Feedback / Apparent lack of "progress quest"

Phoenix Point Game Feedback
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(For some reason my spellchecker turned of so, dead with it :wink: )
Right, The general feel is that is a massive lack of progress; In regards to RPG and immission.

Attributes
Speed is the only one that really feels like it gives anything, move a futher. But lack explanation on how long I can move; how much longer I can move.
Strenght, sure but who cares its not like there is any stuff to bring?
Will power well, to be fair havent really had a problem with that…

Skills and classes are lacking, not much at all; but most important no options just one/two things to pick and feels like it dosent matter.

So in general when leveling up its not really engaging, I just randomly pick the skill avaiable and some random attributes with a focus on speed; thats it; do not really care about it at all.

No character customisation; would add to the flavour if you atleast should have some uniforms to play with.

Secondary profession, yeah not relevant or well; sniper and assault is atleast something, but only to use the guns.

Personel
You have your soliders, getting more yeah sure takes a while and well again doesnt really matter that much. Do not really get the same interesting squad selection as in xcom2 where that feels important and vital; now I kinda just pick the solders I have no though behind anything.

Equipment
Again, the solders have their stuff, not really get anything worth changing to nor any research that influence that.

Summary in regards to soldiers
Feels underwhelming and franly unintresting; couldnt care less about the indivual soilders, their setup and well not really anything I can change or alter to make a differance.
If you want to keep players playing this; One needs something to build up, create, get involved in and in XCOM your solders are SUPER important and one fiddles around with everyhing from squad setup to gear selection.
Futher more research gives you “nothing” ; need to have a various selection of professions, attributes, skills and equipment to make stuff interesting not just something one ignores and just plays the “missions”

In it current form (aware its not complete) but I will not be enough interested to care, not bothered to play as I feel no involvement in nothing.

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Look at the september developer update. There will be many customisation options added in the final game. I believe it will help greatly with problem you’ve mentioned.

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Yes, it will cover the basic visuals and that is good stuffl; it will not however adress the core problem of lack of actuall “character” development/management.

I am fairly sure I am not the only one who spends hours fiddling with the character in XCOM, considering best setup for a specific mission…tailoring character to specific roles and so forth.

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I never like it in XCOM, to be honest. In early game choosing suitable squad and then choosing the best weapon and gear for each of member of that squad was fun, but later in the game it was really tiresome…I sometimes spent about 15-30 mins just to prepare for one battle., juggling between soldiers with appropriate classes and skills, and switching equipment between them almost every time! Not my definition of fun.
That’s why I was against making every soldier so unique in terms of skills - because calculating those skills along with equipment carried on mission every time becomes tedious really fast.

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But that was the entire POINT of specialization, especially in Firaxcom. In the OG X-COM games, there isn’t any point in people carrying different weapons if you aren’t going to try and use them strategically. Just give everyone flying armor and plasma rifles and go be boring. Choosing which soldiers you’re going to bring depending on their spec is part of what makes these games great.

@OP, all I can really say is that the original games had even LESS customization and specialization, but they were so popular that we now have like 20 different spin-offs and X-COM clones. Every soldier basically had a spreadsheet’s worth of stats, and you randomly earned points in missions in those stats depending on what your soldier did.

What I liked most about this was that every soldier was a blank slate, and, more or less based on what their starting stats were, you could tailor every soldier however you wanted. Someone could be really good at lobbing grenades. Someone else a sniper. The way all of the newer games work, were you your soldier has a specific class and that’s all they can do is sort of annoying to me. I mean, I totally get where it’s coming from. And while I can agree to an extent that we are sort of limited (three stats to put points in, and only a handful of perks to pick from) I feel that in this situation, in PP itself, adding more might overly complicate the game.

I don’t think they need to add more, I think they need to make the ones they have more impactful and focused. You’re right in that strength doesn’t really seem to matter, and that’s primarily because our inventory is so limited and really there isn’t much reason to carry much anyway. Once you’re able to carry a few magazines and grenades, your inventory is full and it doesn’t matter HOW much strength you have beyond that. I’ve never felt the need to cap it out on any of my soldiers. And the only reason I can see currently to cap out Willpower is because it lets you fly around the map and murder everything in one turn. I can only hope there will be a major change to how dash and quick aim work, because right now having a maxed our Willpower pool with those two abilities just trivializes most fights.

And I 100% agree with you on the equipment thing. I’ve already voiced my complaints several times about this. In every singled X-COM style game there is a sense of progression in armor and weapons as time goes by. In PP we more or less just get variants of the same thing instead of straight upgrades, and you only get them by befriending the other factions. Apparently Phoenix Point is unable to research their own upgrades. As it stands, the piddly little 10% damage increase we get from researching the pandorans is rather paltry. I just don’t understand how the literal creator of the genre can make a game that is so inferior to the rest of them when he KNOWS how the formula works.

