Petition: classless system

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I haven’t played Xcom 2 at all - this is in small part due to the class system, (and a lot more to due to the fact that it has mechanics like aim assist - I’m not going near a game which shows one percentage to the player but rolls a different one in the background).

My preference is for a classless system, but I’d take a hybrid system over a purely class based system. I think Silent Storm did a good job of things in this way, base attributes were kind of classless, and increased based on use, any character could use any weapon, but at the same time there were some difference in starting attributes for different classes, and the perks that character’s could choose on level up did depend upon class. It was then the perks that made one class stand out from another, but any two characters within a single class could also be very different from one another.

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I agree with @Avenger93 , UFO’s treatment of skills & stats was spot on. I do hope, PP class system will be at least influenced by, if not based on UFO’s. Key points here are: flexibility of skill choices, gradual skill development, moderation in reliance on veretan soldiers with high number of advanced skills for the successful campaign.

@Vathar : Having all skills in a group available for a freshly-certified soldier doesn’t mean he will be able to be effective at using those. He will perform well enough with 1-2 basic ones but more advanced ones will require a lot of additional training to become actually usable. Besides, unlike FXCom where skills were essentially perks which were functioning at 100% right after a soldier unlocked them, each skill in PP can have levels of it’s own, requiring further training to unleash it’s full potential.

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From a game design/UI point of view, I’d question the point of having skills showing that will be mostly useless/not very effective. It’s all a matter of balance of course, and a passive skill giving a small bonus still won’t hurt, but it’s quite different when it comes to active skills. I’d expect a fair bit of player frustration if they were getting a new set of shiny skills on promotion, just to realize that these icons will probably be a waste of TUs until they level up a bit.

There’s also the matter of user experience. I know most people posting on this forum are hardcore fans of tactical turn based games, and we all tend to suggest ideas that would complexify the game one way or another, but it’s also important to think about less experienced players.

It’s better to let the player learn one new skill at a time when they level up than bombarding with half a dozen new options on level up. I’ve “taught” a few friends an colleagues how to play FiraXcom (either by streaming a let’s play or by standing behind them with a club and hitting them on the head when they were doing something stupid) and it reminded me than players with less experience struggle with using all options available (active skills, consumables, proper use of overwatch/cover/height advantage, pod activation, scouting …) and can feel overwhelmed when too many options are dumped in their lap all of a sudden.

Is this confirmed? it’s not always easy to keep track of what’s been announced/revealed or what has been speculated. In any case, if it is it sounds good :slight_smile:

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I see your point and I partly agree with the necessity of making game accessible to new players but I guess the key thing I would like PP to have is gradual skill development. I do believe having a skill which gives you, say, 10% chance of success when just acquired early in soldier’s career and then having it gradually improved to reach 95% of success at veteran levels is better and more natural than just having no way to even attempt to use said skill until some arbitrary level and then have it magically become available and immediately function at 100% success rate. I do think a compromise can be achieved here. Maybe skills can only become available when success chance(or some other relevant metric) is at least 25% of maximum value?

Again, I see your point but I have a couple of counterarguments. Firstly, I would prefer to skills simply be there, right from the start(be it per-class sets or simply all available skills if a classless character development will be adopted in PP), with success chance for most of them being set to 0. Unusable skills will of course be hidden from the short-list in the tactical combat UI but opportunity to level improve the skill will still be there. So levelling up will not be so much adding new skills but rather adding skill points to one of the existing ones.

My other point is, veteran players started somewhere. People like me and you, we played XCom and TFTD and Apocalypse and JA and guess what? Not only we survived, we also had a lot of fun in the process. So while I can relate to your concerns about new player experience, I do think that PP should not try to be “Bobby’s first XCom”. We already have those in the form of FXcom. :wink: And don’t get me wrong, FXComs are good games, but they lack depth and the intricacies of a hard-core tactical combat game. So as we already have a new player friendly XCom game made in recent years and as PP is a project kickstarted by us tactical game affectionados, why not try and make it into something a hardcore XCom fan can appreciate? :slight_smile: Again, I do understand the need for compromise and I expect some of the combat and skill mechanics to be “streamlined” but I do hope that making a complex enough game out of PP will not require extensive modding. :smiley:

No, I don’t believe so, this is just something I am hoping for.

