My channel is just cancer (made it to be cancerous) but I might start making vids that are somewhat like yours but more focused on debunking feminists or retarded people in general. But your vids are great and keep it up unless you hate making them
Wow, ive been telling my father all of this for ages haha. But I would add one more thing, the aspect of fear; of seeing an alien momentarily appear on your screen followed by 3 citizens screaming as the aliens discharge their weapons. Great video though.
The OpenXcom project makes UFO defense look simple and easy. Like say the X-files mod. So there's that real niche of overly complicated micromanaging world wide combat sim.
I remember putting the Skyranger into a holding pattern so it would land during the day and rookies would have a better chance of survival than a night landing.
The russian strategy is definitely a valid strategy, but so is bringing 14 dudes and clearing places like you actually want to not depopulate a small nation I think that I brought more laser weapons than plasma simply to just endlessly dakka my way through a lot of missions. A strong offensive push using real world tactics can definitely defeat the AI consistently. You will take losses, but you will also not need to arm the world with plasma rifles to do so
I used this holding skyranger strategy many times. My approach was usually building a super team and never accepting to lose good soldiers. I think I might try again someday using the Russian Strategy, it should be more interesting and realistic
@@lampostsamurai2518 I always put 4 noob soldiers at the entrance of the Skyranger as a meat shield and then throw smokes everywhere (no insta-nade-mod bullshit). Against Ethereals, I let all my soldiers lay their guns on the ground at the end of each turn (only costs 2 TU's), except for those with very high psi skills. The AI is too stupid to pick them back up when mind controlled and all they can do is run around an throw smokes at the rest of the squad, so I don't have to do it lol. That's how I play superhuman ironman and it works pretty well.
@@gaborszarka7596 When I see aliens camping the skyranger right at the start of a mission, I let one soldier in the front drop a pre-primed smoke from the inventory and then pass the turn. Aliens always have full TU's at the start of a mission, but they won't react upon inventory actions.
I think part of what made the original great was its styling, the outlandish 80's Comic/Super Sentai intro and charachter designs, the cool craft and weapon designs and the ufopedia. Additionally it was the pace where you had time to make decisions both tactically and strategically and make plans with your large anonymous squads, upto 24 soldiers in a battle. The later games never captured that being all flash bang high speed action, reducing you to a tiny amount of characters to control usually 6-8 and sticking a massive doomsday clock in your face forcing you to rush. In the original games you could just hunt UFO's for the fun or it or to make a little side money, play around with your base design like having dedicated function bases even if you already had pretty good world coverage, in the later ones you were forced to concentrate solely on most efficent use of resources to complete the game ahead of the countdown.
What made the game great is how well it built tension. It was the John Carpenter of video games. The music plodded along to a rhythm like a heart beat, with accents of terror. Nothing, nothing, nothing, and suddenly BAM something happens. The game play did the same thing: walkwalkwalk, walkwalkwalk, walkwalkwalk.....nothing. Walkwalkwalk, walkwalkwalk, LASER SHOT! Even the limited tech helped build tension. An alien shoots from a distance. You tense up, and you have to wait as the shot travels from screen, to screen, to screen before you find out if you get hit. Always wondering what's around the next corner. And the mission-based game play was addictive. What? Time to go to bed? Just let me start the next mission. Just one more mission. Best game ever.
Panhead49EL : So many times a roommate or my fiance would walk in and scare the crap outta me when playing X-Com. Terror mission at night with that music???? Chryssalids? Thank God for OpenXcom!
I have literally jumped from unseen alien reaction fire at times. It happens so quickly and the events afterward can happen so quickly as well, it really does make every step feel like a tense action where your current soldier either lives or dies.
Absolutely! The music and sounds are just so important to the game. It's something I think the modern XComs dropped the ball on since they went more bombastic which made the feel much more like a Michael Bay film or an action cartoon
It's not just emotional attachment. In modern versions the difference between rookies and higher ranks is so vast and it takes so long to get there that losing your star assault or sniper can really ruin a campaign in lower difficulties, especially because there are not that many missions to recover. Long War solved this by just making your dudes tired and having tons of small missions, so you tend to need several teams and have the chance to send rookies on routine scout UFO cleanups to level them up.
Can't play vanilla anymore because of long war. I just cant go back. Same with open Xcom mod for UFO. But thats more for the UI improvements than anything. EW + long war would be perfect if they added mechanics of dropping equipment/picking stuff and bodies up and the free firing at terrain. In UFO I ABUSE THIS. See wall, no explosives, have laser rifle no problem. And Melee. I just want to see my little troopers beat down that secoid that resisted stun twice with their fists because thats what I would do. Welp now I want do UFO again.
Perfect! I've always told my friends (when we discussed XCOM) that X-COM felt more like a War Tycoon, not just Base + Combat management and that emphasis on management of the organization was a really strong side of X-COM. Now I have a video to back me up, thanks! :)
The game Missionforce: Cyberstorm captured the ‘expendable’ idea too. You have literal clones with expiration dates so even if they survive many missions they will eventually age out just traveling the months it takes to get to later planets.
Many people overthink the attachment to your soldiers in this game. The reason for the attachment is that they gain experience and have made progress for your organization in difficult situations against the odds. If experienced soldier dies, you go a notch backwards in winning the war of saving humanity. The difficulty, which stems from vulnerability and unpredictable enemies, is the key reason why you care in the first place.
Also you get the whole psy training stuff late in the game which then becomes a bit more painful to replace when everything is ramping up. I think this is one of the cool balances of UFO: the experience of your troops vs the improved weapons and armour from your research. Both are important
On the other hand, it’s not like traditional RPG’s. They don’t just gain experience, advancement also depends on your total number of soldiers. If you have an advanced soldier who bites it, you almost always have another soldier who is already qualified to take their place, but wasn’t promoted because there was “no room” for another advanced officer.
@@chrlpolk XCOM is not like traditional RPG probably because it's not an RPG? 😂 Look I love XCOM Enemy Within and XCOM 2 but those games are NOT RPGs. It's a huge misconception that skill trees=RPG when it's just not? What makes RPG an RPG is the *roleplaying* aka tons of choices of how you play the game and what choices you take with their own consequences. You don't roleplay in XCOM games, your *only* role is that of a commander overseeing people squad fighting aliens, in real roleplaying games you would have a choice of siding with the aliens, or do what EXALT does and collect alien tech for evil. Or heck, you would have a choice to just not be a commander and let someone else take that role.