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Exactly. You weren’t limited to classes. And it wasn’t much dilemma which weapons or gear carry out on mission because of squad’s high numbers. Even veteran soldiers weren’t much more than cannon fodder in comparison to aliens and I’d like to have that back.

It wasn’t boring at all. Soldiers had different stats and you could have plenty of weapons and gear on each mission. Equipping each of them in flying armors and plasma rifles took a lot of time and resources, although I agree that pass that point every soldier looked pretty same.

That what I was hoping to see in PP.

:+1: (although I wouldn’t mind having more stats).

I wouldn’t say inferior, just different. I agree that some sense of progression is needed, especially in a game with research being so important feature. But I disagree that PP should mirror other games with their weapons tiers approach. I’ve never liked tiers because of simple fact that each next tier made the former one negligible. And looked more plastic and “futuristic”, too. And that was boring. Some stronger weapons and breakthrough researches on weapons/gear are very important, but I like to have various weapons and decisions connected to them, so there really shouldn’t be weapons good at everything - every good/very good stat should come at the expense of another, so each weapon, no matter how good and efficient is, would have some flaws.

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I agree that we need to have that feeling of progression. But as @bartekb8 said, we can receive just some weapon upgrades not whole new weapons. Guys, please, just picture whole situation to yourself. You have an independent but small organization which tries to stop inevitable. There is only handful of operatives and they have only dozen or so bases around the world (I hope it will increase compared to BB5). And by bases we mean small research facilities, not complexes like Tesla Gigafactory focused on one task. Those guys don’t discover plasma weaponry, they don’t discover teleportation or powered exoskeletons. They use what can be found and used out there. They need tech of one of three main faction as those factions have “cities” counting thousands of people and resources to discover things and produce these things. Let this game be different than X-COM or XCOM or other clones.

About stats. I hoped that there will be more of them than 3 (well there are 6, but only 3 can be trained). I suppose this is just a case for balancing.

  • Right now Willpower is the main stat to do magic tricks and kill everything in just few seconds of combat (first turn), but this has to change.
  • Second stat is speed which is also important if you don’t want to use ‘magic’ and have tactical flexibility. I just hope that maximum range of movement will be decreased for human units (maybe except Disciple mutants).
  • And last one, Strength is quite important I think (when role for WP will decrease). I just hope that enemies will be more dangerous (and I don’t mean that they all will start using sniper rifles from opposite end of the map) and each HP will count. Maybe enemies will start to use more attacks which test maximum HP (Strength). And I hope that armors which will also protect your soldiers from many dangers will become more encumbrancing. Then you will need to have that Strength leveled up just to increase survivability of your soldiers.
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(Look everyone has different opinion on whats good and/or bad, and thats to be expected and just accepted)

A game like this consists of 3 basic things: Stragegy, Tatical, Progression/RPG and I have by decision left the two first out to limit the scope of this thread.

As it is now with basicly rubber stamped soilder where it does NOT really matter in any meninfull way (or atleast thats how it feels) or any selection of equipment/skills/attributes) that matters.

That WILL result in that the progress/RPG part of the game becomes almost irellevant/usless/pointless/not interesting and that will by design remove that part from the game and those gamers that find that thing interesting will have a super hard time getting caught up in the game.

Just pick some random solders send them into battle; get no rewards, no loot, no nothing; nothing to build on; just pick some random soilders and do the battles over and over again.

(futhermore so the replay value of the game is way way way less, if the soilders is removed from the forumla)

So again from my point of view: with the progress part so lacking if find it extremly unlikely that I will get engaged enough to even bother playing more than a handfull of battles before getting bored.

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That doesn’t make any sense at all. That’s like saying, “let’s make a pistol that is superior in firepower to the M1911, but whenever you shoot it spikes come out of the handle and impale your hands.” Every good/very good stat should come at the expense of making the previous tier obsolete. That’s the entire point of progression. Our military isn’t still running around with bolt-action M1 Garands. The M16 came a long and made it obsolete.

In the OG X-COM, and indeed TFTD as well, was about the only time (and oddly the first) where you didn’t completely obsolete a weapon tier with the next one. Sectopods were weak to Lasers. Mutons were strong against Plasma. Ethereals were weak to a stiff breeze. There were still reasons to carry previous tier weapons with you on later missions. Only in the Firaxis games, where they completely did away with resistances all together, did new tiers completely obsolete the previous ones. Unfortunately it seems that PP has followed the Firaxis game logic in that resistances are gone. Maybe they figured it didn’t make any sense? Dunno. It just really feels like this game has stripped out a lot of what made the original X-COM games great so that they can wave their hands and say, “See, we innovated!”.

I do agree that it’s sort of silly how, especially in the newer games, weapons take on a cheap plastic-y effect as they upgrade. I liked the sleekness of the OG Plasma Rifle. I liked the grittiness of the OG Laser Rifle.

