What I think the biggest mistakes in this game a.k.a feedback on general mechanics

We haven’t yet detailed our modding options. If it were possible to mod the game however, to make the campaign “sandbox”, it would be safe to assume that the campaign/progression wouldn’t be balanced around that. Modders would have to resolve that too.

It’s something that has been suggested and is being considered.

It hasn’t been rejected. It’s actually an idea that both myself and Allen really like, and would love to see.

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what did you exactly want to add with this? :smiley: you need to push the campaign all over the game. The problem is exactly this pump your soldiers for a few turns then go fulldumb and just shoot that fxcom became… a few battles to have colonels and from there… there is just no more. keep going into the same battles fight the same aliens with the same soldiers… progression is what makes every battle distinct and worth (not proc maps or other silly things)

yes, we know it but now we can only give our opinion on what you have right now. I guess nothing is in stone yet so on this bases it would be pointless to have this forum (unless you are only interested in people who keep saying how great you are)

:smiley: really? you could help me destroying the buildings and alien crafts in my current play-trough as no matter how i try they wont break. anyway, sure they were all destructible objects but their values set so high only special explosions were able to demolish most things. guns are able to destroy fences at best while grenades can get doors and weak walls… no leveling map as you say…

and again a strange thing, nobody was originally talking about health. my issue is with all the stats at aiming, the you will make 3 damage, damage limb and cause bleeding etc displayed. hp energy or tu or whatever you decide to go with is fine, especially a valueless bar. what i dont like is the math like gameplay where instead of just fighting aliens you calculate damages. ohh this guy has 5 hp, lets attack with 2 ar-s and a pistol, that should be enough, ohh that has 8 hp, lets bring the sniper, the mg and an ar. why dont we play games in excel instead? would be so fun :smiley:

this is just your opinion, strangely i know a lots of people whose enjoyment was ruined by these things including myself. weird in one moment you speak in absolution like “not anyone” and then you say its “subjective” :smiley:

like many other devs though and ended up in the ditch. I dont say this game will be bad, i dont say you do it all wrong, i say there are points that could be improved to make it appealing to even more people. while fxcom was quite good for some casual fun, its not an indepth game (neither of them) and as i see for now, you are going down the same watered up way. that will be fine with your die hard fans but it will put down many others. its up to you how much you want to earn with the game, im just here to help you. you can get offended, or start thinking about these advises…

true, but the best selling and most played games are the ones offer more freedom. just look around and you will see this for yourself…

As long as it’s possible for modders to do both (not just sandbox but possibly balancing it too) then it’s already great for me, can’t expect official balance working in a “completely different” environment.

That is something I missed/forgot, good to know.

Vathar - Which isn’t actually that unrealistic. If you’ve been training to “git gud” at something for all your life and decide to radically change career at some point, expect to suck at first. The difference in real life or open games is that you would probably tackle smaller challenges with your new skills until you can back to a reasonable level of proficiency, which isn’t exactly possible in a game.

The point here was that you actually screwed your character up by moving to bows because the game progression assumed you were continuing to push up one ability (in my example, Nature magic). You switched, discovered bow use wasn’t helping and after a few level ups of bow (to try to improve it) you’d be forced to give up on it and change back to using Nature. At this point however you’d discover the game had continued to scaled its difficulty and now that skill was too low to be truly competitive. That’s a skill system implemented badly. You couldn’t win and not be a specialist. Kind of pointless. Might as well have just picked a class at the start of the game, it would have been a lot fairer on the player.

Fair enough.

When you think about it, recent games with open progression trees tend to reverse the problem and balance difficulty assuming the player makes dumb skill choices, which is just as bad. If you’re a discerning player that will take the time to study skill trees and spend their skill points carefully, you run the risk of trivializing the game even at higher difficulties.

I’m not even talking about proper min-maxing and looking for imbalanced synergies, not being dumb is enough these days.

I really don’t get you. Do you say they should have made a simple class system instead of a badly done skill based system? But why do you expect pp guys that they would mess it up? :smiley:

Blizzard takes an interesting approach to this problem in Diablo 3 by allowing the player to effectively respec their character build at any time. In Grim Dawn, you can spend gold to reclaim skill points from the tree to reallocate them. So some games to allow you to correct mistakes you’ve made… normally games where the interactions between skills/size of the skill tree is so large - that the player cannot know ahead of time if they’ve made the right choices. Which is nice. Though if the games had very clear systems to begin with this would not be an issue.

Vargata your english can make you hard to understand. I was talking about a much older game and illustrating that skill systems can be implemented badly (as can any system). I have full faith in the Phoenix Point team to deliver an excellent game with a class based or skill based system in place (or both).

Diablo allows you to respec’ for free at anytime but you can only progress down the rifts by using specific builds (items and skill combos) which actually kills diversity. I actually stopped playing D3 because if you want to play a specific skill and there’s no set for it, you may as well forget about it. Today you don’t say “I play a #class” anymore, but “I play a #set”.

by the way, you can find respect even in the genre. XCOM 2 allowed it (with some annoying caveats though).

That said, I don’t want individual character development in PP to be so deep that a soldier becomes worthless just because you picked the wrong skills. They may end up suboptimal, but as long as they can equip a gun and shoot at the crabs, they should remain viable within the limits of their rank (a rookie should remain a rookie).

Vathar - What you say is true, but that’s more a problem in Diablo 3 with the set pieces giving such massive bonuses (1500% upwards) to abilities that to play without them is just not possible. Also their game design with Rifts and timed dungeon runs are not great. However, being able to respec a character at any time is a nice thing to have, well before this point. Oh and I should add for anyone who is not familiar with the game that it’s using a class based system (Barbarians etc) and a skill/ability system at the same time.

