While I agree with you I have to comment on this. The learning curve is typically related to understanding how game systems work, not how to orchestrate them into the most optimal way. Like a steep learning “cliff” of Dwarf Fortress is directly related to a large amount of game mechanics that you need to be aware of to be able to play the game at all. From this point of view, the learning curve of PP, for anyone who played TBT games before, is rather small. But when it comes to “how you should play the game in proper way” it’s a completely different story. Yes, players complain because in the middle of the first campaign they realize that this is not a strategy game but a game of using specific abilities in specific chains to solve all problems. The fact that a random battle with 8 level 1 soldiers and 8 level 7 soldiers is nothing a like, is not a difficulty issue but a bad design. This is like if in a racing game, on your final maps you have to open/close doors of the car to improve cornering while doing a karaoke.
The same. I hope to be pleasantly surprised and rediscover this game in a year or two.
I would love to play that game! 
Because nerfs of last patch will change anything to that? Nope.
At worse more player will have learn manage Scylla how I do most often, ignore them as long than possible, until focus on kill and anticipate fragmind stuff.
Argue on reading is like argue on let’s play, sorry but it’s a wrong way. You think different, ok we agree to disagree.
Omen is still probably (obviously) right a lot of complain are related to leaning curve, and too different mechanism than previous similar games played. It’s just one part of the problem, there’s still something wrong in difficulty management, at least before last patch.
Don’t know if such exist but there is this one:
Which is a brilliant little thing created from “why not” principle.
Yes absolutely agree. This is the reason why perks/abilities cannot be powerful. It introduces all sorts of problems and inconsistencies with the overall game design and lowers replayability since the latter will get reduced to finding the ‘correct’ skills and combinations.
Exactly. I’ve enjoyed early builds of PP way more than what we where getting at the end. IMHO there is not point in some of the mechanics now (like ballistics and cover) because of what game essentially became with addition of some of the abilities and other changes. This is why I don’t think it’s possible to fix it by only changing some stats or having better scaling of the enemy spawns. The game needs to decide first what it wants to be and then clearly communicate it from the first minute of gameplay. If it’s suppose to be a super hero power fantasy then you should start with a small team of super-heroes and then look for new members. If you are suppose to grow your power slowly, then this has to be reflected in the gameplay by incremental small increase of the effectiveness of the team. Not by giant leaps and complete change of strategy just because some of your guys can now dash and quick aim.
Dash and Quick Aim are available very very fast.
The super hero vision collides with games as Final Fantasy Tactics, yeah characters will become more powerful than any Marvel or DC super hero, but they don’t start as one, and nobody ever complained on that. I suspect it’s more a cliché and expectations coming from usage and traditions in a sub ganre.
I don’t see any problem here. But auto scaling has serious problems, but different topic.
I am in the middle ground here. I have completed all the old games, some on Legendary. Original Xcoms and even one of the UFO series (can’t remember which one now) were all kinds of fun. I found the FiraXcom games very fun but at times a little too easy. I thought it started going the other way with Long War mod because mechanics were introduced and enemies buffed to the point where everything took too long. I know…it’s called Long War. Here is the thing, I really like the strategy layer / factions / story of this game, but find it too tedious and not rewarding enough in general as I go through.
Part of the reason is the bugs and part is the difficulty curve. Lair missions without extreme exploits just take too freaking long. Even with extreme exploits, they take too freaking long. Here is an example. Bring regular crew to lair with good mix of soldiers. Have a Infiltrator / Assault, RB Sniper with Jet Pack, Technician, Priest, regular assault. Not all maxed out. Run into map with two artillery Chirons and no pathing. I spent twenty minutes going through the map before making a single move trying to find a path / places to blast through. Then I settle in to figure it out. In order to get jet pack over reliably need to take out all the artillery, the 3 screamers I can see and try to lure out the sirens I can’t see. It took many hours and I got the satisfaction of figuring out how to do the mission without losing soldiers and save scumming. To me, that is just too long and late in the game the lack of reward is just annoying. Further, these maps and situations have appeared many times. Are these maps “bugs” or design features? I want the story to unfold faster. Then there was the bugged Moon Defense map where I couldn’t even bail as only 1 of my nine man squad could move. WTH? Then I can’t figure out how Virophage weapons work so that “reward” is just annoying. So I am not upset about the “nerfs” much except that they make the game even longer and less rewarding. Please, make it less of a slog, and if you don’t do that, more rewarding.
