I love Xcom. Its a great game. Its a Tactical Combat lovers happy place. Firaxis did a pretty good job with it and its expansion but has abandoned it and as far as can be seen has zero plans to update or even do the same thing in 'newer' technology.
If I won the Power ball Lottery...850 Million.?? I would buy the liscence from Firaxis and hire Paul to release it as
Xcom-Reborn ...or something along that line.
Native in 64 bit.
Hexes instead of Squares.
DX 12, Fully supporting multi core/threads.
Multi monitor as well as 4K resolutions.
Increased story line. Squad sizes up to 10 men!
Modular gear and appearance gear.
Well one can dream eh?
XCOM: Enemy Unknown was released in October 2012, Enemy Within was released in November 2013, versions for Linux and SteamOS were released in June 2014. I'd hardly call that abandoned. Firaxis is probably busy with Beyond Earth and Starships at the moment, if the new XCOM was profitable a sequel will be made. In the mean time I suggest playing other games, or try the Long War mod.
I prefer the original with the multiple bases.
Rhonin, I love both the Enemy unknown and Enemy within. They are both awesome sauce. However, there has been zero word from Firaxis in over a year on anything Xcom. I also have the Long War mod, tough very tough.
So much hyperbole and slippery slope! I haven't played the Firaxis abominations, but the original is okay.
Have you tried Xenonauts? I found it worth buying and enjoyed playing.
'Abandon' has far heavier implications than what you use it for. Cause if we go by your logic then Nintendo abandons Super Mario, Zelda and Mario Kart after every consolerelease
The current Master of Magic rightsholder have definetly abandoned Master of Magic though this is the strongest example I can find.
You must be one of those "like the original or NO!" guys. You should be happy for what you get and hope for better.
Did you find Xenonauts as great as the original?
The new one has great mechanics, combat wise, it's pretty piss poor on a strategic scale, basically because there isn't anything there. When you're sitting around with just the one base and can easily respond everywhere from it, you're nowhere near as deep into the muck as you were in the original game.
Expanding out and not getting your ass kicked was a real challenge, actually protecting the planet was a damned hard thing to do. EU/EW is a good game, but it's not nearly as deep as the original was even if the capabilities of your one base are quite impressive.
You must be one of those "like the original or NO!" guys. You should be happy for what you get and hope for better.Did you find Xenonauts as great as the original?
Hardly, but since this appears to be a trick question (well, statement), I'll respond to both parts. Branding fills me with ennui, not passion. I'm quite capable of looking at a game on its own (most people can, suggesting otherwise is disingenuous).Sure, I might hope for better, but the rest of that statement is just hogwash.It's a bit difficult to compare a game I played last year to one I played 20 years ago in that way. Xenonauts is the most like the original that I've played (excluding TFTD of course), but they are different games. In most ways Xenonauts is a better game. There is less inventory management, less randomness (or the RNG kind) and numerous interface improvements (although there is plenty of room for improvement here still).
In my opinion the major flaws in Xenonauts are the game engine, funding is heavily biased toward air superiority, lack of research or equipment to help defend against psionic attacks, and lack of a training facility type building for bases.
nevermind new xcom things... did they even finish fixing teleporting bugs and what not?
agreed, I think xcom is one of those titles that will forever be difficult to recapture the "magic". since I played the original, there have been many attempts to kick start the genere with a yet another reimaging, they all fell short one way or another in ways that were difficult do describe, ven its own sequel tftd. The ones that did best were not the ones that slavishly attempted to ape everything in the original(one a few years ago that has legally different but basically identical ideas comes to mind.. ufo afterlight?). The ones that did best were games that said "xcom was the defining squad based tactical geosim game" & did their own thing from there.
xcom:EU was a great game for what it was & I got tons of enjoyment out of it, xenonauts is likewise a good game but...
Hardly, but since this appears to be a trick question (well, statement), I'll respond to both parts. Branding fills me with ennui, not passion. I'm quite capable of looking at a game on its own (most people can, suggesting otherwise is disingenuous).Sure, I might hope for better, but the rest of that statement is just hogwash.It's a bit difficult to compare a game I played last year to one I played 20 years ago in that way. Xenonauts is the most like the original that I've played (excluding TFTD of course), but they are different games. In most ways Xenonauts is a better game. There is less inventory management, less randomness (or the RNG kind) and numerous interface improvements (although there is plenty of room for improvement here still).In my opinion the major flaws in Xenonauts are the game engine, funding is heavily biased toward air superiority, lack of research or equipment to help defend against psionic attacks, and lack of a training facility type building for bases.
