I Found XCOM 2 Disappointing

[Kreett]

I am sad to say that while I deeply enjoyed most every aspect of Xcom 2 the ones I didn't just killed the experience for me. Building a squad of characters that felt unique, friends, original characters, bold strategies, ambushes, even managing your base was fun. Combat and tactics were satisfying and forced you to think, while RNGesus only reared his ugly head occasionally, but... but CENTRAL. Oh GOD Central. He never shuts up, they still wrench control from your hands every opportunity they can to spout exposition at you which most of the time is either inane chatter or information you already knew. How many times do you need to tell me civilians are dying really?

The Avatar Project makes the game really become quite linear in how you play, since I never once had a real reason to expand into territories I'd like to because I was chasing facilities, and every time it seemed like it was clearing up so you could start making decisions it slapped your hands off the keyboard again and plopped a dozen new things you HAD to do down in front of you.

I never felt like I was fighting a guerrilla war it felt more like you were going down a shopping list Firaxis made for me labelled "Fun". Ticking off objectives until you finally had enough time to get something good going, and once it finally does get good the game gets bored and sends you to the final mission.

Great game in theory, 6/10. Had Firaxis kept their meddling paws to themselves would've been a solid 8/10.

 

[Jandau]

Just out of curiosity, how did you feel about the Satellite Spam from the first game? Personally, I find the Avatar project allows me a lot more freedom in what I do, instead of spending the first several months obsessing about how I can spam more satellites, which countries I need to prioritize for satellites, what research and upgrades I can do without for a while longer to build MORE SATELLITES. Seriously, I love the first game, but I find that aspect of it horribly annoying and I feel it makes early-mid game tedious and railroads me into a single playstyle. And that's before we get into the RNG nature of the whole Panic/Abductions system.

Overall, I'm quite happy with XCOM2. Dark Projects are much more enjoyable than Abductions, for one thing. While Abductions always felt like you lost even when you won the mission, Dark Projects feel like you're customizing the game's challenge and it fits thematically into the whole thing (sabotaging your enemy's efforts). Base building adjacency (another mechanic I hated) is gone, with one exception (Workshop boosting any other adjacent building) which I don't mind. Weapons and upgrades are fun and I can't wait to see what they bring out to replace MECs and Gene Mods (or to have them brought back).

While the tactical gameplay is still the same at its core, the changes are for the most part great. The overhauled overwatch system is fun and vastly more useful (no more wasted shots as your whole squad overkills on a single Sectoid), Concealment does exactly what it's meant to (speed up the initial turns) and stays fun, a ton of little quality of life improvements )for instance, Reload no longer ends the turn, etc.)...

All in all, I'm loving the game and the only major complaint I have about it is that the performance seems somewhat dodgy. And yes, Bradford needs to shut up about the civilians, I'll grant you that...

 

[Kreett]

Just out of curiosity, how did you feel about the Satellite Spam from the first game? Personally, I find the Avatar project allows me a lot more freedom in what I do, instead of spending the first several months obsessing about how I can spam more satellites, which countries I need to prioritize for satellites, what research and upgrades I can do without for a while longer to build MORE SATELLITES. Seriously, I love the first game, but I find that aspect of it horribly annoying and I feel it makes early-mid game tedious and railroads me into a single playstyle. And that's before we get into the RNG nature of the whole Panic/Abductions system.

Overall, I'm quite happy with XCOM2. Dark Projects are much more enjoyable than Abductions, for one thing. While Abductions always felt like you lost even when you won the mission, Dark Projects feel like you're customizing the game's challenge and it fits thematically into the whole thing (sabotaging your enemy's efforts). Base building adjacency (another mechanic I hated) is gone, with one exception (Workshop boosting any other adjacent building) which I don't mind. Weapons and upgrades are fun and I can't wait to see what they bring out to replace MECs and Gene Mods (or to have them brought back).

While the tactical gameplay is still the same at its core, the changes are for the most part great. The overhauled overwatch system is fun and vastly more useful (no more wasted shots as your whole squad overkills on a single Sectoid), Concealment does exactly what it's meant to (speed up the initial turns) and stays fun, a ton of little quality of life improvements )for instance, Reload no longer ends the turn, etc.)...