Regarding soldier attachment, the Firaxis XCOM games also provide you with far fewer effective soldiers, so losing one is a much bigger blow to your combat effectiveness. In Enemy Unknown in particular, if you were bring Rookies or Squaddies to missions three or four months in, you were probably in deep trouble, and most players finished the game with under 10 (living) soldiers ever having combat experience. Ultimately, this is another big part of why people were more attached to their soldiers in the remakes. Mods like Long War, or the War of the Chosen expansion with its fatigue system encourage much larger rosters of troops, and rebalance the game to be more forgiving of entering later missions with lower ranked (more expendable, more replaceable) troops, meaning the losses don't hurt quite as much. All that said, I still remember the name of my best soldier from my very first UFO:EU win, so despite the rather Russian World War II approach to troop lives, the ones that got through the meat grinder still made an impression.
yeah I couldn't agree more but the flaws still there when Jake Solomon designed the whole thing based on satellite coverage which in my opinion are stupid. first time playing XCOM: EW remake I got my ass-kick out in June, aliens won I'm like WTF?! so most veteran players saying " dude you need to rush satellite strategy dude its the only way, losing more than 3 countries will be your defeat! " imo that wasn't fun, the original XCOM 1994 are much better than this, I mean like I get it the remake wasn't that generous with funding either but, everything is fucking expensive in XCOM even manufacturing stuff. oh well if Jake Solomon could balance this whole fiasco crap with satellite rush I'm certain I could have more than with the remake even though the Jullian Gollop XCOM are way better ahead of its time.
@@White_Tiger93 That and all the DLC requirements to get to the better content turned me off the new game. I bought Enemy Unknown, did not buy 2. The rush, rush, rush feeling of having to do Satellites combined with some other stuff just annoyed me.
I think the more personal take with the soldiers makes sense in XCOM 2 since you're all rebels living together and there's comparably fewer people than an underground base. Heck, even your scientists and engineers have names and faces. Anyway great video, you seem to have a knack for this. I'd like to see you make a video on Crypt of the Necrodancer if you're able to get something out of it.
I litteraly went "Why the heck is this is my notifications" when I saw it. Then I heard your voice remembered subscribing lol Great video, really high quality for only your second video! Also I love your voice~ it's so nice
As someone who has played the old xcom quite a while I can say that even once you know all the game mechanics back to front. It is still enjoyable. What made the game last so long is that random generation and fog of war is an integral part of the game. Even if you know everything that there is to know about the game. Everything is still randomly generated and its all obscured in a fog of war. Decisions must be improvised based on how the situation unfolds.
My first Base was always my Hometown in Germany and I always named it "Fear Factory", as I named my other Bases after Metal Bands too. My most effective Soldier ever was a blonde Female who went through a Door in a UFO and faced 3 Sectoids. I thought "Fuck she is dead" (she had 12 Kills in 4 Missions until then). I made Auto-Shot on the middle Sectoid: First Shot: Middle one Dead, Second Shot: Left one Dead, Third Shot: Right one Dead. With a Rifle. Then she was my Hero. I didnt let her die. For 26 Years I am fighting these Alien Bastards!
@@hershloodu8925 She survived the War with over 260 Kills and took down the Base on Mars. Sadly no Medals in this Game, but I would guess they made Statues of her Edit: And she gets free Drinks
@@Adam-nc6qg what I Usually do in the Remake is to Play through Ironman Classic with a second Chance Option from the Long war Mod that enabled Mission restart for Ironman, that way it was still tense, but I could consider retrying, which softens the smaller Missions Like abductions, but leaves Base assaults and Battleship raids still intense, since you would loose alot of time when restartimg mid Mission
For some of the points, one of the things that strikes me as different about "old school" video games whether we're talking X-Com: UFO Defense or the original Fallout is their source material of influence. Julian Gollop was fond of tabletop wargames along with D&D. Similar case for Tim Cain and the other Fallout designers who designed the SPECIAL system (heavily inspired by GURPS). UFO Defense plays and feels much like an analog tabletop wargame, even though its macro strategy aspect (outside of combat) is done in real-time instead of turns to put more emphasis on combat instead of resource and base management. The idea of your units being treated as expendable units you can buy correlates to the board game idea where your units are effectively expendable pieces/miniatures on a board/grid. Permadeath is almost always a thing with such games since the idea of being able to save and reload previous games would be completely impractical when playing a board game with friends. Even the most experienced units also have to be very vulnerable and prone to be taken out or killed in very few turns. They can't have like 3,000 HP and take 20 hits to kill while being capable of being healed repetitively, since that would be boring and repetitive as hell if players had to roll dice and move pieces and draw cards every turn. UFO Defense is not too far beyond a board game. It takes advantage of a few things that digital can exclusively provide like being able to obscure some of the dice rolls and card drawing and rules and being able to randomly generate terrain, but they all feel like very restrained and deliberate design choices of a designer inspired heavily by tabletop who wanted to take advantage of just a few features that a digital video game can exclusively provide. Meanwhile when I look at "new school" RPGs and strategy games, they're far, far more abstracted from the original analog roots that inspired the earliest CRPGs and strategy video games, and their inspirations are usually other digital video games, not analog tabletop wargames/RPGs and PnPs and the like. The end result is usually more cinematic and exploits far more of what a digital medium can exclusively provide, but many of them would likely be completely dull to play if they were presented in a slower and more deliberate analog format without significantly reconsidering the entire game rules/mechanics. One of the reasons I'm kind of cynical about the idea of seeing a resurgence of old school games like these is that younger generations of designers might have never played the original analog games that inspired the old school designers. Most people these days into tabletop are usually in their 40s and above; we're all getting gray and old. It's rare to find young people into such games, but those are the games that inspired the classics, and if we want more of such games, I think they have to pay attention to the source material. Julian Gollop didn't set out to create a video game which is inspired by other video game ideas when he created UFO Defense. He set out to make a video game inspired by tabletop wargames like Squad Leader and Starship Troopers (analog->digital). Meanwhile the designers behind Enemy Unknown set out to create a game like UFO Defense (digital->digital).
If it's any condolence to you, I'm 16, and heavily enjoy the original X-Coms, despite my lack of skill with them. I love both the new and old XCOMs *because* of how different they are; depending on how I'm feeling, I can play the newer ones for a more action-hero, we're 100% the good guys, please-don't-kill-my-guys-or-make-me-fail-the-mission experience, whereas I can play the older ones for a grittier, analytical, tactial experience. And I'm also of the opinion that mods for OG X-Com should be able to (for the most part) fix any problems with the game or, better yet, expand the game to explore another idea that could be emulated within the engine.