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Yes and no. UFO had a strength stat, but simply being able to carry a rocket launcher or support the weight of power armor, did not mean you could USE them. That was still a skill set that needed to be trained and the stats served to gate those skill sets so only soldiers who had the potential to be useful with them could learn them. While I am not overly fond of locking some equipment behind skill level-ups, that was a compromise I was willing to take. Another better one in my book is having every soldier able to use everything BUT soldiers not proficient with the gun they are using A)don’t get any inherent benefit of the gun (so a sniper can use an AR but he can’t return fire with it, he could try to use it with his own class skills but it will be less effective than a sniper rifle) and B)can suffer penalties to stuff like the TU cost of firing and reloading or the aiming accuracy of the gun. Going from firing a semi-automatic sniper rifle to a full auto AR is a shock for someone not used to constantly dealing with the recoil of burst fire. And naturally there will be a very small selection of items/guns that nobody can use without a specialized training course, stuff like psi-weapons (assuming they are in the game) or strange appendages that move beyond “I picked up a machine gun with my tentacle and now I can use it”.

As for the part about giving all the skills up front, I suppose this is born out of my desire to have classes serve as guides of play style and role for the soldier, not for lack of a better word magical power sources. I don’t want my guys to go “I now have the sniper force and used it for long enough, I can keep shooting if I kill someone until I empty my magazine”, Basically I want active abilities to be stripped down to some defining but crucially few and customizable with experience and not feature the glut of magic powers nuXCOm features. Yeah ITZ looks awesome. You know what it also looks like? Stupid, forced and trivializing of the game when you move beyond the visceral spectacle of annihilating your first pod with 1 sniper turn and realize your soldier magically turned into the flash for that turn. Or if abilities like those in nuXCOM are to feature, then tone them down severely and limit what they can do. in the ITZ example, I can see it as a unique version of class skill available to a assault trained into a sniper where he focuses, but instead of making his aim better or more devastating to the internal organs of the target, he just focuses on aiming faster, reducing the TU cost of firing, and becoming capable of firing 2 or 3 times in a row assuming he kills the target of each shot. Going further still, it could be an exclusionary option to specialize that base skill with double-tap, where he just fires twice at the same target for increased damage. Spit balling ideas here but what I want to get across as an option to everyone is that classes can be more guides and molds for a soldier, and less a superhero power source that gets better over time and grants more magical abilities. More buttons is not always a good thing, especially not for new players :wink: but rather than trivialize the game with superhero powers and artificially restricted classes, trim down the abilities to a set of iconic but few and effective, maybe 2 or 3, 4 tops, available from the start, that can be improved via passive perks (along with other things about the soldier to shape his play style rather than dictate it) gained leveling up/training his class and turned into specialized variants later. And ideally keep the class and attributes of a soldier on separate XP bars.

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^ This, exactly this. Tone down the uberskillz, root them in game mechanics as opposed to just having them break all the rules simply " 'cause iz kewl " and let skill point system and stat requirements do their job of limiting the number of skills a soldier can master. Having marvel superhero-like soldiers is, of course nice and cool and all that. But you know what else is cool? Winning a battle despite all the shortcomings by using your squad tactically instead of spamming OP abilities to mash the enemy into a bloody pulp with barely any thought process involved.

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While I do think your compromise of 25% is still a bit low, actual numbers are immaterial here. The idea is that any skill that a soldier brings to battle has to bring something. It may not be useful in every mission, but I don’t want it to be a hail mary that you use once every 10 campaigns and succeeds once every 100.

In generic terms, I think a rookie skill should be added to the skill bar if it has a reasonable chance to succeed in perfect conditions (target in the open, elevated position, enemy stripped of armor or whatever is relevant). A trained soldier should be expected to pull it in trickier situations, and a vet should pull it off in a moonless night with a BB gun while teabagging a crabman.

That way you create situations where the risk-reward is interesting even at rookie level.

We survived, but at what cost. I think some of the monsters we faced did scare us for life!

Joke aside, i agree on your assessment of FiraXcom’s difficulty and I hope PP will provide something more challenging for vets of the genre. I have a hunch it won’t be nearly as complex as the more hardcore fans hope, but only time will tell.

More to the point, I hope for more complexity, more mechanics, more tactical options, an enhanced tactical layer and whatnot, but when it comes to UI and general packaging, FXcom got a lot of things right. Hence my warning about having too many icons too fast.

It is cool and may be needed in PP since you can grab weapons from the ground, but there would be very few situations in FXcom where you’d consider picking an off class weapon with heavy penalties. The class system in these games served Firaxis’ needs, but I think PP can get the best of both worlds (much like they did blending the TUs and blue/gold move logic of FXcom)

This looks like a general consensus here, and I agree that the more “Ultimate” skills do more harm than good. the power creep in FXcom is one thing, but the power spike of unlocking some colonel skills is a problem on its own (along with the subsequent power vacuum of losing a soldier knowning said skills)

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Not very related, but a game that has hundreds of skills across tens of classes is T.o.M.E. (Tales of Maj’Eyal), a Lord of the Rings-spirited turn based RPG. Skills become available at certain player levels, and each skill has several levels of training. Different classes also increase common skills with varying ease, e.g., a rogue is better at detecting hidden stuff than a mage, but both can train it.

