How about less meta mechanics instead of more?

Phoenix Point Game Feedback
41

Where all those people now then? :smiley:

But more seriously. BB3 didn’t have progression so few perks that where there can easily be assumed as an end game perk. I wasn’t even thinking that “rage burst” or “return fire” is something that you will have to unlock. Then BB4 came around and a lot of perks where added, some where OP as hell but many where pretty simple ones, like “point my turrets at the same target”, additional proficiency with a pistol, ability to use mounted weapons and etc. Abilities where locked behind minimal attributes too, Exertion was heavily criticized and any class combo with assault was a new meta. We didn’t got less of it, we got more. As I’ve said in the first post, I don’t mind perks as a concept, what I do mind are perks which are complete meta, which allow you to do something that just doesn’t make sense in a physical sense and is not intuitive. Like what kind of training would allow a soldier to run 500% faster just by using his willpower multiple times in a turn, or start shooting both faster and more precise. Double shot was like a high end ability with a cost of 5 willpoints (max pool 16) and limited to an action right here and right now - it was an investment, you would use it only when you really have to, but still abusable. If that would take APs in addition to willpower then no problem - the guy is taking more time to align his weapons for multiple precise shots and maybe get’s one extra shot for a price of two. Instead we got Quick Aim, which allows you to do pretty much the same but is less taxing on willpower so easier to manage and practically can be used more often. So I’m sorry that I wasn’t posting earlier because I though that devs would go for a balance where abilities are less OP and are not suppose to be used on every turn. Something like Rapid Clearance can be achieved already with a Dash, instead we can even stack it on top of Dash and on top of itself, adding some Quick Aim into the mix for a good measure. And getting this “beautiful” combos is just a matter of restarting campaing and doing exactly X and Y combination of classes. No training, no hard choices. All this just to steamroll enemy into submission where they are in constant panic after a second turn.
Sorry, this is turning into a bit of rant. I’m just not enjoying these battles all that much anymore. I had enough of this “fun” in XCom2, where at some point you even forget what some enemies can do as they got killed again and again on first contact without a chance to react.

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42

Invisible Inc. is so very very good. As someone who enjoys procedurally generated roguelites, XCOM and stealth games it is just so my type of a game. I would love for Klei to try to make a bigger sequel at some point, though InvInc strength is it’s absolute focus. I even thought the DLC extended campaign doesn’t quite work.

43

Absolutely agree with that point of view. That would be great to forgot about meta, see our soldiers to train their capabilities on battle ground and see them get killed by one precise head shot.

I think this way we would get a solution to counter need of meta, just more realizm in damage. Like in good old games.

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44

I was thinking if there was some sort of tactics or OP weapons in JA2. There is hardly any, besides that you could wipe multiple enemies in a single turn, with something like a mortar, explosives or a multi-shot from Milkor or other MGL. But that doesn’t make them OP as you are taking a risk of using expensive ammunition without a guaranteed result. This ammunition have to be procured and carried to battle, if it’s gone - it’s gone, was it worth it? You will know only later. One of the important factors in this is that you don’t get an aiming sphere which is telling you who you are going to hit and for how much damage, it doesn’t even land exactly where you want unless the merc is really proficient in using it. A little change like this can make a lot of difference in how weapon “balance” feels.

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45

I have a similar thought, this game will be a new Firaxis XCOM, not an original XCOM.

It will be an enjoyable game and has some nice mechanics like you really need the different classes of soldiers in different situations: heavies + explosives are useful against enemies that are grouped together, assaults are useful to make the extra push to kill enemies that are out of reach for the others, snipers are good for taking out enemies you do not want to come close to.

What is different from the original XCOM is that in the original XCOM you had freedom, this XCOM forces you to choose in all dimensions and that is basically the distinction between a Firaxis XCOM and an original XCOM. In Firaxis XCOMs you have to choose one thing and you loose the other.

