For all those who loved the old X-Com, and those who have no idea what it is, you might want to take a look at this free one, which some people has been working on, called UFO: Alien Invasion: http://ufoai.sourceforge.net/
I haven't played any of the Fallout games, frankly (*dodges a tomato*) but looking at a F3 trailer a while back showing the player charging an oblivious and unresponsive (effectively) enemy for an easy kill dropped all my interest. Great, you've got some graphics, some uber weapons to compensate for your short male-appendage and you get to kill and advance, but that's so moot without proper AI. Fallout 1&2 may look dated, but I bet they still provide twice the challenge of F3...
I think one of the main drawbacks of real-time vs. turn-based is that it requires proper AI, whereas turn-based doesn't (not as extensively, anyway). Even a dumb enemy can still give you a fair fight, which makes those games a true strategic challenge. RTS is much more easily exploitable...
Zwebbie: Yeah I'll learn to "accept" it by just ignoring and avoiding. I have a brother who is a priest and literally a hermit--he spends much of his time away from most amounts of popular culture--and he has never seen the SW prequels and has always been a happier man for it.
I learned that lesson from him and never saw Indy 4 and so can enjoy the actual Indy movies still, unlike SW. The present and future artistic work is in constant dialogue with the past. You CAN change the past, in that you can bear it up, you can make interesting allusions to great works, or you can cheapen it, you can ruin it.
It isn't nostalgia. The original X-Com game was filled with nuances that could only be discovered by multiple playthroughs and/or trading strategies with other players. Base placement, base layout, base deployment and construction timetables, soldier hiring practices, team composition, tactical deployment techniques, the vagaries of loadout, research queues, bankrolling operations. Only a fraction of this depth will be in the new game.
I think it's fine if they want to use the brand equity of the X-COM name, when none of your typical 360 players will ever have played the original game (much like FO3 as pointed out). But it's not a game I'm interested to play, and I think the developers are more or less lying to themselves about how this new game is in any way in the rightful tradition of the original game. It's an IP they bought.
I am a terrible human being I know but I fired up X-Com a while back and I don't think I could make it through the opening. Give me Jagged Alliance 2 any day.
But you aren't going to see strategy games like that popping up from mainstream developers, unfortunately. It's not a AAA-budget genre.
Altho being the eternal skeptic of revivals im gonna go ahead and be ...skeptic about this. FPS? Yeah, they're totally gonna rape another one of my childhood memories.
Also if its from the makers of bioshock 2, then blech because bioshock 2 was completely uninteresting to me. Got about halfway through and i just didn't care. Didn't hold my attention.
I actually haven't got anything substantial to add to this, I just want to completely brag about working with one of the three artists on the original X-COM. Such an extremely down to earth and nice, modest guy. Had I worked on it, I would have my head so far up my own ass by now that I'd just be one infinite loop.
He did a bunch of the sprites for characters and aliens, and various artwork, if I remember correctly (I grilled him about this over a year ago when I realised who he was). Will see if I can convince him to drop by here sometime and pimp some of the artwork that never made it into the game (nice treat), but every time X-COM is brought up he kinda rolls his eyes, sighs, and goes "oh here we go again.." :P
Wow, thanks for bringing this to my attention crasong. Looks like someone actually remembers what XCOM was all about i.e "turn-based tactical command." I applaud this small team Goldhawk Interactive!
It's the new wave of the future! Only awesome games are FPS anymore... Third person view? PASS! Isometric view? BOOOOORRRING!
I must be too young for this xcom stuff, I too, had no idea what it was until I googled it... Looks interesting though and it also looks like FPS would ruin it.
Fuck it, lets just give dwarf fortress to 2k, I'm sure they could work something out.
I was thinking the same thing!
My guess is that we'd get a simplified minecraft with HD graphics.
I was super exited when i saw the announcement, then got all "MEH.." when i read it was gonna be a FPS. Who knows? It might turn out to be a good game.. But I'm not holding my breath.
Someone got their hands on the french magazine CanardPC apparently:
I'm reading the article right now so this will be short :
- No world map : There's a USA map (with a 50s' style) for selecting the missions.
- Research & production : yes.
- Base management : yes.
- Team management : yes.
- Choice of the next missions : yes.
- No control of your teammate during the mission (in the demo, this may change)
It seems like you can goof around in your base between the mission (in first person view).
EDIT :
- The demo was running on an XBox360.
- You play as the chief of operation of the base between the mission.
- The choice of the played mission will impact the game.
- In the demo, lots of area of the base were off limits.
- During the missions you can take photos (research ?).
- The game is due for release in a little more than a year.
- The choice of the played mission will impact the game.
branching mission tree instead of random/downed ufos ?
No control over team mates??? what heresy is this? What happened to tactical deployment over terrain? pfff...
This, and the first-person, it's just not x-com. I hereby call for an official protest, one of those internet petitions nobody cares about.
No control over team mates??? what heresy is this? What happened to tactical deployment over terrain? pfff...
This, and the first-person, it's just not x-com. I hereby call for an official protest, one of those internet petitions nobody cares about.