I find that the maps are just too crowded & ranges too short given the bizarre advancement system exacerbates the lack of training type facillity. there are a ton of mods for it in the steam workshop, some pretty good improvements, but the killbox entrance you have to pass through w/ every ufo is the most bothersome thing IMO & one of the mods helps there
Now, if SD made something (maybe early Iconian v: Yor set in pre hyperdrives?) as a squad based tactical geosim type thing without going into the xcom mythos, it could be very interesting since the yor aren't yet another alien invader but a part of society that one day achieved a technological singularity & was not hard to reach due to orders of magnitude higher technology coming from hammerspace, but simply because they don't need to breathe & can trivially colonize asteroids, the sea floor, etc to grow in strength from (or vice versa simply because all of the existing infrastructure is still iconian).
It doesn't take much reading from the yor tech briefings to realize thatsomeone at stardock wants to dive into the exploring newfound sapience+sentience pool & a squad based geosim type thing set during the pre-hyperdrive yor/iconian period could be a great place for it to start blossoming in ways that would be more difficult to do on galactic scales.
Larsenex, I agree with you. That would be cool if it ever were to pass, though I'm not hopeful of SD doing it or you winning the power ball. But I enjoyed the original and the last two remakes a lot, despite the differences.
No trick question.
I've seen so much negativity from people who liked the oldschool games that are NEVER happy whatever they get nowadays.
I meant that you should be happy for what you get considering we've gotten both X-COM: EW and Xenonauts. You think we're gonna get anything better than that soon? Far as I know, X-COM: EW and Xenonauts are the only games of the 'UFO Defense' type we've gotten in the last 5 years.
@campaigner. Part of the problem is that there have been does a of attemps to remake the original game but most were...
* terrible cash grabs that stick the name on c grade games (a retro futuristic styled police department game with aliens and xcom mythos applied in slapdash over a rts with hasty (and terrible) TBS toggle... A flight sim in deep space with zcom mythos hastily splashed across what could probably been adecent b game had it not been dying to apply zxom mythos so slavishly keep ij mind that trails back to the 90s.
a plethora of games trying to copy the original in legally distinct ways that end up falling short in gameplay .and hamstringing themselves by trying to copy the original . xenonauts does a better than a little original things. But with 20 years of bad attemps to copy the original, there is really no past games in the genere they can look back at And say x worked will in $game & y in $other game, but I think a bit of z from $third game would work well given our take on things. their success simply because they do more than attempts to say "hey this was a pretty cool type of game and taking that for a board to build their own game on. Warcraft was kind of the first mass marketers, but you dont see 15 20 years of eying to remake it with moorks and nelves, you see original takes on .it over all those years on nelves or orc v humsm/elf flight Sims
part of the problem stems from the fact that a lot of those older games are under tangled ownership over the IP itself resulting in certain levels of weirdness just to avoid a lawsuit
Give the Geoscape back to X-Com! And stop dumbing down stuff for the Console Kiddies! And the Console grown ups as well! I know you're getting older. You can't fool me!
I have missed all of those cashgrabs (not sure if Master of Orion III count as one) but then again I didn't look after X-COM style games until just a few years ago.
I...don't understand what you're trying to say in your second paragraph
X-com by Firaxis was very fun. I spent countless hours. There has been no update to the game since last January. My request here really is for nearly the same game but better, just like we are doing with GC III. Same as GC II but better, larger maps, prettier units, better gameplay.
For a tactical game I love both Enemy Unknown and Enemy Within. All were fun.
@campaigner... Typing from phone again, but no moo was moo.
xcom apocalypse, zcom enforcer , xcom intercepted, xcom apocalypse in no particular order.
xcom clones?...
UFO: Aftermath UFO: afterlight , UFO:Alien Invasion more I'm forgetting I'm sure,
Many Xcom fans think that Apocalypse was the best of the original 3 (I am inclined to agree, but it was different enough that if you felt it went to far astray that's fine). The mess that came after that wasn't xcom anyway and no one thinks that they were.
the UFO series has some fans, and it's not bad, but it's not xcom either... if you just liked the game play mechanically you were probably happy (I really enjoyed UFO:ET, the rest I didn't bother with after seeing that they didn't really do anything that I felt was that interesting). If you wanted Xcom lore then you weren't happy. Kind of like the difference between MoOs and any other space 4x. Some of them were good, or at least ok, but since they didn't have the back story of MoO a lot of people crapped on them anyway. Which I did to GalCiv, though after many years of playing it and CG2 I finally decided that I just didn't like the mechanics in GC enough to like it no matter how little I cared about the races.