Wait Virophage isn’t pure damages added only against aliens (and perhaps humans with mutations)? Mmm what’s sure is the Virophage SR is as good than piercing SR against armor, and quite better without armor. It’s the best SR but for range and precision aspects.
For some players there’s a clear problem with too many research steps and not enough special missions, but a special mission is a lot more time of dev. There’s problably something to improve here.
About diversity, LW2 is no match and become repetitive a lot sooner, for XCOM1&2 they don’t just because a campaign can be quite shorter. Otherwise they become repetitive for a long campaign quite before LW2 and a long time before PP.
This is a good thread topic 
My short answer is ‘a human opponent’. No AI is ever going to truly provide a challenge that suits everyone in a game of this complexity. If that’s not available, then an AI that behaves in as human a way as possible is my 2nd best option; I’d prefer an AI that is being smart in using strategies over just more enemies, more HP, more special abilities all of which act as a substitute for that truly smart play.
I think Snapshot got a lot close to that smart AI with Chaos Reborn that in PP, though to fair it was a simpler game and the AI was still doing some dumb stuff that you could exploit (it really struggled with holes in the map for instance), but at least it felt that it was close to making best use of the tools that it had.
But when playing PvP the human opponents were at lot more capable, if you also put some AIs opponents on the map they were just cannon fodder most of the time.
It’d be interesting to see data on that, I wonder also how disproportionate that minority was in backing the game given who it’s been developed by.
That’s my typical experience with PP since BB5 - at some point you are just “This again? Do I want to waste another half an hour on a mission that has no impact on anything besides giving me some scraps?”. That’s typically where another campaign just ends and I don’t play it anymore till I get an ich for TBT. The larger effect is that now I’ve tried 3 different mods for OpenXcom, did another beta campaign of Xenonauts 2, watched some X-Division and considering fixing resolution issues in JA2 1.13 to try it again. All of these games have issues, but they get abandoned long after the desire to play TBT is satisfied. The PP and XCom are exceptions that get thrown away to play something else in the genre instead.
There where some numbers floating in past. For a reboot of JA2 they looked promising enough for the devs to consider working on the game at all. The issue is that while you might get something like 100k maybe 200k (with good marketing) of potential customers, the development effort and resources needed can be used to make 2 games for much wider audience. So you can’t really do this as a professional business, your goal has to be delivering a specific game for the sake of it or praise and glory from relatively small group of people. At the same time, if you are willing to do this, you can make a new original game and avoid all potential issues with fans that might expect something different or comeover with some preconceptions.
Great comment. PP is less repetitive than LW2 and much better. I still believe the underlying game is great. Just fix the balance issues and bugs and see where we are at. Once that happens, we’ll have a better idea about how tedious the game actually is. Honestly, I am pretty optimistic that this will become a classic game.
At very best JA2 sold 300K units, it was 1999 and for the time it was a fair success for an AAA game very ambitious. Nothing big or even noteworthy.
The problem is it was in a time anti TB, but at XCOM release it wasn’t different.
TB is a so complicated topic, can it sell enough for real AAA releases and without too many compromise. That’s a full topic related to playing education, life rush increase, video games as an adrenalin drug, time to play, other genres competition.
I was believing that the industry banned TB because of series of TB half disaster, and JA2 300K is part of it. So TB evolution get stopped, many players never learned TB, and this build an ignorant population not educated to know have fun with TB.
But I think it’s wrong, there isn’t a huge pool of players avid to play TB games, only in the strategy category and even them with real time approach of grand strategy.