All in all, I'm loving the game and the only major complaint I have about it is that the performance seems somewhat dodgy. And yes, Bradford needs to shut up about the civilians, I'll grant you that...

I agree the gameplay aspects have all been wastly improved over Unknown and Within. But I felt the Satellites provided a more reliable if tricky to keep every country way of keeping the game going. Granted I've not played through 2 more than once but on my first playthrough, therefore my first impressions, I felt incredibly stressed and led down a very linear path until I ended up at the final mission by the time I had really got into the swing of things.

 

[Zhukov]

I'm sorry to hear that.

There is an option to cut out the chatter between Bradford, Tygan etc when you're in the base screen. That sounds like it would be to your liking. However I don't think it affects the in-mission dialogue. And yeah, those can be a bit annoying. "We're seeing heavy civilian casualties commander!" "I know! Shut up!"

It also may of interest to you that you can alter many of the game's parameters by editing the ini files. For example, I've made a small change that made it so the game will prioritize giving me soldiers from my character list over randomly generated ones. Of more relevance to your complaints, you can extend the Avatar project meter so you can take your time rather than chase facilities. I don't know how it's done exactly, but it shouldn't be hard to find out. If you're up for it I'd suggest you start by asking this guy [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/9.933672.23506987].

 

[Kreett]

I'm sorry to hear that.

There is an option to cut out the chatter between Bradford, Tygan etc when you're in the base screen. That sounds like it would be to your liking. However I don't think it affects the in-mission dialogue. And yeah, those can be a bit annoying. "We're seeing heavy civilian casualties commander!" "I know! Shut up!"

It also may of interest to you that you can alter many of the game's parameters by editing the ini files. For example, I've made a small change that made it so the game will prioritize giving me soldiers from my character list over randomly generated ones. Of more relevance to your complaints, you can extend the Avatar project meter so you can take your time rather than chase facilities. I don't know how it's done exactly, but it shouldn't be hard to find out. If you're up for it I'd suggest you start by asking this guy [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/9.933672.23506987].

I'm incredibly lazy so I'll just wait for the guys on the workshop to do the work for me

 

[DoPo]

I'm sorry to hear that.

There is an option to cut out the chatter between Bradford, Tygan etc when you're in the base screen. That sounds like it would be to your liking. However I don't think it affects the in-mission dialogue. And yeah, those can be a bit annoying. "We're seeing heavy civilian casualties commander!" "I know! Shut up!"

It also may of interest to you that you can alter many of the game's parameters by editing the ini files. For example, I've made a small change that made it so the game will prioritize giving me soldiers from my character list over randomly generated ones. Of more relevance to your complaints, you can extend the Avatar project meter so you can take your time rather than chase facilities. I don't know how it's done exactly, but it shouldn't be hard to find out. If you're up for it I'd suggest you start by asking this guy [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/9.933672.23506987].

I'm incredibly lazy so I'll just wait for the guys on the workshop to do the work for me

You don't need to wait for long: take your [http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=618254897] pick [http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=618059450].

 

[asdfen]

I find all of the cinematic stuff that the game tries to show extremely annoying as well. All of the explosions zoom in on mission objective at start incoming reinforcement planting explosives animations "new unit" intros and so on. The tutorial mode in this game is atrocious. I had it enabled because I felt that I could benefit from knowing what changed but after 1-2 hours of the on the rails crap I had enough. Luckily I could restart with tutorials disabled and was ok but then I am not sure whats what as things have changed in 2. I find a lot enemies extremely cheap the half a map long grab attack by vipers and most of the map traverse melee attacks by lancers. AI is horrible on veteran. Aliens do some extremely dumb stuff. The RNG crap is back where chance to hit doesnt mean anything. For some reason the options that were in enemy within like reset RNG seed on load is missing... The turn timer on missions is annoying. There are a lot of annoying features in this game and very little of a reason to play this over the original 90's xcom or even the enemy within.

 

[sXeth]

I'm a tad underwhelmed with it so far.

The storyline is pretty cliche, I've literally called any twists in it before they told me. The voice acting ranges from barely servicable to annoyingly bad. And the near constant tendency of Central to look directly at you/the camera in cutscenes really makes me notice he's wearing heavy eyeliner for some reason.