...or we keep kicking SyaPed until he turns his mini-men into a real game.
Thanks for the Xenonauts link crasong. I read through the bumf on their site : it looks like a direct clone of X-Com with some modern imorovements, including tactical air combat and a random map generator. If it's good, I hope it out sells the big-budget version to show publishers what fans of old games actually want. Fallout 3 was a decent game in its own right, but in no way had the same vibe as the old ones.
A little offtopic, but regardless of personal opinion of the game I dont really understand how bioshock, a game ENVISIONED AND CREATED BY THE LEAD DEVELOPER OF SYSTEM SHOCK 2 is in any way a franchise rape in the sense that fallout 3 or this Xcom is.
Why even call the game XCOM? 90% of gamers haven't even heard of X-Com or UFO, so it can't be a strategy to bank on the fanbase of an existing IP. The only people who would want to play a game called XCOM are people who don't want to play *this*. The logic here boggles my mind.
Also, for some reason the dosbox.conf that comes with the game uses a retarded pixel interpolation so you get dumb gloopy pixels instead of the gorgeous square pixels we all know and love. Whoever enabled this by default needs to burn in a fire.
To fix, go to:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\xcom ufo defense (or whatever)
A little offtopic, but regardless of personal opinion of the game I dont really understand how bioshock, a game ENVISIONED AND CREATED BY THE LEAD DEVELOPER OF SYSTEM SHOCK 2 is in any way a franchise rape in the sense that fallout 3 or this Xcom is.
A spiritual successor to a survival horror rpg fps that was up there with deus ex in terms of gameplay, and then have the successor stripped from all kinds of survival horror, rpg and replability.
Ken himself even intended for bioshock to be deeper, with a monster ecology(which sister/daddy is the remains of), weapon crafting from spare parts, and the inventory/rpg stuff that would've made it a shock game.
so at first he had to make due with an fps and ship it, but then noticing the popularity of pretty vintage retro style worlds it became insanely popular.
So now at 2k the publishers will really want to push for shooters with vintage a vintage look, and they've been shown people will pay for less of a complexity when bringing back old franchises.
I liked bioshock, it had a shock worthy world of horror, but it just lacked the gameplay of a shock game, and since replayability is at zero, people won't be playing that one more than once.
This is what Im afraid of with a new x-com game, replayability will be shafted, progression will be linear, missions will be handmade and most likely not randomly generated, the game will most likely not make squadmember-loss anything harsh since that doesnt work in todays games.
and besides, Im pretty sure we wont be hunting down ufos anymore, we'll be getting phonecalls that an alien has been suspected kidnapping and proping young girls down in the cellar of the fairfax residence, and while we might get to pick in a tree style structure, it wont be a mass of randomly places, randomly generated missions, on random maps.
it'll be regular prebaked premade maps that we're used to in most modern engine games.
Anyone remember the destructable terrain and blowing up the side of a ufo, or having a firefight result in a leveled town in xcom way before the bad company series?,
fat chance of that happening in todays xcom.
I actually started playing it again after hearing about the new one, and yes it's great. I always put my base in Greenland/Iceland. Cold places, I dunno why i just like it, reminds me of "the thing" also i must echo that bioshock was a good game but i am upset that it didn't take the "shock" direction fully.
I have the same fear with the new Thief game, I didn't especially find the last one that good, they took out a lot of the good stuck in the game, it was very linear level/map wise, they took out rope arrow (I LOVED those) and replaced them with gloves. :P I really hope they look at the first two games instead when they make the game and if we get a consolized port of it...heads gonna roll...after the blunting....and backstabbing.
Yea dead space rocked... but it was deff more resident evil than system shock.
McGreed: from what I've noticed on the forums, Eidos have been *very* attentive to fans' voice about the rope arrow, probably one of the most voiced crits of T3. At this point, however, I think the rope arrow is the last thing to worry about... god knows what they're gonna do with the game.
Replies
http://ufoai.sourceforge.net/
Might be of some interest.
[ame]
Ja3 was supposed to be around 2005, the rights have changed so many hands I'm doubtful we will ever see it.
http://ufo.ufo-extraterrestrials.com/
EDIT: And you might want to add this mod for pleasure when you play the game.
http://ufo.ufo-extraterrestrials.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1691
I think one of the main drawbacks of real-time vs. turn-based is that it requires proper AI, whereas turn-based doesn't (not as extensively, anyway). Even a dumb enemy can still give you a fair fight, which makes those games a true strategic challenge. RTS is much more easily exploitable...
Actually, I heard ja3 became hired guns: the jagged edge, after licenseholders became unhappy with how the game was developing.
Dante's Inferno was originally a book.
I learned that lesson from him and never saw Indy 4 and so can enjoy the actual Indy movies still, unlike SW. The present and future artistic work is in constant dialogue with the past. You CAN change the past, in that you can bear it up, you can make interesting allusions to great works, or you can cheapen it, you can ruin it.
