Some Ideas to improve the Game in a big way

Phoenix Point Game Feedback
1

The game does still need some features and polish, clearer and more readable UI and so on. These are the things that concern me the most. And as you see, all are fairly small, but I think have great impact on the game. I also added some suggestions for new features.

Improvements, fixes and QoL:

  • Animations: Add run animation for civilians, and fix the jetpack jump animation. As now, in both animations unarmed civilians and heavies hold an invisible gun in these animations.
  • Reloading enables disabled limbs (BUG): this happens for all your soldiers and human enemies as far as I know, reloading after disabling a limb negates alll the disabling effects afecting use of guns and abilities.
  • Difficulty: Add a normal difficulty option in between rookie and veteran, in think the jump in difficulty is too high in these two modes. Some missions in veteran seem a bit unfair for a regular player that wants more challenge than the Rookie difficulty, but not too hard. Also some difficulty options could benefit the game.
  • Geoscape: Do not autoplay the geoscape when you order a ship to move, this only works when you have only one ship to give orders to, it is really annoying and there is already a mod that fixes this. The problem is that if you manage more than one ship you may want to adjust destinations of all ships before pressing play, the geoscape does not allow this now.
  • Camera (1): Allow to rotate the camera holding the 3rd mutton of the mouse and moving it.
  • Camera (2): Often the aiming camera does not lean to the shot position, no you end with a wall close up, fix this.
  • Camera (3): The camera often does not allow you to see the effect of the shot, when performing an action, needs to be zommed out for big enemies and an option to adjust the zoom and deactivating completely the action camera would benefit the game.
  • Melee Icons: The Melee abilities icons should be reworked, when you have a melee weapon you have 2 icons, one is a fist and the other one is a riffle, both attack with the melee weapon but one (the fist) makes more damage than the other, change ingame descriptions and icons so one is clearly read as a weak attack and the other a strong one.
  • UI QoL (1): Add in the UI an option to filter items by tech in the menus.
  • UI QoL (2): When manufacturing a vehicle, add an option similar to the one in the recruitment tab to manufacture an option in a specific facility.
  • UI QoL (3): In the personnel section add an option to filter by location, affecting in the arrow navigation.
  • Voice (1): Voice reactions to some enemy combats seem to have the genders messed up, in my human missions i noticed that all my enemies have what looked like the same female voice.
  • Voice (2): Add the voice options for more nationalities, and change de description according to it. For example (Voice 11 -> Chinese 1).
  • Voice (3): Add more voices/sounds for non-human enemies.
  • Visual Variety: Add some helmets and armor variants. Specially having more open helmets would improve variety a big way, and seeing the facial features of your soldiers would make easier for the player to feel for each soldier.
  • Character portraits: Add a way to see the portraits of the player with or without helmet. This should make the characters more recognizable.
  • Geoscape ship navigation: Navigate the ships with the arrows is annoying and slow, I think a better way would be to have the incons of all your ships, showing in them if the crew is fully rested or not. And the details of the one currently selected.

New Features:

  • More Dynamic Factions: All factions seem to hate each other as the game progresses, it would be nice to be able to have a way to change the relationships of the factions with each other, so at least it would be nice to have a more dynamic faction system with two factions taking sides against a third one late game, and conquering some heavens that change sides.
  • Mutated Humans: It would be nice to have mutated humans as a type of enemy, seeing as evolutions happen, how they become less and less human. I think the game needs a bit more variety in the base types of enemies you encounter.
  • Soldier Psychological Perks: It would be nice to have some more perks and abilities or even traits the soldiers have as the game goes on, maybe not all of them being good, as a way to reflect the Lovecraftian psychological impact of the soldiers, maybe for example every time the head of a soldier is disabled, he/she has the chance to gain a bad perk, and every time he escapes a mission without taking damage has the chance of getting a good perk or removing a bad one.
  • Map variety: I would also like more variety in the maps, and some bigger ones, like swamps, city ruins, jungles, deserts or snow terrains.
  • Actual Night Missions. I would love to have night missions, implemented visually like actual night, this would allow you to embrace the horror of the setting, maybe the objective would not be kill all enemies, but cross the map alive.
  • Base defense: The base defense mission seems a bit weird, the map is maybe the biggest of the game, but feels somewhat empty having all your soldiers scattered, and a bit too difficult, it would be nice to have at least some research or construction that gives you some automated defense systems, and some AI controlled personnel, even if the difficulty needs to be adjusted to not be too easy.

EDIT: Added more suggestions, and clarified some of them too.

5 Likes
2

Nice suggestions, but forum posting does not appeal the devs.
Use suggestion tool and develop each marker to a more mature suggestion

Its a remake of Xcom terror missions :slight_smile:

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It is possible to max relationship with all 3 factions, I’ve done this in most of my campaigns.

1 Like
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Thank, I edited the coment to remove this line, since it is not needed then. Good to know, I was only able to max one so far, I must be doing something wrong

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Thanks for the suggestions, I tried to make the suggestions a bit more clear and better formated, and removed a line that was missinformed. Also I added some new ones.

1 Like
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It’s not really wrong, I would say it is more normal, my way is only different.
To get all three to max reputation I almost do not that much to decrease the reputation, especially in the beginning. No attacks, raids, tech stealing and so on. This makes the start more difficult because I don’t have these nice possibilities to boost my resources or research. But it pays almost off later on when I got all techs from any faction.

PS:
Good suggestions all in all, keep your work going on and up to date :+1:

3 Likes
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You need to know about after mission choices, some make some fractions agry. As well as some on site choices. Not raid them much, maybe only once if you need to boost one opposite fraction reputation or steal a plane, and do a lot of defenses of heavens and nest-citadel destruction. Defence boost single fraction and destruction of pandorans all fractions, so in time.

1 Like
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There have always been night missions. They look just about the same (whereas with XCOM original it was obvious), but perception is reduced significantly.

Some good suggestions, especially the voice one. Probably it would consume more RAM, but the regional voices exist, and what the soldiers say doesn’t make any difference, so doing this would add flavor without breaking anything.

1 Like
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If there are Night Missions, I did not encounter or notice this after 40 hours of gameplay. If there is a night modifier in the missions, but they play and look like day missions, then I meant, actual night missions, where you play in the night (Edited in the OP) :slight_smile:

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There are night mission (it is shown in the mission info screen before the start) and they also look slightly darker but not that much. It could maybe not be noticed if one doesn’t have the same map type at daytime and nighttime in a following mission.
In night or dark (nest) missions perception is halved as long as you have no equipment for night vision (there is one helmet module and also one bionic head augmentation).

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Yes, I just updated the post, night missions should look like night imho, or if not changed for most missions, special night missions that actually take place at night could be added…

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Special night missions are maybe not so easy to achieve. Actually only the daytime on the geoscape position is relevant for the mission to be on day or night time, as it should be in my opinion. One can simply wait on that position to switch from day to night or vice versa.

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Probably are not that easy to achieve, but I think it would be a cool feature. And is not like XCOM2 or wasteland3 have not nailed the visuals in that regard. I think it would be cool to have them.

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It would be nice touch as it existed in XCom 1, but then again, since perception plays big role, I would like to see night googles as equipment anyone can wear in slot where launchers and anti psy equipment stays.

1 Like
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Of course, the visuals could be better to create also a better feeling for night missions. On some map types it is actually pretty dark, but it could always be better of course :wink:

The “Multivisual Sensor Module” is exactly what you want to have, bot not as ‘goggles’ :wink:
See here:

2 Likes
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Nice, but very late Synd tech. With more night missions, it should come early.

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Again, the amount of night missions is decided by the daytime when you by yourself start a mission. There is no way to get more night missions when you always start them on day time. That said, if you don’t want to have a night mission then wait until the next day arises. Or vice versa, you can play most missions on night time by yourself if you wish to do so.

A picture, maybe then it is more clear what I mean:

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All missions on the left side are day missions and all on the right are night missions, the border spins around the world as it is in reality when you unpause the game.

1 Like
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[MadSkunky], I think he ment The “ Multivisual Sensor Module ” should come earlier, anyway it is clear for me that the visuals of night time should be reworked, as it stands now I can not even notice.

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It isn’t really THAT late, shortly after the Infiltrator research and this is still in the early stages.

Edit:
I edited the quote in my post. For me it sounds he wants to have more night missions and the game decides when it is night or not. I just wanted to clarify that this isn’t the case, mainly the player decides if the mission is on day or night time.

1 Like
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Well, I did not get it until 20 hours into the game. It al depends on what missions you chose.