the variety of mutations (how much can it force the player to adapt, if you can blow up everything with grenades regardless of mutations, it will not change the player’s way much)
and the (evolutionary) algorithm used for selecting the “better” and “worse” versions over time (or whatever else the devs choose, I’m not a game dev so don’t know what’s the industry thinking about it).
It can be awesome, mediocre or even underwhelming, depending on how the devs balance not just the game, but the development (resources spent on them), and we as backers/players have relative little say in that, because we want everything perfect and are bad at compromising (with each other ).
I’m with @Vathar here. While enemy mutations might make a particular weapon obsolete(i.e. heavy reliance on AP ammo might lead to meaty enemies with no armour and lots of HP getting almost no damage from AP ammo due to overpenetration), I doubt that weapon categories(and, thus, relevant skills) will be easy enough to be made obsolete. As was said above, you still need to shoot your enemies till they drop dead, no matter what mutation will affect them; I don’t expect enemies in PP to mutate too fast and too drastically to require complete a overhaul of the approach to combat very often if at all.
Besides, if enemy mutation will make soldier’s skillset obsolete, it wouldn’t matter which skill/class progression will be used in the game. If anything, rigid FXCom-like skills will make everything even worse as you cannot change soldiers’ skillset in this situation; after a path is chosen, the only way is forward unless comlete respec will be a thing(which I strongly hope against BTW).
Fair point, though the og game logistics didn’t manage to get in the way as much as alot of the customization options and character ability screens, etc. Most of the soldier load out options could be figured out on a single screen as opposed to each character having it’s own menus which you had to browse through for every adjustment you wanted to make.
It was sort of like being an RPG with a gigantic roster of characters, which I felt bogged things down and a part of why the game took so unnecessarily long to play through.
Having a roster of 16 troops as a max would be horrific if this wasn’t accounted for in some way. I guess it’s just a matter of how much needless logistics you can lose while keeping the remaining logistics an interesting interlocking of systems to enhance the gameplay.
hmm regardless of classes, i really like the whole XCOM2- WotC ability points earned via types of actions. I’m not sure if i liked how it constrained players who like min-maxing (me) to playing in very specific ways to get those points (because I NEED them, okay?). I do like the idea of feats in combat affecting the soldier permanently, in particular i hope that will can be improved in that way.
The WotC system worked because those points were bonus points, applied to the bonus pool. This means you didn’t actively have to make an effort to game them out. You could play the game normally and still get your promotions running just fine or try to min-max things out if you were so inclined.
As long as things are kept on that footing, why not?
The best class system I’ve seen so far is the Long War mod for XCom 2. It has specialties, cross-classing and officer training. But WotC also was good, although it basically allowed a soldier to get every ability rather easily through the experience model which really blurred any specialties and just made everyone a super-soldier, limited only by the weapon types you could carry.
I think the problem I’m seeing with classless vs classes subject is that not everybody can be pleased here. Some people prefer to have rigid classes and others like to pick and mix to come up with their own unique type of soldier. I haven’t played the original X-Com games (please don’t kick me out @JulianG ) but out of all the FXCOM games and their mods that I’ve played I feel Long War 2 did it best with the amount of options you have vs the balancing problems in WotC (much better than the previous rigid upgrade system but too easy to end up with super soldiers).
I wonder if there’s some way that both sides can be satisfied? Maybe have soldiers pick a class when they reach the appropriate experience level so they have direction with skills that naturally complement each other but also allow them to multi-class at an increased cost (for balance)? At least that way people can either stick to the originally chosen classes if that’s what they prefer but it’s also open to experimentation for people that wish to multi-class and create something unique.
I like the sound of what @Siilk mentioned earlier in the conversation about stat progression and slowly building towards a ‘perk’ rather than just suddenly being able to perform this new amazing skill out of the blue (looking at you Reaper skill ). That makes a lot more sense to me. Not to say I haven’t had fun using skills like Reaper but when you consider it in the context of the general game mechanics it feels a bit silly.
