Sir, you replied to me with my quote and told me dishonest and more. So that you was me clearly. If you did not do that willingly, just be carefull what or who you reply and say sry and go on.
There is no dishonesty from anyone here. You are happy with you pizza but I did not. It’s a matter of taste. You can like the game and it’s great. I like it too for first 1.5 month without LotA or FS DLC’s.
If the delivered content is low quality, I would not name it as delivered. I would tell this to pizza boy and return it to change with the one I wanted/expected/pictured at their website.
You can be happy with lower qualities. I REPEAT… repeat with me please. “It’s ok”. Your expectations could be lower. It’s good for you. BUT not for other people. You can’t blame people for this as I don’t blame you for your taste.
Do you understand me? Please re-read this post before you hurry to answer, because there are problems when you don’t read good enough.
So you mean all different body parts. It still doesn’t matter. As they are no reaction to any of our actions in the game. So your claim that reactive evolution is there is false. Snapshot did not deliver that. Wait for more, maybe after evening…
Context is key here. And so Is that I clarified the context and the meaning of my words. So I reject any dishonesty. As one cannot include all the context in all the comments and the intentions of words are not obvious in written languaje. That is how civil conversations work, you missunderstand my intentions, I clarify them.
I reject you from now on and ignore what you say. Take your civil conversation and put into your pocket. You are a bad politician as lies, change words and act like you talk about absolute facts… We got enough of you at my country already.
Yes and agree, the evolution system is not as good as it could have been. But I think is in the realm of what can be exected, as dev decissions are and should be a thing. And the budget of the game was really low.
And I actually agree in that feature being the one that can be argued that was underdelivered, but again, expecting all that is initially planned will be in the end posible in the final product is not that reasonable. Overall they delivered the vas majority of all the content, and I actually think in some places they fairly exceeded what was promised.
You are in no obligation of responding to me. And yes, I think civil conversation is a desirable goal. And saying my intentions or the meaning of my words are for you to decide, despite my effort to explain them, well is up to you. But I would still refrain myself to move the conversation to the realm of personal attacks.
OK, I really don’t have the time to wade through this entire conversation, but TL;DR no, this was not delivered as promised (or rather as advertised).
But before I explain why, I want to make it clear that I love this game as much as you do. It stands head & shoulders above X-Com and all of its clones, because of its open sandboxy nature and the AP/targeting system. It has effectively retired all those other games for me until someone like Firaxis comes along and adds some much-needed balance to the design while they steal the best bits of this game.
But what was advertised, what I bought into in the Fig campaign way back when, was a TBS with an enemy that - and I quote - “evolves new forms in response you your tactics!” Wow! Now that’s what I’ve been waiting for all these years. THAT, right there, is the Holy Grail. THAT I can get behind
You see, much as I love them, the problem with every TBS I’ve ever played is the Inverse Difficulty Curve, where you start out struggling to survive, but by the endgame you’re so powerful that you can virtually stroll blindfold through most encounters without breaking a sweat. XCOM almost fixed it for me with a combo of the Long Wars and the ability to switch Difficulty mid-way through a game. So I’d start on Veteran and every time I hit the big ‘turning point’ missions in the storyline (the Advent Body Factory or the Alien Flagship) I’d turn the Difficulty up a notch. It was still too easy by the end, but at least it provided a modicum of challenge.
What PP promised (and almost delivered) was an enemy which responded to the way we fought - which did what real enemies do in (especially modern) warfare, by looking at what we did and changing its systems to deal with that. So just like tanks were a response to machineguns dominating the battlefield and anti-tank guns were a response to tanks, I expected the Pandas to evolve bigger shields in response to my snipers, ablative armour (which takes half damage to explosives) in response to my Boom Blasting Heavies, and massively innacurate armour-shredding weapons in response to my blatant abuse (dare I say it: ‘exploitation’) of vehicles.
