Greetings,
I just want to provide my (late) feedback on BB5. In short, I feel that the foundations are solid but the content built on top of it which was stated as “feature complete” is shallow or will be hard to balance in only 2 months. Personally, with the development rate I’ve seen on BB5 & other previous builds, I’m expecting more of another 6 months delay to make the game right instead of a December release.
This being said, I’d like to comment on a few topics. I’m going to discard placeholders art & story since I understand those will be replaced on the final release.
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A gun/An ammo. I consider this matter really annoying: Each weapon has it’s own exclusive ammo. You can’t share shells for shotguns or bullets for rifles. This clutter up the inventory for nothing and just increase annoyance for the player. As of now, it’s not something that spice up the game for the player but just a mechanic to annoy. Ammo should be shareable and be handled like fallout or resident evil: One inventory square contains a stack of ammo which can be loaded into a gun. You could also create various types of ammo (toxins, Armor Piercing, etc). Balance between guns could be handled elsewhere (accuracy vs damage vs number of shots). This could also be used to create researches for bigger stacks of ammo or different ammo types. Also, wasn’t Synedrion supposed to have only one single type of ammo (laser)?
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Gun 2 research complete, scrap all Gun 1. New weapons that only differs in small stat increases should replace the previous versions instead of having it’s own section. For example, if you have AR-50s and just developped the AR-51 with +5 in gauss, instead of having 2 guns and 2 ammos types, just swap all AR-50s into AR-51s and keep the old ammo. This will make constant upgrading more streamlined (mk1 with +0%, mk2 with +5% and so on) without cluttering the inventory and/or starting a scrap & build program each time a tech is learned. Same thing with aliens: Claws mk1, mk2, mk3, etc. Armor too could benefit from that scheme.
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Fumble. I’ll rather trade a constant minimal damage roll/awful accuracy/major debuf than a 20% chance of nothing happening.
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Number of shots. Mostly for rifles that have more than 1 shots: There’s potential here to have skills that increase the number of shots fired by salvos.
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Broken guns goes poof. I’ll rather have a permanent debuff for the rest of the fight (minimal accuracy, damage and/or number of shots) than having the gun vanish out of thin air.
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Features of tactical maps. Ok, here’s the part where I feel that 2 months won’t be enough for a good release. So far, I’m seeing “kill target(s)”,“save target(s)” and “reach spot(s)” but I’m not seeing anything else such as “stay in sector”, “stop sector occupation” or other objectives that turn a primary objective into sub-tasks. The “get in sector” that was in BB1 never got upgraded. Also, the maps have zero neutral hazards: No mines, no toxic zones, etc. I really don’t think new objectives could be implemented really soon.
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AI. That thing is hard to improve and with the lack of any other objective than “kill all”, I feel it will stay as is. This means we won’t see any kind of behavior such as “retreat” or “protect”. Also, AI defenders not showing up in BB5 means that “3 way fights” might be toned down drastically or even scrapped in favor of a “tag INACTIVE friendly, now YOU control him”. Remember, “third important player” kind of AI (the Lost & Resistance) only showed up in WOTC for XCom 2, not before. In short, I’d like to see the AI handle more situations but I doubt it will be possible for december.
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Tactical balance. Throwing more enemies and having fights that takes ages to finish isn’t fun. I strongly suggest to cap the number of aliens and give them extra damage output instead. End result is to still make the game hard if needed but without slowing everything down. Also, aliens should retreat when disarmed or when the group is down to 1-2 aliens out of 10. Disarmed aliens running around like headless chickens and bleeding out feels dumb.
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Strategic balance & pacing. This thing will be hard to balance. Serious work will be needed to make sure the aliens & factions are progressing without slowdowns and spikes. Nothing for days and then 5 missions in one hour is an example of annoying pacing. Something like X-time cooldown between geoscape events for aliens/factions would be a good thing to look at.
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Strategic clutter. Small comment about explored scavenging sites and destroyed lairs: They should serve a purpose or just be removed after a while. Also, the “discovered all bases” faction bonus kills a bit of the fun of exploration.
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Soldiers progression is too fast and too short. Classes in PP are half of the XCom ones (they have 2 columns) and most of the skills seems lackluster except a few OP ones which currently benefits from no cooldowns. I don’t see how it will be possible to increase the skill amount, find way to synergise them and balance them in such a short time frame.
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Non-soldiers. Absence of non-combat personnel makes bases & havens feels…empty. It’s like moving a squad of space marines from mission to mission without having something to do non-tactical combat related. I just hope it won’t be like that in the final release…
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Non-combat decisions. So far, it seems that non-tactical combat decisions are inexistent. There’s no situation on the geosphere that makes me think or plan ahead. Base building, exploration, research, manufacturing, nothing much matter so far and I feel that when the min/max formula will be found, it will make each play through the same.
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Alien containment. I feel the game is sitting on a gold mine on this matter. Vivisection should be far more expanded that being only used as a currency maker. Intel on aliens, extracting temporary special buffs, new researchs. A lot of potential there that would make this game stand out since new XCOM’s containment/autopsy is minimal.
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Targetable body parts. Again, a potential here that should really be exploited. For example, research from an autopsy could cause a specific alien body part to be vulnerable to a temporary antivirus which cause said part to break or cause x debuff until the nest change parts. It’s some kind of mechanic that won’t be found elsewhere.
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Vehicles. Seems so far is that their purpose is to act as a replacement for soldiers. Personally, I would like them to be used for special purposes like loading crates or civilians or any other objective that soldiers couldn’t do.
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Air vehicles. They should do more than ferry troops to one combat zone to another. Transporting goods from 1 haven to another or any kind of non-combat duty that help the strategy layer could be interesting.
That’s it for now. The base is good but I don’t feel that BB5 + 2 months of development will be enough with the current pacing. There will be a lot of comparisons with XCom in reviews and so far I can’t feel that PP will have a noticeable amount of different features that will make it stand on it own.