What T.o.M.E. manages very well is that each skill is useful and interesting immediately upon being unlocked – what the XCOM team valued so highly. However, you still want to improve your skills, as the subsequent gains are worthwhile as well, and you won’t have enough skill points to max out all skills, and so you need to prioritise very carefully.
I guess T.o.M.E. manages this by balancing the extra power of the first skill point in each skill with the added usefulness a maxed out skill has, relative to several which are barely trained.

And just be to perfectly clear, I don’t advocate a class based PP – T.o.M.E. being one is besides the point. Besides, it, too, really has more of a hybrid system, which isn’t necessarily all bad :slight_smile:

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Don’t forget that leveling a talent not only makes it stronger (200% dmg instead of 199%), but can add second/third function too, basically 2-3 skill in one.

And ToME has classes only for balance reasons. There is adventurer for balance-less “freestyle”, and it has some really broken builds :smiley:

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No powerful spells, errr…perks are needed. Just a bunch of weak fellas with knowledge of how to cover and how to shoot. There will be up to 16 soldiers on missions and looking at their super skills all the time would tire me to death. Also, they are not supermen, they are desperate humans in front of real danger. I like the idea with DNA mixing and mind-controlling but even then I want to feel not too powerful.

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I completely agree I want my men mortal!

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What you’re describing reminds me of Might and Magic VI and VII. VI had it so that if you could learn it you could take it to the highest mastery while VII would cap your mastery (basic, expert, master, and VII added grandmaster) based on your class, while both allowed for you to always increase your level in the skill but the costs became excessively prohibitive. So a character level might only give you 7 skill points but to raise a skill from 7->8 would cost 8, promoting you to diversify your skills or else spend multiple character levels to increase a skill level.

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I think that is a good point. Complexity of combat interactions will come from the number of soldiers in a squad. The combination of loadouts and individual skill variety will provide a lot of tactical options which FXcom was lacking due to severely limited squad size. Being hard-capped at 6 soldiers in a squad, they had to seek variety and combat effectiveness elsewhere, hence a plethora of superhero-like abilities. With a generous squad size and vehicles on top of that, there will be no need for supermen in PP.

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I don’t get the fascination with classless systems - it quickly becomes messy instead of cool.

I like the fact, that classes is a thing - but I could see it being developed, so that every character has a base class (rookie) and when they get enough xp you can choose a tree to go down (any of the mentioned paths)

In the original x-com you didn’t have classes, true, but you did have stats - stats determined greatly what equipment you put on that soldier, effectivly granting them a class of sniper, heavy or what not.

I like the idea of freedom, but freedom within limits. I like the idea of randomizing skills, but within limits so that you don’t end up with characters that get useless skills.

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Lets let the developers do their jobs before even telling them not to do something they already planned for and have a road map for.
Since we don’t have much of a game yet, changing something crucial to the strategic game play like having no classes might undermine big parts of the games design that we have no proper insight into.
I’ve seen quite a few games being ruined by the community pulling the strings in the wrong direction…
Well, that is just my opinion.

Complete freedom isn’t always a good thing, playing a game that restricts you in your options gives it the feel of solving a puzzle with a handful of choices where you have to make the right ones.
With classes, it resembles somewhat of a chess game. Only here there is much more to lose, the soldier, the mission, the campaign.
Classes are linear no doubt, but when you have a nice choice of classes and whom you bring to the mission it shapes the strategic approach that you as a player choose. With enough classes it will be your unique way of playing the game.

For the problem of “irreplaceable soldiers”, the player should be given tools to bolster his ranks when the veterans die, not necessarily making everyone being able to do the same job just less efficiently.
Again, these are only my thought on the matter.

I found Firaxis Xcom EU\EW dull and boring and it had no place in my heart until Long War was a thing.
The game itself was very linear on the strategic layout because of the fixed spawn points with the lack of random map generation.
Firaxis Xcom2 has random spawn points and generated maps, but has too much linear story yapping.
The game doesn’t feel like an “Alien Invasion Sandbox” (not that it has to, that is just what i prefer), it is a streamlined pipe that leads you on your endeavour to save the world. Between the Avatar Project, and the constant missions with more or less the same objectives with a timer to force you into tough situations.
Take out the timer, and the game isn’t that challenging.
The game itself had too much stuff you can fiddle around with, all i wanted is raw action of murdering aliens against all odds, improving your tech and pushing forward.