Then you get to XCOM:EU and EW. A massive effort which was incredibly well done. Unless you played on a console, but who cares about console players anyway
Of course everyone is free to prefer whatever they prefer, but to crap on EU stinks of sour grapes frankly, because the stuff it does right, it really does right. The stuff it does wrong... well it really wasn't that important anyway
But largely the 2T vs. TU split was huge, and if you really really needed your tedious and silly time units back then you were never going to like XCOM anyway. If you could adapt (or even preferred) the 2T style you were immediately immersed in a much more fluid and unforgiving tactical game than the original Xcom could ever dream of.
2T over TU means no firing options as they baselined the entire system down to single action play, but it's hardly the biggest flaw. It's the lack of bases, the super hero status of high level characters, the inordinately lame mechanism by which enemy units are introduced to your troops as your turn pauses and they run off to guarantee you the first shot on them.
A more fluid and unforgiving tactical game? You could lose your entire squad to one alien in the dark just because it would actually start shooting at you before you'd even seen it. You'd move a unit down a street and boom, shot through two windows from an invisible alien on the other side of the building. When you move some troops around to try and catch it, the damned thing has moved behind another hedge and pops a couple more guys from the dark before you've managed to spot it.
The UI improvements are epic, knowing how covered you are, being able to fire from behind cover, there's tons in the new one that was done right, but the base game is X-Com on crutches. The way they set up unit behavior was like some crappy arcade shooter on rails. They all come to life at your presence, diving to cover so they can pop up to present you a target. They replaced aimed/snap/auto with a single firing mode, made over-watch a thing, and then basically removed the aliens from using it with their tacky spotting system.
2T over TU isn't a flaw, it's a massive improvement! TU was bogged down by micromanaging and ridiculous turn plotting due to the advantage of one square creep.
Lack of bases is a personal thing, neither is obviously superior to the other in my opinion, it's down to personal choice.
And I'm not sure what version of Xcom you played where high level characters were never heroes, not sure if it was better or worse in which version, but the perk tree in XCOM at least gives you a significantly superior role playing opportunity, if that's your thing (it's not mine personally, but it works).
As to bad tactics (or just insanely stupid alien placement) from the original... spare me.
You could (and many did) just blaster bomb the entire map and then run a spotter so that everyone else could snipe anything on the entire map from literally anywhere else. Tactics in the original became unappealing and trivial far too quickly.
2T and pod activation mechanics can lead to certain encounters equally being trivial, yet some missions (maps really) see you getting swarmed without access to proper cover so that you really do have to figure out a plan beyond 'blaster bomb everything'.
Anyway, like what you like, I'll like what I like, and everyone else can like what they like
What is 2T vrs TU?
The new X-Com's two moves per turn versus the Time Units of the original X-Com.
the 2t in EU worked well because they used a class system that worked surprisinglywell
Sniping from anywhere on the map? Like upgraded snipers on a roof with squad sight that have 90%+ accuracy from across the map and fire twice per turn? I played through EU with two super snipers that never died while my nearly impossible to kill heavy and supports provided backup for the fast moving assault with crit immunity and high health. Casualties were non-existent.
The core of tactics for beating EU on higher difficulty levels is to keep two snipers alive long enough to get upgraded to where they'll kill everything you flush out but can't drop with your other units.
The big problem with 2T is that they made actions a simple thing, not that they did a two part turn system. They didn't even give an aim bonus for not moving before you fire.
There is another thing that sucks, and that is the aiming and accuracy system. In the original game, your accuracy would mean shots would veer off within certain angles. That means even if you missed the shot, you might hit the alien standing next to him. Hell, some times with an auto-shot you'd hit the intended target, the guy next to him and then the fuel pump behind them blowing them to bits.I enjoyed the new Xcom as a strategy lite game, but as an Xcom game it really let itself down. The thing that bugs me so much is reading about their original prototype, they basically kept the same mechanics of the original, albeit with improved UI and technology. They tested it with people in the studio and Xcom fans loved it, while people who had never played Xcom found it 'slow' and too hard. So they dumbed it down.
And that right there is why gaming makes me sad as I get older.
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