I've tried.. I really have but now its time to ask for a refund

Crouching. Or being able to open / close doors (unless I’ve missed something obvious).

Step back from the door and it’ll shut, unless it was shot off. Sometimes it works great for overwatch, though the majority of the time it seems like the pandorans know where overwatch is even without line of sight.

unfortunately EpicStore make this possible, in Steam it will be disvotet at the first week … this piece of code with “all unit test are green” but someone try to play it befor release ???

Since my game bugged out that one time to many I have been trying to play other similar games, form Banner saga to Xcom-2, but nothing else seems to make up for PP. Goes to show how much am into PP.
I keep looking at the PP icon on my desktop thinking, should I, shouldn’t I.

It has to be worth sticking with even though the wait for fixes is excruciating at times. First thing I do after my cup-o-tea in the morning is check to see if a patch has dropped.

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I’ve noticed this. Not all the time but most of the time they will avoid OW to the point of retreating. I put this down to them having the same advantages as me. It’s very rare that one of them will trip my OW cone of death.

Yea, I agree. I didn’t even uninstall it. can’t bring myself round to it… I’m just hoping so much for a game of this type to take my attention up for a few months… i come here everyday to talk about the game and see if a patch is floating around the internetsssssss.

I am not sure if this applies here but I will post a little wisdom I have accumulated about gaming purchases.

Back when Aliens Colonial Marines was announced and then up for pre-order I was totally overjoyed. Gearbox software, creators of borderlands, was making every Aliens Fans dream. A chance to go back to LV426, a sequel that followed the last true alien movie. I pre-ordered instantly, there was no hesitation. Well we all know how the game turned out, it was an epic disaster, Gearbox had cheated customers as they where not even the principle developers on the game. Controversy ensued, gamers raged, even going so far as filing a class action suit against Sega and Gearbox.

The day it released and I played it I learned a valuable lesson. Since then I refuse to pre-order any game. I treat the game industry like the automobile industry, I would not buy a car that I had never test driven, and only seen early pictures of. Since that day when I said “never again” I have avoided many situations I see fellow gamers in. This game was another case of “OMG this is another X-COM and by some of the original team, how can I not pre-order it”. However I did not pre-order and instead waited on reviews, gameplay videos and posts about bugs and issues. I also saw that they where going to have this game on microsoft game-pass. So I waited and then finally installed it from gamepass.

I fired up the game and was unable to play it because of the shoddy programming bug that prevents the UI from scaling properly on ultrascreen monitors. Boy am I glad that I have adopted a new philosophy regarding how I purchase games.

My new philosophies are this.

  1. If I must purchase the game I wait on reviews, watch game play videos, read about bugs, and look over post by gamers who have purchased the game. I then purchase with this in mind “if they never fix the games problems is it worth my money in its current state?” I do this because there is no guarantee problems will be fixed. So if I can’t tolerate specific bugs or gameplay issues then I will not purchase on the “hopes” it will be fixed. Let’s face it there are 1000s of games already released that have had bugs since day one which have never been fixed and, at this point, never will.

  2. Another option is to use gaming subscription services. Your typical game costs 40.00 to 60.00 dollars retail, your typical game pass service cost anywhere from 5 to 15.00 dollars a month. Reassigning that money to a gamepass service gives you anywhere from 2.6 months and up. In the case of a 40.00 dollar game and a 5.00 subscription service that would be 8 months. In the case of Phoenix Point and Microsoft gamepass you would have 8 months to play this or any other game. So when you found bugs that make you mad or break the game you just install another game from the subscription service. This has the advantage of the once popular rental format. The days long ago you would go to BlockBuster and rent a game. If that game sucked you just took it back and was out only the rental cost!!

Take my opinions as just that: MY opinions!!

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Absolutely agree. My usual philosophy with games is simple: wait at least a year until all the bugs have been fixed and people have posted help on the forums and a Wiki-How.

For PP I broke that rule to help crowdfund the game, and have been as active as I can on the forums since BB1, giving what feedback I can.