We never got that. We still don’t have it. The closest PP got to it was the Dynamic Difficulty Algorithm which simply added extra enemies to each mission if you were doing well and subtracted them if you were doing badly. Only problem was, that took no account of the way many modern gamers play their games today by - for want of a less emotive term - Save Scumming. So if you saved and restarted till you got a perfect score, the game treated you like a gaming god and hammered you for it - cos how was it to know that you were massaging your ability score by only cherry-picking the best outcomes? People hated it. Some argued (erroneousy imho) that it ‘punished good play’ - which it didn’t: it punished bad play that pretended it was good. But it got junked because casual gamers simply couldn’t cope with it.
Good players - or rather players who got the ‘meta’ - had a different complaint. Because the meta is such that unless you play with a host of self-restrictions (which in my case runs to more than a page: What Self-Restrictions do you Use?), it is perfectly possible for a single squaddie to completely break the game by, for instance, strolling through the first chamber of the Final Mission annihilating every Panda there - including 2 Scyllas - in the first turn of the mission! So rather than fixing the Inverse Difficulty Curve, PP’s biggest strength - its open sandbox system - has exacerbated it by failing to add any colldowns or other limitiations to the stupidly OP skill combos you can simply stumble on by accident in this game.
Now, I’ve seen you argue elsewhere that the devs are perfectly within their rights to shut down an ‘exploit’ when they find it - and that’s what they’re doing. Some players hate it, but you are no longer able to pump 15 Sniper rounds into a Scylla with pinpoint accuracy from the other side of the map by abusing Rage Burst in a way that was never intended - and I for one think that’s a good thing.
On the other side of that coin, I have been a ceaseless voice calling for Easy Difficulty to be just that - easy (which it still isn’t imho). But I also want Heroic & Legendary to actually require you to play like a Heroic Legend to beat it - which it doesn’t.
Proper Reactive Evolution would go some way towards solving that. PP’s already halfway there with the Evolution System they have in place. Now all it needs is for the devs to use the much-vaunted analytics they used to eg. nerf Piranhas because they were being overused, to say: “This team uses Snipers 70% or the time, so let’s evolve a Hoplite-style Tower Shield for the Pandas to counter that; this Teminator Build is abusing Dash & Rapid Clearance, so let’s evolve Goo-spitters or motion-sensitive Reactive Firers to make Dashing into the open and shoving a shotgun at point-blank range into a machinegun-toting Panda’s face the kind of stupidly dangerous action it ought to be.” And so on.
TBH, I wouldn’t even mind if it was a Second Wave Option. I’m all for players being able to play this game the way they want to play this game. But that stands just as much for the so-called ‘hardcore’ as it does for the more casual player. I want a casual player to be able to breeze through this game committing Terminator-style mass-murder with ridiculously untactical suicide-charges as much as I personally want the Pandas to evolve ways to show me just how terminally stupid such behaviour should be in what purports to be a ‘Turn-Based Strategy & Tactics’ game.
But right now, because ‘Reactive Evolution’ is nowhere near what was promised in the Fig campaign, I have to treat this game like it’s a 5-year-old and play with one arm tied behind my back. And I have beein doing so almost non-stop for the past 2 years because even with all its mind-bogglingly irritating foibles, this game still stands head-and-shoulders above every other TBS I’ve tried.
Yes, I actually agree. This featue was much more shallow than promissed. And In can see why is a controversial thing. And I even agree that it is the one feature where SG underdelivered.
But on the other hand… I can only imagine what balance nightmare may end such a feature being. And to be honest I also dont know if the evolved traits are just randomly selected or there is an actual algorithm to select them.
I also think SG did indeed want to implement the feature and simply were not able to add it in a satisfying way to the game. There are many reasons why that may have happened, balance, is one of them, but also resources needed or even being unfun. As the Pandorans may easly trend to deploy the features the player dislikes and hates the most, and always evolve in the same way for the player. All and all, I think this was an understandable design decission. Even if everyone of us would love an actual evolving system.
