad job of it. I was kinda hoping that this episode would dig beyond that surface impression, but no such luck. Maybe they'll revisit XCOM 2 when an expansion comes out and time will have colored their memories of it as much as it did for Enemy Unknown.

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Wow. It's not often I listen to a 3MA podcast and profoundly disagree with the main conclusions of the panel (well, most of the panel) while agreeing with the vast majority of the observations made during the episode! At times I seriously wondered if we'd all been playing the same game or i have some weird copy that seemed to be using the same mechanics but had totally different outcomes.

 

The thing that made my jaw drop was David Heron's statement that "everything in this game apart from Armour and the Support Class is a step backwards from XCOM 1" - I have never heard anything on 3MA that I've disagreed with more. Having said that, I completely agree with Rob and David's comments that the strategic layer in those early stages of the game is a mess and almost willfully goes out of its way not to explain it's mechanics to the players. However after 30 hours of playing (One failed attempt at Commander difficultly where I kept getting absolutely trashed in a plot mission just after I'd unlocked the second tier weapons, and one on Veteran that's progressing fine despite the myriad mistakes I've made throughout this play-through) and in the end I concluded that although the game really doesn't explain anything to the player it's really not that hard once you've got into the mid game to work out both what you should be doing, and how you should be doing it. Considering how many games spoonfeed their players these days in exactly how to play the game I'm surprised at the amount of negative comments about it to be honest - yes, at first it's a mess, it actively hampers the player and it's really not well explained at all (both on the strategic layer and the tactical layer) on the other hand it's really not that hard to figure out once you've played it into the midgame or so, and more crucially (and the part that worries me more than a little so far) the game is more than forgiving enough to let you get away with it for a very long time indeed.

 

Now I think that's an improvement on XCOM 1 (Firaxis XCOM1, not the microprose original) in that it allows choice. XCOM 1 greatest failing was always that the Strategic layer was about working out the optimal path - and you had to work out that optimal path because if you didn't you'd fail, especially on Classic or Impossible. There was only one way to complete the base build and approach the high level game - get your satellites up, build an uplink and a generator and then the OTC once you had a soldier at the right promotion level. After that it was a rush to capture a outsider, and get laser weapons and armour researched so you could hit the alien base before the global panic levels got away from you. that was it. Once you'd got through the alien base successfully you'd only fail if you;d really cock things up on the tactical level and suffer a couple of squad wipes. But really that was it - get through that gate of assualting the alien base and winning and then you were just on that long victory march everyone was talking about. Enemy Within tried to shake that up by seemingly adding choice in what to build at the start of the game, but really it didn't becasuue it never adjusted the economy of the game to allow you to build that much stuff. And of course if your steamvents were on the bottom level you'd just restart your game anyway.

 

XCOM 2 I think does away with all that and clearly is trying to allow you to choose how to proceed - or at least allowing variations on how you build that "optimal" path. Whether it's building a conventional squad or rushing Psyonics, how you expand your network is up to you (that avatar doomsday counter not with standing - why it rushes up so fast and then goes incredibly slowly is really a strange design decision) - both in the methods you have to build and upgrade the rooms you can construct - and more importantly I don't think it really matters all that much how you do it. What it is doing is taking Sid Meier's "ever turn should end with an interesting choice" maxim and cranking it up to 11 - both in what you can do on the map and what you can do with the Avenger. It's a shame that (in my experience) it really doesn't last into the later stages of the game, but it is much more a Firaxis game now than XCOM 1 ever was, and it extends into the tactical layer as well.

 

Because the Tactical game is a massive improvement on XCOM 1 on every single level. It really is. It does away with the optimal (there's that word again) gameplay style of "creep forward in overwatch" and forces you to make decisions. It's no fluke that the best missions in XCOM:EW are the Newfoundland Cryssalid infestation, and the mission on the dam to rescue the french woman, both of which force you against a timer.  To their great credit Firaxis recognised that from the outset and have designed the tactical levels of XCOM 2 accordingly. My favourite mission type is the "snatch the Advent VIP and escape" mission which are almost cinematic in how they play out. How I'd love a replay function in the game that allowed those missions to be played out in realtime once you'd finished - desperate dashes to the evac point with overwatch shots coming in from all directions, blowing out the sides of buildings to give yourself an escape route, noble last stands of single soldiers to allow their squadmates to get out - I've had them all and they are all completely brilliant experiences. How on earth anyone can think that is step backwards from XCOM 1 I genuinely do not understand.  Again it doesn't explain the little things that make a huge difference which meant I really struggled at the start (like flashbangs breaking Sectoid mind control abilities, or that pressing Control and right clicking allows you to dictate the path of your soldier through the map - man I wish I'd known that much earlier in the game) but like the strategic layer you work it out eventually.  

 

Yeah it's got it's problems - stun lancers are just a little overpowered arriving so early in the game, especially with vipers appearing to be able to grab people through multiple solid walls, and it's bugs for me make playing it in Ironman mode unthinkable (I've had far too many instances where Soldier turns have ended when they've just moved once - usually when I'm flanking someone ready to shoot them - and when buildings collapse I've had soldiers falling down and getting stuck in the map unable to move. Not good when it's an evac map) but everything else is just a massive improvement on the Firaxis original. The soldier synergies are so much better as well, and they level really well with the enemies you face on the later stages of the game.

