Game play is far too difficult and game isnt fun

Phoenix Point Game Feedback
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So here’s the deal - your game will always be compared with the original Xcom, and Xcom1 and xcom 2.

Why the decisions to allow Sirens to mind capture multiple soldiers? Did you think by making this extra hard people would love this or praise you for being brilliant? Originally you even had the Sirens able to fire at soldiers from afar. And it tells me you you’re making this frustrating as hell for no reason but because you can.

Why allow panic turns to last far longer than it needs to be? Even when there are absolutely no enemies on the map after you clear it, i have seen soldiers panic for the next 17 turns. This is so unnecessary. Very frustrating and utterly not fun. I know you designers love your game algorithms but panicking a max of 5 turns is enough. If you were a game designer at firaxis and had adult supervision, they would have never have allowed you to put something do detrimental into the game and would have sat you down to patiently explain why.

Why no ETA shown on world map for ships going from point A to B? Yet bases and settlements gets destroyed if you dont get there on time, yet your soldiers need to find a friendly base to rest and heal. This is so anal. It’s almost like you have good ideas but no inkling of how to implement it properly.

Why does reloading ammo cause all the ammo rounds in the current ammo magazine to be dumped? Was making a count of all ammo too difficult? It’s unrealistic and frustrating, and something I havent seen from another developer. It’s a lazy design and one calculated to frustrate the player for no reason at all.

Why make capture enemy units so damn frustrating and difficult? I understand you wanted to make it different than in Xcom 2 but this is so hard to do. Again not fun. And you deliberately made this mandatory in the game.

Final mission - if you dont carry enough healing kits you simply cant win. Yet you are supposed to face off against 2 Scylla, at least 8 Chiron and an assortment of other creatures, plus the creatures spawn by Chirons and Scylla. After spending hours and hours beating these gatekeepers you finally meet the final boss, only to find out it can drain your health from afar and hides behind a rotating shield and has double the health of other large creatures. Hey man, how about being fking reasonable when designing the end game?? Was this fun? fk no. Was I supposed to get this this point then restart the whole mission this time with 1 guy carrying all healing kits while the rest of the solders carried loads of ammo? Who the hell thought this mission was a good idea?

Did you see the reviews of your own game? “Tedious” is mentioned quite a bit. As in not fun. Almost everyone universally says this game isnt fun. When a game isnt fun then you have failed at designing it.

Again, it points to your inability to design a game that is fun. Listen, anyone can be a sadist. I know of 10 year olds who can easily suggest things that are even more sadist than this. It doesnt mean they know how to design a good game. In the same way your design choices also shows you dont know how to design a good game. All i see is autistic sadism from the designer. And some good ideas but poorly implemented.

Are you sure you are the same guy who designed the original Xcom? Or were you macro designer for the game and others figured out the balancing, and game play mechanics for you? Im seeing some troubling design decisions that damn the game and prevents it from shining. Saying this game is beta for the past year is a poor excuse for what i see here. If you dont know how to tweak game mechanics so that it is fun, then find someone who has a clue. This game is a total letdown.

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after playing this game for 350 hours i can tell its not that hard… you just need to use all what this game gives you… and there are multiple ways how to handle things… for example, in all those 300+ hours i never ever used any ANU technologies… no berserkers or priests, nor mutations (i dont like how they look, i dont like how they behave)… yet, i had literally no problem with the final mission on Legend difficulty…

Why? because I used what game gives you - I used defensive turrets, who shoot anything that shoots at you, i used flamethrowers and inferno grenades to create zone no Pandoran can walk through without taking serious damage… it really doesnt matter how many mindfraggers or worms those Chirons and Scylla spawn, because they cannot get through fire… plus, they are easy to kill by assaults who with proper ability can kill them and get AP back… (and if you multiclass with sniper, you can even get more AP than you spent killing them)

Anyway, i agree this game has its issues, has some design choices that could be better implemented than they are now… but Developers are trying to address them… if you dont like game now, give it some time…

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The problem is if you NEED advanced tactics (your examples) for EASY difficulty then it is too hard for this setting.

@feedbackloop what difficulty are you playing?

If you can beat the game on LEGEND with always the same advanced tactics or builds/skills then it is also a design problem.