But being pretty much the only thing I can think of, where SG was not able to pull out their original plan. Is a testament on how commited they were to deliver their vison, and precisely a point I would not handle as critizism. JMO.
As a Community Councillor and an active member of this forum since its inception, I personally cannot fault SG for their commitment to engaging with their players and working to improve the game.
There is a relatively valid argument that the early Backer Builds - especially BBs 2 & 3 - delivered more in terms of the kind of atmosphere and difficulty that most old-school original X-Com fans were expecting. But that was just a tiny portion of a much bigger game, and I agree that SG has done an impressive amount with a fairly small budget and team.
That said - and this is said from the perspective of someone who still loves this game - there are a multitude of design choices and decisions which do not make sense to me to this day. Why , for instance, do game-breaking skills like Rapid Clearance or Adrenalin Rush have no cooldowns? Why can you instantly mutate or surgically enhance your soldiers without any downtime for recovery? Why do limbs heal magically between missions, making it more cost-effective simply to manufacture multiple medkits rather than invest in a Med-Bay at base?
None of this type of thing is particularly difficult to fix - they’ve all been addressed multiple times before in XCOM/Xenonauts/JA2, so it’s not like it’s an impossible programming job.
My own personal opinion is that someone fairly high up in the SG hierarchy - perhaps even the big JG himself - has an aversion to cooldowns. As for the rest, I think it got overlooked in the rush to get stuff out and the devs simply haven’t had time to address it since, which is a problem because I think it turns would could have been a TBS classic into a ‘very good but…’ game.
How are we using RPG though? There seems to be at least two independent concepts of what an RPG is. I like RPGs too, but not the kind that sells it would seem. RPG to me is Fallout 1. It’s the interactions with the characters, the various paths and decisions to be made and the differences in outcomes… but most importantly, when I play that game I actually can roleplay my character and get away with it.
A lot of this can be said about PP as well (one of the few things I like about PP I guess)… despite its many flaws, I can roleplay being a devotee to a specific faction, or a pirate, or whatever I want really and get away with it and still progress the game. It’s the roleplaying that makes this one any bit fun, but it also becomes difficult to do with how broken and out of place so many things seem to be (I’m looking at you, Diplomacy screen that I have to pretend doesn’t exist), and how grindy or easy it can become.
Then to a lot of people RPG simply means Experience Points, Levels, and Skills… which this game also has. The part I would hope to have minimal impact in the game (but with +50% dmg and such, can hardly be considered minimal impact… though at least changes over the past year continue to go more in the direction I’d hope for. )
So I think it fits into the category quite well. I’d say it’s more of an RPG than Firaxcom was.
Don’t forget the years old bugs still standing even reported countless times and SG answer was always, “there are things with priority and more important things to do before those”… but the priority never arrived for those bugs.
Nonstop DLC development did not help too. Most of the “fixes” did not fix even broke more things and flagged as “fixed” by SG.
There is a harsh truth too as the game is already more then 1 years old and it’s nearly at ver 2.0… so it’s done for this game. There won’t be any ground braking things about it. The biggest chance was year one addition and it did not help much. So arguing here won’t change anything.
Will SG make a PP 2? Even they do, who will care? What should we expect from that?
Gollop waited for his new xcom game for 20+ years when Solomon (frax-xcom head developer) tried “3” times with different prototypes to make Frax accept to develop a xcom game. He made the prototype in his home for 3 years… when he resurrected Xcom, suddenly Gollop wanna make another xcom game with so many promises…
The problem of this game is not content, it’s design. If there was a mod support, someone with a text editor could fix at least most of the balance problems in a week and create more fun weapons and classes.
For sure. Various screenshots and videos show something that look far more impressive than what was finally delivered. The environment in that screenshot linked in that article earlier in this discussion is a good example. Why does this look so much better?!
So many things are more pleasing to me in that screenshot.
The artistic portrait of the soldier J.P. Richter >WAY> current portraits.
