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X-COM creator Julian Gollop discusses his most important games (2019)

smikhanov 1y ago
Wow, I didn’t know Laser Squad was done by the same guy (and his brother, full indie-style, it turns out) — I remember playing that game on Spectrum in 1992 or so, and it was absolutely next level, no other game came close at that time.
simonebrunozzi 1y ago
X-Com was amazing, and Xcom2 also pretty good. I just checked, and there is an amazing mod and very active community around LwotC (Long war of the Chosen), with tons of fixed bugs and improvements, a decade or so after the game was released. [0] I am surprised Firaxis didn't work on an X-Com 3. I would guess the fan base is still huge. I'm getting old and I don't play videogames anymore, but if I have a month of free time imprisoned in a cell with nothing else to do, I'd give xcom2 with LwotC a go. (and Master of Magic, and Master of Orion 2, etc). [0]: https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/Long_War_of_the_Chosen https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/Long_War_of_the_Chosen
- Podrod 1y ago
  There's also an open source reimplementation of the original Gollop designed game which has extensive modding support. There's quite a few total conversion mods for it https://openxcom.org/ https://openxcom.org/ https://mod.io/g/openxcom https://mod.io/g/openxcom
- yyyk 1y ago
  I do not think you're talking even about the same games? This is about the _original_ X-Com.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 1y ago
    Yep. It's this game: https://www.gog.com/en/game/xcom_ufo_defense https://www.gog.com/en/game/xcom_ufo_defense Not this one: https://store.steampowered.com/app/200510/XCOM_Enemy_Unknown/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/200510/XCOM_Enemy_Unknown... There's a bit of confusion because the first game was called "UFO: Enemy Unknown" in the UK and "X-COM: UFO Defense" in the US [1] but the one discussed in the article is the 1994 game: X-COM: Enemy Unknown Developer: Mythos Games Publisher: MicroProse Format: Amiga, PC Release: 1994 Also: graphics [1]. _____________ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO:_Enemy_Unknown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO:_Enemy_Unknown [2] https://dcnxazdl1qzggl.archive.ph/2Ue9d/b72fb5aeb68b363eebfc65e4d8278b26a86a163c.jpg https://dcnxazdl1qzggl.archive.ph/2Ue9d/b72fb5aeb68b363eebfc...
- YeGoblynQueenne 1y ago
  >> I am surprised Firaxis didn't work on an X-Com 3. Firaxis didn't but Julian Golop's company, Snapshot Games (discussed in the article) published Phoenix Point which is kind of like X-Com 2.0.1: https://store.steampowered.com/app/839770/Phoenix_Point/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/839770/Phoenix_Point/
  - acdha 1y ago
    That one unfortunately got caught up in publisher politics as they had a very successful kickstarter but then broke promises to backers because Epic offered them a lot of money for an exclusive. I think the game would’ve been more popular if it hadn’t had the distraction of many of their biggest fans feeling used. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/phoenix-point-becomes-epic-store-exclusive-for-a-year https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/phoenix-point-becomes-epic-...
  - carefulfungi 1y ago
    The long war mods are X-Com 3-ish - they are extensive!
stevekemp 1y ago
I maintain that his best game was absolutely Chaos: The Battle of Wizards. Although later creations were more popular it's that first one that really stands in my memory 40+ years later. I guess it might be time to fire up an emulator and play again, as I do every couple of years: https://torinak.com/qaop/play/chaos https://torinak.com/qaop/play/chaos
- raffraffraff 1y ago
  Chaos Funk was a pretty good reworking of it. That one you posted is pretty good until you get to casting a spell, and then they little keyboard sans-cursors and the lack of apparent touch control all goes wonky.
