I finished the game. But bugs aside, my major gripe with the gameplay concept which makes the game feel alot less X-Com-ish is that most of the tech in the game come from either Phoenix, Jericho, Synedrion or Anu. Most of the tech from either party are practically available from the start, but locked off until they’re shared or stolen.
Even after unlocking, most of the tech revolve around the concept of opportunity cost:
Jericho tech is heavy duty but slow
Synedrion tech is stealthy/fast but weak
Anu tech is more insidious (ie.poison, mind control) but lacking direct damage
Phoenix tech is balanced
So as it turns out. The tech from any of the 4 parties are viable from start to finish. It all boils down to your personal preference and playstyle, down to even your dropships - 6 soldiers, fast travel with Manticore, 7 soldiers, moderate travel with Thunderbird…or 8 soldiers, slow travel with Tiamat. Gosh!! Talk about turning the opportunity cost dial to the max.
So my gripe is, previous X-Com games weren’t quite like that. When you unlocked alien tech, it is better than your existing tech in every way, no downside - everything from your weapons, armor and even ships. That’s where the satisfaction is derived from! After playing 30 hours, you unlock an armor based on alien tech which is stronger AND lighter than your current armor, and it felt gratifying. But here, the sense of gratification isn’t there, because you’re just sacrificing one aspect for another, and most of the tech are available from the start.
Anyone else miss the feeling of the old X-Com games were you felt you literally turned the alien tech against them?
100% agree. This is one thing i missed most. Ressesrching aliens and there Tech to get better weapons and armor. Capture them alive to get even better tech or more Infos and possibilities on the battlefield. I would wish a special weak point which i can aim After a vivisection or more Infos on the battlefield…
And when you reasearched their tech the enemies in old xcom suddenly had more deadly weapons. This was always a shocking Moment when you heard the Sound of a new deadly weapon and see the shot out of the dark
That is true. But enemy here isn’t advanced civilisation which came on Earth with super advanced tech which can be re-engineered and used by humanity. Phoenix Point has different setting. So your complaint is miscalculated here. It sounds like complaint that Half-Life doesn’t have railgun and plasma rifle in the arsenal for Gordon Freeman.
And factions tech has to be balanced and none of them should be superior to the other, because it would mean that players would always choose path of that superior tech/faction.
@Yokes. Yes you are also absolutly right with your points. If you look to the set up of PP i totally agree. But the other point is that research in PP did not give the satifaction to the player like it was in others xcom games. So, if not weapons there should be others things you get to have this satisfaction. Better armor perhaps Made of athrons shield Material. Or a helmet which have a Chance of blocking sirens mind controll. Something like that.
I Think there could be many “half-realistic” cool improvements you could get by reasearching the enemy. These things could work with the PP Setup and also gives this “xcom-reasearch-satifaction-and-fun” to the player.
What people are missing is a progression of the technology and development, not a flavor setting.
Research doesn’t have to come solely from the studying super advanced alien technology. You can have long term scientific projects that can require some materials or prerequisites that could be obtained in missions. Some of that “prerequisites” could be even bought or stolen from other factions.
Factions don’t have to be balanced if you don’t have to align with them, even in the later case you can have an asymmetry that can work as added difficulty level control.
But at the end of the day, PP is very different game to X-Com and has very little relation to it, besides being done by the same designer. The expectations of this being a spiritual successor of X-Com are pretty much misplaced and are result of a marketing.
I’m not bothered about tech coming from aliens, and I think, like Yokes says, it doesn’t really fit the type of alien menace that we’re facing here (or PP’s resources as what is essentially a guerrilla outfit). I’m also not a fan of weapon tiers that give an illusion of progression, I’d rather see weaponry that has adaptive/situational use throughout the game.
And it’s some of that adaptive/situational use that I think is missing. PP research department could be looking at Crabmen and thinking ‘you know what, some kind of shield for our own soldiers might not be a bad idea’, the example above of trying to find ways to resist mind control, tweaking jet-pack use so you could hover for a turn to avoid melee attackers, amplifying sound detection in order to spot enemies in mist, laying down traps, IEDs; that type of thing I think would fit to the game.
I think the OP’s analysis is spot on, but we disagree on whether this is a good or a bad thing.
I like the fact that each Faction adopts and caters for a different play style. Ultimately, it should mean that you can have at least 4 complete playthroughs of this game that will give you a very different experience - 5 if your first (or last) playthrough adopts a mix & match approach.
