Bought the game and all it’s DLCs pre-launch. Played 8 hours and had some problems with difficulty spikes but enjoyed my time. Stopped playing figuring that the game would smooth out but this forum does not lead me to believe it did. Did it?
My suggestion maybe to follow Larian Studios lead with the Divinity Series. If you set up the game and people learn a work around, so be it. Based on these forms I am seeing comments on spikes in alien offensive weapons and nerfs in human weaponry. Makes me want to wait even longer to start playing again.
The latest patch gone a long way in smoothing out the difficulty spikes. While there are still a few gotchas, it’s hoped they might be addressed in the upcoming patch.
Just to echo mcarver2000, I’ve been playing since Backer Build 4 and while I may not agree with every decision or tweak, the experiance is getting better each time. I see a studio who listens to their base (even the manbabies who just need to improve their tacticle thinking) I think I see where it’s headed and I’m liking it. I think we forget X-com released in a pretty buggy state but was aided by modders having instant access to it. I still think ‘James fix your game’ anytime any game i’m playing crashes. There is a big patch due any day now so i would wait for that and start a new campaign.
Note to that: Waiting for patch won’t fix difficulty in your current campaign. It may be that it went really high by now and none of the patches won’t do anything with it. Only starting new campaign can give you better experience.
Thanks again for the answers, I will start a new game after the patch.
One note: Years ago I was playing an RPG, definitely not an AAA title but it was fun for awhile. I learned how to play setting up the team and so on. Had to replay some battles but that is expected. As you played along you hit a “trap door” which plunged your team and mixed up its placement (Tanks in front of priest and mages, Archers in the back. The normal RPG placement). The first time it was a challenge and fun but by the third time my opinion of the developers/designers tanked and I never played again. Hope these developers are different. Game should be a challenge and fun!
My two-penn’orth, from someone who’s been patiently feeding back to the devs since BB1.
Snapshot has some really cool ideas, but much like X-com in its early days, those cool ideas come at the expense of bugs and balance.
Acid is a perfect example of this. The devs listened to the chorus of cries for acid to be made more powerful - and therefore more relevant in an alpha-strike dependant game. But at the same time, they clearly so fell in love with their new acid mechanic that they thought it would be cool if the Pandas had acid too - completely missing the fact that the new acid they had created was going to be a squad-killer. So the new patch came out with the RNG either weighted towards acid-lobbers, or simply randomly creating them in an unfortunate RNG spike, and squaddies died in droves.
Cue mass wailing and gnashing of teeth.
The devs are listening. They are now doing something about acid - again. In the short-term, they’re enabling medkits to cure it. In the longer-term, they are working out how to balance it better.
And here is where they have demonstrated to me that they are (finally) learning. The initial release and first bug-fixes came out rushed and without proper testing - and suffered terribly as a result. So Snapshot has now created the Community Council, which is simply a bunch of dedicated players who have demonstrated from their 100+ hours of playing time and (generally) constructive feedback, that they have both the game’s best interests at heart and an overall understanding of the delicate balance needed to make it work. In essence, we’re glorified playtesters, who aren’t simply going to jerk our knee in one direction the minute the game drops something on us from a great height.
This, I think, is a good step forward, and while it will not influence the patch that is due out shortly, it should help ensure that the fixes which are implemented from then on won’t simply be knee-jerk reactions to the loudest cries of complaint, and won’t sacrifice balance for ‘cool’ as has happened previously.