 

I guess it just goes to show just how different people can have different experiences from the same outlet. But seriously this game is fantastic. I completely agree that it needs some serious patching and a much much better tutorial, but it's not hard to see past all that the longer you play it and the more you get used to it and how it's working.

 

I love it. I can easily see it becoming my favourite game. ever. 

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What a hot topic.

 

I think XCOM 2 is a lot of fun but I still struggle to understand what's going on with the economy. The game is still way to buggy to attempt an ironman run but hopefully they will roll out some patches soon.

 

RE: The Economy. Maintaining a steady stream of supplies seems to be the most difficult task. There are so many different items and weapons you can buy this time around and definitely not enough supplies to manage them. Playing on anything above rookie it seems like you run out of money really fast. Gotta get those supplies.

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I was also shocked at how much the panel seemingly hated the game. The rose tinted googles for XCOM EU is bizarre. I thought it led to a terrible discussion of the game, it felt like it was people who had played about 5 hours discussing it. They picked on the tiniest of things and blew them up like they were the most important thing ever.

 

I've put about 30 hours into the game, I've never completed an XCOM game before and I'm about to start the final mission and I have never restarted this campaign. I also have a half filled Avatar countdown. At one point my Avatar countdown was at 11 and I was certain it was Game Over but I pulled things back. It felt like many of the panel restarted as soon as there was any sort of set back because that's what you had to do in XCOM. You don't in XCOM 2, things might look grim but it's definitely possible to pull it back. It's not perfect and they touched on some genuine problems(hacking is a waste of time imo) but they got lost in the noise of "XCOM 2 is a bad game.".

 

I agree that the game is incredibly lacking in polish and some of the bugs are very annoying. Vipers totally don't follow the rules and there's been plenty of times I've had the enemies blatantly cheat(moving, shooting, moving again) none of which I think is intentional. The game just needed another few months to polish all of these things up.

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I agree that the game is incredibly lacking in polish and some of the bugs are very annoying. Vipers totally don't follow the rules and there's been plenty of times I've had the enemies blatantly cheat(moving, shooting, moving again) none of which I think is intentional. The game just needed another few months to polish all of these things up.

AAA games should not lack this much polish at launch.

I feel like most of the criticism was for the strategic layer, which still is the weaker portion of the game. I am still enjoying the missions, especially since I installed the "Stop Wasting My Time" mod.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=620600092&searchtext=time

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AAA games should not lack this much polish at launch.

I feel like most of the criticism was for the strategic layer, which still is the weaker portion of the game. I am still enjoying the missions, especially since I installed the "Stop Wasting My Time" mod.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=620600092&searchtext=time

 

I think there's probably a complex story behind the current state of the game. Someone on the Steam forums mentioned that there's a "fast load" option that's commented out of the .ini file "by request of the art director," so it sounds like some of the game's technical woes at launch are the result of the creative and technical teams clashing and the former winning out.

 

Overall, a lot of this game's first impression seems emblematic of "new" Firaxis: the shaky technical launch of Civilization V meets the patchy documentation, tutorialization, and UI of Civilization: Beyond Earth...

 

I've put about 30 hours into the game, I've never completed an XCOM game before and I'm about to start the final mission and I have never restarted this campaign. I also have a half filled Avatar countdown. At one point my Avatar countdown was at 11 and I was certain it was Game Over but I pulled things back. It felt like many of the panel restarted as soon as there was any sort of set back because that's what you had to do in XCOM. You don't in XCOM 2, things might look grim but it's definitely possible to pull it back.

 

I got that sense, too. The sheer number of times that Rob especially said some variant of "...and there's no way I was going to come back from that" had me wondering if he even tried with most of them or if he assumed (not without reason, given that they're games in the same series) that it would probably be as impossible in XCOM 2 as it was in Enemy Unknown.

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Someone on the Steam forums mentioned that there's a "fast load" option that's commented out of the .ini file "by request of the art director," so it sounds like some of the game's technical woes at launch are the result of the creative and technical teams clashing and the former winning out.

Damn it. If there were an option for a static load screen instead of the seamless 3D skyranger transitions, I'm sure my laptop would be a lot happier. The way they did it is cool in theory, but it takes so ridiculously long.

 

Thanks to the current state of the game, I've stopped playing entirely, and I'm not going back until some patching happens. Maybe I should see if I can get a refund in the meantime, in case they never sort it out.

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I do think that flaws such as camera glitches, frame rate dips, long load times etc should absolutely be criticised (particularly as they were so prevalent in the previous game and were the devs were well aware of how irritating they were to the player base).

However, XCom2 is such a huge improvement in all other respects over its predecessor that it's blindingly obvious. Just consider everything that has been added; new classes, skills, customisation, modding support, hacking, new and improved guerilla strategy, procedurally generated maps - this game leaves 2012's offering in its dust.

That's what's so odd about the conversation here. I got the sense that the panellists all wanted to play on ironman from the start without investing the time to learn the game's systems and were then pissed off when the Inevitable wipes came.

For strategy gamers well-versed in spending many hours with a game and learning it's nuances, this mindset of short-term gratification really surprised me.

In my view the game is amazing. It needs a little tweaking and a few mods but in 6 months I think we'll regard Xcom2 as the one of the best 4 or 5 games out there.

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