In the original XCOM, you soldiers became better at what they were doing. In this XCOM, you have to choose one of getting more speed, getting more health points, getting more will or getting more abilities and once you reach a cap, you cannot train your soldiers more (except from the slowly accumulating squad points).

You get 1 manticore, building another one takes more than 20 days and it takes too long to increase your production speed. With your manticore you can only defend against attacks that are nearby, so if the Aliens decide to attack a haven that is three times the radius of your manticore away, forget about being able to defend it.

I would like to complete a mission on the other side of the globe, but I am constantly being spammed by haven attacks near my base and if I defend a haven, I have to recharge my soldiers at the base, because they are exhausted and before they are fully recovered, I have to defend another haven. It would be nice to have a slower paced strategical game so you could actually explore, I even have no time for that.

Base building is dull, because all bases look the same, they all have 1 vehicle bay, 1 research center, 1 power generator, 1 living quarters, 1 medical bay, 1 of everything and for other stuff there is no place and there are no resources. And you do not get to choose where to build your bases.

Firaxis introduced the idea that to make the game interesting, you need to be constantly constrained, so you can take interesting decisions. I do not agree. I just love to power up my soldiers so that crushing enemies becomes easier over time, but with powering up I do not want special “magical” abilities, but just increased stats like running further, aiming better, slower exhaustion, higher health points, better armour and weapons through research, throwing explosives further, … And importantly, I do not want to have to choose between either of them, I preferred the mechanism where soldiers could become good at everything, they just needed to practice in the field to get the experience.

Finally, in a Firaxis XCOM you can only send 6 soldiers to a battle and after a while you may be able to unlock 2 more for a grand total of 8 soldiers in combat!

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46

Yes, but it’s a good or bad thing to you, because I’m not sure?
I like to have more soldiers on the field (as I remember playing X-Com back then in 90s) BUT in XCom it was pretty exhausting to have 8 of them and constantly switching them back and forth to check what skills they have and what skill is best to use in that very moment. This is the reason because of I’m not sure having 10+ soldiers in PP is a good thing… I really would like to not see strong emphasis being put on skills/perks in Phoenix Point, especially those most gimmicky ones.

47

And firaxcom allows you to 6 soldiers tops. You guys might be thinking about LW.

Handling 8 (or 10 or 12) soldiers withouth crazy special skills is not more cumberstone than handling 6 supersoldiers that can take a few minute turns each t hrough dashing, shooting, dashing, shooting, dashing, shooting, etc.

The real difference is how powerful your soldiers feel to you. In Firaxcom your soldiers get much better, but to be fair, in firaxcom 2 it’s not even close to the level of powerlevel we are getting right now in PP.

In Phoenix Point any soldier at lvl 7 with assault class are freaking Ares incarnated. For some people, that power fantasy is entertaining.

Meanwhile in xenonauts (i will use it as an example because i think it’s the closest successor) your soldiers will get better, and it won’t start to become very noticeable until very long, and you will lose plenty of soldiers on the way. Your soldiers don’t feel like they are miles ahead of the aliens. Quite the oppossite, even opening a door just to peak will scare you.

Meanwhile in phoenix point i am dashing like there is no tomorrow, opening a door? who cares what’s behind, i will just shotgun it, or dash away.

I prefer the more “humble” soldiers experience, since that’s how i get thrilled in game, because i know any misstep (or not) can result in a dead soldier. It sets a different tone to the game, more paused where the atmosphere is about getting tense, meanwhile in the new games firaxcom and PP, i don’t know a better way to explain it, but it’s about feeling kinda like it’s an “action” game.

Loosing a soldier in xenonauts isn’t a big deal, you just get a recruit, while in FiraXCOM it is, because it must be.

