My sole problem with the game are the tactical freezing issues.
Reduced most graphics to low and it’s playable longer now but it still freezes sometimes.
I was thinking the same thing today- game feels like BB6. In no way does this feel like a delivered final product, even with issues/bugs to patch after release. Core systems are still clunky, 3 base classes are boring with no variety even within themselves, and the difficulty spikes completely randomly.
Also, yes, grenade launchers are overpowered in enemy hands, though thanks to the ‘broken limb’ mechanic, which as-is, is a terrible design choice. Eliminating limbs from an enemy is great, but having the same done to you to the point that you can no longer use your primary weapon is very bad game design. Simply put, losing a limb pretty much nullifies your character and makes them useless, which in turn can cost player character lives. The computer can consistently field higher and higher ‘level’ enemies, while the player is seriously set back by the loss of a high level character or two. This is why game systems are ALWAYS skewed towards the player, and not ‘fair’ or even.
‘Lost’ limbs should instead inflict aim penalties or something similar, just like their effects in Fallout. I’ve had multiple occurrences of unexpected crabs with launchers eliminating two or more characters from the fight by double-tapping them with grenades. And no, you can’t always ‘duck under a roof’, in fact you can hardly ever do this. The game does not present you with the tactical options to circumvent such a (frequent) occurrence. Destroying enemy or player weapons should also absolutely not be a thing. Again, this is a terrible limiting factor that can too easily happen. Specially when you consider that on top of these poorly implemented mechanics, you have a cover system that is all but worthless.
I get that there’s an emphasis on realism here, but realism is terrible game design. Sure, the minority will enjoy the experience, while the rest will stop buying the game and its DLC because the game makes ‘fun’ difficult or circumvents it entirely. That’s a good way to have a game financially fail, and the ever-increasing mediocre to negative reviews on gaming websites aren’t helping.
The grenade problem though is symbolic of the greater problem- the core systems of the game aren’t complete. At best, they are 80% there. At the moment the game feels like a mod, or ‘homebrew’ where the creators have some great ideas but don’t really understand design or balance very well and have implemented those ideas poorly. Compare a typical overhaul mod of Firaxis’ Xcom with Long War, and you can see the vast difference in quality and balance.
I am not saying that PP’s creators are not skilled, in fact I suspect that the devs were forced to publish early. I am shelving PP for now, but plan on returning, confident that additional patches will ‘finish’ the core game experience in time.
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I’ve been with PP ever since BB1, and dammit Jim!, I’m not going to jump overboard now! 
Funny things aside, I do find enjoyable participating in PP’s growth, so I’ll continue playing regularly.
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I can only play two hours a day right now, so I don’ have the best experience or knowledge, but even so:
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guys, cut that Manticore cinematic flying to the mission, it feels really weird and it’s not a welcome sight after ten missions and so many loading screens;
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I thought the soldiers would have random stats? Because as I see it, all of them have 180HP, 8WP, so on.
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Not every map has cover or buildings to hide in … and once you go in them, my experience so far is that you may be protected, but you’re severely restricted in what you can do.
And I haven’t yet seen missile launcher for my team, just a high powered but horribly inaccurate cannon (the one you start with) … there is a grenade launcher, but it tends to hit terrain between you and your target (in my experience, I’ve had multiple times where the shot was clear, but it clipped the edge of a building each time) … and it does LESS damage than the other weapons, as it seems to trade damage for AOE.
That the overlord (or spawner or whatever) isn’t immediately apparent and that it will spam high level units, which if you don’t take out you die, is what I feel the complaint is.
Last night, for instance, I decided to take out a nest … took out the 3 headed screamy thing, then started moving forward at maximum speed to find the spawner … then, not wanting to group my party up for AOE attacks, I split around a medium sized obstacle (the LOS on these maps is nasty) … one group ran into a mind control snake that the other group managed to provide fire support for, then we got one of the four legged tank lobbers, which completely disabled one of my guys (didn’t kill him, just knocked out both arms and both legs) before we took him out … then ran into another mind control snake … and another … and then another. All the while being peppered with little guys. The spawner wasn’t sending in continuous waves of little guys that we should, as you say, not waste our time fighting every alien … but the mind control snakes and the tank lobbers that CAN’T be ignored … and that’s what it kept sending at us … again, at the LOWEST difficulty level.