moomin 1y ago
As an old Spectrum head I was obsessed with JG’s output back in the day. Chaos may have looked awful but it was so much fun. I still have core memories from that, Rebelstar Raiders and Laser Squad. (Beating people online is one thing, beating your friends when you’re hot-seating in the same house is something else.) Ironically never played XCom, but I have a lot of hours on Magic and Mayhem (which had the executable… Chaos.exe)
- raffraffraff 1y ago
  This was the only game that my whole family played.
YeGoblynQueenne 1y ago
I've never played the original X-COM, though I played the two Firaxis games to death. I have 132.2 hours on X-COM: Enemy Unkown (the Firaxis game) and 327.5 hours on XCOM2, both of which seem like an undercount (especially the first one). I thought I had the original game in my GOG account but it turns out I only have a clone (Xenonauts). I haven't played it at all and I bet I wouldn't have played the original XCOM either if it was in my GOG account. The reason? I'm sad to admit that but it's the graphics. I can sometimes play older games, e.g. arcade games from the '80s or '90s, but I really struggle with most older graphics games. That makes me sad because there are some real gems that are now older than 20-30 years and I'd really like to be able to enjoy them, but I can't. There's a time to play, and a time to admire graphics, I guess. Oh Ecclesiastes, you were so right.
- ileonichwiesz 1y ago
  It’s important to separate graphics and UX here - I don’t mind if the soldiers and the aliens are blobs of pixels, or even just coloured squares, but the UI of the original UFO/XCOM games is pretty much incomprehensible to a modern player.
  - ido 1y ago
    The contemporary Jagged Alliance, while it has a handful of baffling UI (that was already the case when it was new), is still imo much easier to get into than the original X-com while having nicer looking graphics.
  - mock-possum 1y ago
    Yeah I got a copy of the original XCOM as a kid and could not make heads or tails of it - after playing the modern releases, I figured hey, I’m a seasoned adult gamer™ now, maybe I should go back and check it out… Unfortunately I’m also a software dev, and an interface snob, and the UI/UX for the old games sucks. They had access to the exact same mouse+keyboad back then as we do now, but the standards for controlling a Turn Based Tactics game just weren’t established yet, and interfaces ranged from ignorant to amateurish to experimental to actively user-hostile - and I don’t know which one to characterize old XCOM as, but I don’t have any patience for it nowadays. It’s such a shame that old games with good gameplay are effectively hidden behind bad UX. Rereleases like the recent Tomb Raider that practically preserve the original experience, but fix the UI issues (the tank controls of the original, in this case) are a blessing.
pjmlp 1y ago
I was a big fan of the predecessors like Raiders and Laser Squad. The first X-COM felt like those, afterwards not so much.
nness 1y ago
I recently played through 'Aliens: Dark Descent' which manages to feel like a X-COM game, but real time. It felt like the natural next step for tactic strategy games and was instantly hoked -- I can't imagine returning to the turn-based roll-of-a-dice luck systems after that. "random-number stuff was really too brutal for a lot of players to handle" -- I never finished XCOM 2 specifically for that reason. I think, having not come from a background of table top RPG's, it just didn't click.
- reqres 1y ago
  Thanks for the recommendation. Seems like a natural X-COM follow on. Appears to be 60% off on Steam atm as well!
- carefulfungi 1y ago
  Turn based and random are orthogonal (of course). Coming from table top gaming first, I rarely enjoy real time games. But also find the x-com RNG too much after awhile.
nickdothutton 1y ago
Rebelstar player here, was a great little game.
araes 1y ago
