I think several other posts have mentioned the thing that makes X2 and WOTC so great… the mods.
Bored with the classes? There are tons of mods with new, edited, crazy, etc. classes.
Yawning over the gear and armor? There are tons of mods with cool new gear and armor.
Turning down the volume because the voices are annoying and repetitive? There are tons of mods with new voices.
I’ll play X2 and WOTC for a few days… get bored and move on to another game. After a couple weeks, I check out new mods, load 'em up and play for another few days.
And now is a great time to try it because they just released the new Tactical Legacy pack that fills in the gap between X1 and X2… for free.
Oh yeah… try Xenonauts the original and Xenonauts 2 is out soon. Great game.
At release the uproar was more about the timers. If anything is divisive in X2 it’s those things. In EW the timers rewarded you for meeting them with meld but in X2 you get punished, and punished hard, for not meeting them.
Firaxis basing X2 off of losing caused some consternation but I wouldn’t call it an uproar or divisive. Granted Jake didn’t do himself any favors when he stated that if you won EU/EW then you won and there’s no X2 as this still doesn’t answer the question of what’s canon (so did we win or lose? We get that the sequel is based on losing, but is the sequel canon, not canon, just a “what-if” etc). Now there were some people who got all butt hurt as they viewed X2 as saying that all of their hard work in winning EU/EW was pointless but it was a crap argument to begin with and went away pretty quickly.
Exactly. To me both games are nice, but not proper “reboots”.
Nice - as better then “Syndicate and Robocop reboots”
Not proper - I just like games that keep original gameplay and give it a new look only. Like Wonderboy Dragons Trap has a great HD Reboot that even offers retro/HD switch between music/gfx at any point.
I see he will be renamed “Monster boy” soon !!???
Gaming industry sees to try to reinvent itself in lack of ideas.
However, I do acknowledge Faxis games have brought a lot of “fresh blood” that yet has to experience what real strategy is (Panzer General / Civ 1-3 / Xcom old school style
And that is exactly where PP might fall in.
But my idea is not to say Xcom 2 is bad per se. It has improved a lot from 1.
Just not my piece of herbs.
Well, modern game makers dont really pay attention to such small details.
I would say that what you’re calling a reboot sounds more like a remastering (graphics and possibly audio upgrades only) or a remake (graphics improvement combined with some new story elements). Halo:CE on the 360 sounds most like what you’re talking about and was a remastering. That compared to Doom 4 which was a reboot to the franchise given all of both the story and gameplay changes. Or if one looks at Metroid Fusion, FF6 Advance, etc which are all the same story as the old games but with both updated graphics and a bit of new content and thus are remakes.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the Firaxis XCOM games and the OG XCOM games take place in completely different universes and outside of using the same base enemies they don’t share any history. Which further goes with it being a reboot of the IP as opposed to a continuation of it. Imo generally a reboot changes so many things that they could often be their own IP but for whatever reason have chosen to retain the old one’s name (generally due to story/lore reasons but not always as seen in XCOM, Quake, and potentially DOOM).
True enough. I think I spent so long immersed in Reddit at XCOM 2’s release reading about people’s opinions that I lost perspective on that. Someone did a good youtube commentary on rewarding players vs punishing players via timers, I can maybe dig the link out of my history if you’re interested. Basically agreed with what you said and expanded on that idea of reward vs punishment for meeting a timer.
In any case, I do feel like they did a good job in WotC dialing back/adjusting the timers. One of the cooler (imo) solutions was those supply recovery missions where you fulton out supplies. It’s basically a timer, but if you don’t get literally any of them, you still win the mission, just with no extras. If you get all the supplies, you get a ton of loot/supplies/intel that really jumpstarts a campaign.
These were fun missions, and the ones where you had to shoot gizmos to extend your time were a welcome variation too. That said, the only timers I had issues with were council mission timers because timing out wouldn’t only mean a loss, but also a squad wipe (capture technically but rescue missions were so rare that it made no difference)
Timer were more than manageable if you were willing to abandon the overwatch crawl EU/EW meta, the only issue was that EVERY bloody mission was timed, and it didn’t always thematically made sense. Alternating slow methodical missions with blitz commando ops would have provided a lot more variety.
All things said, even if X2 failed in some of its intentions, it seems like more than a good enough try, and more than worth getting it. Heck, even Julian Gollop said it himself. Only thing is that right now money is a problem, even with the current -40% discount. I’ll wait for better times
Thanks for the offer but no need to post it for me. I regularly follow/post in r/XCOM and r/PhoenixPoint and have actually posted that video a few times when the subject of timers have come up over there (though I wasn’t the original poster of it).
Yeah I’m having a blast right now playing through the Tactical Legacy Pack addition, which I think right now is fused to the WotC DLC. It’s a fun change of pace playing just the tactical missions with certain upgrades after each mission. Also really tunes the missions so you don’t have overpowered soldiers on your end, and have to adapt to the squad you’re given. Really reinforced my decision to take grenadiers on every mission when one of the campaigns didn’t give me one lol
Given the aiming system Grenadiers are arguably OP. I always ran with two of them (and two Snipers) in Vanilla X2 and regularly ran with two in WotC (only dropping to one when I ran with all three hero units in the same mission).
I agree. I think it was the absolute best idea they had for a sequel. Even though TFTD was a crowd favorite, changing the narrative allows for a lot of basic design changes that i think gave them a lot more room to expand than a straight sequel could do. It really was a stroke of genius imo.