The lighting and atmosphere.
The mutated environment.
The chasm with the pipes sticking out.
The outlined black and white drawings of the equipment on a rotation.
The layout of the map, with a bridge to be crossed and cover set up in strategic places as opposed to randomly scattered about EVERYWHERE.
The only things I think is better in current PP is:
Everyone is in time you take substance and believe you have enhanced your joy.
“Take your JOY” - We Happy Few
It infused funds, but I dont see much gain on our side (fixed game).
Depends how do you read it.
I am still waiting for “second coming of”
In Phoenix Point , the alien threat evolves as part of a gameplay system designed to generate a wide variety of challenges and surprises for players in tactical combat.[5] Aliens encountered by players are procedurally generated on two basic levels: first, aliens will draw upon a pool of available, interchangeable body parts; second, aliens can change in size and shape.[14] When the Pandoravirus encroaches on new regions, animals and other biological material found, including humans, are recombined to increase the pool of available body parts for the creation of new aliens, through mutations.[5] For example, in Africa, the procedurally generated mutation system might mash up the body of a lion with body parts of humans and other animals to create alien monsters that resemble a Sphinx.[7]
When aliens are victorious in combat, they may mutate more in order to use captured weapons and other technology.[5] In contrast, aliens that are consistently defeated will continue to mutate in a natural selection process which mimics evolution.[22] For example, a mutation might generate aliens with a new melee attack ability or a new defensive counter to certain types of weapons used by the players’ soldiers.[22] These mutations are somewhat random; however, the game’s AI works in the background to find mutations that can defeat players’ soldiers by discarding iterations that are unsuccessful.[7] Aliens will continue to evolve until they develop a mutation that allows them to prevail in battle.[22] Aliens with successful mutations then will be deployed in increasing numbers.[22] Thus, the Pandoravirus responds and adapts to the tactics and technology used by players.[7
In Phoenix Point , the alien threat evolves as part of a gameplay system designed to generate a wide variety of challenges and surprises for players in tactical combat.[5] Aliens encountered by players are procedurally generated on two basic levels: first, aliens will draw upon a pool of available, interchangeable body parts; second, aliens can change in size and shape.[14] When the Pandoravirus encroaches on new regions, animals and other biological material found, including humans, are recombined to increase the pool of available body parts for the creation of new aliens, through mutations.[5] For example, in Africa, the procedurally generated mutation system might mash up the body of a lion with body parts of humans and other animals to create alien monsters that resemble a [Sphinx](https://
I am no drama queen, but by my standards we are beta testing all along.
See my bugs list, most of them go back to BB5 and are still there.
If that + new one regularly introduced is not beta testing and finding major bugs,
(that used to be paid) I dont know what is. I am not talking about proposals.
And mostly are true, they are not just whinning as you try to downplay.
Objectivelly, game has been rushed. See hash Steam reviews as public mirrors.
As a bit of fanboys here, we are even biased towards studio and Jullian.
Seems like we are on the same page here. And using Fallouts as an example:
Fallout1&2, New Vegas - RPGs
Fallout Tactics - well, tactics game
also: Solasta - mostly tactics game
Them using RPG combat systems don’t make them RPGs
Is it though? So Civilization is an RPG, because you choose your path of progressions, and can ally with city states and other civs and achieve different endings? Are Paradox Strategies RPGs, because of narrative events? Is FiraXCOM2 an RPG, because you will prioritize between weapon, mech, psy research?
There has been a trend in recent years to add narrative context to purely mechanical events in strategy games - I am currently playing Frostpunk, which is a neat survival city building game, but with a strong setting and narrative. It doesn’t become an RPG, because upgrades we research also happen to be narratively defined.
If I were to draw the connection to where the PP’s events and factions are coming from that would be Paradox Games (same as Frostpunk), with it’s use of story events to give context to mechanics running underneath.