Enjoy their quote midway through about how pointlessly miserly the Spectrum Holobyte people were about development. Made me bleak laugh a little. > suddenly we really had to finish it by end of March, and they required us to work in-house in Chipping Sodbury seven days a week, 10 hours a day for several months. They didn’t give us any extra resources. In fact, we had to beg them to give us a more powerful computer to use, because my brother’s computer couldn’t handle it! My computer was having serious overheating problems. I had to remove the case and it crashed occasionally. They begrudged us one new computer for Nick and they stuck us in this tiny little room. The Magic and Mayhem quote's pretty funny too about game dev, still seems to be the same. > They said RPGs don’t sell, which was, of course, complete rubbish. They wanted to make it much more RTS-focused, partly because of Command & Conquer, which was very popular at the time. (...) We started to make it before Diablo came out, and it was also before Baldur’s Gate, which was the real milestone in RPGs. And naturally the demise of Nintendo > my boss was opposed to doing a sequel. He said the 3DS was dead and that we had to go with the PS Vita 3DS sells 76 million, PS Vita ... 10. Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars even sold "acceptably". 340,000 according to the data available.[1] Not exactly Mario Kart 7 or Pokemon, still acceptable for a third party. [1] https://www.vgchartz.com/game/47651/tom-clancys-ghost-recon-shadow-wars/?region=All https://www.vgchartz.com/game/47651/tom-clancys-ghost-recon-... It was an enjoyable read at least. Lots of standard horrible practices in the game development community, and some actually surprising ones. Such as, "they didn't even hire the X-COM people to work on any of the X-COM sequels?"
brayann 1y ago
[flagged]
nis0s 1y ago
I hope the future direction of this game goes back to its roots. The X-COM2 DLC which introduces alien combatants to your team as players always seemed deeply misguided to me. To me the point of XCOM is about humanity confronting those aspects it finds unacceptable to its condition, I’ve never taken it literally about aliens vs. humans, so the othering of a race of aliens is not a concern for me. What I care about are non-fictional people, their nations and their cultures. So the DLC where aliens were part of your team seemed like such a misguided venture to me. It seemed like something someone might come up with in a thoughtless effort to be inclusive of diversity. But what does that even mean in this case? So, yeah I hope XCOM reexamines it point, or someone else should create a better IP.
- testdelacc1 1y ago
  > It seemed like something someone might come up with in a thoughtless effort to be inclusive of diversity. The more obvious explanation is that having alien members in your squad opens up new gameplay opportunities. Your comment seems like a caricature of a right wing person who thinks everything they don’t like is “DEI/woke”. It’s like you need the world to be black and white and when it isn’t it upsets your world view?
  - Krasnol 1y ago
    It is quite interesting to see this development on forums like this one. I guess the Thiel influence is strong here too but it seems like "The Last Scream of the Old World", which is a right wing, populist and anti-intellectual tone, will seep deep even into areas we wouldn't have expected or didn't even think it would happen because it wouldn't be necessary. We're living in interesting times indeed...unfortunately.
- Telemakhos 1y ago
  The plots to XCOM were never very strong: it was the gameplay that set them apart. Gollup’s earlier games (the subject of the article) developed turn-based, grid-constrained tactical simulation out of board games; plot was just polish added to that. Using roughly the same mechanics, you command a death squad on search-and-destroy missions, terrorists doing direct action against the government, and, in Chimera Squad, cops. The story is just window dressing for the mechanics.