It isn't nostalgia. The original X-Com game was filled with nuances that could only be discovered by multiple playthroughs and/or trading strategies with other players. Base placement, base layout, base deployment and construction timetables, soldier hiring practices, team composition, tactical deployment techniques, the vagaries of loadout, research queues, bankrolling operations. Only a fraction of this depth will be in the new game.
I think it's fine if they want to use the brand equity of the X-COM name, when none of your typical 360 players will ever have played the original game (much like FO3 as pointed out). But it's not a game I'm interested to play, and I think the developers are more or less lying to themselves about how this new game is in any way in the rightful tradition of the original game. It's an IP they bought.
But you aren't going to see strategy games like that popping up from mainstream developers, unfortunately. It's not a AAA-budget genre.
Altho being the eternal skeptic of revivals im gonna go ahead and be ...skeptic about this. FPS? Yeah, they're totally gonna rape another one of my childhood memories.
Obviously you now see that no publisher will ever touch that brand again, it would never sell!
...
And an awesome read:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/04/14/why-x-com-matters-to-you/
so .....hope no health regen -_-
its a strategic game so im curious how izzit look like in this gen quality
http://www.joystiq.com/2010/04/15/2k-marin-working-on-xcom-2k-australia-name-is-no-longer-used/
http://kotaku.com/5518361/another-new-x%20com-game-and-its-not-a-shooter?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:%20kotaku/full%20%28Kotaku%29&utm_content=Google%20Reader
What's this FPS malarky?
It's the new wave of the future! Only awesome games are FPS anymore... Third person view? PASS! Isometric view? BOOOOORRRING!
I must be too young for this xcom stuff, I too, had no idea what it was until I googled it... Looks interesting though and it also looks like FPS would ruin it.
...yeah?
That actually sounds like a very dwarvenly project.
I was thinking the same thing!
My guess is that we'd get a simplified minecraft with HD graphics.
I was super exited when i saw the announcement, then got all "MEH.." when i read it was gonna be a FPS. Who knows? It might turn out to be a good game.. But I'm not holding my breath.
branching mission tree instead of random/downed ufos ?
This, and the first-person, it's just not x-com. I hereby call for an official protest, one of those internet petitions nobody cares about.
...or we keep kicking SyaPed until he turns his mini-men into a real game.
Thanks for the Xenonauts link crasong. I read through the bumf on their site : it looks like a direct clone of X-Com with some modern imorovements, including tactical air combat and a random map generator. If it's good, I hope it out sells the big-budget version to show publishers what fans of old games actually want. Fallout 3 was a decent game in its own right, but in no way had the same vibe as the old ones.
Why even call the game XCOM? 90% of gamers haven't even heard of X-Com or UFO, so it can't be a strategy to bank on the fanbase of an existing IP. The only people who would want to play a game called XCOM are people who don't want to play *this*. The logic here boggles my mind.
Edit: More positive comment. Everyone buy this:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/7760/
Also, for some reason the dosbox.conf that comes with the game uses a retarded pixel interpolation so you get dumb gloopy pixels instead of the gorgeous square pixels we all know and love. Whoever enabled this by default needs to burn in a fire.
To fix, go to:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\xcom ufo defense (or whatever)
In dosbox.conf, find:
scaler=advinterp2x
change to:
scaler=normal2x
A spiritual successor to a survival horror rpg fps that was up there with deus ex in terms of gameplay, and then have the successor stripped from all kinds of survival horror, rpg and replability.
Ken himself even intended for bioshock to be deeper, with a monster ecology(which sister/daddy is the remains of), weapon crafting from spare parts, and the inventory/rpg stuff that would've made it a shock game.
so at first he had to make due with an fps and ship it, but then noticing the popularity of pretty vintage retro style worlds it became insanely popular.
So now at 2k the publishers will really want to push for shooters with vintage a vintage look, and they've been shown people will pay for less of a complexity when bringing back old franchises.
I liked bioshock, it had a shock worthy world of horror, but it just lacked the gameplay of a shock game, and since replayability is at zero, people won't be playing that one more than once.
This is what Im afraid of with a new x-com game, replayability will be shafted, progression will be linear, missions will be handmade and most likely not randomly generated, the game will most likely not make squadmember-loss anything harsh since that doesnt work in todays games.
and besides, Im pretty sure we wont be hunting down ufos anymore, we'll be getting phonecalls that an alien has been suspected kidnapping and proping young girls down in the cellar of the fairfax residence, and while we might get to pick in a tree style structure, it wont be a mass of randomly places, randomly generated missions, on random maps.
it'll be regular prebaked premade maps that we're used to in most modern engine games.
Anyone remember the destructable terrain and blowing up the side of a ufo, or having a firefight result in a leveled town in xcom way before the bad company series?,
fat chance of that happening in todays xcom.
McGreed: from what I've noticed on the forums, Eidos have been *very* attentive to fans' voice about the rope arrow, probably one of the most voiced crits of T3. At this point, however, I think the rope arrow is the last thing to worry about... god knows what they're gonna do with the game.
http://game.jseuss.com/