PP project is a rather unique project, and I don’t think it can target XCOM1&2 success because (thanks for it) they refused replace the adrenalin from action by the adrenalin from gambling. I hope be wrong. There’s a lot of work on apparent huge difficulty, not that huge in fact, it’s a way of adrenalin source but it can only decrease the more you play unlike gambling, or pure RNG, or pure action.
I don’t think that difficulty/complexity/lack of hand holding in TBTSGs is something new generations can’t handle, and that this is the problem with PP, that you can’t please old gamers and new gamers at the same time. Take the success of Dark Souls as evidence that this not the issue and that the kids are alright.
The problem with PP’s difficulty is that the player has not the slightest indication of where it comes from, not by express explanation or by something implicit or logical. It’s completely unpredictable. Why do the crabs suddenly have all these hitpoints and armor? What did I do? What didn’t I do? What happened?
So I would suggest that the devs tell us how difficulty actually works or is intended to work, and then we could make suggestions, including so as to how to make the difficulty more predictable to the players.
Dark Souls is not all that difficult game. It’s just punishing and challenging but not difficult. The whole thing with get gud is no more than a meme. They tried to make it more difficult in DS2 but that was a bit of misguided decision on the devs parts, being not core devs they didn’t necessary understood how it’s suppose to work.
Check reviews of the ADOM, Caves of Qud, Unreal World on Steam, if you want to see what bothers typical gamers. The difficulty/complexity/lack of hand holding is their exact issue. They don’t want to watch 3 hours of youtube videos to understand how to play a game. They don’t want to read wiki just to start playing. They don’t want to lose 20 hours of progress because they forgot about some mechanics or made a single mistake. Some have no idea what dice notation for stats is and can’t be bothered to google it. Some just can’t handle ASCI graphics or tiles. Some can’t be bothered to read descriptions. For many, it’s more important to have simpler controls or better UI than to have a deeper game mechanics. You yourself was pointing out how unhappy where people when discussing changes in the Interrupt system in Ja2 1.13 
There are many players who didn’t like NCTH system in JA2 1.13 because they don’t understand how it works. So hardcore fans are not exception to this. One of the funny examples of trying to make a modern “complex” game is for example Rimworld, which is inspired by Dwarf Fortress, looks good, easy to understand and play. But has a 5% depth of the mechanics of it’s inspiration. If “difficulty/complexity/lack of hand holding” wouldn’t be a problem, then we would see hundred times more players playing Dwarf Fortress instead of Rimworld. The other recent example is Rule The Waves 2 and Ultimate Admiral Dreadnoughts. The first one is a game with 15+ years of linage of complex mechanics and polish. The second is a tech demo that does 10% of the first, but I’m pretty sure it sold much better and a lot to the people who never heard about the first. The difference is pretty much just graphics. Which is hand holding in this type of game. The other example is Aurora 4x and Stellaris, while Stellaris is adored by millions its a puny toy compared to Aurora 4x in pretty much every aspect except graphics and UI.
And before the question raised, why those things are even related - depth of features and visual presentation. They are related for a simple reason that the more abstract presentation you have the less you are confined into how features or mechanics can be implemented.
In a typical RPG you have some face morph with tatoo and ridiculously and pointlessly detailed armor. In Dwarf Fortress you can read in character description everything about what they like/dislike, what their nose shape is, how long is their beard, what their thougts on life is and etc. and it’s all possible because non of that need to me rendered or drawn with some icon in UI. But in X-Com alone, all weapons had to be drawn in a cartoony large size just so you could see them on the character sprite better.
If you take a look at Stellaris then you can see how they cut corners on features just for them to have a more clear UI in the game.
In many modern TBT you have small team of soldiers so that turn goes faster. You can’t change stance because that requires more buttons and UI and player control. The APs are unified so you don’t have a variable AP cost for using weapons and etc. If you don’t believe me that this can be an issue for modern gamers, check reviews of the Xenonauts on steam.