My whole point though is that right now, there is no sense of progression. Armor doesn’t change. Weapons don’t really change. You can get your best-in-slot gear within the first ~hour of playtime, and then all that changes is that your soldier can run a bit further, use more WP abilities per mission, and maybe carry an extra grenade or clip. So by mid game, any of your veteran soldiers look and feel the same as they have the entire game.

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@endersblade in the OG X-Com I just stuck to laser weaponry. Powerful enough to take out any alien, and never had to worry about ammo again!

PP is set over a very short space of time. Even with military speed of research I’m not sure tech should come that quickly, realistically speaking.

It would be nice to have a genuine choice though; once I create my level 7 assault gods all I need are PP shotguns or NJ gauss rifles to wipe out a map in one turn. Toning down the superpowers and making the weapon genuinely tactical would go a long way to making this game awesome.

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Look in theory its super simple; lets ignore the cosmetics and play pretend stats and such.

You start with a projectile weapon; use it in combat a couple of times and Im sure some smart people would be able to figure out how to improve it eather by adding stuff to it or various types of modding.
If you look at the firearms progression, its not so the 1911 started out as a finished product direcly; not is it the same now as it was before.
As the PP guys are actually manfauturing the guns and not buying it; Can easily replace some materials, longer-shorter barrel; larger caliber, various types of ammuniation.
Faster reload, higher rate of fire, larger magazine, scope, folding stock im sure you get the drift.
Then a handfull of months in time; im sure those that use the weapon and those smart guys lingering in the background would have enough data to produce a new/upgraded weapon that takes in count the problems with the current guys, like getting blow up with handgrenades.

That way the current projectile weapon would have lets say 10 various types of upgrades and 10 mods that can be attached.

Most of them will be sort of simular, but in an optimal situation all guys should have the latest weapon but due to manufacturing restrictions and what not perhaps not all can have everything.

That will give the projectile weapon a life cycle, a progress path as well as make it important if you use the various soilders for instead of as it is now not relevant.

Also we are in the future, gauss, magnetic acceleration, laser, plasma why the hell not?

Light, heavy mashineguns, shotguns in all its glory; why not sawed off shotcut as a pistol?

Also it would would put actual results into the research and combine things in to something more interesting.

Because as it is now; its NOT interesting, engaging or rewarding; only and I repeat only thing that one does is fight the tactical battles with few options/alternatives; where the individual soilders are just irrelevant. No insentive to try various things out; as it really is not such to select from.

I understand some people can enojy it just playing the tactical battles as is; but I feel there is a super big risk that the hardcore games will just play lose interest super quick and to be fair just play xcom instead.

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Beyond game play reasons, I think there’s two issues with the manufacture of new tiers of weapons:

  • The time frame as already mentioned above is very tight to allow for the research and invention of these type of weaponry.

  • But also supply chains. PP is set in a post-apocalyptic world with individual communities of people just trying to survive. Where are you going to get the necessary raw materials and parts to manufacture high tech equipment?

I do think that there needs to be more variety of equipment available, but to fit with the theme and setting of the game I feel that it should come more from scavenging and ‘finds’ that are discovered during the tactical missions, rather than from R&D. It’d be far more interesting to come back from scavenging mission with a new unique assault rifle, than just some generic soylent green food resource. Put some good shit into scavenging missions and they become way more interesting than they are at present.

What I think you can then do with R&D is make adaptations to existing weaponry. I don’t feel that you’d have the capacity to start producing futuristic laser blasters, but I do think you could take a shotgun and turn it into a sawn-off. I do think you could jerry rig a silencer for your pistols.

Whilst you’re at it I think you could also make some low tech equipment through R&D. Start making some Molotov cocktails, or spike traps for example.

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But how long of a time period was there between the two? And was the M16 then obsolete a year later when the HK33 or something else was produced?

The M-16 is a great example though of a weapon that received a tonne of variants depending upon need.

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No need to be so nitpicky, I rather meant something like more damageful weapon = less effective range/accuracy/less ammo cartridges/more time or cost of production etc. :grinning:

True. I have FIraxis XCOM on my mind when talking about weapon tiers.

Agree. It may be a question of proper balance and duration of the game. There’s also no feeling of making some breakthroughs in researches. I hope researches will be given proper technologies trees and even sometimes exclude themselves, so choices will matter and player couldn’t see/research everything during one playthrough.

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Dudes and Dudettes; Timescale, apocalyptic, immission or what ever - Its less relevant; Fun, Deapth and Complexity and that; its what really matters.

There are clearly lots of people spending tons of hours on Candy Crush and whatnot; they are happy with blue or yellow things; as it is not those people can play PP have fun; those that are looing for more will NOT; its as simple as that.

Or even easier; For a game to beat XCOM-whatever it needs to be more; not less. As it its now it feels so barebone, simple and there is nothing to care about.