If you ever have a chance, play Space Hulk. I bought the board game a few years ago, since they made a new edition and, in my opinion, it's probably one of the biggest influences on X-Com. The combat system is strikingly similar.
For what it's worth I'm a game designer in my early thirties and I'm heavily invested in intricate tabletop systems such as you describe, and have been for years. I use everything I've ever seen, digital and otherwise, to inform future designs. I often build paper or tabletop simulations to feel out ideas for video game designs. There are people like this out there, but often they are not the ones who end up working on these projects. Sometimes when they are, they aren't granted the creative freedom needed to make that meaningful. We were and remain something of a minority, even as gaming expands. There is a lot of opportunity now in the Indie Gaming scene for these things to play out without such constraints, and we are already starting to see good things come of it. Darkest Dungeon, Rimworld and others are rising stars in various niches taking a stab at deeper forms of play. What you are concerned about is a problem of course, but time will sort the wheat from the chaff.
For what it's worth, "new XCOM"/Firaxis XCOM was actually completely redesigned this way during development on the advice of no less a game designer than Sid Meier himself. From the 4th pre-release RPS interview of Jake Solomon, lead designer of XCOM (2012): "So I went to Sid and said "look, I'm lost. I've made two bad prototypes, they're not working, they don't feel like X-COM." So he said "let's just start over." So he and I started on paper - we drew the world, we had dice, we had little army men and he was saying "look, let's just make a strategy game from the ground up." We wanted it to be like X-COM so we used a few of the original rules, and we worked on it every afternoon for about two weeks, continuing to make this boardgame version of XCOM..." The full interview is worth a read, I can't link it directly because UA-cam bans comments with links, but Google "RPS Interview: Firaxis On XCOM's Secret Origins" and you should find it. (This is a principle something I've seen echoed elsewhere by other game designers as well, for what its worth: make a cheap prototype of your game as a board game or something, and iterate rapidly based off that. The ideal is to spend less than a hour between coming up with a feature & being able to test it out and play around with it, modifying it on the fly. Failing that, the recommended max seems to be less than half a day between concept & experimentation.)
It opened up new ways of thinking for me as a child. Very few games ever do that. That's what made it feel real. Consequence and responsibility for your actions.
Even back before OpenXCom and its Commendations/Diary mod, I cared about my soldiers. I used to put an * next to the first fourteen soldier's names so I could keep track of them and follow them through the game, trying to keep them alive without savescumming. I don't re-load saves when soldiers die, but I will admit that I've restarted the whole game a few times after some disastrous missions.
One of the things that always brought me back was not only the atmosphere, but the absolute mercilessness. No matter how good you are, a lucky shot can turn a mission one way or the other... One of my most successful games saw me all the way to the end, then I got greedy and went for one last landing site... and my entire squad got wiped via mind control when entirely armed with VERY heavy ordinance. It was hilariously FUBAR'd when my entire squad wiped itself out with blaster bombs. To add to the hilariousness, there was one guy who survived it all but got stuck in a loop of getting mind-controlled and breaking free so he could never get close enough to fire a shot with his sidearm but the aliens wouldn't do anything other than just mind control him again and again!
Saying "a lucky shot can turn a mission one way or the other" is too big of a stretch. Unless you blow yourself up with a rocket/torpedo, 1 shot does not affect much, and if it does that's because the player made blunders earlier. And that's by definition is affected by how good the player is.
@@kane_lives reaction fire from the back of the skyranger can wipe a squad. Eventually I learned to face my heavies away from the ramp until the squad was spread out.
As another commenter also stated, the original DOS game interface was horrendous and made playing the game very rewarding when you just mastered their meanings (heck, my friend told me that the game is shit, because after a while your soldiers can't move any more - he didn't find the "end turn" button). And the OpenXCom "remake" while add some QoL streamlining to the interface, just keeping everything pixelated as hell, keeps the feeling very well. I love this game, and I love that people ported it as OpenXCom and made mods to it.
I 100% disagree with your first point. When I was a kid, I never let my soldiers die. What I enjoyed was the random maps, skill growth, researching, manufacturing, and deploying new and more powerful technology, building up a powerful squad, and realizing how much more profitable it was to attack landed UFOs rather than shoot them down.
Yeah... Same. I've done ... Don't know, like 10 superhuman Ironmans runs now... And yes my goal is to try and bring everyone home I use a lot of HWP (expensive but oh well) as scouts smoke and explosives to minimize risk That being said ... Just a couple of bad moves and blammo or blaster launcher to the skyranger or a psy attack to the guy with the rocket launcher and...... That's it And that's the beauty of the game it really keeps you on your toes, few games can achieve that atmosphere
@@productunited Did you mod the game? The game is always on easy. It was a flaw in design. Once you saved the game was set to easy. There was no harder mode. It was all just an illusion.
I used to love my squad when playing xcom. I remember I always put the names of my friends and related in my whole squad. And I always felt very sad (sometimes restoring an older saved game) to come back with a deceased soldier.
I am a fan of the old good X-COMs myself and had several discussions about what makes it so great that people still tend to play it 20+ years after release. But hell, this is an excellent video. You got a new subscriber, mate. Excellent work!
Same as for Morrowind and Warcraft3 the low graphics enhance the expierience, rather than aproaching the uncanny valey everything you see is distinctly not real, and you are left to imagine what everything would look like imagining it to be completely real.
So for what it's worth the AI in XCOM is actually extremely dumb, and does one of several things based on pure random dice rolls. This is according to the game's designer.
I've had some pretty wacky stuff happen though that i could not predict, like sending out 4 dudes and leaving the rest in the avenger to take out aliens on a small ufo... then an alien mind control my soldier took a grenade out and drop it right in the middle taking out everyone. That was pretty shocking. Then you have the aliens that hide in buildings and don't want to come out, and run away when you find them. Feel bad shooting those ones :(. All that stuff is missing from the newer games, it's just run to cover and shoot.