If you could replace veterans easilly in FiraXCOM, there wouldn’t be any thrill whatsoever, you lose a soldier, you recruit another, and move on. Meanwhile in Phoenix Point backer build right now, not only it is very hard to lose a soldier, but it’s very easy to get a soldier up to speed. Training facility is nuts, and it works while you are just hovering above your base (so get one early guys), i didn’t make the calculation, but by the time i got my second base i already had a second lvl 7 squad ready to rumble JUST by staying in base.

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48

Looks like 2 xp / h. So 2nd lvl is achieved after little more than 2 days. Whole skill tree 31 days.

49

Isn’t it that we can have more than one facility?

50

I am not sure that’s how it works. I think it was less than a month to get to lvl 7 (and that’s still quite a lot, if you take into account that an airship takes 20 days). Maybe it’s a 2% rather than 2 xp / h ?

51

hmm, maybe. I didn’t pay too much attention to this part of the game. :wink:

52

Meanwhile in phoenix point i am dashing like there is no tomorrow, opening a door? who cares what’s behind, i will just shotgun it, or dash away.

In the current build you can know if there is something behind the door and where: wherever there is an enemy, you cannot dash to. Or if you move your cursor over different squares to see where you can move to, then wherever there is an enemy, you see a grey X.

53

Even so toongeorges, cheesing mechanics like that is entirely unnecessary due to the over the top super solider nature of your units even right from the get go.

Currently your units start off feeling and performing like I’d expect ‘end game’ highly trained units to perform when sporting the highest tier of equipment. Snipers can pretty much one shot anything they please with incredible accuracy at level 1 and can win all general missions pretty much single handed with the rest of your team just additional excessive firepower.

Once your team is more levelled up, you’re then looking at units that perform well above a level that was already feeling like the absolute peak of what they should be capable of.

In earlier backer builds it was easy to pass this off as the progression not being implemented yet and figuring we were getting a look at what a highly trained team would look like well into a established campaign. But now that we have the latest build and can get a proper indicator of initial unit/team power and how the progression scaling escalates right out of the door, and it turns out what we’d been seeing all this time is pretty much the base foundation for unit performance that Snapshot then built upwards from and it just feels so out of place and ill-fitting for the game experience.

If Phoenix Point ends up being focused on being placed at the power fantasy wet dream end of the spectrum with just some “Level Bosses Encounters” or “Optional high threat missions” thrown in periodically at narrative points that pose the only real interest in between just mindlessly stomping mutated folk with your army of steroid soaked vat grown super soldiers, then well that’s a huge shame and is really going to bring down what is otherwise a really engaging list of features that just got built around some really poor balancing. :frowning:

I’d much rather have Snapshot pick up on some of the feedback from this thread and delay the game even further until late next year if it meant they went back and gave a serious rethink of what kind of experience Phoenix Point is meant to be delivering and if what is present in the latest backer build is at all delivering that based on reactions from people who have actually shown a invested interest in playing the final product, and not just a hypothetical random pool of people who might have been sat down and asked to give their thoughts on something they weren’t all that bothered about before or after.

8 Likes
54

Now I see how much backer builds are double-edged weapons. They are meant to make waiting more livable and to give developer some feedback on their work but at the same time it could give a bit of a headache… I’m sure that backer build we had got wasn’t the exact thing Snapshot team was being work at that time: they were much further in development at the time BB5 was launched, so many things hadn’t been shown on purpose, many of them surely has been much more evolved/progressed (than in BB5) in directions which we couldn’t even expect. Many of them could still reach our expectations. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

56

It’s not about naming convention but fantasy powers that have no bearing as to why they would be possible for a soldier to do.

Because it doesn’t consume any action points which means that such action is done in an instant. If action points are not related to time in any way (as was common argument for XCom mechanics) then there is no reason why running should take any action points at all. The issue here is that when abilities and action points work like this, then they become meta game mechanics with arbitrary rules not grounded in any sort of approximation of reality. I’m not talking about something being a simulation like but something just not making any sense.
If Dash would consume both willpower and action points then it would make sense, then you can argue that someone is pushing himself to a limit of running fast.