I completely agree with you … there doesn’t seem to be a responsive ‘director’ in the game (thinking of Left 4 Dead / Alien Isolation). Ideally if you manage to keep your entire team alive and keep them equipped with the best stuff, you should be able to stay ahead of their ever increasing curve … while if if suffer expected losses you should be equal to the curve … and if you constantly have bad luck, you’ll be behind the curve.
Instead I think what we get is that you have to be at the top of your game at all times, there is no margin for error, and if you slip even a bit, you’re done for.
I think part of it comes down to a difference in strict simulation vs. responsiveness. In a strict simulation, the game (whatever it is, my thinking comes from mainly a tabletop RPG context) goes on without any response to the player … at month X it deploys alien Y, regardless of whether the player is ready for it. This is, arguably, realistic, as you can’t control the pace of what your enemy is doing … in a grand strategy game, just because you don’t defend the front doesn’t mean your enemy isn’t going to attack there. But much of this game is predicated on being responsive … if you employ certain tactics, it’ll develop units to counter that tactic … but then to stack that on top of a mechanistic, strict simulation seems to be overkill.
I’m not arguing that the game shouldn’t be smart or that it should play to the player’s weaknesses, but that having a system where it both counters your best strategies while blindly increasing difficulty at a regular pace, seems to be disjointed. If the difficulty increase tended to lag a bit, so that if you didn’t progress, it still would, so you wouldn’t ‘rest on your laurels’ … combined with an active response to your tactics, would make for a better balance.
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I’m going to withhold judgement for a bit but yeah, I’m getting the same feeling as you.
I feel like we’re here to test the game for further balancing. I’m getting the impression that the version that gets released on Steam in a year will be the real deal, with everything ironed out.
Overwatch and sniping seem too dominant.
Game difficulty is janky. I’m playing on Heroic and was actually thinking, ‘Wow, it’s pretty comfortable, maybe I should have tried Legendary’. However, I’ve also encountered a few scenarios where things are completely over-the-top punishing in a way that seems to limit player choice/options but in sporadic, uneven ways.
That’s no good. You need a steady consistency. The game needs to be engaging from the beginning, not just be an easy ride for 15+ hours of campaign before going to another extreme and feeling like it’s impossible…and that’s how I feel it’s going. It’s especially important with regards to an Ironman mode.
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I think one of the main issues are the map sizes, which are probably caused by the game being a memory hog. Each map is pretty much like fending off a horde of zombies for a handful of turns (full contact in one or two turns) and then finishing off the stragglers. There’s no tactics or strategy here. There’s not much difference between the last backer build and the release in this sense…not much optimization seems to have been done.
The biggest drawback is clearly the Unity engine or lack of skill by coders. Majority of game issues would be solved by bigger maps, which simply don’t seem possible until something is done about this.
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Couldn’t agree more - looks like Gollum’s precious has turned out to be gold-plated costume jewellery.
- Loading times need reducing and the Phoenix landing scene cut altogether.
- Enemies with no head still fully functional.
- The LOS needs seriously reworking - I was on an upper level crouched down behind a wall, the enemy on the ground managed to shoot me in the chest and I couldn’t get a shot at him.
- Snipers with bionic vision taking me out from the other side of the map.
- LOS indication shows a shot only to find that you can just about see an elbow.
I play games for fun and enjoyment but this is just frustrating - guess I’ll wait for the Steam release; they might have a working version by then.
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One of the main selling points for PP was much bigger map sizes, even supporting 16 man squads. Here’s hoping it was not a scrapped idea.
This is, right now, the major issue with the game. The game revealing a line of sight that doesn’t exist or, even worse, reveals itself to be just a pixel of the enemy’s arm or leg, and as such impossible to hit.