lofaszvanitt 1y ago
Original XCOM and XCOM2 was ok, PP was rubbish.
- Podrod 1y ago
  [dead]
- YeGoblynQueenne 1y ago
  "Original XCOM" from 1994, or are you thinking of a later "original" game?
  - lofaszvanitt 1y ago
    Of course the ones from the 90s. The new ones were lobotomized by an inept group.
- scotty79 1y ago
  Why was it rubbish?
  - JimDabell 1y ago
    I’m a big fan of XCOM, but I bought Phoenix Point and it just kept crashing mid-mission. Sucked all the fun out of it and I gave up.
  - eterm 1y ago
    IMO, it made the one of the biggest mistakes that games can make: It just wasn't fun. Browsing the reviews now, it's full of people saying how hard they tried to like the game. Good games make themselves effortless to enjoy. Even quite flawed games cause people to look past any awkwardness or glitchiness if they're fun at their core. It's hard to express what makes unfun games not fun. But it was grindy in the wrong places, and just felt awkward to play. The balancing and pacing was terrible, and it just lacked charm. It felt like it took itself really seriously, and it projected an air of superiority by deliberately not choosing to do some things that made the 2012/2016 XCOM games fun out of a sense that they were too "dumbed down". If you go into developing a game being "Not X", then you better bring along a game-changing mechanic, graphics, or something else that separates and elevates you above that game. And PP didn't have that.
rendx 1y ago
"Obviously X-COM also faced this problem. One of the biggest complaints is when an enemy is right next to a player and they’ve got an 85 per cent chance to hit and they miss. ‘That’s absolutely ridiculous!’ People ragequit and never play again. It’s an issue they partly solved in XCOM 2, and we had another mode in Chaos Reborn. It’s a rather sobering lesson in game design and how people manage random factors."
- mdp2021 1y ago
  People frequently do not understand the statistics underlying real world dynamics, embrace oversimplified world models, and going against that has them discouraged? That is one strong re-expression of the satanic attitude. From cinematography, two big examples "that may have people leave the theater, then": -- in Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, the Sheriff (Gene Hackman) re-telling the story of English Bob: > You see, the night that Corky walked into the Blue Bottle, and before he knows what's happening, Bob here takes a shot at him! And he misses, 'cause he's so damn drunk. Now that bullet whizzing by panicked old Corky, and he did the wrong thing. He went for his gun in such a hurry that he shot his own damn toe off. Meantime Bob here, he's aiming real good, and he squeezes off another, but he misses, because he's still so damn drunk, and he hits this thousand-dollar mirror up over the bar. And now, the Duck of Death is as good as dead. Because Corky does it right. He aims real careful, no hurry... [...] BAM! That Walker Colt blew up in his hand, which was a failing common to that model. You see, if Corky had had two guns instead of just a big dick, he would have been there right to the end to defend himself. [...] Well, old Bob wasn't gonna wait for Corky to grow a new hand. No, he just walked over there real slow - 'cause he was drunk - and shot him right through the liver -- the scene in Vince Gilligan's El Camino, in which a bunch of gunners is so hijacked by the unpreparedness to the havoc that most bullets end on the scenery. Not documentaries, but statistically relevant like the ten "black" in sequence at the roulette, frequent as the wheel is having well over a thousand spins.
  - izacus 1y ago
    People don't need to understand statistics for games, people understand what's fun. And that mechanic wasn't fun no matter how much you "well akshually" it. There's a reason why pretty much ever single new tactics game got rid of the probability based hit chance. It's a dead end in game design.