Having abilities unique to a certain class or an item has nothing to do with XCom. As discussed previously, ability to spend more action points on a single shot but with much greater precision, makes sense for any precision weapon. But current ability Quick Aim, gives you both accuracy boost and takes less time to take a shot - this is fantasy, how would you explain this besides it being a magic spell?
Ability like Rage Burst makes sense on weapons that can auto fire, but neither cannon nor sniper rifle is described as such weapon and they still can Rage Burst.
Another example of something that would make sense - ability to take a shot from an under-slung GL on assault rifle. Something that doesn’t make sense is starting to deal heavy damage to armor by using weapon that has almost no armor penetration - sniper using a shotgun or assault rifle.

Regarding meta abilities it’s a simple principle: if you are not able to describe to someone what ability does in layman’s terms and have to use terms of internal game mechanics then it is a meta. Meta rules are something that exist outside of the presented world. Not only they brake immersion but often tend to be arbitrary. This is what board games or card games use for 99% of their interaction. This is what crappy writing does to drive its story.
You have games like Dawn of War, that takes a board game and hides all of it’s rules underneath a regular looking strategy game. Xcom does exactly the opposite, it takes a simulation like game and turns it into a board game, that’s where problem is.
It is not necessary bad, as huge audience of XCom seams to like it. But Phoenix Point wasn’t advertised as a board game or recreation of XCom in a different setting, it was advertised as “Spiritual successor of X-COM”.

XCom - Firaxis games
X-Com - classical games

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57

I just have to mention that you are projecting your expectations due to Gallop’s involvement, rather than quoting what was promised or advertised.

It was always XCOM-like game with the designer of original X-COM at the helm. As far as I can remember (even before fig) the vibe of the game was clear - Gallop bouncing from the Firaxis-update and doing his own spin, keeping what he felt was good, bringing back from his previous projects what he felt was good, and adding some new ideas on top. At no point were we promised anything closer to Xenonauts, then Firaxcom, though many mechanics from the original were to come back, with clear call backs to X-COM1 and Apocalypse, like the ballistic system, factions or multiple base building.

Original campaign clearly advertises classes and soldier abilities, bringing it closer to XCOM then X-COM (I am not sure if I would call them robust at this point though).

So while I do agree that it might have been more beneficial for the game to focus on taking full advantage of the more robust combat mechanics, what we seem to be getting is precisely what was originaly promised.

58

That’s a literal quote from the gaming magazines. So it’s clearly not just my expectation. What are those expectations is a different matter.

Yes starting from first BB you could see that game won’t be a “classic” 100 TU type of mechanics and nothing like Xenonauts. No where I’m claiming the opposite and it’s completely fine. But till BB4 there was no indication that what we are getting is a game about small super hero squads with a bunch of super abilities, with the end game play being much closer to Firaxis XCom than anything else.
Could you point me at materials that state “It will be like XCom but with ballistics and multiple base building”?

Just to add to this, there are many “XCom like” games nowadays, but they don’t necessary play the same way. An example would be Hard West, Phantom Doctrine, This is a Police, Mutant Age, Xenonauts 2 and Phoenix Point Backer Build 3. Being a like, doesn’t mean “being pretty much the same thing tactics concern”

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59

Google: phoenix point spiritual successor of X-COM
…

60

Then perhaps I simply follow more reliable gaming sites. Still, I wouldn’t keep Snapshot responsible for what tabloids write. A quick google did indeed display such titles. That’s is not a quote I can find among materials or quotes coming from Snapshot

The best source of information about PP? Well, site crowdfunding this game.
https://www.fig.co/campaigns/phoenix-point/updates
Some of the quotes read:

My personal NewsSite of choice and two articles which shaped my early view on PP.

PRE-FIG CAMPAIGN ARTICLE:

FIG CAMPAIGN ARTICLE:

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61

It doesn’t mean it won’t change to accomodate XCOM features. :wink: