Hello! Am I the first one to create a new topic? (edit No, I’m not :() Do I get a prize for that? Induction into the Phoenix Point forum Hall of Fame (let’s be honest, every forum needs one of those)? Cookies? One PhoenixBitCoin? I even completed the tutorial with discobot and that ugly unicorn. No?.. Oh well.
OK, jokes aside… let’s get down to business. So… Phoenix Point… where to start?
I have to say that this is the first time in a very long time (like, 10 years or so) that I’ve been this excited for an upcoming game. In fact, it is also the first time I’ve preordered a game. And so far I’m very pleased with how it’s coming along.
I really love the small changes to the UI as compared to XCOM. I can’t tell you how annoying it was to not be able to see whether I will have line of sight when I move to a tile. As far as I can tell, you’ve also made a split between solider and weapon abilities, which should remove another one of my annoyances with XCOM, which is pressing a number key too soon and having it change to another function. Like throwing a grenade instead of… doing something else. Can’t remember what it was, but I do remember blowing my soldier up.
I also like soldier portraits in the UI. Makes identifying them quicker.
I love some of the changes you’ve made to the mechanics to bring it closer to the original series. Not being able to move tile by tile was a major annoyance I’ve had with XCOM, so what you’ve done here brings back some of the freedom missing from the Firaxis games. I really like the idea of willpower for abilities, but I’m not quite sure how it works. I realize that certain abilities lower it and that there are ways to raise it (resting, killing aliens, accomplishing secondary objectives etc.). What I don’t understand is when do negative effects occur: only when willpower goes down to zero, or does the chance of something bad happening increase as your willpower goes down? Also, do soldier deaths decrease each remaining soldiers willpower? If so, is this rank or stat based or just a flat number?
Another thing that is bugging me is return fire on the assault rifle. While it’s a great ability to have in theory, I’m wondering about a potential problem with it. Suppose that I am far away from an alien and have no realistic chance of hitting it, why would I want to use it? Especially when I have limited ammo. Is there a way to prevent that situation? Perhaps clicking the “return arrow” icon to change how it’s used. Say: “always use”, “prompt for confirmation” and “disable”.
Free aim. I’m split on this one. It’s a great idea, but I’m worried about two things here. The first is something you’ve already noticed yourselves, which is that it slows the pace of the game down. The second is that it seems overpowered. what is the downside to using it? Apart from laziness, obviously. If I can only gain an advantage by using it, then I will most likely use it all the time (easpecially on higher difficulties), which goes back to slowing the pace of the game down. Instead, it seems a lot better to me that this ability is only given to the sniper class. In fact, it can easily replace the old body part aiming system you had for the sniper, while still giving you an aim bonus on top. The question remains whether to give free aim to all soldiers when fighting behemoths though. One other thing I’ve noticed is that free aim tends to… spasm a little as the alien moves in slow-mo. I think this could easily be dealt with by allowing the player to stop time completely when he’s satisfied with the position. Say, you could hold Ctrl to fully stop time and release it again if you’re not satisfied. While time is stopped, you could perhaps further adjust your aim. This only leaves one problem that free aim solves, which is destroying cover. However, I don’t see why this couldn’t be done in isometric view for other classes instead. As you may recall, RTS games such as Command and Conquer used Ctrl + left click to force shoot. I don’t see why such a method couldn’t be used here. You hover the mouse over the target tile, then hold Ctrl to enter “object highlight” mode, and once you’ve picked the correct object, left click to shoot. You could also zoom in if the object is smaller.
Multiple shots per turn is another mechanic I’m split on. Although I’m used to it in the original series, I’m not sure how useful it is, especially with the willpower mechanic. One of the downsides of the way it used to work in UFO is that all your auto-shots from all auto weapons fired three bullets. Which doesn’t really make sense to me. So if a weapon now fires 6 bullets, it’s kind of like shooting twice in UFO, except you have less control. For some weapons it makes more sense to me to have less control than you did in UFO (not to mention the per-bullet control you had in Apocalypse’s TB mode). Yet at the same time, I would like to have more options. Willpower is one way, having to exert your soldier for every additional shot. Another thing that could be done is to give the player the ability to add additional bullets to the shot at the cost of additional TUs or willpower. This would be a useful ability of some automatic weapons which would balance them out with the sniper’s free aim. So instead of getting more damage via accuracy, you get more damage via bullet count. So if your shot would normally use 6 bullets, you could now trade say… 4 TUs for 3 extra bullets added to your shot. But always in stacks of multiple bullets, so the player doesn’t have too much control. Willpower could also be used for this instead of or in addition to TUs.
This does bring up a problem in terms of conveying the bullet count to the player via the UI. While I don’t mind the wheel interface (especially if I can use keyboard shortcuts to rotate it or pick directly), perhaps it would be better to have a vertical list instead? This still allows you to select them via “rotation” (the highlight moves to show which item is selected) while also confining item icons to the same outer limits, as well as allowing you to have a unified way to show item information. You could use the same “progress bar” you’re using for time units to hint to the player how much weapon ammunition is going to be spent, while also allowing you to display a number denoting current and total ammunition. Obviously, the same goes for items such as medi-kits.
Overwatch is a nice thing, but I’ve been thinking that this is one mechanic that could be expanded upon to make the game less like XCOM and more like X-COM. And the idea I’ve got is actually something that’s been used before… in X-COM Apocalypse. Agents in Apocalypse had aggression controls which allowed them to react to aliens in different ways (the same was true for aliens). Instead of always reacting with fire, they could also attempt to run and hide. This is something that I could see increasing the tactical options of Phoenix Point. Say, if I don’t think my soldier can do useful damage, he could fall back to a safer location instead. This would have three possible uses that I can think of:
- outrunning melee aliens you can’t take down during the current round
- hiding from potentially dangerous aliens
- using a soldier in a bait tactic to lure the alien closer
The question is how should this be done? Should it be a soldier/class ability? Or perhaps it could depend on the soldier’s character? Or amount of willpower? Or how the soldier perceives the current tactical situation? Remember how in Apocalypse, the aliens would escape when they thought they were in a heavy disadvantage? Your soldiers could choose to run or hide instead of shooting if they think it’s the safer option. The downside of letting the computer figure it out is that it takes control away from the player. You could also use the interruption system of Jagged Alliance to give the player and aliens freedom to spend the remaining TUs as they wish during the opposite turn. On the other hand, this does slow the game pace down, especially with multiple soldiers.
Which brings me to my next point. The general pace of tactical missions. While I hated the 4-soldier initial limit of XCOM, 16 seems a bit much to me. One of my major gripes with the original series was that missions tended to be long. Initially, this didn’t bother me, but as the game went on, it really felt like the game as a whole moved slowly. Part of the problem was the general lack of mission diversity, but also mission length. Ideally I think a single mission should be 15-30 minutes long, except for special missions. This makes the game more dynamic in my opinion. I realize that there are players that like spending a long time in missions, but in the last few years I’ve come to value game replayability far more than game length. Replayability allows me to put in a lot of hours into the game, while not making any single playthrough get to the point where I’m just wishing I’m done with it. So it seems to me like the maximum soldier count shouldn’t be more than 10 or 12 at the most.
The second thing that can influence the pace negatively is map size. This was a problem in Apocalypse where the maps were too big in some cases, making the issue of finding that last alien a chore. The problem was partially alleviated when the aliens decided to escape, but this didn’t always happen.
One more question mark I’ve had is secondary objectives. How do they work? Can they have pros and cons? How do you plan on explaining them for each mission, so that they make sense? Do they give you rewards other than willpower: e.g. resources or weapons, or perhaps techs or bonus to techs, or relations with other factions? Can aliens use them as well to give a sort of “compete for objective” side? This would be really interesting if a faction for example asked you to retrieve some item for them as a secondary objective, but if the aliens get it first or destroy it, this could make your relationship worse.
Moving on to general notes about the game.
Factions - I feel this is not only a good idea, but also I like that there’s only three of them. They are diverse, while allowing you to balance things well. You can always expand them by another one or two in expansions later on, as well as give the players additional diplomatic options or having any future factions influence the game differently. I can really feel the influence of Apocalypse with this idea, and it’s a good thing. As a minor digression, I could never really tell what were the cons of losing some of the organisations to the aliens were, but for the rest, I really loved how each provided you with something else. Marsec and Megapol provided you with weapons and vehicles, Transtellar provided transportation, the Government with base locations and so on. This is something I’d like to see in Phoenix Point or in some future iteration. So not always soldiers and tech, but perhaps resources (independent havens could also be used for this), or intel on alien nests or behemoths and so on.
By the way, how does research and engineering work? Are scientists and engineers just a number like in UFO, or is each an individual as in Apocalypse or something else entirely? I don’t remember this being explained.
One overarching sentiment I have is that as much as I liked the new XCOM series, there are two major things I really disliked and am hoping Phoenix Point will do better. The first is the general feeling of lack of maneuvering space. By this I mean things like only being able to build one base, having to choose only one mission at a time and not really being able to ignore missions (why does ignoring a supply raid cause me to lose the territory?). The games also depended far too much on having superhero soldiers (XCOM2’s “Marvel superheros” look didn’t help). While soldier attachment was a thing in the originals, so was the bodycount. UFOs were also not as major a part as they were in the originals, especially in XCOM2 where they only appeared once every few months. Then in the tactical part there were the cover mechanics and the 2 action system. It’s not that the new series is bad, it’s just that I always felt so… confined. I don’t mind them being hard (I still can’t beat them on the highest difficulty), but the beauty of the originals was that they allowed you to make mistakes and bounce back if you played well. Some of these seem to be corrected in Phoenix Point.
The second thing that was really lacking was the “enemy unknown” part. Which is kind of ironic, given the first game’s title. It became all the more apparent as I replayed the originals recently, and it’s definitely something that could be used to make PP stand out more. I think that, especially with the Lovecraftian influence, the overall tone of the game should be that of tension and fear of the unknown yet with hope and bravery to not make it too depressing. I think that in terms of atmosphere Terror from the Deep was actually the best of the three originals. Just listening to the soundtrack brings back those nasty memories of Lobstermen completely shrugging off my entire Aquanauts’ turn worth of Gauss rifle shots, the floating-Chryssalids a.k.a. Tentaculats coming out of nowhere to give my Aquanauts that sweet, sweet zombie-kiss-of-death and those Tasoth screams which still send shivers down my spine. This is why it’s great news to hear that John Broomhall will be scoring the game, and I’m hoping for something reminiscent of TFTD’s soundtrack. Though I do like Simeon Dotkov’s current piece and hope it’s not thrown away.
But it’s not just a matter of sound, or game difficulty. One thing is how the game portrays the unknown. While I realize that there is going to be fog of war, it isn’t clear if it applies only to what the soldiers can see. One of the ways UFO and TFTD made the unknown more apparent was that everything you couldn’t see was black. The new games did the same, but somehow it didn’t have the same impact. I’m not sure if it was due to the color palette or the fact that you could see the silhouettes of buildings, but it didn’t quite work for me. One thing I definitely disliked and would like changed is the alien’s healthbars. I feel that at least initially, these should not be displayed. This adds to the player’s uncertainty with regards to the enemy he’s facing. How dangerous is it? Will I be able to take it down quickly? How fast does it move? How much armor does it have etc. When you’re displaying health and armor, you’re already telling the player what he is facing. Instead, please consider hiding this information until the player researches the alien (works if research is split into body parts) or carries some sort of Mind Probe equivalent into battle. Or make both a requirement. If you really want, you could give a general feel of the alien’s health, like Fallout did (healthy, wounded, severely wounded, dying, dead), but honestly, I wouldn’t even recommend that. This does leave the question of behemoths… as far as I’ve gathered they will tend to escape, so you may not be able to research them until they’re already dead anyway, right? Perhaps you could gain intelligence on them in other ways then? Via other research or perhaps from factions or some other means.
You could also apply this “unknown” to the Geoscape. Sure, you don’t know where the locations are on the globe. But at the same time, why should you even know where you are on the globe? You could make the whole globe dark in the beginning (apart from your immediate surroundings). This way the player would not know how for he is from the sea where the mist is, and would be forced to go into the unknown until he gets a sense of where he is. I’m not sure how mist applies to the Geoscape so I don’t know if this would make sense, but sounds very appealing to me.
One final worry I have is diversity. So far my impression was that there isn’t much of it in terms of how the aliens looked. I realize that this is partially achieved via mutations, but they should also look distinct enough. While I’m aware that you have a certain theme going on, it still looks like you could add more color differentiation to them. It all looks grey-red-brown currently and I can’t tell the aliens apart at first glance. If you’re using animals and humans as the basis for mutations, there’s more than enough color in nature.
The same problem seems to be in environments so far. Again, I know there’s a theme you have, but it would be nice to see different parts of the world look different to some degree (snow, desert, forest, etc.).
All in all, I’m really looking forward to both the Backer build and the final game. I didn’t mean to be overly critical of what I perceive to be (potential) problems, so please take this as me wishing the game to be the best it can. And of course, correct me where I’m wrong.
I intend to add more to this thread as the game starts moving toward the final release and as I think of more things to add.
Whoosh, that was a long post, wasn’t it? Do I get an award for that? Heck, whoever read this in its entirety should get an award of some kind, I think.
Cheers!
P.S. Excuse the rambling tone and errors, it’s too late here so I’m not in the mood for corrections.
Maybe there could be an option to force a shot regardless of hit chance, for when you’re really desperate.