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To my understanding they had to ship it on specific day due to contractual obligations in regards to EGS release. I hope that we see patches and fixes in the near feature. Perhaps it will be in much better shape before Steam release and all who refunded get a much better product than what we’ve got.
It’s me again. I was pretty active on forums until massive disapointment that is BB5 dropped. While BB6 improved many things, there is still a lot to be done.
*Inverse difficulty curve is gone, even equal one is out of the way. Anyone who played any grand strategy will be annoyed at this. I bother myself to get as many labs as possible, train my troops best I can, and enemies are still getting stronger faster than me. THE WHOLE POINT of the X-com genre is that you get stronger and start leveling the play field. Not here though.
*Cheese fest galore. All explosive weapons are absolutely broken. Now, some of you disagreed, but take a look at it this way. If enemy uses one grenade on you, few limbs go out, and losing single arm means no two-handed guns until the end of the map. If enemy uses two, it’s instant death, as almost all of your soldier’s body parts will be disabled, and with damage taken they will die, and I don’t mean “they” as gender-neutral, I mean at least two of your soldiers will die from unpreventable damage. On “plus” side, well, not really real plus, but you know, - and - is plus, you can also cheese it yourself, but you have limited number of grenades, unlike enemy.
*Most of the science locked behind faction politics. Now, from all the lore, it clearly states that phoenix project members are scientists, and NJ even calls them nerds with guns. Yet PP has no decent tech on it’s own and must complete special missions for scraps.
*As for the special missions, they spawn in mostly inconvenient places, for example, I started in Abyssinia, Journal was in Cyprus, and three missions after where all in east Asia and Americas. Also, missions don’t care about anything, you have to beat Siren and Chiron (or something) and Co. to even get Havens shown on a map. That’s it, no tech, no anything. If you want tech, you need to beat double that (yeah, not even trying, they just double the numbers). Although they call them “special” missions, they are anything but. You approach some arbitrary object in arbitrary location, click interact, and then you need to clear out the map.
*Events are the most interesting part of the game, however they, too, are flawed. Instead of rewarding you, or maybe giving you a minor trade off, trade off is higher than gain. Yeah, you gain, +3 with one faction, and -9 with another. This is so the game can shoehorn you into war with all but one factions. What, you tough you can balance diplomacy with at least two? Tough luck.
*Reinforcement system is stupidest thing ever conceived by a human being. Instead of having some semblance semblance of balance, or at least scale, this game throws idea through the window to artificially increase difficulty, fun, immersion and game design be damned. This is most apparent in Nest/Hive missions, which, in contrast to all the others, have no real way of actually reinforcing, so naturally, they reinforce the most. The game spawns 2 enemies each turn, forcing you to take breakneck through gauntlet of unexplored enemy territory, just to reach some arbitrarily placed hatching sentinels. Now, imagine US commander, instead of just blowing up everything, sent 6 marines, with limited ammo, directly into the underground complex to destroy something, while letting enemies enter unimpeded, and also giving no intel to them. He would be shot, even if that is illegal.
*Maps were cited as “procedural generated” which they are clearly not. I won’t go too much into this, you will see it for yourself. They are also not good, as I have mentioned, as many times, enemies are spawned directly next to the object they have to destroy, while you cant even reach them before they destroy it.
*Will Power, my God. It’s strait up magic. I’m not even gonna pretend it is not. For example, the ubiquitous Dash. At the cost of significant willpower (Mana), you move some distance, without spending time. Since V=s/t (in most basic form), this is, by all means, teleportation. They could not be bothered to give your crew skill that allows them to use teleportation device, or something sane, even using astral projection like that one guy from the story, no, they don’t care.
This enough from me, there is plenty of stuff you will see for yourself. Game freezing and loading for extreme times, detecting clicks when I did not click etc. there is all you can eat buffet of bugs.
This is truly the game that just keeps taking.
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That cinematic is the woooorrrssstttt
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