The reason for that is simple. As a middle-aged boardgamer who used to love Squad Leader, XCOM is probably my favourite computer game - as I describe it to fellow boardgamesrs, it’s basically ‘Squad Leader with added Command & Control.’ But XCOM has its limitations, most particularly its simplistic 2-Action turn format (Move then Fire), and the way your Squaddies turn into unstoppable supermen at the endgame - which is why I play LW2 nowadays, rather than vanilla XCOM2.

As things stand, PP has fixed Problem #1, but has Problem #2 in spades! So I’ll keep plugging away, I’ll keep feeding back, I’ll keep suggesting how to limit the ludicrously OP skill combos and how to refine the DDA so that we actually don’t need to be so OP while the Crabbies still stay interesting by evolving to nerf our exploits.

Snapshot have publicly committed themselves to at least another year supporting this game - and have a good track record of supporting Chaos Reborn as far as I can see. So I have hope that they will read these forums, pick up on what’s going wrong and work hard to fix it. I really do hope so, because if they get this right, this game could be great.

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I’m similar to yourself in that I made an exception to my normal rules of also waiting that 12 month period for a game purchase. I’ll also add, that on steam in particular I’ll wait to see whether post release updates are coming regularly if needed. Bard’s Tale IV for example was tanking for reviews on release, but the devs kept working at it, so it’s still on my wish list.

Yes and no.

Similar to PP it released prior to being fully complete. Upon release CR’s core game was very tight on balance but it was missing some additional features. I believe that the reason for early release was financial, Snapshot said as much at the time and were a lot more open and engaged with their community than they have been in PP. Unfortunately this financial obstacle also meant that CR wasn’t marketed well.

Post release CR was made ‘feature complete’ however some of those late features that came into the game, such as guilds, are quite shallow/lacking (the game has guilds within it, but they don’t really do anything). Similar to PP it also suffered from some feature creep, the addition of a 2nd game mode for instance was something that was never really needed and took resources from elsewhere whilst also hacking off a lot of the existing player base.

Eventually Snapshot moved resources to PP. I think the final update added was the possibility to create custom games, it’s very good to be able to do so, but quite janky (at this stage it was just 1 guy who was very kindly trying to still support the players) and there’s custom settings that you can make to online games that you can’t make to offline and vice versa. Again the reason behind this was I believe financial.

I would love to have seen more development of CR (or a CR2) as I feel that it’s a great game at its core, certainly worth giving it a try for anyone who’s waiting for PP to be patched up.

It’s sad reading sentiments like this. People can’t get used to any sort of narrative then the standard “hero save the world everyone’s happy” trope? That’s more fantasy than anything else, and I find it boring. The way these factions fall into war with one another as a RESULT of the Pandorans I find thrilling. Anu are seen as terrorists, New Jericho as Nazi’s and Synedrion can’t just stand by and do nothing. Not even fully realizing or understanding the mistakes they’re making. Seems pretty human. A nice mix up halfway into the game instead of just more of the same as usual. What’s there honestly to complain about? Don’t like change?

Read the news once in a while. Maybe all of this will seem a lot less surprising to you.

Try to be less presumptuous.

And not following a trope is fine. Promising a trope and not delivering it is not. Do not put the blame on people who were promised something when that promise wasn’t delivered.
First sentence in the store description: Phoenix Point puts the player in the midst of a desperate fight to take back the earth from a mutating, alien menace.

And since you want to make real life parallels: when the Allies won WWII, they did not wipe out the countries that formed the Axis. That is what the game factions are doing - not because it was planned lore wise, but because the gameplay ended up getting rushed into the faction warfare we have.

You like it, good for you. Do not belittle other people for not sharing your opinion.

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The factions were always planned to be at war with one another, right from the start.

Infact, in our earlier prototype of the Geoscape, before it was even a part of the Backer Builds, the system would procedurally place the faction Havens and simulate many years of war between them so that the territory for each faction would always be different.

So now it is more “set in stone” rather than generated? Something like 20 variants of haven’s affiliation from which system is choosing from at the beginning?

I personally like it that the factions are going at each other, it feels very appropriate given the three very different ethoses that the three of them have, and it adds an extra level of gravitas to the need to eliminate the Pandorans as quick as you can.

Not giving all of humanity a white hat is a good example of modern story telling, I really glad that PP isn’t following the done to death trope of humans finding united peace against a common enemy.