Where I do think PP is lacking is less in better weapons through Alien research, and more in better information. I find the info provided by Autopsies & Vivisections to be virtually useless - it’s just generic flavour text rather than solid info like HP, trigger radius of abilities (like Hatching or Screaming) etc. So what I’d like to see from our Research is stuff that actually benefits us in the long-term, like specific weak points we could target using the ballistic aiming system, or a visual indicator of trigger ranges on Pandas we have researched, that kind of thing.
Adaptive and situational use requires a notion of intelligence service that would provide you with data on what you might be facing upfront. In X-Com there where no such thing so you would crap the drop ship with the goodies that might be useful. Here we can’t do that, so the only thing left is to carry all these situational weapons in your backpack. Which is what you would do in something like JA2 but it had the whole logistic related to it, like if someone has a specialized weapon like MG, he would carry some PDW for Defence. Here it’s more like let’s put some extra points into strength so my assault can carry extra two rifles with their own specials. This is kind of gimmicky.
I wrote earlier on other topic, but applies here too:
But I would like to see more research that gives me some benefit based on panda abilities. For instance to be able to research tritons’s stealth ability and make module that gives more stealth to soldier. Or to research triton’s silent echo ability to make a module that acts like silencer. Or research that gives me option to make grenades from arthron’s launcher arm.
So I am a bit confused how this would work unless the alien tech is fleshed out more. Yes there are some exceptions.
Tritons use human weapons. Defensive ability to chameleon would be worth it. But “Vanish” ability is effectively identical in impact.
Arthrons use a pincer, better melee available. Grenade arm, comparable to Goliath grenade launcher so no point in researching that. Machine gun - okay that is unique to them, maybe worth researching early on as it is much more accurate than what you will field then. Spitter head - guess that is worth developing because 80 poison damage is a lot.
Chiron - Goo, some goo gun? Mortar Chiron - Scarab is comparable. Single fire mounted weapons are comparable as well, but shoot one projectile rather than 3 at one time.
Siren - injector arm? Not sure that is hyper useful.
I think that the number of things that would logically be reverse-engineerable are very few. But this would be a bigger deal if the amount of usable tech was in line with what X-Com alien’s offered. It’s a little tougher here because the Pandorans aren’t hyper-advanced space fairing aliens, but rather mutations from an alien virus. Their unique tech from a mechanical perspective would be super limited. And a lot of their abilities have comparable ones already in the humans.
Yeah but you could reverse engineer their carapaces and develop new armours, for instance, or harvest their poison glands to coat bullets or weapons, or the scylla brain to develop a mind shield.
Yeah but you could reverse engineer their carapaces and develop new armours, for instance, or harvest their poison glands to coat bullets or weapons, or the scylla brain to develop a mind shield.strong text
Great points. From where I am standing, while the idea is awesome, I think there are so many more things that they need to fix in this game and fleshed out first, though. Like enemy variety and mission variety. But this kind of stuff would go a long way to making the game more fun and interesting.
I’m with @BoredEngineer on this. I can see where people are coming from that the weapons are specialized into their own playstyles and are meant to be viable as part of a single “tier” (except maybe the PX weapons which use tech from other factions’ weapons), but that generally makes research… boring. If there’s no tech progression, only tech alternatives, then tech and research stops being interesting as soon as the player figures out their playstyle - even less interesting if they decide that they like the jack-of-all-trades PX tech that they start with (rather than sacrificing accuracy for damage, or damage for accuracy, or both for status effects).
It would be a lot more interesting if there was an actual weapon/armour tier system which could give the player a sense of progression and gaining power/advantage slowly in the fight against the Pandoravirus. Not necessarily the clearly-delineated tiers such as in FiraXcom, but even just things that actually feel like an improvement/upgrade rather than alternatives/sidegrades:
faction weapons/armour still being specialized, but more clearly upgrades over PX gear (e.g. NJ weapons having less accuracy penalty but the same damage improvements)
making the PX “upgraded” weapons that are researchable a very clear upgrade, like the Gungnir SR (which would be a clear upgrade if virophage wasn’t broken) and doing the same for armour (rather than just optional equipment items)
just giving all factions (including PX) a clear second tier of equipment
I am also with @MichaelIgnotus on the current uselessness of autopsies and vivisections, they only currently provide flavour text and a list of possible mutations (but without any description of those mutations). Getting info like HP or in-mission indicators as mentioned would be very useful and make that research less useless, but I think that something like “Arthron Autopsy: unlocked Armour Upgrade Research” or “Siren Vivisection: unlocked Universal Willpower Stat Boost” or “Triton Vivisection: unlocked Paralysis Damage Boost” would make them even more interesting.