Part of the strategy though is the fact that the AI has moves that can be exploited tactically. If you don't know what the AI is going to do, or the AI always behaves optimally, then there's not really much depth to the game. Not to mention it'd make abilities like untouchable and the mimic beacon totally useless if the AI was just like "Yeah we know that's useless, I'll attack someone else"
I have been quietly working on a little fan project for quite some time, and I think that there are some things worth pointing out here. Looking back on decades of playing this game (It's 30 years old now!) my sister and I used to play the game and become attached to our soldiers not because of how they looked, but because of the absurdity that could take place in the original game. I think that the big thing that no other game has gotten right since the original and TFTD (Apoc included!) was the tension. I can't tell you the number of times this game had my pulse racing, especially in the late 90s/early 00s. The pulsing gated bass and piano keys thumping out a steady beat as you walk through the inky blackness, not knowing if a blast of plasma is going to come from the void. Even the boxed mouse cursor letting you peer through the shadows, seeing vague outlines of things in the darkness. A lot of remakes want to constantly engage you, they never let you lull into that false sense of security. There's no gradual build up, there is just rigid structure and a philosophy of doing "more with less." Xenonauts is the biggest offender of this. That game is incredibly off putting, it doesn't have the right atmosphere, and Xenonauts 2 makes it even worse with the immediate presentation of human/alien human hybrids as the main aggressor force. There is still a lot of thirst for a turn based alien invasion simulator. Open XCOM mods have proved this, and have made the original XCOM everything and more that it could be, and then some. I won't say that my project is going to be that change, but I do know there are a lot of people out there that still feel that X-COM still hasn't struck gold twice, and are willing to prospect for it.
I really appreciate your disclaimer at the start acknowledging that the modern XCOM titles are trying to be their own thing. It helps encourage people like me who appreciate the new direction, and no longer having to manage the inventory of 14 or 26 soldiers every mission, etc. This is the first video of yours I've found, and hearing something reasonable right away helps keep me around to listen more. It also helps that I've discovered OpenXCOM, which is the old game but with about a billion quality-of-life upgrades that fix some of the nagging issues with the old masterpiece. Not to mention it even made Terror from the Deep playable for me, fixing the research tree bugs and other annoyances.
As an extension to your comment on can't make lightning strike twice', I'd suggest looking into a game called UFO: Aftermath. It attempts to stay as rooted to the original style of UFO Defense as closely as possible, complete with the strategic management of your bases and production, while still leaning more toward an importance of making highly-specialized soldiers, similar to more modern takes on the genre. Plus, it used a real-time free-pause system, where instead of you and the enemy take turns, everything happens in real time, but you can pause at any point to plan and strategize(This was actually the company's second attempt at incorporating such a system into old genres, as they did the same thing for an RTS. All this back in the very early 2000's.) It hit really close to me in comparison to the original, while still feeling as if it was advancing the genre. Also, when are you going to make a video on OneShot? I really want to see your take on it :^)
One of the biggest things that UFO Defense does that many others don't is try to treat the battlescape as a simulation of a world that enables combat, rather than a series of combat mechanics with a world painted over them. The limitations of the engine definitely do make it a janky simulation (luckily in an endearing way), but it's a simulated 3D world rendered in 2D graphics. In 2012 XCOM, you have some RPG characters that start each turn with a choice of chest high walls to travel between during the-movement-phase(TM); and go in search a series of interactable objects that look like aliens, which enable the use of the gun mechanic, letting you watch a shooting animation associated with the hit/miss calculation. UFO Defense doesn't tell you what you should do, it's just a sandbox to do it in. You start each turn with however many solider are alive and conscious, each of them having so much time, effort and whatever is in their inventories. They can spend that turn doing whatever is within their power to do. Your troops can run up and throw a stun gun to the guy close enough to use it on the alien commander, they can deadman switch grenades to kill the cryssalid that kills them, they can blow holes in a house to gives someone else an opening to shoot an alien through.. If they're holding a gun, they can use it to shoot out a bullet/plasma burst/rocket in as specific a direction as skill and circumstance allows (usually in the direction of an alien); once that shot is out in the world though, intentions go out the window, and it will do whatever it does to whatever its trajectory finds first.
Exactly this. I develop attachment to my veteran soldiers in old X-com games and I like 2012 game (and love it with expansions), but new games lack that pure sandbox feel. In old games we have all the world to pick precise spots for numerous bases, to send patrols and interceptors in whatever numbers we can afford. And being NOT limited to 4-6 unit teams allows much wider choice of tactics. And of course that thing when operative misses he can (and will) hit something or someone else, which never happens in new games.
4:03 - "Don't hurt my babies" = "Savescum" = "Less tension" - Um, even though I know it'll make me "that guy" in the comments... isn't that what the Ironman mode is for? So that you specifically *can* have a playthrough with more tension? Maybe it's just me, but I personally think "player psychology" would more gear towards the idea that all those cosmetics are just fun little extras *secondary* to the fact they can adjust and optimize the gameplay itself to be as harsh or forgiving as they want - whether it's lo-res or high-res has no bearing on that. IMHO, this doesn't even seem like something connected to the customization or resolution options, much less something the older game has as a strength over the new one - because honestly speaking, it's not; the other game doesn't lack any of those mechanics as opposed to them being optional now. Then again, I'm a person who thinks a lot of the things you called "strengths" for UFO Defense were actually either detrimental and/or frustrating and tedious to the game, so take my words with a grain of salt.
@@l1b3d74 You can probably cheat or mod a godmode into UFO. You can even savescum as hard as you want. If you do it and complan aftterwards that its the games fault, you are acting like you don't own any personal agency. If you use it as an argument against one game over another, although the possibility is present in both (and cheating always is) then you are simply disengenious.
@Vladimirs Kacs There is a issue of willpower here. Some people can't help themselves and "playing the way they want" will lead them to ruin the fun of the game. The added inconvenience of exiting the game and fiddle with folders to savescum, plus the symbolic commitment of agreeing to Ironman in the first place, is the only thing that allows some of these people to play the game as intended. For others even that isn't enough to prevent them spoiling the challenge. It's true that removing the savescum option is one way to solve this conundrum, but present some technical challenges for single player games. @Mitchell Baran > the other game doesn't lack any of those mechanics as opposed to them being optional now It REALLY does. It is missing a lot that was there before. But if you didn't like those mechanics and the challenges they posed, you won't miss them. Others will.
And now I know what the magic of this game is supposed to be. I hopped on X-COM Enemy Unknown and enjoyed how visceral the whole experience was. Trying to keep my squad alive and finding even more alien variants kept me on the edge of my seat. I remember emulating this game to see where the whole series started and I just couldn't get into it. It felt like I was playing an operation system than an actual game. And that was even after I looked up what the controls were for everything. I was initially intrigued by the Time Unit mechanic for doing actions and moving around but I just couldn't get past those controls. Oh and one of my soldiers straight up died as soon as they walked off the Skyranger, so that was nice. I'll respect this game for what it is and how it went about doing it's strategy gameplay and money management. I'll just hop on Enemy Unknown to see what the ending looks like since it just felt miles better to play. Great video man!