Wow, I didn’t know Laser Squad was done by the same guy (and his brother, full indie-style, it turns out) — I remember playing that game on Spectrum in 1992 or so, and it was absolutely next level, no other game came close at that time.

simonebrunozzi 1y ago

X-Com was amazing, and Xcom2 also pretty good. I just checked, and there is an amazing mod and very active community around LwotC (Long war of the Chosen), with tons of fixed bugs and improvements, a decade or so after the game was released. [0] I am surprised Firaxis didn't work on an X-Com 3. I would guess the fan base is still huge. I'm getting old and I don't play videogames anymore, but if I have a month of free time imprisoned in a cell with nothing else to do, I'd give xcom2 with LwotC a go. (and Master of Magic, and Master of Orion 2, etc). [0]: https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/Long_War_of_the_Chosen https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/Long_War_of_the_Chosen

Podrod 1y ago
There's also an open source reimplementation of the original Gollop designed game which has extensive modding support. There's quite a few total conversion mods for it https://openxcom.org/ https://openxcom.org/ https://mod.io/g/openxcom https://mod.io/g/openxcom
yyyk 1y ago
I do not think you're talking even about the same games? This is about the _original_ X-Com.
- YeGoblynQueenne 1y ago
  Yep. It's this game: https://www.gog.com/en/game/xcom_ufo_defense https://www.gog.com/en/game/xcom_ufo_defense Not this one: https://store.steampowered.com/app/200510/XCOM_Enemy_Unknown/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/200510/XCOM_Enemy_Unknown... There's a bit of confusion because the first game was called "UFO: Enemy Unknown" in the UK and "X-COM: UFO Defense" in the US [1] but the one discussed in the article is the 1994 game: X-COM: Enemy Unknown Developer: Mythos Games Publisher: MicroProse Format: Amiga, PC Release: 1994 Also: graphics [1]. _____________ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO:_Enemy_Unknown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO:_Enemy_Unknown [2] https://dcnxazdl1qzggl.archive.ph/2Ue9d/b72fb5aeb68b363eebfc65e4d8278b26a86a163c.jpg https://dcnxazdl1qzggl.archive.ph/2Ue9d/b72fb5aeb68b363eebfc...
YeGoblynQueenne 1y ago
>> I am surprised Firaxis didn't work on an X-Com 3. Firaxis didn't but Julian Golop's company, Snapshot Games (discussed in the article) published Phoenix Point which is kind of like X-Com 2.0.1: https://store.steampowered.com/app/839770/Phoenix_Point/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/839770/Phoenix_Point/
- acdha 1y ago
  That one unfortunately got caught up in publisher politics as they had a very successful kickstarter but then broke promises to backers because Epic offered them a lot of money for an exclusive. I think the game would’ve been more popular if it hadn’t had the distraction of many of their biggest fans feeling used. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/phoenix-point-becomes-epic-store-exclusive-for-a-year https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/phoenix-point-becomes-epic-...
- carefulfungi 1y ago
  The long war mods are X-Com 3-ish - they are extensive!

stevekemp 1y ago

I maintain that his best game was absolutely Chaos: The Battle of Wizards. Although later creations were more popular it's that first one that really stands in my memory 40+ years later. I guess it might be time to fire up an emulator and play again, as I do every couple of years: https://torinak.com/qaop/play/chaos https://torinak.com/qaop/play/chaos

raffraffraff 1y ago
Chaos Funk was a pretty good reworking of it. That one you posted is pretty good until you get to casting a spell, and then they little keyboard sans-cursors and the lack of apparent touch control all goes wonky.

moomin 1y ago

As an old Spectrum head I was obsessed with JG’s output back in the day. Chaos may have looked awful but it was so much fun. I still have core memories from that, Rebelstar Raiders and Laser Squad. (Beating people online is one thing, beating your friends when you’re hot-seating in the same house is something else.) Ironically never played XCom, but I have a lot of hours on Magic and Mayhem (which had the executable… Chaos.exe)

raffraffraff 1y ago
This was the only game that my whole family played.

YeGoblynQueenne 1y ago

I've never played the original X-COM, though I played the two Firaxis games to death. I have 132.2 hours on X-COM: Enemy Unkown (the Firaxis game) and 327.5 hours on XCOM2, both of which seem like an undercount (especially the first one). I thought I had the original game in my GOG account but it turns out I only have a clone (Xenonauts). I haven't played it at all and I bet I wouldn't have played the original XCOM either if it was in my GOG account. The reason? I'm sad to admit that but it's the graphics. I can sometimes play older games, e.g. arcade games from the '80s or '90s, but I really struggle with most older graphics games. That makes me sad because there are some real gems that are now older than 20-30 years and I'd really like to be able to enjoy them, but I can't. There's a time to play, and a time to admire graphics, I guess. Oh Ecclesiastes, you were so right.

ileonichwiesz 1y ago
It’s important to separate graphics and UX here - I don’t mind if the soldiers and the aliens are blobs of pixels, or even just coloured squares, but the UI of the original UFO/XCOM games is pretty much incomprehensible to a modern player.
- ido 1y ago
  The contemporary Jagged Alliance, while it has a handful of baffling UI (that was already the case when it was new), is still imo much easier to get into than the original X-com while having nicer looking graphics.
- mock-possum 1y ago
  Yeah I got a copy of the original XCOM as a kid and could not make heads or tails of it - after playing the modern releases, I figured hey, I’m a seasoned adult gamer™ now, maybe I should go back and check it out… Unfortunately I’m also a software dev, and an interface snob, and the UI/UX for the old games sucks. They had access to the exact same mouse+keyboad back then as we do now, but the standards for controlling a Turn Based Tactics game just weren’t established yet, and interfaces ranged from ignorant to amateurish to experimental to actively user-hostile - and I don’t know which one to characterize old XCOM as, but I don’t have any patience for it nowadays. It’s such a shame that old games with good gameplay are effectively hidden behind bad UX. Rereleases like the recent Tomb Raider that practically preserve the original experience, but fix the UI issues (the tank controls of the original, in this case) are a blessing.