And those people are silly. It’s like calling Systemshock or Deus Ex First-Person-Shooter - sure it has this in it, but that’s hardly a defining point.
UFO had experience points and unit progressions - the very appeal of UFO is that it was combining different genres into one game - Civ inspired strategy layer, Lazer Squad tactics encounters, and light-RPG soldier progression. Firaxis made a variation on that design and to add some depth to a rather simplified combat mechanics they added soldier skills and classes, which is good, as without it there would be no difference between soldiers and no choices to make (if I remember well, those came late in development after the team decided to strip the game to the barebone essencials). PP does what Firaxis does, because that what they set out to do, just with a bit more depth.
If the argument is that enemy progression is poorly designed and undermines tactical gameplay of Phoenix Point - sure, but that’s a matter of balance not changing genres. It’s not even like there is an indepth way of defining and developing your soldiers. There are good tactics games, there are bad tactics games. Starcraft has unit upgrades, and it ain’t RPGs. The problem in PP is that unit upgrades are (or were? just starting a new game, so dont’ know the current state of the game) so powerful they can erase a need for tactical play.
And strategy layer is underdeveloped in both FiraXCOMs and Phoenix Point - in FiraXCOMs by design, as it was reduced to shop inbetween timed missions, and Phoenix Point by… too much ambition? Both became more of Tactics Games with overworld, then strategy/tactics hybrid.
I don’t know with Civ, never played them. But I’d guess no because at a glance I tend to see things like Gandhi living forever and being nuke-crazy, so it seems more like just a strategy game with a silly veneer.
I assume Paradox strategy might include something like Stellaris? Which I did play, and yeah I’d personally kind of include that one . Optimal strategy is to destroy everything, so everything else has to be roleplayed (similar to Phoenix Point - I’d roleplay various countries and see what I could accomplish in time, or roleplay races from other games by custom creating them). Customize races, their backgrounds and information, adjectives even. Feels kind of DnD to me. This what most people seem to call a Sandbox type game, but when I hear sandbox, I think Minecraft because of its building stuff like you would in a sandbox. I’d assume this would be true of Civilization games too, but maybe not?
Firaxcom2… not the kind of RPG I like but the kind that most people think of merely because of its progression system. A tactics RPG. Levels, xp, gear (even more so, the new Chimera Squad because you can find EPIC GEAR!). People tend to just say “RPG mechanics” when I personally think it needs to be called something else, but words are words. Kind of reminds me of those Final Fantasy Tactics games.
I’d also agree with you on Frostpunk. Just a survival/strategy game. If in Frostpunk you had the ability to slaughter and eat your citizens for seemingly no reason (obviously survival I guess - I actually barely remember this game, but I don’t think that was an option?), it’d begin to lean more towards RPG to me. Whenever there’s decisions to be made that impact the narrative heavily (whether it’s portrayed well in-game or not) I tend to think RPG. Like Mass Effect… Paragon or Renegade decisions, clearly an RPG, but does the label “Paragon” or “Renegade” need to exist (I recall watching a Youtube video that argued that these restrictive terms/points do more to limit the story than expand it)? If I’m roleplaying something of my own creation, or it feels like I am, then I can’t see why I can’t call it a Role Playing Game.
As it is, RPG is applied to too many things for too many different reasons to the point where the acronym seemingly has barely any meaning anymore, and for many simply means “XP, Levels, Abilities, Gear”. Last time I was asked to play DnD, I asked them “Are we actually roleplaying, or this is more about acquiring gear and fighting dragons?” Guess what they responded with.