I cannot reccomend playing the X-Com Files mod enough. It does an amazing job of capturing that feeling if olaying Xcom for the first time again, while also building on top of it in so many ways it's almost a completely new game of its own
Normalize audio. It wasn't a killer, but there were times where one new recorded sentence was louder than the previous. I loved the video and its contents. Keep up the good work! When I saw this I thought 'who do I subscribe to plays x-com' but then I saw the name. I hope you can get much more popular, and if you do, here's some advice. Balance popular things with things you like. That way, you always stay true to yourself and you aren't always doing something you don't want to. Whatever your outro catchphrase is, be sure to say it after the content ends, about 9:35
Also, don't forget to establish what the game is. You could go very technical 'year name ect.' Or very a vague, but all we need to know is that x-com is about fighting aliens from space and you control the force to fight back through top down turn based strategy game. This would be helpful for anyone unfamiliar.
a spanish streamer recently did a full playtrough of xcom and it was an awesome time for chat, almost 1k people tuned for the ending in cydonia, and the soldier names were chosen at random from viewers, and while it was a bronzeman run (no savescumming to save soldiers, but reloading to avoid taking missions that are doomed) it was genuenly brutal trudding trough the slaugther of viewers as they screamed in chat but the campaing kept going it was somewhat a sweet point of, attachment, but also knowing this shit is doomed, because if you got lucky you got to experience what it feels to be thrown to the aliens to die and be replaced quickly
Stuff I miss; tactical base defense missions, time unit usage flexibility (though the current two-phase turn isn't bad either), the OG Sectoid skin. Stuff I don't miss; putzing around the battlefield for ages trying to find that last alien who's just running around at random, turn two blaster bomb into the skyranger.
Have to say, I was a bit confused when I saw a video from someone I didn't remember in my subscription tab. Had to check your channel to remember who you were. Now I'm happy to have subscribed after watching your first video. Looking forward to the next ;)
The stand-out feature of UFO: Enemy Unknown for me has to be the nighttime terror missions which were absolutely terrifying for me when I first played it as a kid. Ending a turn often meant hearing the aliens' creepy movement sounds but you couldn't see them, or if you saw them it was pitch darkness in a building with something moving in the shadows for less than a second. Then the plasma shots starts mowing down civilians and your soldiers like flies. By the end of the first turn you've lost maybe two or three soldiers and the rest of them are losing morale fast. If there were Chryssalids in the terror mission and my guys didn't have flying suits, I often kept one guy in the Skyranger so if everyone outside goes dark for good (which can happen rather quickly), I can abort the mission and not lose the Skyranger.
Spot on with the stuff about simulation and keeping things intentionally obscure. I really hate the modern idea that not having all your numbers out in the open, especially in a single-player strategy game, is a bad thing. This kind of taking hundreds of small gambles and trying to maximize your chances of victory gameplay is much more intense not to mention multitudes more immersive than simply choosing the right reaction to an enemy action based on an excel spreadsheet. Part of why the old Total War games are so good: it's not just action and reaction; you have to account for damage control in case things don't go perfectly, keep a reserve on hand for the attack you didn't see coming. That level of uncertainty adds a realistic additional dimension to the strategy. I miss this intuitive simulation-style approach to game design.
What I loke the most is the constant tension during the missions. There are so many things that can go wrong that you *must* stay alert no matter what. That and the music gives it this unique horror vibe that I haven't seen anywhere else.
I got just as attached to my pixely soldiers as my mind filled in the blanks. Had "Silver" raising up to captain, I really liked her. She had great stats. I protected her as much as I could. Then an alien threw a grenade into the ship at the beginning of the mission.
Amazing video, really enjoyed it! I played UFO Defense (or Enemy Unknown for me) in my childhood, both on the Amiga and later on console on the first Playstation. I felt that nothing really captured the atmosphere of the original but you nailed it.
Loved the video dude! Im loving your work. I was a bit confused when I saw you in my notifications, but once I clicked on the video, I remembered subscribing. I guess I just need to get use to seeing you in my sub box! Anyway, once again, the quality of the video was fantastic and the video itself was cool and interesting! Seriously good work And yay for catchphrase outro
i think the most important difference is every crash zone map automatically randomly created depends on the map location and time... the new remake does not have it, it s also said by the game designer, he mentioned about it in one interview....
Xcom is one of the most fascinating games I played when I was a Teenager. My older brother had a PC 486 and we got the game on a floppy disk. I think the game needed to be installed and it came on a 3 or 4 floppy disks and it was installed on DOS. The sound, graphics and gameplay were amazing. The game had an incredible atmosphere. Then It came the second game which I also enjoyed and played a lot, but I don’t know why I didn’t play as much as the first game. A few years later we also got the game for the PS1. It was nice to see the additional cutscenes, but the loading time on each mission was damn long. Nevertheless, the PS1 version is probably the version that I played more hours. Than I got say that we waited for years for another decent game. I remember a lot of conversations with my Brother that we dreamed about a new x-com game that never came. I never liked the apocalypse version. We had to wait for years until the release of the Xcom made by 2K games
I played Terror From the Deep first, and then only some years later Enemy Unknown. Even though TFTD is essentially a reskin of EU, it still had more atmosphere in my view. I played TFTD a lot, and EU only a little. Maybe had I played EU first, I would then have been a little disappointed at how similar TFTD was.
@@itskarl7575 Indeed, TFTD is so similar to EU that almost looks like a reskin. But I think the first time you see an Xcom game you will definitely be more impacted, right? Since you played first TFTD it will always have a special feeling for you.
@@itskarl7575 one thing that maybe a like more in EU is that I feel more diverse environments to play the tactical phase (desert, jungle, ice, farm, city) while the TFTD What I remember more is being to much time playing the underwater. Although there are the terror coastal cities and onboard the terror ship as well.
I agree that the meat grinder is a core component of what makes XCOM great. I don't really buy your argument of fidelity contributing to that. There are several other factors that define XCOM. It was one of the first games to combine strategic and tactical elements. The art style is another core part of the appeal. The original XCOM also did such an amazing job of incorporating popular culture around UFOs, in a similar way that Fallout did with the post war era. Something they largely recreated with the XCOM remake, but they totally botched with XCOM2 IMO. To me XCOM2 seems to be more inspired by Stargate and is a huge minus in my books.