The turns are often sort of ridiculously low, especially for objectives across the entirety of the map. Although they do at least generally stop the time limit once you secure whatever. It feels incredibly forced though (compared to an "organic" timer like having to keep civilians alive), and counter-intuitive to tactical play. Using Concealment to set up ambushes feels like its half-baked, as you have to OVerwatch for it to work, and your targets are essentially picked at random. There's no option to set your guys to try and ambush specific units once the first shots fired. There's other kinks here and there too, like not being able to choose where your Ranger stands to slash guys.

I'm also waiting for mods that hep suss out some of the camera issues and the horribly constant framerate drops.

 

[Jandau]

There's other kinks here and there too, like not being able to choose where your Ranger stands to slash guys.

You literally can do that. Nothing more to say there, you can straight up tell your Rangers where to stand while chopping dudes up. Just mouse around the target to pick the location.

 

[aegix drakan_v1legacy]

For example, I've made a small change that made it so the game will prioritize giving me soldiers from my character list over randomly generated ones.

Oooh! How'd you do that? I'm gonna want to set that up for my next playthrough.

 

[Kreett]

I think the most disappointing thing for me about this game is how it performs on my machine, which is a little strange because it does not seem visually like it should be as demanding as it is. The FPS seems to be throwing itself all over the place when running on a GTX 980 Core i7 based machine.

Weirdly though, I know people with less powerful systems that seem to pull better performance from it.

I figure it might be driver and / or optimisation related so hopefully it gets patched, but still, it was a bit of a bummer for me.

 

[Zhukov]

For example, I've made a small change that made it so the game will prioritize giving me soldiers from my character list over randomly generated ones.

Oooh! How'd you do that? I'm gonna want to set that up for my next playthrough.

So, first thing you need is to find your config ini files.

They should be in Documents/My Games/XCOM2/XComGame/Config

The one you want for this change is XcomGameData.ini. (Note that the ini extension might not show up.)

Open it up and Ctrl+F search for the word "character".

These are the lines you want:
InitialSoldiersCharacterPoolSelectionMod?e=eCPSM_Mixed
RewardUnitCharacterPoolSelectionMode=eCP?SM_Mixed
RecruitsCharacterPoolSelectionMode=eCPSM?_Mixed

You can replace the "Mixed" with "PoolOnly" or "RandomOnly". The functions of those three terms should be self explanatory.

Be sure to save any changes you make.

Note that if you run out characters from your pool during a campaign then it will just default back to giving you randomly generated soldiers.

(Apologies if any of this is really obvious. I don't know how familiar you are with this sort of stuff, so I'm giving you the newbie-proof version.)

 

[Jandau]

I think the most disappointing thing for me about this game is how it performs on my machine, which is a little strange because it does not seem visually like it should be as demanding as it is. The FPS seems to be throwing itself all over the place when running on a GTX 980 Core i7 based machine.

Weirdly though, I know people with less powerful systems that seem to pull better performance from it.

I figure it might be driver and / or optimisation related so hopefully it gets patched, but still, it was a bit of a bummer for me.

Try turning off AA and Ambient Occlusion. I remember reading that those two are the biggest framerate killers and disabling them helped my performance quite a bit. Still not perfect, but better. The loading times are still a ***** though...

 

[Hawk eye1466]

I understand the irritation from the reprisal missions where the instant a civilian gets killed on the other side of the map bradford yells about it which can get annoying but personally I enjoyed the rest of the game immensely. I really liked the whole gurrella aspect where you were always outnumbered and outgunned and not because the entire world couldn't find more money or spare scientists lying around but instead because the world has been under an occupation for 20 years and everyone else seems happy with the fake reality.

If there's stuff you didn't like that's fine hopefully you can change the ini files or find a mod that tailors the game more specifically to your tastes. I'll probably get the mod that extends the mission timers because 8 turns to destroy an uplink with all 15 enemies right in front of it is bullshit.

 

[B-Cell_v1legacy]

I will be playing it soon then i will judge if it will be any good or not.

 

[Tsun Tzu]

Still waiting for Amazon to ship it.