I would love to see it! Well, I’m not sure how it would actually affect the feel of the gameplay and how the major population accustomed with FXCOM would react to that, hmm. But even now in BB1 the player can easily see the disabled arms and bleed effect, so with adding some stances for “wounded” and “near death” it may work pretty well.

Also I’d like to vote for the “quick battle” option. Just pick the map, select skirmish type - like capture the flag, defend the fort, rescue civilian, plant explosives etc. - then equip your squad and go! It would significantly increase the replayability (besides starting the new campaign) and in the far far future perhaps it could even be a good base for co-op or PvP battles.

lol. Its an easy to understand sentence even if you don’t speak English. You nonstop talk about how class system is not worse than skill based system because skill based system can be made wrong too. this is a totally illogical argument.
-you say you are sure pp team will make it right whichever they chose
-and if we take that freedom is better than restrictions
(or at least it would appeal for more people as it wont put down either those who would accept restrictions and also wont put down those cant accept restrictions)
-ergo in the hands of the pp team skill based system would be a better option,
first of all for them as their game would sell better.
sure both can be done wrongly but you say you don’t expect pp guys to make it so :smiley:

Would it appeal for more ppl? Can you link some study/research on this? The small-scale results were “classes are fine” (Petition: classless system), so I’m interested if it’s just the backers for PP who are okay with this.

I just can’t believe that the average player loves full-freedom systems as much as you say, in my experience they will just say the game is too hard and will not even try it because there are too many stuff to choose from.

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The petition has failed because this is the forum of JG fanbois and if he would say there will be a single class with zero flexibility it would still win. I would ask you a simple question. Which one would you chose if you could decide the future of the gaming mouses. You can choose one and only one option and all of the future mouses will be like that:
a: all gaming mouses should have only one button and no other options
b: all gaming mouses should have 2 buttons and there should be no other options
c: gaming mouses should have exchangeable cover with a multitude of button variations
lets see option a: it will only satisfy those who are happy to be restricted to a single button
option b: will satisfy both the ones at option a (they might just ignore the second button or learn to love it) and both those who likes 2 buttons
option c: will satisfy everybody as you can just choose the settings you want to use from one button to whatever amount of buttons
this needs no study, these are just facts

Will a mouse with 1 to 100 buttons have the same quality as a 2 button mouse designed as such? In a perfect world, maybe, but in this reality, no.

I would rather have a good, quality 2 button mouse than a rushed, average quality 100 button one.

Class based systems do have advantages over freedom, they are just maybe harder to see.

For example they are easier to balance, which means from the same resources, you will have a more “enjoyable” game, because balance is the main point behind “choices”. If you don’t have enough resource to balance a full-freedom game, classes will help a lot. Considering even big, “AAA” studios have problem with balance, I don’t think it’s realistic to think the cost of balancing truly free systems is small.

For example you can have stronger/cooler powers right from the start, because you know those skills will exclude each other, no need to wait for late-game, high-(opportunity)-cost talents. This makes the game “fun”, having interesting choices after the first mission is good.
Sure, you can make talents exclude each other, but then we’re speaking about a not truly “Free” system, it has restrictions other than opportunity cost in it, which makes it a class system, even if classes are numerous (and are not “classes” in the traditional meaning).

Freedom has its cost, and I don’t think it’s worth it for PP. Even less because PP was designed by the devs with classes in mind, they would have to change a lot, with ~1 year remaining, I just don’t think that would make a good game. (To say nothing about the fact that I prefer semi-restricted systems over “full free” ones, because I find them more enjoyable.)

are you sure? I rather wait a year of extra development time and shovel out £50 extra to get a good quality flexible mouse than to have a 2 button mouse that is good quality but useless in most of my games. same with games, i would rather wait and pay extra for a good game then a watered down rushed out game that has restricted options just to earn a quick buck…
yes, freedom has its price, its called quality over quantity…
ohh, and still you have forgot about an important thing, you might would choose the 2 button mouse but you have lost a lots of customers going to other “developers” for more buttons

I’m finding your attitude on this forum very offensive and hostile, especially towards others. If you want to discuss and debate game features and mechanics, that’s fine - but please do it in a less aggressive manner.

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Seems to me that you’re not understanding. It’s not that classes are bad, or skills are bad, or one is really better than the other. It’s how they are implemented that makes all the difference. Also you can’t look at any of these mechanics in isolation and expect to get a good understanding of a game. The complex interplay of game mechanics of the whole system is what needs to be evaluated and as the game is not yet ready, we cannot do that at this point. And forget about contrived examples of mice with multiple buttons; you just classified them yourself into distinct groups and without realising it, undermined the point you were trying to make.

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Why are you so wrong about everything, @vargata?

That’s your problem. I’m perfectly fine with it, because I prefer it that way. Which may not be the same as yours. But that does not mean it’s wrong by default.

You asked what I want:

And I choose the 2 button variant. You said it’s wrong because it’s not ideal for you. That’s just your preference, not a fact which applies to everyone.

You are free to think the freedom worth every cost, but PP was advertised since Fig-campaign with classes, so it seems like the game is not for you.

Your soldiers gain experience through battles and training in specialised facilities. There are extensive skill trees for each class of soldier. Skill knowledge is developed from research and interaction with other human factions through trading, alliances or conflict.

(The Fig-campaign.)

And if the game is only for “JG fanbois” [sic] because only they can agree to the inferior class-system, (even though afaik original JG X-Com had no classes, so he should know the advantages of the superior system), then why are you trying to argue with us “fanbois”, when it’s apparent that no reason will change our mind?

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