2:50 Back then aliens were viewed as an insurmountable threat. Vast technological superiority, only to be overcome by another vast superiority which Earth does have. Manpower. Not meant as disposables, but at least readily available. I always kept my team in one piece which leads to much better in combat performance. Once they get their ambush skills up they can take out anything that comes from an alien vessel. Also, capturing intact ones instead of shooting themd own (last option, not first) helps increase the tech much faster, but also boosts income.
A great way to boost income is by manufacturing motion scanners and selling them. This keeps the guys busy making money, while still being available for when something needs to be manufactured, which then happens really fast. My bases employ roughly 200 engineers for that purpose alone, which are auxilliary product plant bases with minimal defences but lots of engineers. If all the surface connection is done through one elevator in the corner with only one defence turret next t that, the aliens can only enter through the elevator or it's connected defence battery, which then leaves two avenues of entering. Either one side of the elevtor left or right, and one side up or down, which is then basically a firing squad that drills anything foolish enough to be in the elevator. This is why reaction is about the most valuable attributes for any soldier. They spot an alien, before the alien spots them, and start blasting. Alien down, next. Endgame usually means start round, get into position, and let the turns fly by. Once the remaining aliens go bonkers and fail their courage tests, they start blasting stuff or drop their weapons, but they won't have any TU's left to react. Time to get some easy prisoners. High TU commanders run in with their stunrods, and keep poking till they go naptime. The initial funding is like 5% overall of what you can make each month, after some initial investing. Captured whole vessels pay off many times of a downed one. And yes, save scumming. lots and lots and then some. (It's about the longevity of the men.) Ge the high stats, increase survivablity, save scum less play faster. In the beginning pain, but the payoff is great.
I've come to really appreciate the minutia of stocking up and fiddling with inventories, it really helps sell the idea that its a simulated war rather than the streamlined heroic adventure feel the newer games are going for. XCOM feels like a real organization that exists as more than a way to give your dude better stuff
Neat video! I remember playing this game as a kid, i have recently watched play through videos and would love to play it again myself but i would not know where to start to even find it 😢
This is the sort of discussion I live for. I love hearing the takes on what makes things different and sometimes better or worse in various games, and how people internalize their experiences. Love this sort of thing. For my personal take, however, I've not really run into the savescumming makes things less tense. This could just be my history with Fire Emblem bleeding over into Xcom, but when a unit is low on health and thus more vulnerable, I find myself getting even more tense than usual. Perhaps for the wrong reasons though. Instead of "Oh no, that guy's gonna die" it's "Oh crap, I'm gonna have to do this mission over, defend him at all costs." Though it's also because of that mentality that I find myself being more cold and calculating about when I allow a death to stick in Xcom than in Fire Emblem. Because yeah there's faces and more character attached to them than their pixelated counterparts, but at the same time they are still - essentially - the impersonal soldiers that you don't really interact with on the same level as in Fire Emblem, making the "I really don't want to restart, and I've got another Assault guy waiting in the wings... I'll just sell something so I can get better gear for the newbie and catch him up" decisions more palatable than having a character with their own side story and relationships that are very much touched on removed from the story going forward as if they never existed. Anyway, that's just my take on that one point. Great video and I'm definitely looking forward to more of this sort of thing!
@@jemperdiller lol, that audio track where the little girl suddenly chants "Hiiiitler!" - that was... something. But the balance was killing it for me. All the time, you get missions where you only kill 1 creature.... then suddenly, multi-stage mission with 50+ spiders and you can only bring 2 guys and have to kill every single spider! Which is doable, but takes forever and isn't fun at all. When I got my third spider infestation, realizing that this will probably be something I have to do over and over again, I just stopped playing. Also, those cringy anime pictures that you get for research results etc. ... get that weeb shit out of XCOM!
28 years and it's still the one i remember most fondly. big-enough squads good-enough support stylish if simplistic visuals engaging management of your forces from the location of your outposts to the arming of your individual troops base layouts that directly affect you if/when counter-attacked. time units and hidden aliens allowed some flexibility but sometimes a body can do what 1 hours of planning can not and an economy that made some sense, you had funding but anything special you would have to find your own side income to pay for. primary issues with it to this day remain are the UI and how you get ambushed when leaving the dropship too often. maybe once in a while offer the opportunity to land the ship further out at the cost of a slight delay?
I'm reminded of a part in the X-Com UFO Defense novel (There are many novels based on the second series but AFAIK the original games only got one. Its awesome IMO and there should have been more) where the protagonist is wondering which countries are going to be facing very well armed rebellions in the near future thanks to the high tech weapons X-Com doesn't need any more which are being unloaded on the black market.
Ever considered jumping into the crazy world of X-PirateZ? Its the original with an improve engine (OpenXcom Extended Plus) shoved into the crazy imagination of a visionary mod creator that forces the player to work from extremely backward tech (flintlocks and swords) up to take on a crazy post apocalyptic world. Cheers, Ivan :D
Ivan THE Dogovich? :D Man I'm loving the Area 51 mod (doing a let's play of it now), and I promise you the next thing I'll take on will be the X-PirateZ!
Xpiratez might be a bit too much for newer X-com players. Imagine them trying to sort out the 50+ melee weapons in X-piratez. The there is the night vision mechanics and side stepping.
The only time Ive savescummed to save soldiers is when me and my bother as 6 to 10 year olds named 2 after ourselves and gave them 1 assistant each. We and our asistants where true superhumans by the end of the playthrough the rest of the crew where propably rookies I dont even know, they didnt matter they where just replaced if they died.
This might be four years late but my most memorable playthrough of Long War was definitely only so memorable because I chose the base option that gave you extra recruits. It captured that feel of having expendable soldiers really well and you only got super attached to the ones that managed to survive like ten missions. I actually never renamed any of them because there were so many but I can still remember the death of my star medic Santos more clearly than maybe any other video game death just because she had survived so many missions and saved so many teammates to become really memorable. What the Firaxis style loses in creating memorable soldiers from the outset is the soldiers earning memorability from their actions in the missions. Not saying it's necessarily worse but I much prefer when the memorability is earned through gameplay.