The tiered equipment is what I hated the most from previous games. But, in the same time, feeling of progression is what I miss the most here.
I expect some weapons to be obsolete and ineffective over time because both sides made technological progress (being it engineering or bioengineering). But I don’t feel like laser weapons should instantly make ballistic weapons obsolete and junk, like it was in most of previous games. It seems a bit “sci-fi natural” to me, that being able to produce effective and portable energy source for laser weaponry, could lead to evolution of firearms into rail technology.
I would love to see more damage type variety and more damage type resistances. With ability to scan and scout missions before going rambo on them, you could adapt arsenal to the situation. Something like: “Mission full of gelatinous ugly things? Kinetic weaponry ineffective. But I still don’t have powerful lasers. Incendiary grenades to counter regeneration and lower tier lasers will have to suffice. But ill take a guy or two with rail AR, because scout said there’s chance of highly armored target and laser would be useless”. This is done, to some degree, in an overhauls mods like The Long War to FXCOM1 or X-Division to Xenonauts. Would be great to see it native here.
Would be awesome the weapon branching and diversity to be something much more important than support for different playstyles as it is, more-less, right now.
XDivision mod for Xenonauts addresses these issues by not granting you ability to do an easy overhaul of all equipment. Like you might research a first laser rifle but it will be an expensive prototype and it can’t be upgraded. You might still want to use it on few of your soldiers but economically it’s better to keep researching this branch till you get MK1. Another reason is that any weapon beyond the starting requires components that can be acquired only by completing ground missions and disassembling spoils. Which means that unless you are rolling in components you will have to take a choice of which weapons to upgrade and which teams are going to get it. So the whole upgrade happens over time and cant take few month. Not something that you do overnight in vanilla XCom.
But one can go even further and change research system into something more similar to research in Rule the Waves - you select directions of research and a progress of such research can take few weeks or years, depending on how well it goes, if proper people are assigned, if right resources are dedicated and etc. Meaning that in different campaigns you can have a very different technology trees that effect composition of your fleet. Like one time the battleships might become obsolete before even reaching the level of 15-18 inch guns because the aviation and torpedo research was much more successful. In other campaign you might struggle with being a nation that has bonuses for using U-boats but having a garbage research results in the same area. The same way very poor aviation research can propel all nations into using super battleships in 1960 and not even touching the concept of carriers.
My 2 cents, I don’t really care how it was marketed or if it’s realistic or who decides what expectations I should have. I found the grind to the endgame to be very unrewarding and I think adding in more concrete rewards for the player’s hard work would mitigate it. Working hard early in the game to get to a place where you can finally steamroll the opposition up to the final showdown is proven game design, is it not? Even if we aren’t getting that, at least I’d like to see the stakes rise at the same rate for the player and the aliens equipment wise. There’s a serious lack of that, the rpg elements of soldiers leveling and the aliens getting more armor in response isn’t as fun as an arms race.
I have not read all the comments, but I’m at the Yuggothian thingie, and it feels like it might be the last battle. However, it’s grossly hard, it’s like super hard. But despite that i have come close to the Yuggothian thingie, but I cannot get to close since then I will be blasted with green rocket thingies and loose all my arms and legs, so I have to be quite far away and hope to hit it when it’s not blocking itself with it’s arms.
Furthermore, even though I’m packed with ammo, it’s running out on some soldiers since it’s fucking alot of enemies on this one… so how to beat it.
If i start over, I have lost hours, since it takes many hours to beat this one, but at this point when I’m so close I feel like I will not beat it until I re-do the entire mission ab maybe bring 2 ships and pack even more ammo. The entire game, even on easy is so fucking more hard than any Xcom game in the past, it’s a beast.
Louis, no, the ship only holds 6 and I can never bring 2 ships very far, since they attack my base all the time, if I go with 2 ships somewhere I loose a base for sure. (only have 2 hips in total)
when you heard the Sound of a new deadly weapon and see the shot out of the dark