I respectfully disagree. I do enjoy most of the writing, and agree that if you watch the news once and a while you will see more than enough examples that people can be horrible, foolish, and selfish. I like the fact the the different factions have wildly different views and generally do not get along great with each other.
That said, when monsters are rising from the sea, mutating your friends and family, and basically threatening to wipe out humanity, most people will set their priorities differently.
I’d say in addition to

you might also want to read some history. A bigger threat tends to make allies out of enemies. Maybe not permanently, but at least until the threat is largely gone. Then people can act like selfish a-holes again. I don’t care how much you disagree with somebody’s philosophy, once aliens come out to murder everyone you have ever known, you tend to find common ground.
Thant’s just my take at least. In a resource starved population, waging war between factions just seems beyond ridiculous. Perhaps there is a way to write that so it seems to make sense, but it didn’t read that way to me. It just seemed unbelievable, which makes me not give ‘rat’s behind’ about the stupid factions and pulls me out of the immersion.
Just my $0.02, but I was personalty disappointed, given how much potential I felt this cleverly imagined game contained, and after reading the entertaining and well written “pre-game” lore while waiting for the game to come out.

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I must say i feel that i have encountered my fair share of bugs in the first playtrough. All from the game braking type where loading up old save game was the only option, to the countless small anoyances that follows you all the way through out the game. Even now after the latest hotfix, the game crashed three times in the final mission today…

To be able to overcome this buggy struggle and spend 80 hours in-game says a lot about how great the core game and how brilliant addictive the gameplay is,vanilla X-Com is suddently redused to a shallow stream lined consol game in comparison imo.

So with a couple more months of bug fixing and with additional content coming soon, i hope that in the end of the year PP wil be the the best and most complex/addictive turn based game ever made. Just keep those patches coming!

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Completely and utterly wrong (with the one big exception of the Soviets in WW2, though even they actually planned to push on to Paris after taking Berlin, but were stopped by America demo’ing the Bomb). Here’s my reply to a similar sentiment on another thread:

But actually my current take on this is much simpler and based on the game itself. As the ODI ticks up, we are treated to a continuous stream of ‘Bad Dream’ stories that gradually escalate into people attacking their companions. We also encounter this when we first meet New Jericho in the NJ intro mission. Regardless of human nature, as illustrated by our bloody history detailed above, the Pandoravirus is making the factions attack one another! It’s all part of its insidious plan to wipe out humanity.

It would be nice if this was spelled out more clearly in the ODI texts, but it seems consistent with the game lore (until I get to the end of my first playthrough and discover some spoiler I’m currently not aware of).

And talking of spoilers:

The thing that disappoints me is that, having chosen to go down this route, PP doesn’t follow it through. I ignored the Faction War in this first playthrough of mine (I had more important things to spend my precious squaddies on) - and the war simply petered out. WTF?!?? If you’re gonna do this, Snapshot, either turn it into another timing mechanism where the Factions are literally driven to murder one another by the Pandoravirus, and we have to get to the endgame before it happens, OR have some public declaration of peace when they fight themselves to a standstill. Don’t just have it peter out, because that just makes it feel irrelevant, regardless of how humanly accurate it might be.

I think it would be more natural for the factions to satisfy their bloodlust after destroying several settlements and negotiate a ceasefire.
They could even ask a third party (Phoenix Point) to help them with negotiations, especially if they get along with it. This situation could even result in a special mission.

Even back in Middle Ages people figured out that just wiping population of the city is not the best long term decision. It was still done occasionally but wasn’t the usual practice. Regardless of what is subject of war, even if it’s based on ideology, wiping out civilian population and destroying all industrial capacity, instead of occupying it just looks stupid. More over, why would NJ strike any faction first if there are independent havens all around the place that are not occupied? Wouldn’t you deal with them first? Convince them to “join” you. Even just in case if they might change their neutrality when faction war begins.

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I think what is trying peoples patience is Snapshot’s very relaxed view when it comes to patching their games. The verse “Take your time” being the order of the day.
Gamers are known for not being to big at being patience. :slight_smile:
When PP is balanced and polished people will drift back, but for now it’s a rocking boat.