A little help with the narrative

Here is a thought…

One of the big complaints with PP is that lack of engagement with one’s troops, as they are little more than placeholders with weapons…

Why not introduce some scripted characters with their own unique histories and characteristics… the missions leading to the discovery of said individuals could be as diverse as raiding a secret genetics lab, to breaking a dissident out of prison…

This not only has the potential of creating a host of new missions, but would result in characters that once lost could never be replaced… creating the kind of connection to our pixxled heroes that is sadly lacking…

While we are at it, something of the kind could be used to create an avatar for the player… something of the ilk was used in XCOM 2, but a little thought here would produce a unique twist even if it is a somewhat borrowed concept…

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I wonder where are those personal stories for soldiers which were worked on by the writers. Another thing missing in full release.

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This seems to me would easily integrate itself into the game, add a plethora of new missions, and actually give us a personal stake in our men…

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Phoenix Point - Lavecon 2018 http://youtu.be/7tVROgW28IU

I also counted on

  • Tactical battles can contain several stages: change the goals, place, number and sides of the conflict.

Let us say “Scavenging Site + Ambush”

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This was beautiful time when imagination could take us where devs didn’t. :wink:

Or perhaps a time when design/development took lead over project management chopping blocks. :stuck_out_tongue:

Very little seems to point to things being a case where the developers decided “Ok, We aren’t going to do this. And we won’t do that either”, heck to this day the games main webpage still advertises various elements to the game that never made it into 1.0… it really does feel like development wise there was (Is?) a team still eager to deliver what they spent those years aiming for, but above them was a layer that disregarded all of that and pushed things in a direction to simply get whatever could be wrapped up together, pushed out the door… maybe even telling themselves that “We can do the rest later” which if remotely close to the case is just weak justification for what would have been a massive lapse in project management decision making.

But like I mentioned in another thread, unless Gollop or someone else heavily involved in the various layers involved in managing the project decides to do a public and frank post-mortem write-up, then we’ll never really know what really happened and the reasons behind it.

‘Something’ definitely did happen… there’s really no decent alternative to attribute what we saw happen during the last year leading up to release. But it could be any number of things.

Soon we will know about the future. Believe in the best.

I hope that if they do something like this it will be in some DLC, so that players can choose not to have that content.

Basically for the same reason I don’t like the idea of an avatar for the player, as we already discussed here There is no there, there

That would be nice to put randomly as bio for the soldiers, provided they have many of those stories. Or otherwise integrate into the lore.

They should. That is what writing contest was for. To give soldiers personal stories. There should be also mechanic supporting mental condition of soldiers. I also expected that personal perks will be attached somehow to those stories and soldier conditions… But now we have random soldiers with no background.

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I think one of the saddest (or most infuriating) stories of cut content is Xcom Apocalypse, because the game that was envisioned not only didn’t get made, but now can’t be made at all because it would be so at odds with the market.

On the other hand, not at all content cutting prior to release is dictated by resources/market. Some things just can’t be made to work well enough, or to work well enough with other things.

What I am most interested in is what happened with Panda evolution. Was it attempted? Or maybe it didn’t work in internal testing? Or it worked but not well enough?

I hated the faction characters from x-com…