PAX 2013: XCOM: Enemy Within Hands-On Preview

[Syzygy23]

I liked enemy unknown, but the RNG was bullshit. I missed/hit 50% of the time when I clearly had a 80% chance to hit (give or take 2%). Seriously, I counted them. Just release a patch to sort that and I'll be happy.

Supposedly the game pregenerates a list of seeds, which are used to predetermine whether hits will be successes or not. You can LITERALLY be screwed over before you even begin a mission. From what I hear it was an save scumming coutnermeasure. A pretty shitty one if you ask me.

 

[Dominic Crossman]

I liked enemy unknown, but the RNG was bullshit. I missed/hit 50% of the time when I clearly had a 80% chance to hit (give or take 2%). Seriously, I counted them. Just release a patch to sort that and I'll be happy.

Supposedly the game pre generates a list of seeds, which are used to predetermine whether hits will be successes or not. You can LITERALLY be screwed over before you even begin a mission. From what I hear it was an save scumming countermeasure. A pretty shitty one if you ask me.

I realised this after missed every shot, including a marine with double shot ability in a 6-person squad all with above 50% chance of hitting the target, don't reload saves normally but I called bs on this occasion. Every shot was exactly the same and I ended up losing all marines and eventually the game cus it was my best squad, was not happy.

 

[Bindal]

As for the base defence, it was a very important part of the difficulty curve in the original. In all iterations of XCOM, the start of the game is by far the hardest point, and it only goes downhill from there. (With maybe a little difficulty spike in the final confrontation) Base defence missions excisted to present challenge, after you've progressed far enough for vast majority of the missions to be cakewalks. In Enemy unknown, this is not the case, and once you get a couple of characters to max rank, theres literally no losing.

Base defense was very easy because you could literally bottleneck the enemy in a single room if you planned your layout right (that is hangars in the top, then the elevator and lower half everything else), making a base defense trivial in the worst of things.
Not just that, but it gave you a heck of resources you then could sell or use. Base defense are my PRIMARY INCOME OF CASH near the end, next to "Laser Cannon Factory #1", "Laser Cannon Factory #2" and "Laser Cannon Factory #3".
Base defenses were nothing but a waste of time for me.

 

[DeimosMasque]

As for the base defence, it was a very important part of the difficulty curve in the original. In all iterations of XCOM, the start of the game is by far the hardest point, and it only goes downhill from there. (With maybe a little difficulty spike in the final confrontation) Base defence missions excisted to present challenge, after you've progressed far enough for vast majority of the missions to be cakewalks. In Enemy unknown, this is not the case, and once you get a couple of characters to max rank, theres literally no losing.

Base defense was very easy because you could literally bottleneck the enemy in a single room if you planned your layout right (that is hangars in the top, then the elevator and lower half everything else), making a base defense trivial in the worst of things.
Not just that, but it gave you a heck of resources you then could sell or use. Base defense are my PRIMARY INCOME OF CASH near the end, next to "Laser Cannon Factory #1", "Laser Cannon Factory #2" and "Laser Cannon Factory #3".
Base defenses were nothing but a waste of time for me.

This. Heck if you were like me and bought the huge ass strategy guide for X-Com: UFO defense it flat out told you that the initial base was built like crap intentionally to make Base Defense hard and how you should really build it. It also told you nice things like "Just make a ton of laser cannons and sell them and you never worry about money" and "The AI cheats as the aliens can see X-Com soldiers for up to three turns after they've been spotted, even if they move out of LoS"

 

[blackrave]

Great
One more thing I really hope is ability to send small squadron of Interceptors after enemy ship(s) (3-5 maybe)
To counter that, aliens could deploy some drones.
Just something to think about

 

[Chicago Ted]

Piff Paff! Where's the Terror from the Deep remake? and we I want multiple bases and skyrangers and aliens attacking Xcom bases!

1. Nowhere because it wasn't good.
2. No, we I don't - those bases would only serve two purposes anyway: Make cash and scan areas. Guess what saterlites do?
3. Well, I would settle for a good reason why we got only one, too.
4. No, we I don't (unless it is a story-mission)

Neither of your voices represent the masses. No one should be throwing around "we" here.

As for Terror of the Deep, I'd be interested in seeing that, though this also interests me, multiple bases would be questionable unless they had definite purposes, more Sky Rangers would be a good addition (Seriously, why can't I send out 3 Squads at once to stop Abduction Sites? Why do my troops just sit back at base doing nothing while one team goes out at once?) And I think that base assaults could be pretty interesting if done correctly. After all, if you're being attacked, suddenly you have to worry about the security of your base, and what might happen if a Satellite Uplink is sabotaged. It could be a good idea if pulled off correctly.

As for the topic itself, I'm somewhat hesitant on this expansion. While the Mechs and Genetic Modifications seem cool, some of the other changes I heard that they were planning to implement (Example: Squad Sight Snipers now have 0% Critical Chance unless using Headshot), I'm more iffy on. I'm also not liking this idea of Meld. It expiring for no reason makes it seem more gamey, and while I understand the idea of attempting to make players take more risks, I feel like this is just going to artificially make the game more difficult by making you continually trip ambushes you don't want to trip but have to. Also, I'd rather them focus on some of the more glaring bugs. Last I checked, the spawning of aliens can still be off with them coming in from areas you've already checked, and have had numerous other smaller problems. I don't know what it is, but it almost feels as though the quality of my game has degraded with time, with a higher frequency of bugs occurring the more I play.

 

[Agayek]

There's no supposed. I believe the developers themselves confirmed it a while ago, and even then its a simple check to perform. It's not set up before the mission, however, far as I've seen. I wouldn't have nearly the kind of knowledge though to make a solid claim on it.


There really isn't any other way to manage or prevent save-scumming though, aside from making the game auto-save on a single file (same as your normal save) every action. It can be manipulated slightly though, as the chances are locked to your actions. If you move five spaces to half-cover, and fire at an alien with a 90% chance to hit and miss, for instance, if you repeat that same action you will miss again and again. However, if you move six spaces to half cover (right next to it) and fire at the same alien with the same 90% to hit, you'll likely hit. Hell, enemy behavior pretty much falls into this as well, considering often times they'll repeat the same exact things if you do.

It seems to go off a list, that alters itself based on actions taken by the player. It can't predict everything the player will do right before the mission, so it sets all the actions possible for the next turn or two in stone, as the mission goes on.

Actually, your example is wrong, if I remember correctly. In that scenario, you'd miss both shots.

If memory serves, the way it works is once the mission starts, the game generates a list of random numbers, and every player action consumes one of those numbers. If the action in question requires a dice roll to decide it's outcome, it checks the number it's set to consume and compares it to its own success value and decides the outcome there

 

[Lil_Rimmy]

Two things:

One, the reason they did not include Base Defence was because it would make no sense if the entire base wasn't defending. And EU was built around playing like 4-6 soldiers, not the entire 20 or so would be at the base.

Two, the way the numbers worked was they were randomly generated and were consumed every time you used an ability that required a roll. But that meant if you 90% missed, you could take a 10% shot with the shitty marine, meaning your 90% soldier would then (hopefully) hit.

And as for you "being screwed before starting", just remember the enemies use the same number pool.

 

[Drummodino]

Do want! Super keen for mechs. Maybe I'll finally win a classic ironman run.