Not XCOM1, it’s much more XCOM2 that focused more on numerous special skills, and more and more with extensions. Or I don’t remind well.
I think there’s place for both approach, both have positive and negative, but also that’s why I don’t see XCOM series continue, the series evolution is like designers are cornered by shooting and need more to bring innovation elements. Fireaxis should better switch to Tactic Fantasy.
Mmmm, “more likely” is chance to hit, currently with a naive approach it’s game with chance to hit.
100% chance to hit is certain hit, always, this game isn’t that.
Well, Xcom2 is a tactics fantasy. The whole thing with aliens is just aesthetic dressing. You can replace them with golems, orks, elves and etc and it won’t change a bit. The WOTC dlc only highlights it with Chosen talking about gods quite a lot.
Abilities where core mechanics starting from XCOM, simply because it’s how Firaxis designed many of their games.
And? Anything wrong with that? It sounds like a rant.
I would ove to see a fanatsy schemed game using the FiraXCOM engine, with ork,s elves, dragons and Co.!
Welp, not much wrong if you like fantasy board games. Like Divinity: Original Sin 2 is extremely well done and it doesn’t pretend to be something else, neither uses someone else IP to get attention.
I prefer games with a congruent image of themselves. Just my personal taste.
XCOM2 skills is very far from design freedom of skills for Fantasy Tactic. Just close range is a world of difference.
HAHAHAHA no it’s not. Not in the slightest. It may be one day, in the not too distant future hopefully (I’m crossing my fingers tightest!!) but it is far from a masterpiece.
What you say about game mechanics etc is correct. Yes it’s different to Xcom and is a good game with lots of choice etc…but it not a complete game. It is unbalanced, buggy as fuck and a lot of cases BROKEN!
Maybe my standards of masterpiece are higher than yours, nope, sorry, they defintely are! But then again, I don’t give OTT praise to something that’s not working as designed and that needs support from its community.
Did you read this? Is it so different from this:
As to OTT praise, I think creating something is not easy, even something mediocre but adequately polished, or something that is just a slightly better copy of something that was made before. So in my book PP deserves to be called a masterpiece, bugs and lack of polish and all.
If a dev is saying it’s a masterpiece they will get all bird names, a game in this state doesn’t deserve be named masterpiece, sigh.
Future Masterpiece perhaps, but not yet and from far, it’s not a collection of great ideas that make a masterpiece, it’s when they work together, it’s the whole, and now the whole is a lot of garbage.
I’ll just leave it here.
Title should be: it has potential to become masterpiece. 
Everything has the ‘potential’ to become a masterpiece.
… well apart from maybe anything to do with Love Island 
Nop, very few things can be made into a masterpiece. Unless you are looking at the second meaning in the Merriam-Webster dictionary.
And with video games, innovation comes at a heavy price. You have to cut some slack to the developers who take the plunge.
Also, if you play a game for 20+ hours I don’t know how you can call it garbage.
For a simple reason that there are many entertainment products that can hook you up into spending time on them while still being of questionable quality. There are quite a number of movie series like that. Like one can pretend that last few seasons of GOT don’t exist and then “it’s a great show”. But this is no different to games where you can argue that it’s great because 50% of its features are great and then for the rest you just pretend to not matter.
I think we already far past the point where playing Duke Nukem from start to final boss is considered as a full experience. Plenty of games now have sandbox elements, strategies with a fixed single player campaign now look like some anachronistic artifact from the past as most moved to dynamic campaigns. Then you have content paicing and grind. The point is that’s it’s rather normal to invest large amount of time into a product and have a negative final verdict. Especially when said product is still under development.
And there is huge gap between something being garbage and something being masterpiece.
Moreover something has to be finished in a sense of composition to be properly judged. I can’t judge PP on quality of its gameplay as to me it’s clear that game is far far from being finished, not because of bugs but how different game mechanics work with each other right now and how difficult it is to explain a game loop without watching a 12 hour long video of someone’s lets play.
I didn’t look at any definition anywhere, I just took a logical philosophy approach.
A. Everything thing starts with an idea, and that idea can grow - Thus everything has potential.
B. What is defined as a masterpiece is subjective according to the individual and to society as a whole. - Thus what is or isn’t considered a masterpiece is not a constant classification. (This thread proves that).
Bah! Words mean stuff, and such meanings can be argued for and against.
OP statement that I take the most issue with, is that people simply can’t accept PP for what is: being different from original UFO and FiraXCOMs. While it might be true for some, I don’t think it is true for everyone. PP has some very serious problems - technical and design wise - to the point, that I would not recommend buying it, and waiting for patches DLC. And it is more or less what I expected - perhaps the strategy layer is weaker then I anticipated.
Manual aim praised by OP is a neat concept, with a lot of potential and some problems (vagueness, and changing hit chances depending on animation encouraging tedious rather then tactical play) - but for now it remains a gimmick, as it is either explored. Or actively undermined by other mechanics, most notably use of skills.
Strategic side just doesn’t seem to have much to it, either when it comes to importing new ideas, or developing the new ones.
Masterpiece comes with an expectation of “quality” and “pinnacle”, neither of which can be used to describe PP in its current state. It’s neither the deepest, tightest, most contest rich XCOM-like game, nor does it stand tall when compared to previous Mr. Gollop’s titles.
I do hope it is not the end of base game PP, and we will see it improve, so I can enjoy it as much as OP does. For now I will let it so back, hoping it will be put back into the oven and gain some substance and finish baking. I do, however, doubt how much core of PP will evolve - after all it is not pre-early access alpha build, but a finished title.
Yeah, that was my point. 
I am glad some1 remember to mention to the developers that they made a GREAT game 4 us. Tx
So far I have not personally encountered anything that I would qualify as a serious design flaw (bugs, yeah, sure). And most of the stuff I read about here falls in the category of people wanting different gameplay. There are of course legitimate grievances, but everything must be taken in its proper context.
When I call the game a masterpiece I also do it in the context of the criticism it is facing (most of it, IMO, unfair).
As you can imagine, I disagree. Also, to be precise, it’s not the free aim that is a game changer for me (though I like it), but the ballistics. I find that it completely changes the way I play the game, and that I don’t want to go back to the die rolls of f-xcoms, to where terrain is just deco.