pjmlp 1y ago

I was a big fan of the predecessors like Raiders and Laser Squad. The first X-COM felt like those, afterwards not so much.

nness 1y ago

I recently played through 'Aliens: Dark Descent' which manages to feel like a X-COM game, but real time. It felt like the natural next step for tactic strategy games and was instantly hoked -- I can't imagine returning to the turn-based roll-of-a-dice luck systems after that. "random-number stuff was really too brutal for a lot of players to handle" -- I never finished XCOM 2 specifically for that reason. I think, having not come from a background of table top RPG's, it just didn't click.

reqres 1y ago
Thanks for the recommendation. Seems like a natural X-COM follow on. Appears to be 60% off on Steam atm as well!
carefulfungi 1y ago
Turn based and random are orthogonal (of course). Coming from table top gaming first, I rarely enjoy real time games. But also find the x-com RNG too much after awhile.

nickdothutton 1y ago

Rebelstar player here, was a great little game.

araes 1y ago

Enjoy their quote midway through about how pointlessly miserly the Spectrum Holobyte people were about development. Made me bleak laugh a little. > suddenly we really had to finish it by end of March, and they required us to work in-house in Chipping Sodbury seven days a week, 10 hours a day for several months. They didn’t give us any extra resources. In fact, we had to beg them to give us a more powerful computer to use, because my brother’s computer couldn’t handle it! My computer was having serious overheating problems. I had to remove the case and it crashed occasionally. They begrudged us one new computer for Nick and they stuck us in this tiny little room. The Magic and Mayhem quote's pretty funny too about game dev, still seems to be the same. > They said RPGs don’t sell, which was, of course, complete rubbish. They wanted to make it much more RTS-focused, partly because of Command & Conquer, which was very popular at the time. (...) We started to make it before Diablo came out, and it was also before Baldur’s Gate, which was the real milestone in RPGs. And naturally the demise of Nintendo > my boss was opposed to doing a sequel. He said the 3DS was dead and that we had to go with the PS Vita 3DS sells 76 million, PS Vita ... 10. Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars even sold "acceptably". 340,000 according to the data available.[1] Not exactly Mario Kart 7 or Pokemon, still acceptable for a third party. [1] https://www.vgchartz.com/game/47651/tom-clancys-ghost-recon-shadow-wars/?region=All https://www.vgchartz.com/game/47651/tom-clancys-ghost-recon-... It was an enjoyable read at least. Lots of standard horrible practices in the game development community, and some actually surprising ones. Such as, "they didn't even hire the X-COM people to work on any of the X-COM sequels?"

brayann 1y ago

[flagged]

nis0s 1y ago

I hope the future direction of this game goes back to its roots. The X-COM2 DLC which introduces alien combatants to your team as players always seemed deeply misguided to me. To me the point of XCOM is about humanity confronting those aspects it finds unacceptable to its condition, I’ve never taken it literally about aliens vs. humans, so the othering of a race of aliens is not a concern for me. What I care about are non-fictional people, their nations and their cultures. So the DLC where aliens were part of your team seemed like such a misguided venture to me. It seemed like something someone might come up with in a thoughtless effort to be inclusive of diversity. But what does that even mean in this case? So, yeah I hope XCOM reexamines it point, or someone else should create a better IP.

testdelacc1 1y ago
> It seemed like something someone might come up with in a thoughtless effort to be inclusive of diversity. The more obvious explanation is that having alien members in your squad opens up new gameplay opportunities. Your comment seems like a caricature of a right wing person who thinks everything they don’t like is “DEI/woke”. It’s like you need the world to be black and white and when it isn’t it upsets your world view?
- Krasnol 1y ago
  It is quite interesting to see this development on forums like this one. I guess the Thiel influence is strong here too but it seems like "The Last Scream of the Old World", which is a right wing, populist and anti-intellectual tone, will seep deep even into areas we wouldn't have expected or didn't even think it would happen because it wouldn't be necessary. We're living in interesting times indeed...unfortunately.
Telemakhos 1y ago
The plots to XCOM were never very strong: it was the gameplay that set them apart. Gollup’s earlier games (the subject of the article) developed turn-based, grid-constrained tactical simulation out of board games; plot was just polish added to that. Using roughly the same mechanics, you command a death squad on search-and-destroy missions, terrorists doing direct action against the government, and, in Chimera Squad, cops. The story is just window dressing for the mechanics.