@Siilk when you mentioned the stats progression how did you envision it? Would the player choose which stats are upgraded at each level? Would the stats naturally increase depending on which skills/actions the individual soldiers use the most? Or would it work similarly to long war 2 where the classes defined which stats increased each level?
EDIT: Just for the record, I voted classless. If I have to pick between the two options at the top then that is my preferred route for upgrading soldiers.
Originally I was actually thinking about JA games as something to have skill & perk system be modeled against, JA2 to be exact. It is often brought up in the discussion of tactical and for a good reason too. One of the greatest games in the genre, it allowed for a very flexible and intuitive progression for each character without giving player too much to micromanage. All unique mercs had per-determined sets of starting stats which made each of them into a ready to use “package”(a proto-class if you will) without the rigidness of an actual locked-down class.
Progression in JA games was natural so skills were improved by using them. Note that while there were levels in JA2, skill progression was not tied to them directly. On top of that there was a teacher-student system where mercs with high skill values were able to teach that skill to others while not on on active duty.
Most skills were soft limits, meaning having low skill would usually not prevent a merc from trying a corresponding action(at least a basic one) but will give a low chance of success and an automatic failure for a harder tasks. Just like low accuracy will not prevent a merc form shooting, low medical skill for instance will still give him an option to try and use a first aid kit but the amount of healed HP will be low.
Improving skills not only improved the chance of success but also allowed mercs to gain access to new actions covered by that skill. For instance high medical skill allowed mercs to treat recovering squad mates while not on active duty to speed up the recovery process.
While I think that natural skill progression can be used in PP, even a skill point distribution-based progression(as in classic Fallout games fro instance) can work well enough if people are considering natural progression cumbersome. I don’t think that progression style is critical, my biggest wish is to see skills being freely available to every operative to learn(i.e. not locking particular skills behind a particular class) and perks not to be instantly available as a reliable fire-and-forget action upon unlocking a certain skill level; developing a skill should be a more gradual process with advanced skills being limited by having other skills of a certain level as a pre-requirement.
In short, I would very much prefer for classes to be “starter packages” of skills which work well with each other instead of a locked path for a soldier to follow. That way further development of each soldier will be fully up to the player, limited only by XP available to a soldier. I strongly believe that arbitrary hard-locking skills and even equipment behind classes with no option for a cross-class skill development will leave the character progression feeling very artificial, just like it was in FXCom.
I have tried Xcom Long War (add to first Fireaxis XCom, not the second one) and while i found I can create really interesting mixes of classess, they ended looking like a mix in a bag compared to properly developed class mates.
I agree with you, best would be to have classes normaly AND option to have your RANDOM ablities class (you pick one out of every level skills)
On stat progress, I am always for player picking the ones.
I’m afraid you won’t see it. There will be classes and only two classes will be available to single character as cross-class. So not everthing can change. But they are right saying it is not done yet. Game is still in pre-alpha.
Since this thread suddenly resurrected… lately i’m playing battle brothers, in this game you don’t have classes and your guys choose perks from a pool as they level up.
And then each weapons has it’s own abilities associated, that’s a feature I like very much.
And that’s a question for the people who don’t like classes, Do you think this kind of system would work in pp.
Yes, you don’t have classes and you have the freedom to choose whatever you want, but at the end you want some guys to be tanks and some guys to be snipers, and then there are perks useless for a tank and perks useless for a sniper.
I think a class system what makes is help the player to build a character by not letting him pick the “wrong” perks.
I can see why freedom and experimentation with perks is fun, but some people, me included, don’t have the time or the skill to do this kind of things and having a “guide” to not cripple character leveling it up is very helpfull.
And those are thingss I was thinking while playing BB : p , maybe you can put a toggle that locks perks to choose if you decide to build a defined class and a classles class wich can choose whatever perk, but since I don’t know the perks in pp it may have balance issues I think.