Edit:
This game has a lot of fun. Body parts, free aim, realistic cover, horizontally weapon tier design, status effects, 7 absolut different classes, panda evolving system are all GREAT!

Tedious are the meaningless enemy reinforcements, meaningless diplomatic consequences, extreme overpowered advanced tactics and grind missions.

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no, not really advanced… in that Legend campaign, i did not even multiclass a single soldier… i just used what i had… inferno grenades, flamethrovers, turrets… those are not advanced things… you get them all eventually… definitely by the game end… even on Legend difficulty

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Yes I know. :pensive:
After 100h game experience I finished my first legend campaign with massive self restrictions too (single class, no load after bad things happens, no dlc1 super toys, no dlc2 super toys, only class related armor)
Even then it is makeable. So for me not a good design for skilled players.

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It’s great if you guys don’t have a problem to beat the game on highest difficulty etc.
But for me the game isn’t fun to play in the long run.
Because in every campaign I get to the point where the enemies evolve way too fast for me.
My first reaction was to start another game at a lower difficulty. And it felt easier at the start, but half way through it was more difficult than the campaign before that.
imo the overall difficulty of the game could stay this way but the difficulty settings should mean something. I only noticed a difference in early game; and early game was already fine for me in higher difficulty settings.
Maybe I’m alone with this opinion but I think low difficulty settings in a game should be beatable without trying too hard. To be fair I didn’t try the lowest difficulty since the new dlc but I wasn’t able to beat the game at the second lowest even though I tried everything including reloading several missions (and I HATE to do that).

And inb4 “hurr durr n00b get good”: I have beaten XCOM 2 Legendary Ironman several times.
Yeah, thats relatively easy when you get through the early game but still: Someone like me should be able to play this game on medium difficulty or something is wrong.

tl;dr:
This game needs some rebalancing that at the very least makes mid to lategame easier on lower difficulties

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Guys, please… Fun is something different for all people. You can be sado-mazo and get fun by injuring yourself. I just tell this as an example, not directly to someone. But at game wise, some people likes to have challenges… some people have time and patience to play a game 10 times and became master of it. Some people got specific skills at a specific genre.

This game got many aspects which kills fun… sadly this is the truth. I won’t discuss those because it depends on people too. Limited resources which needs making same missions constantly, limited time to finish the game, fast enemy progress, not having a good tier system to make you feel you get improved, all boring and complex LotA stuff… just some of them… as I said I do not want to discuss them here… but they are there. I enjoy the game but it’s sadly not far then average for me… for some people it’s worse, for others better…

If someone here comes and tells whats bothers him and he thinks it’s not fun and harder then it should be, the answer should be not “not so hard”… You can drive a car so easily but another can hardly do it…
The point is not about doable. A game would be not short just because a user finished it with a record.

It’s not about tactics too… the AI is very bad so you don’t need a tactic at all… it’s all about balance and the game is far from it… something is always stronger and safer then others. Some are useless, some are just the exact solution…

You just need to know what to use against what and when… then you got the game… but still the un-fun factors and unbalanced gameplay is out there… time will fix it…

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I have to say this is a very individual statement as FiraXcom contains mods. I’ve already seen Youtubers who were bad, but could easily handle the game with overpowered mods (ultra super classes, etc.).

I personally beat XCOM 2 on Legend, but only after about 600-700h and then with loads after bad missions and all the known advantages (except mods). PP feels significantly easier to me AFTER one Playthrough (even with massive self restrictions), but not the FIRST TIME.

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This is the most important aspect for this thread, we were discussing it in another one. It became very clear to me that the game is SO MUCH RNG DEPENDANT in the beginning that it’s what leads players to this.

The way you handle the first 2 weeks of the game is what shapes your entire campaign difficulty. Problem is, it’s totally RNG dependent. It depends on which factions start close to you, which start close to your first mist zone (so that you get haven defenses for them), and heavily into 2 things: how much resources you can amass in the beginning and how early do you get (and make good use of) a 2nd aircraft. This leads to the game being very difficult in the first playthrough in any difficulty.