Point being, i am more worried about the linear feel of the game itself and the invasion scale than it being linear because of a class system.
Even though the best Xcom games (in my opinion) don’t have a class system:
1.UFO: Enemy Unknown
2.Xenonauts

I trust SnapShot will deliver a bad ass product, in my opinion it is too soon to try and derail some of their development choices.
Like it was said previously, with mod support something can be fiddled with or changed to your liking.

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I think the way “A better barrack” mod in xcom 2 works really well and it is very similar to PP imo

It is like PP, weapon have skill attached to and there are 3 lines of abilities.
Each rank you unlock 3 ability:
the first line is class specific
the other 2 lines are common ability
all 3 lines are random in their respective pool, so you have both your training roulette and even within the same class, you have different ability

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I’ll ask again, what kind of stats are PP soldiers planned have? We don’t know. Without knowing what’s planned, I’m a bit surprised that folks are pushing against the plan.

I, for one, don’t want soldiers who are all the same but I don’t want to manage a variable strength stat. I’ll find it too fiddly to manage when equiping before a mission. I’m concerned that if we go classless, it’ll be a full stats system. It’s too OG for me. It’ll be too much work to keep track of who is good for carrying a heavy weapon.

Also, echoing a post above I tried to quote (but it didn’t work) is picked skills just start to mimic a class system anyway, as there is going to be a meta game that develops around the best skill combinations, so the soldiers end up being the same anyway.

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Well i think that declassified soldiers is better. Like in old X-COM. How that should work? Just look at Xenonauts it has that base stat system + classes are like templates. Btw weapons has there own stats, that give accurity (like sniper rifle).

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I like the idea of classes representing skill sets. It would make managing the soldiers a lot easier.

For me it would be good if it were something like this… I have a sniper and he/she runs out of ammo on a mission. he/she could take an assault rifle from a fallen comrade and equip it. But my sniper would have an accuracy penalty and would not be able to use any perks associated to the rifle, as this would reflect his/her lack of training with that weapon. If my sniper had some levels on an assault rifle wielding class, the he/she would not have the aim penalty and would be able use some perks reflecting the level of assault rifle proficiency.

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What i didn’t like about the class systems in xcom 2 and the general soldier management was that it was just too fiddly imo. You had so many flipping things that you could adjust and tweak and it just bogged the game down so much for me.

I feel like the strategy of the game should focus on simple soldier/equipment logistics and get interesting with the diplomacy, scavenging, exploration etc. I wonder how much the latter could be improved upon if the prior was toned down some. In xcom 2, i felt like the exploration/diplomacy/etc. took a back seat to the all of the doodads you could put on each troop.

Personally, I’d like a class system that lets you plunk a soldier into one before each mission, assigning them an auto loadout, which you could adjust. say if:

1)You click on loadout for mission/whatever
2)You get a list of slots, which you could assign classes
3)The classes draw up stats of most fitting soldier and creates a list with them on the top (auto fitting those at the top of the list into the mission slot)

This way, you could organize a squad based on classes, but avoid all of the fiddly soldier management (assigning abilities/lvl up upgrades/etc) Being able to create you’re own classes in this fashion could be very handy as well. Say you wanted to create a template (essentially what these classes would be following this idea) were you want a medic that’s loaded out with extra ammo…This custom template could also ask for specific stats (that you could choose, being this is a custom class), which will automatically create a list of best soldiers to fit that position. Otherwise, you could just have generic classes that are preset, which players could utilize if they don’t want to customize as much.

So this proposed class system isn’t really equipment or special powers based, but something more of template based. I personally wouldn’t mind abilities that were linked to specific stats and equipment rather then ones you go through a special level up system to gain, though keeping them toned down to fit with the simulation feel of the game might be the best way to go.

Abilities like the rocket jump boots are cool, but stuff like double shot might be neat to have a reassessment to see if something more simulationy might be more interesting, considering you’re planning on having up to 16 troops to manage (the jigsaw metaphor is a good one) I’d much rather just have squad compositions that are filled out with generic troops.

I feel like xcom2 tries to shoe horn characterization of soldiers with all of these arrays of features, while the original xcom was so powerful in how the vulnerability of the soldiers, the world of the game, and your interactions were able to build such a strong connection, simply based on the shit that happened whilst on missions.

Just some thoughts.

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