I think he is too cynical and critical towards a product from a young studio. But I do agree that despite the great potential of this game, the unpolished and unbalanced nature of the current version does greatly impact my experience.
For now, I honestly have more fun reading the e-book of Phoenix Point lore than actually playing the game. It is not the story rich, complex main part of the game that disturbs me, but little bugs and bad features that greatly reduces the fun and would scare off new players.
Problems include:
Sudden crashes that restarts my PC.
Sudden flare in surface texture.
Strange fluctuations in difficulty where it can go from very easy to impossible to win.
A complexte lack of personal attachment to your squad or your organization itself, which should be easy to fix.
Sometimes the flow of turns would take minutes.
Tutorial is useless.
I still have no idea how the AI can adjust to my gameplay.
Anyway, it is a great game. I hope it does not die due to all these small bugs. I wish the development team happy holidays and a happy new year. Hope the hot fixes can come in soon enough so I can finally enjoy the game.
Update: Yes, so to summarize my critics into one piece. Ironman Mode for this game at this stage would be impossible, since there are too many bugs and flaws that would break the game.
Been loving the game to! It’s very addictive in the sense that I want to just keep playing it! lol! Nothing fancy to say from my perspective. Although, I do like the seeming emphasis on exploring that the game has.
I get the impression that I’ll be sort of jumping from base to base as the mist over-runs the locales that i setup at. Perhaps I’ll eventually get tech to fight back the mist, but you wouldn’t know it until it happens, which I find super fresh!
I particularly like the evolutions as well! They seem to do a good job of giving you the “WTF is that?”, as opposed to relying solely on the novelty of completely new units (which is finite to one playthrough).
Bug fixing.
Polish. lot’s of polish.
Tools for micromanagement. They are less than bare-bones at the moment.
Better checks for enemy spawn points on missions. On some missions they spawn in places that make 100% completion impossible.
With 50+ hours I’ve never had one of these. Sounds like a hardware/driver issue. Everything up to date?
Never seen this either. Again - graphics driver problem? Are you playing on a laptop for example, with a mobile version of the chipset?
Agreed - difficulty does fluctuate. There is much conjecture about this; the enemies are supposed to be able to do whatever you can do, and this presents big balancing issues. The range of what random spawning is allowed to do is too great, and hopefully this will get fixed. Some missions end up virtually impossible, but it wouldn’t be beyond the scope of some game for this to be the case. With regard to this one, losing multiple soldiers on a mission creates a sort of spiral of failure where on any difficulty other than easy, it’s unlikely you’ll catch up.
Yeah, I feel you. Some more customisation/voice/nationality options would be good.
Enemy turns can take a bit, yes, but if you find it’s freezing in one place showing you nothing for more than a few seconds, that’s not right. I’ve never seen one take an annoyingly long time though, so I guess that’s subjective.
I disagree. I think the tutorial is ok, but it omits some later things. I keep seeing screenshots of others with a resource I don’t know how to get - ‘virophage/xenovirus’ or something. No clue.
I think the original idea was that it was supposed to, but I’m starting to suspect this has been quietly tucked under the carpet, and what we have is just incrementally upgraded monsters. The mechanism that governs the rate at which these upgrades appear isn’t clear, but there aren’t enough of them to create the illusion that the enemy is ‘adapting’. They’re simply improving in a common sense way, so I wouldn’t hold out hope for any great revelation in this department.
Thanks for the video. Unfortunately, I do agree with it
Hearing him describe some of this stuff makes me even more certain that the true reason for Ironman mode not being in the game yet is because the game is just too unbalanced and capable of producing campaign ending bugs.
I want this game to get better and fulfill its true potential but it’s gonna take a lot of work. It still feels like it’s in beta, imho. The elements are all there but they don’t come together in a tight, coherent, balanced, focused and reliable way.
I was sorry to hear about the large number of refunds though. After all, I do wish the team well and think they have a potentially great game in the making.
That would be quite the development, if the game forced you to jump from base to base as it was impossible to sustain them for a long period of time, Pandorans would always overrun them. It would be so in touch with the idea of a vastly superior enemy and an apocalyptic situation.
I had a bit of a shrug reaction when watching through the beginning of it honestly…
-Unpolish of the game: Sure, but it’s still fun.
-Epic Game scandal & implication that it didn’t really help the end product: Well…I guess, but it’s still fun lol.
-Aiming system not being indicative of true shots: I actually found aiming to be relatively intuitive. What I found was that you just simply zoom out and see whether the line drawn between you and the enemy runs through any terrain or not…It actually plays out like this really cool, sandboxy miniatures game in the sense that you have to give it a bit more thought and be creative with how you position your dudes.
-lack of instructions: Well, you get enough to get going & honestly, I was far too immersed in just bumbling around with the game systems to really notice that I had no idea how some it worked.
Truthfully, I didn’t watch much other than that. They were fair arguments, but I don’t think they neccesarilly make or break the game given the features you get for it. Maybe my standards aren’t that high? lol
Worth noting, a sudden crash that completely restarts your PC points to other issues then the game.
Crashing to a desktop would make sense but if your PC is fully restarting then I would suggest checking other issues. Prime candidates are maybe some bad memory, or possible overheating your CPU or GPU.
Not saying that PP may not have an issue that is the initial cause of the restart(like a memory leak) but modern OS are designed to crash a program without crashing the whole PC.
I went past the Epic stuff and visual, sound etc, and straight to the gameplay stuff since that’s my main concern.
He mentioned uneven, yo-yo-ying difficulty, along with uneven enemy selection.
He also mentioned his team spawning and getting stuck behind computers. Also strange spawning of enemies, with missions where you have to save civilians but you start a long way away and you simply can’t save them because the enemy spawns right next to them.
I actually am fine with the aiming system, lack of polish and slightly unhelpful UI
What I meant when I said I agree with the video was partly to do with most of what he said, but mainly the overall conclusion; that it feels like it’s still in beta.
Didn’t mean to imply that there was anything wrong with the line of thinking regarding performance and certain annoying bugs…I’m just loving this game so far!
I guess I have yet to experience the newer baddies (still dealing with tritons and crabmen), getting a 2nd line up of soldiers and a 2nd manticore ready to start some 24/7 activity. lol!
I guess in my conclusion (when contrasted with the OP), it’s far from unenjoyable xD
That said, it is a shame that it wasn’t more polished as I’m sure that this game would be a slam dunk otherwise.
Despite multiple delays this game was still not ready… easily needed another 6 months to cook. After playing a few sessions I decided to shelve it for awhile and come back to it later, HOPEFULLY Snapshot will listen to the communities feedback but I fear with DLC already in the works the parts of the base game that need fixing won’t be. I decided to go back and play XCOM 2 to scratch the itch and it only made it much more apparent that this is a far cry from what we deserve.