In my opinion, in lower difficulties, the game should diminish the RNG factor. It should guarantee at least one haven of each faction near the player, and also at least one haven of each faction near the first mist near your first base. Also, that you get enough HD’s for reaching at least 25% with one faction, in the first couple of weeks. This opens up exploration. Load-time tips could be enough to help more, indicating that the player should invest in a second aircraft at the earliest, to be able to explore more.

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Just give a second aircraft on EASY for free.

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That’s also a good option. Maybe if we had recover aircraft missions that could be a thing, or we could get aircrafts at recovered bases.

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I played this on the default difficulty. I also finished all 3 Xcoms at the games’ default difficulty level, with the original (allegedly) by this same designer as being the most fun. This phoenix point is the most tedious, most brutal of all the bunch. You are forced to defend all the havens because nobody else will lift a finger (more like the developer got lazy and didnt program an AI that would do it). Literally went through hundreds of fights, with most on identical maps but from a different direction. Tedious doesnt begin to describe it. The developer if he even played his own game from start to finish (and quite frankly should be mandatory for each major revision to test the gameplay aspect of it), would have realized a need to create an auto-battle feature that will assign a victory or failure and death/injury so that the player doesnt need to go through this many battles. It isnt that hard to make.

I noticed a lot of you mentioned playing this at the highest difficulty - some of you probably thought Long War was exactly the hardness Xcom 2 should be. And I would say you would be in the minority. Sadly not everyone is capable of playing at your level. For me this isnt supposed to be chore that I need to make every decision correctly because i do want to experiment around with different decision choices. Besides, it isnt even like there is a proper tutorial on how to fight properly for this game. Is every player supposed to finish xcom 1/2 before playing this one?

For the final mission, what should have happened was a strategic placement of caches of ammo and healing kits at certain intervals. Had the developer actually played this game he would have seen how obvious that was. Really, having a final boss that drains your soldiers of health between 50-100 for each soldier per turn FROM AFAR is supposed to be reasonable and fun??? I actually clicked on the Info on the creature and I think it was supposed to be drain health for soldiers within 5 tiles, not like this.

This game is just a sad implementation of some really good ideas that expand the genre, but unfortunately due to the malpractice approach he uses, it utterly fks the game for anyone other than hardcore players. Maybe his aim was to cater to the tiny minority of players who like tedious and extremely difficult. Would explain why this was funded by the pubic.

Is the expansion of this game equally as brutal?

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I had also thought something similar, look here:

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If you talk about Legend of the Ancients. Sadly worse…

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… Avoiding then. Good thing i asked. Im still stuck on the last mission of phoenix point. Maybe the guy will patch and it make it more reasonable, and have it work with the saved games for this current patch.

I hope the developer doesnt pull a Star Citizen on everyone and keeps this game in permanent alpha/beta before moving onto another project.

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In reality I hijacked your idea :grin:. I remembered the main points about aircraft but couldn’t remember who said it.

I think you have very valid points in your criticism. With that said, as someone who backed both PP and SC… at least I got my fun from PP, while I’m extremely regretful of backing SC. After SC, I decided to not participate in any crowdfunding again. PP was the only exception, as I loved the pitched idea and the x-com franchise is my favorite of all time.

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Unfortunately, PP is very poorly designed. Unless you play in a certain way (borderline exploits) you will have issues with winning. In truth in terms of tactical freedom, it is nowhere near XCOM.

Its been a while since the release and the game still feels like a mod rather than a stand-alone polished experience.

The most annoying thing is that what is simply a poor design choice or lack of skill to balance things properly is depicted as a “game feature”. This leads to comments which imply that if you are not enjoying the game it means that you are a noob and you don’t know how to play it.

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In what way does X-com give you more tactical freedom? PP is far from perfect, but tactical freedom is one of its strong points, IMO.

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im curious, without sucking up to the Synedrion early on, are you able to get the mist repeller in a reasonable time frame? I tried stealing from the tech but after stealing 7 meaningless things i still couldnt get the mist repeller (yes they had it in use).

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7 could not be enough, they have a bunch of base techs before the mist repeller research comes up (AI, Helios, energy tech, Aspida, armor, weapons, nanotech, paralysing pistol, Infiltrator … and some more).
I’m not sure, AFAIK you get them in order. But even if it is random, then it could be long way to get what you want.