lofaszvanitt 1y ago

Original XCOM and XCOM2 was ok, PP was rubbish.

Podrod 1y ago
[dead]
YeGoblynQueenne 1y ago
"Original XCOM" from 1994, or are you thinking of a later "original" game?
- lofaszvanitt 1y ago
  Of course the ones from the 90s. The new ones were lobotomized by an inept group.
scotty79 1y ago
Why was it rubbish?
- JimDabell 1y ago
  I’m a big fan of XCOM, but I bought Phoenix Point and it just kept crashing mid-mission. Sucked all the fun out of it and I gave up.
- eterm 1y ago
  IMO, it made the one of the biggest mistakes that games can make: It just wasn't fun. Browsing the reviews now, it's full of people saying how hard they tried to like the game. Good games make themselves effortless to enjoy. Even quite flawed games cause people to look past any awkwardness or glitchiness if they're fun at their core. It's hard to express what makes unfun games not fun. But it was grindy in the wrong places, and just felt awkward to play. The balancing and pacing was terrible, and it just lacked charm. It felt like it took itself really seriously, and it projected an air of superiority by deliberately not choosing to do some things that made the 2012/2016 XCOM games fun out of a sense that they were too "dumbed down". If you go into developing a game being "Not X", then you better bring along a game-changing mechanic, graphics, or something else that separates and elevates you above that game. And PP didn't have that.

rendx 1y ago

"Obviously X-COM also faced this problem. One of the biggest complaints is when an enemy is right next to a player and they’ve got an 85 per cent chance to hit and they miss. ‘That’s absolutely ridiculous!’ People ragequit and never play again. It’s an issue they partly solved in XCOM 2, and we had another mode in Chaos Reborn. It’s a rather sobering lesson in game design and how people manage random factors."

mdp2021 1y ago
People frequently do not understand the statistics underlying real world dynamics, embrace oversimplified world models, and going against that has them discouraged? That is one strong re-expression of the satanic attitude. From cinematography, two big examples "that may have people leave the theater, then": -- in Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, the Sheriff (Gene Hackman) re-telling the story of English Bob: > You see, the night that Corky walked into the Blue Bottle, and before he knows what's happening, Bob here takes a shot at him! And he misses, 'cause he's so damn drunk. Now that bullet whizzing by panicked old Corky, and he did the wrong thing. He went for his gun in such a hurry that he shot his own damn toe off. Meantime Bob here, he's aiming real good, and he squeezes off another, but he misses, because he's still so damn drunk, and he hits this thousand-dollar mirror up over the bar. And now, the Duck of Death is as good as dead. Because Corky does it right. He aims real careful, no hurry... [...] BAM! That Walker Colt blew up in his hand, which was a failing common to that model. You see, if Corky had had two guns instead of just a big dick, he would have been there right to the end to defend himself. [...] Well, old Bob wasn't gonna wait for Corky to grow a new hand. No, he just walked over there real slow - 'cause he was drunk - and shot him right through the liver -- the scene in Vince Gilligan's El Camino, in which a bunch of gunners is so hijacked by the unpreparedness to the havoc that most bullets end on the scenery. Not documentaries, but statistically relevant like the ten "black" in sequence at the roulette, frequent as the wheel is having well over a thousand spins.
- izacus 1y ago
  People don't need to understand statistics for games, people understand what's fun. And that mechanic wasn't fun no matter how much you "well akshually" it. There's a reason why pretty much ever single new tactics game got rid of the probability based hit chance. It's a dead end in game design.