XCOM1&2 Normal difficulty doesn’t feel like a hand holding, and I rarely see a game so different than predecessors which doesn’t help the discovery and the learning.
It’s no RPG with radar, exclamation mark and interrogation mark, one choice dialogs, straight corridor exploration, a global map showing automagically where you are exactly, and so on. It’s just a tactical game with some global management strategy aspect. Those games have rarely hand holding, sure Fireaxis did it for some Civ, but not the XCOMs.
You have higher difficulties for extreme challenge on all aspects, management, roster building, squads design, and tactical combats. Sorry but a difficulty named Normal doesn’t hint that at all.
EDIT: Mmm ok for you rules must be hidden and discovered yourself? Hidden mechanisms are part of difficulty design, it’s up to dev to tune that, and to player to give a feedback, believe that XCOM1&2 shows everything is wrong, it’s just an appearance.
So let say the question is if it is fun to hire a recruit then search how equip and then discover quite later that you have a long road before to give him any weapon. Sorry but on that OP is right in my opinion. Now how fix it is delicate. In my opinion all classes should be able to use some base weapons and ammo you can find, it’s just too weird to hire a “no weapon” recruit, same for armors.
Again, the FiraXCOMs were dumbed down and very hand-holdy compared to the original X-COMs. This game feels like it is splitting the difference. You’re entitled to your opinion, and to you, you don’t like having to discover mechanics and learn as you play. But don’t bash a game for making a different design choice, when this is exactly what some people enjoy playing. Minecraft didn’t have an extensive tutorial explaining everything you can do with redstone, you had to either experiment yourself or go on forums/wikis to find out what you can do. Many people enjoy the way Phoenix Point feels experimental like that. I didn’t know I could steal a faction’s airplane until I saw the option in game. I saw I had a plane with 6 space, but many missions allow 8 or more, and until I stole a Tiamat, I didn’t know how to increase the number of soldiers I could bring to a mission, other than sending 2 planes. That’s fantastic being able to discover that in-play. I spent lots of time in my first few playthroughs making sure I had an empty space on my recruiting plane, cause I thought you had to recruit into your plane. Only recently did I discover you can recruit with a full plane and the extra soldier goes to one of your bases (randomly?). That’s awesome that the game didn’t give me a tutorial laying that all out for me, but let me have my own misconceptions and figure things out during play.
Complains about too much handholding in modern games, praises game for telling him that he can steal vehicle…
Old X-com was made in the era when games came with a manual, here you go, enjoy the read:
Now games come with pretty scatches if you pay extra 20$ but can’t be bothered to not rely on wikis or YouTube videos to explain how it’s meant to be played.
That’s because at BB5 times we complained enough about how you had to have a spare space in vehicle to pickup a guy and bring him to base.
I mean, I played the backer builds, maybe that’s where I got the idea I needed a space free in my plane. And I agree, more games should come with manuals. Less games should have 1 hour long tutorials that script the first several missions/turns and force you to leave your guy out of cover to get blown away when you can see from the basic game mechanics that it’s a bad idea. FiraXCOM 2 is the biggest offender of this in recent memory, outside of Bethesda games. And FiraXCOM 1 actually gives you a mechanical reward for sitting through their shitty 30 minute tutorial!
Devs know that players don’t read manuals anymore. Devs know that you can’t show/teach all aspects through tutorials, because people forget or don’t understand information provided out of context. Throwing a metric ton of tutorials at players is pretty much useless, not only it will have a negative effect on their enjoyment, they won’t remember much anyway. This is why it’s important to present information clearly, like you don’t need to make a whole tutorial on how to buy equipment if interface that does it is clear and unambiguous. The issue is that designing said interfaces in such a way is a lot of work that goes through multiple iteration. That’s what polish is.
We get it, the game is not finished, we provide feedback on what we find frustrating or what we think is not fun. Figuring out gameplay mechanics is pretty much universally fun, this is proven. But figuring out a busy work, is not all that fun and can feel as a waste of your time. Like sending your vehicle to a mission in old X-Com and getting a message that it doesn’t have enough fuel to reach target, few kilometers away from it.
The discovery is fun when you see that it opens new opportunities and gameplay mechanics. It’s not fun to discover that you actually need 3x more resources and time to hire someone than what you thought it is. I hope this makes it clear.
Perhaps I’ll give an example of how this is handled sometimes. There is this crazy game called Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead, it’s a survival roguelike in post apocalyptic world. There are no tutorials or manual, you pretty much have to go through a series of youtube videos and wiki articles to survive for more than a few days. So game mechanics can be as contrived as you can imagine, but they are not. I had many runs where for some reason I was mind bend on finding a kettle or a pot, so I could boil some water and make it safe to drink. I was literally 40 hours into playing this game to accidentally find that you can boil water in an empty tin can… It’s logical right? Why didn’t I try it before? Because playing games for 30 years of my life, tough me to forget about expecting game mechanics to work as something would work in real world. Because so many games are based on meta rules and mechanics more similar to board/card games instead of being based on the rules of the world that game itself established. It’s easy to come-up with new rules and features but it’s much harder to make them not contrived or arbitrary.
I didn’t noticed, and in fact an old manual probably include more explanations and more hints than new XCOM have in game. Anyway, example of hand holding in new XCOM please.
I don’t see at all.
I’ll pick another example of another old turn based shooter game, because I played it recently. Jagged Alliance 1:
When I need hire a mercenary I see everything, everything has some explanations, you see all skills, and details, only hidden details are hidden.
Manual is explicit about knife use, for water.
Any item type is explained in manual and in game if I remember well.
The problem with comparing this to other X-COM titles is that this one does things so insanely different that you can’t compare them. In the OG X-COM games, yes, your new recruits showed up empty-handed. But you could buy weapons for them for almost nothing, and they arrived quickly. In the new XCOM games, you have an infinite supply of weapons and all of your soldiers have them by default. In PP, you can only make ONE weapon at a time, ONE piece of armor at a time, and if you only have one base going, it can take a month to spit out all the equipment a new recruit needs. That’s insane. On top of that you have the Berserkers which are only profficient with melee weapons, but you can’t get melee weapons from anywhere other than Anu.
Thankfully there are a couple of people looking into removing this arbitrary BS from the game via modding. Just waiting for them to finish it up and never worry about it again. I HATE having to play XCOM games on anything other than hardest difficulty, it’s just not a challenge.
does nobody uses non-proficient weapons? i always give pistols to heavy, and rifles to snipers, sniper rifles to all support classes, proficiency or not, that penalty is not so big anyway
I do it only when a soldier has a broken arm, and only sometime. Plus a few rare time from a weapon picked on ground or container. So only during a combat. No idea of the penalty. Not sure the extra carry weight worth it.
This is from the game manual PDF file. Nice info, though it is wrong stating higher difficulty levels get armour and weapons.
There are four main difficulties in Phoenix Point. While it is
recommended for starting players to play at VETERAN, if you decide to
challenge yourself you can replay the game at a higher difficulty.
The higher the difficulty the less the starting attributes and equipment
will be.
DIFFICULTY STRENGTH SPEED WILLPOWER STARTING EQUIPMENT
ROOKIE_____20________ 14_____ 9________ Weapons Equipment Armor
VETERAN___ 18________ 14_____ 8________ Weapons Armor
HERO______ 16________ 14_____ 7________ Weapons Armor
LEGEND____ 14________ 14_____ 6________ Weapons Armor
HMMMMM may have been (or should be) the case, but I have received elite recruits with partial armor/weapons at Veteran (i.e., normal). I just got a Priest recruit with nothing (no armor, no weapons, no ammo). The latter was on Rookie (Easy).