So just to reiterate… I lump Phoenix in because I definitely can roleplay in this game to a fair degree. I wish it was better incorporated into the game mechanically instead of just being left mostly to my imagination (What a lot of us refer to as self-restricting even in a lot of ways - as in it’d be nice if I could declare Anu an abomination to the organization, solidifying negative relations for a huge boost of support from New Jericho)… but it IS possible… and it has XP, Levels, Abilities, and Gear… too… As an example: I choose whether to report the heads to New Jericho, take their helmets, or leave them be… and each has their own series of benefits/consequences (negligble for the most part) but I tend to make these decisions purely based on what I’m roleplaying in my current play through, and NOT for what it offers me. – Near the end, do I support the Nazi research program and gain bonus HP on my soldiers (seems like a given if all I care about is winning) or get more involved with the story side of things and reject it because it’s not how I’d personally like to see us define humanity (despite that offering nothing equal in comparison ** this is important, because I swallow that, knowing I’m doing it for a good reason)? That’s what makes this more of an RPG in my mind. – Am I renegade organization that only cares about survival at any cost (raid, steal, ignore factions - I’ve done this)? Am I concerned about all human life and will do everything to protect them (protect, work together, build bases and aircraft to fulfill this mission across the globe - I’ve done this)? Am I New Jericho’s devoted lapdog organization because I have 100% faith in the genius known as Tobias West (F*** you Anu, you’re dying at every opportunity I get! Disgusting scum! - This is my favorite) etc. Reminds me a lot of creating a custom character class in any of the well defined RPG games.
I’d also say original Xcom doesn’t count as much of an RPG to me. It’s just got a few of those “RPG mechanics” in it to a very small degree. I’m only ever playing as the defenders of humanity in that one, doing my best to save lives. (In a way everything is a roleplaying game I guess, but we do have to draw the line somewhere… maybe where it really becomes a defining feature, whether intended or not?)
I won’t argue that, but majority rules. So for the record, I don’t care for personally defining RPGs as games that have levels/skills/gear, but many do. Diablo 3 for example is just an Action game to me. Nothing to roleplay there. Hold down your right mouse button and watch droves of demons die. HDYRMBWDDD genre.
So is a Myrmidon kind of a Sphinx or we are still waiting for it?
Just like rest - it is just fantasy of the designer.
Another day passed and I still don’t have time to search for not delivered content… Can someone find the video where second co-founder (not the Julian Gollop) of Snapshot Games is talking about features PP will have? It would help me.
When aliens are victorious in combat, they may mutate more in order to use captured weapons and other technology.[5] In contrast, aliens that are consistently defeated will continue to mutate in a natural selection process which mimics evolution.[22
The coders accepted that AI is beyond repair or fix as the free aim system needs so much brain power and this makes loonger turns.
If you make a PVE strategy game and you got fantasies to add, first you need to figure out that you can create enough AI or not. Just throwing everything you saw in your dream to a kickstarter campaign is nothing a good manager do.
“We will give you everything!!” - Jullian.
AI is so broken now. I hate to see ranged enemies just run to the perfect cover and then 1 step away to expose themselves fully.
Addition to a bad AI, you are giving spammable War Cry to limit the enemy TP to fry the AI…
)
As an example: I choose whether to report the heads to New Jericho, take their helmets, or leave them be… and each has their own series of benefits/consequences (negligble for the most part) but I tend to make these decisions purely based on what I’m roleplaying in my current play through, and NOT for what it offers me. – Near the end, do I support the Nazi research program and gain bonus HP on my soldiers (seems like a given if all I care about is winning) or get more involved with the story side of things and reject it because it’s not how I’d personally like to see us define humanity (despite that offering nothing equal in comparison ** this is important, because I swallow that, knowing I’m doing it for a good reason)? That’s what makes this more of an RPG in my mind. – Am I renegade organization that only cares about survival at any cost (raid, steal, ignore factions - I’ve done this)? Am I concerned about all human life and will do everything to protect them (protect, work together, build bases and aircraft to fulfill this mission across the globe - I’ve done this)? Am I New Jericho’s devoted lapdog organization because I have 100% faith in the genius known as Tobias West (F*** you Anu, you’re dying at every opportunity I get! Disgusting scum! - This is my favorite) etc. Reminds me a lot of creating a custom character class in any of the well defined RPG games.