Absolutely. I've had a few soldiers in Xenonauts who single-handedly saved the mission, or gotten a ridiculous number of kills at the start of the game when all they had were good ol' bullets against big, tough, regenerating lizard aliens. Those who survive and make a name for themselves get remembered, the rest who show up, accomplish little, and die are just an annoying loss of resources, a grunt with a gun tossed into the meat grinder. I had one game very early on in X-Division (sorta Long War but for Xenonauts) where everyone died except one bleeding, nearly dead Private First Class heavy weapons specialist who had previously panicked and thrown away her MG somewhere. She got her shit together, grabbed a medical kit and a shotgun from the breacher who died on the first attempt to enter the UFO, patched herself up, stepped through the door to the UFO, and systematically blew apart every alien inside. She was the only survivor, and ended up with a promotion, three medals, and 9 kills from that one single mission, having 10 kills and 4 medals total across the first three missions of the invasion, that one being the third. Cpl. Camilla Romano, absolute legend.
Don't entirely agree about the Firaxis version - I love the original and agree nothing else is quite like it, but even in the Firaxis version of X-Com (I haven't tried Xcom2 yet) I have had my share of memorable soldiers, many of whom have eventually come to a sad end. When you have a sniper with a plasma rifle that almost single handedly saved the base defence mission from being a total wipeout only to have her casually wiped out the next time she goes out, that stings!
A friend of mine bought this game when it released in the UK for Amiga 500 . I didn't even know it existed, it was on 10 x 3.5 floppy discs, this was one of 3 games that blew me away on the Amga, the other two where Civilisation and Dune 2: Battle For Arrakis.
I think another key detail is the intent and focus to make sure the player never really feels safe. Just earlier today, I'm on my first real playthrough on beginner. I admit, I've been save-scumming a fair bit. And got a good monthly review, certainly... ...Then I find that the UK signed a secret pact, and withdrew funding. The UK, who is right next to my base in Switzerland!
You’re not wrong about the character-stuff. Being able to personalise them makes for attachment that definitely causes savescumming. It may also have something to do with having a 100% shot but still missing for whatever reason. What’s funny is that I often customise my characters to look like a swat team, with face masks and helmets so you can’t really know what they looked like, but even then I have trouble letting them die. It’s both good and bad that they aren’t just a commodity. If they don’t matter, you don’t have to care, but if they do matter, you won’t explore the options. I’ve many times risked the whole team, or savescummed, when a member of my squad gets mind controlled. If taking them out was a better option, I should do it. If they posed a bigger threat, maybe, but it’s just easier and less risky for me to shoot the alien and have my guy back. It really should be better to just take out your squad mate, or at least they should be able to do real harm.
It's interesting to see you contrasting xcom with modern iterations. Much of what you're finding didn't feel that way when we played it back in the 90s. I guess that's part of the evolution of a classic.
I blame gamers for it. XCom: Enemy Unknown was a good game. It had unique soldiers, skill trees, and, as you discribed, a lower mortality. It all fittet toghether nicely, but it was more stargate then starship troopers. So, of course, gamers whined about not being chalanged enough. XCom2 tried the make soldiers face danger and even death more often, by making aliens more deadly and adding countdowns to nearly all missions, so players can't just overwatch-crawl through the level. So, of course, gamers whined about being pushed out of their comfort zone. The most used mod at this time was "remove timers" XCom2 War of the choosen removed most timers, but keeped the voice lines unchanged, so now we have "We have to move fast commander!" while there is no time limit. And it also made soldiers more unique with friendships and an additional skill tree, but they also keept the "soldiers getting random one shot killed" even behind full cover, with full hp and best gear. It's a mess. But still one of the best turn based games^^ Would addvise going into it with the expection of an rambo style action movie, where the main cast can change at any second.
I like Enemy Unknown, but UFO Defense is obviously the OG. My dad actually got me into it when I was 12, and we even enjoyed its sequel Terror From the Deep, as well.
I think what makes this game so good is that is beautiful and has character, among the other things you mention, like Master of Magic and games of that era with similar art and creativity.
Beaglerush did a brilliant mod that addresses the problem of games becoming increasingly brittle as advanced soldiers become more invaluable in XCOM2. It's not finished, but it's available on Steam under "Operators vs. Aliens". He borrows a lot from Battle Brothers' specialization system. There's only one class, the Operator, and that class can use any weapon. Perks are weighted to be more valuable up front, so even a new recruit is pretty potent. Veterans are *more* potent, but the advanced skills are more about nuance and niche specialty, rather the base game's increasingly superpowered abilities that you can't afford to lose. I really love the concept and wish it had been finished. I know Firaxis would never depart so much from the successful formula they've already laid down, but man... I'd love it if they did.
When I played the original XCOM games some 25 years ago, losing anyone wasn't an option. I saved often and re-loaded the mission if the loss was unacceptable. I renamed the soldiers by adding a grade to them (C,B,A,A+ and so on,based on stats like e.g. time units and accuracy). I 'binned' the soldiers right after hiring, not keeping them if their random initial stats was a 'bad spin'.Soldier characteriazation in late XCOM games is also a great way to train specialists for different types of missions, which eventually leads to less KIA solders. For example, rescue soldiers will need special training right off the bat, they have to be though guys with 'run'n'gun' skill as they must run to get between the alines and civs, shooting the aliens while taking shots to defend civs.