What if there is a “second wave” option which “disables” class restrictions, with a red warning sign “game is not balanced around this feature”?
You win the game once with the balanced approach, then you are free to mess around if you want. New players will not get confused, and veterans don’t need mods.
I just can’t know exactly how much work it is to include an option like this, so it’s possible that mods are still the better choice for the devs.
Example from ToME, which is exactly the same, you can learn anything you want, making otherwise impossible cross-class combos without modding the game.
How about a compromise and make either/or/both synedrion and Anu classless/perks based since New Jericho seems like it would be fundamentally opposed to this idea? I’ve gone in depth on prior posts on how it could work specifically for classes but I’m open to the thought as it would probably mesh well with our religion and gmo hippie survivors.
([EDIT] my original thoughts on class is featured here:)
But it also prevents players from creating builds more tailored for a particular playstyle by being overly rigid which is it’s biggest problem; “wrong” skills are often only wrong if picked without thinking or adjusting the play style.
To give you some examples, heavy armour or autonomous weapon operation skills might seem like a bad choice for a medic but some players might want to build themselves a “trauma team” medic, heavily armoured and equipped with deployable riot shield and an auto turret, Such soldier might be capable to quickly jumpjet in to help a downed ally caught in the open, deploy the shield to create himself a cover, stabilize the downed soldier and then drop the turret to lay down suppressive fire down while he is healing the wounded back to health. Rigid classes simply wouldn’t give you such freedom to experiment and see what works for you.
I understand your argument of “can’t be arsed to waste time figuring out what will work” and I think it’s a perfectly valid concern, especially in a game where risk is high and replacing a killed or even improperly skilled soldier is very costly. I think a good workaround here is to treat classes as guidelines, consisting of pre-made but modifiable starting skill kits as well as suggested levelling paths. This will give player the ability to mix and match both starting skills and skills picked when levelling soldier up, provided all the skill requirements will be satisfied. So instead of “no, sniper cannot learn drone operation skill”, it will be “drone operation is not a suggested skill for this class, you have to learn basic engineering first to gain access to it” so players will be able to build a sniper who can spot for himself with a spy drone if they would want to.
How about primary and secondary abilities learned from classes with passive and active support skills like above? (Final fantasy tactics a2 is severely underrated for srpgs btw)
“With great flexibility come great balance nightmares” - Uncle Ben, probably
I love to be able to experiment with unorthodox builds, but it comes with downsides. Let’s look at the Riot medic above. He’s using a lot of specialized equipment borrowed from other classes. This means that :
Anybody can use a jetpack, snipers probably can too, which means their positioning weakness is greatly reduced. Game balance must account for this as the class has effectively gained a massive buff. but then, any sniper NOT using a jetpack is at a comparable disadvantage. The abundance of jetpacks also means melee enemies can be kited more efficiently, reducing their power
Anybody can use a turret. While having a single technician with a single turret in a mission is reasonable, the added firepower of a stack of them could be a problem. You also now have turrets and jetpack combos, meaning one can place them in otherwise hard to reach spot, enhancing their powers.
I’m not saying that any of these are crippling flaws. Many are probably trivial to balance but when stuff is mostly unrestricted, you often have to reduce overall gear’s power to avoid balance breaking synergies.
It also has the perverse effect to actually reduce diversity if one is not careful, because there’s often that one piece of gear that’s too good NOT to have on everybody. On one hand you’ve given creative players the ability to mess up with exotic builds, but on the other the masses will go for the meta-vanilla build. Once again, not an unsolvable conundrum, but something to bear in mind nonetheless.
).
) but out of all the FXCOM games and their mods that I’ve played I feel Long War 2 did it best with the amount of options you have vs the balancing problems in WotC (much better than the previous rigid upgrade system but too easy to end up with super soldiers).
). That makes a lot more sense to me. Not to say I haven’t had fun using skills like Reaper but when you consider it in the context of the general game mechanics it feels a bit silly.