Prime my ass.

It looks good though and friends tell me it's great...so I'll reserve judgment, but remain cautiously optimistic.

So, first thing you need is to find your config ini files.

They should be in Documents/My Games/XCOM2/XComGame/Config

The one you want for this change is XcomGameData.ini. (Note that the ini extension might not show up.)

Open it up and Ctrl+F search for the word "character".

These are the lines you want:
InitialSoldiersCharacterPoolSelectionMod?e=eCPSM_Mixed
RewardUnitCharacterPoolSelectionMode=eCP?SM_Mixed
RecruitsCharacterPoolSelectionMode=eCPSM?_Mixed

You can replace the "Mixed" with "PoolOnly" or "RandomOnly". The functions of those three terms should be self explanatory.

Be sure to save any changes you make.

Note that if you run out characters from your pool during a campaign then it will just default back to giving you randomly generated soldiers.

(Apologies if any of this is really obvious. I don't know how familiar you are with this sort of stuff, so I'm giving you the newbie-proof version.)

Thank you for this!

I didn't realize it randomly drew characters. Saved me a lot of future frustration.

 

[aegix drakan_v1legacy]

Note that if you run out characters from your pool during a campaign then it will just default back to giving you randomly generated soldiers.

Wonderful! Thanks for the help and with mentioning that last bit (I only have like...25-ish people in my character pool, something tells me I might run out, lol)

(Apologies if any of this is really obvious. I don't know how familiar you are with this sort of stuff, so I'm giving you the newbie-proof version.)

Nah, even though I've done some of this kind of stuff before (even rejiggering other people's RPGmaker scripts) I prefer it when someone lays out EXACTLY what I need to do to get the fix I want. It saves time. XD

EDIT:

It looks good though and friends tell me it's great...so I'll reserve judgment, but remain cautiously optimistic.

Yeah, it's pretty great so far.

Aside from a handful of minor hiccups (game lagging for 5 seconds after a turn to finish the behind the scenes math, etc), the game's been fantastic.

Anything else that might be a problem has most likely been modded out already too if you want it gone. Like, I find the mission timers fun, but on some missions it's just next to impossible, so I picked up the "True Concealment" mod and it's made it so much more organic and fun (the mod makes it so the Turn counter doesn't go down while your squad is concealed)

 

[MASTACHIEFPWN]

And the near constant tendency of Central to look directly at you/the camera in cutscenes really makes me notice he's wearing heavy eyeliner for some reason.

Having to stop mankind's imminent extinction doesn't mean you can't still look fabulous.

OT: the biggest issue I'm having with it is it seems the AVATAR progress dark events are glitched for me- they will literally complete as I'm about to start the mission to stop them- and I go after them immediately. Even if I complete the mission, the moment I get control of the world map back, it just adds the point anyway; and it's not like them randomly making progress with the hidden facility or one of the sites you have to destroy- it will literally tell me "Dark event complete- AVATAR progress breakthrough" and flagrantly add the tick.

The salt with me is real.

 

[James Theesfeld]

Two thoughts: You don't need to rush bases or mission objectives. This is the same game as X-com. You take out bases when you need to stop the clock, and you finish mission objectives after you've gotten important milestones. Just because they yell OH MY GOD COMMANDER doesn't mean you have to respond. By the time I researched the black site item I was fielding heavy armor and plasma weapons. At this point I'm progressing with story missions quickly now because I'm actively working towards the endgame. It's literally exactly the same as the first game. It just takes a little bit to figure out the pacing - also like the first game.

Turn timers on certain missions... was a deliberate design choice to prevent overwatch balls crawling around the map. They decided that they didn't want that to define high level gameplay, so they made specific and calculated design decisions to prevent that from happening. If you pay attention to class abilities lots of them are designed around being aggressive or moving quickly to facilitate the turn timer. I've never failed a mission because of the clock. Although one mission I finished on the last turn - but I took extra time to murder guys and I had a run of bad luck that slowed me a turn.

If you enjoy overwatch-balls and super slow methodical map clears that's perfectly fine. I'm not telling you how to enjoy your vidya games. But please remember that they made choices to encourage specific kinds of gameplay. They're features, not bugs.