Having played the original recently but having learned on nuCOM, I have to say that I heavily agree that the increased graphics and customization does mean that nuCOM shifted dramatically in how you treat your soldiers - and that's /before/ we had XCOM 2's character pool preset! In Enemy Unknown I usually didn't bother too much other than maybe changing the primary color as XCOM's "faction color" that playthrough, mostly because while it was fun it was kind of a hassle. XCOM 2, I've got it all pre-loaded and thanks to mods I can even save other armor designs to them or make sure they're the class I intended. It really gets me attached to them, particularly since quite a bit of the pool are characters from other mediums that I liked. I mean it can lead to great stories - I've got an XCOM 2 one where Kim Possible got shot to pieces saving a bunch of civilians against multiple ADVENT pods because she was tip-of-the-spear in there, survives by the skin of her teeth as the rest of the squad moves up, only to be zombified by a Gatekeeper that blatantly cheated to know her location with it's Null Lance. I still save scummed (mostly because it was cheating - if the game cheats, I have no compunctions about returning the favor or at least cheesing the AI), but it didn't have the same feel since she wasn't gone the rest of the playthrough. Mostly because I just don't like playing Ironman since it means all it takes is one game-breaking bug to eat your game alive. TBH, that's also probably why when I finally tried oldCOM, the only name customizing I did was attaching a designation tag as to whether they were rocket troopers, a heavy gunner, scouts, snipers, etc. because of their stats, otherwise I just left it as is. I still had some attachment, but honestly the desire to save scum was even less despite that. Plus you know, giving a woman's name to a guy :P (I may be slightly OCD like that) Another aspect is that nuCOM reduced the squad size dramatically, which means that by the late game you just can't bring a half dozen rookies as your plasma fodder because you just don't have room for them. It also tended to mean you had a small group of superelites rather than a broader organization. WOTC helped mitigate it by introducing Fatigue, but the main effect was you had two or three squads rather than a massive roster... only time I've been able to get anywhere comparable to an oldCOM roster was when I used a mod to majorly kick up the squad size, along with increasing difficulty to keep up with it, but even then it's clear the game just wasn't built with a large squad size in mind. And that's just with soldiers. That said, I do think that nuCOM made the right choice to ease your logistics at least in terms of remembering to bring enough clips and the other details. Is it a touch of realism that you also have to R&D and buy the ammo? Yeah, absolutely. It's one of the few games that really gets across just how much of a nightmare logistics can be. There's a reason why standardization is done IRL, and so in XCOM you want to have standard kit that you just mass produce and make extra as you need it. But it's just one more hassle that can bite you hard, especially since now the soldiers are a lot more complicated which means another thing to track. It's probably why Long War is so memetically hard - it just adds more and more complexity along with a quite frankly elitist attitude towards the game and some highly questionable design choices (Removing the cover-removing trait of grenades, really? Showing which guys have loot and massively upping the amount of it you need to grab already disincentives casual explosive use) Honestly, the only real thing that I think oldCOM would be dramatically improved by that nuCOM had was the cover system - or perhaps how soldiers and aliens interact with cover - the oldCOM cover system is quite frankly a pain in the ass and not at all intuitive. That's probably the biggest thing to bring over, but otherwise nuCOM should be taken as its own thing. And I think that was even part of why nuCOM was what it was - IIRC Jake Solomon's earlier builds were a hell of a lot more like oldCOM but it was just too sluggish and juggling too much, which was why it made the change. Overall though, great video that hits the nail on the head.
Heh, I was board and named a whole bunch of them after game of thrones characters and then sent them on a series of missions which were then used as my season 8 predictions, the last 3-4 were the ones that I hoped would survive, I don’t remember most of the results but I do remember a few so here’s a list starting with the first to die and then relative positions (Highest difficulty mind you) 1. Jon snow, killed by a gray after disembarking the sky ranger on the first mission. 2. Mel, also died on the first mission while breaching the ufo. 3.davos, died early I don’t remember to what though 4.arya, ripped apart by one of those bug aliens ( it’s Been a while) 5. Dany, killed in a friendly fire incident involving Theon Greyjoy and a live grenade... yup. 6. The Greyjoy’s, all died while saving a city, although we later abandoned the mission because casualties were far to high. 7. Gendry, M.I.A left behind to save the others 8.cerci, M.I.A also left behind 9.sansa, despite outliving all her family members, she meet her fate at the hands of a plasma grenade. 10. The night king, killed by a gray That’s all I remember, I do feel sorry for leaving operatives behind during what was maybe my fourth or fifth terror attack. All I can say is it was pretty funny.
I recommend trying out X-Com Files, it's not a perfect experience, but it's the only time I've been able to really experience the joy of a first time run through X-Com again, the mystery is all there and lasts a surprisingly long time. It's essentially the same game, but it shows that even now we can produce more content like X-Com.
To be fair to the recent XCOM games you can always just play on Ironman mode, so you can get to keep tension and keep the personal attachment to your soldiers.
Inquisitor Thomas This. First play through was iron man. Lost a colonel in a random mission--my best sniper. Had to sacrifice a soldier to obtain an energy crystal. Not being able to go back and find the 'perfect outcome' made the game visceral and engaging.
Isaac Blouin of course Ironman has its problem, the one personal example that makes my angry even thinking about it was when one of my favorite soldiers was bleeding out and I was surrounded by the lost and vipers, so I couldn’t get to him till he had one round left, I ran the only soldier in range to pick him up... and the tile wasn’t perfectly aligned so I couldn’t extract him. I rage quit that campaign.
On the last one finished it on the Ironman and I suffered when my veteran from the first mission was cut off from the rest of the squad by the forgotten and I needed to leave him behind.
In my opinion I disagree with what you said to a degree, rather it was things like the Sectoid Commanders being able to Mind Control and screw over your entire team. Chyrslids being nightmares from hell. I feel it was the fact the game was just unfair. Even if you knew what you had to do... it could be completely impossible. Other games try to be fair, give the player control... and this means our failures are our own. The original game would screw you over simply because of dice rolls being so important. That being said, as you said greed was a large portion... a dead high ranking soldier means time and money and risks retraining them. This means Save Scumming is MORE important because it costs you a resource which could potentially stop you from doing something. If anything with how slow and painful it is to gain stats I feel like save scumming is even more important compared to later games.
It's perma death done right. It doesn't make everything threatening for the sake of being perma death, but makes a few real threats that makes retreating a legit strategy.
Man. Nostalgia hitting hard. I played this when it was new and for decades afterwards. I love the new games (was playing WOTC earlier today, actually) but there are lots of things I must as about the first one. The medium size squads. Electro lamps. Real base design. Sigh. I can still bear the snakeman scream.
Tune in next time where I talk about video game protagonists and why they generally kinda suck
woah that might spark a flame or two >:c
You deserve more subs
My channel is just cancer (made it to be cancerous) but I might start making vids that are somewhat like yours but more focused on debunking feminists or retarded people in general. But your vids are great and keep it up unless you hate making them
Wow, ive been telling my father all of this for ages haha. But I would add one more thing, the aspect of fear; of seeing an alien momentarily appear on your screen followed by 3 citizens screaming as the aliens discharge their weapons. Great video though.
The OpenXcom project makes UFO defense look simple and easy. Like say the X-files mod. So there's that real niche of overly complicated micromanaging world wide combat sim.
The fact you named a soldier Megumin and shoved 4 grenades into her while explaining your warcrimes launched my sides into orbit, great video man
Hah, lol
exxxxxxXPLOSION
He is a man of culture. I didnt even notice her name.
I cackled like a demon when I saw that. Man has good taste.
@@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 I did and I didn't realise "Oh shit, it's THE Megumin"
I remember putting the Skyranger into a holding pattern so it would land during the day and rookies would have a better chance of survival than a night landing.
The russian strategy is definitely a valid strategy, but so is bringing 14 dudes and clearing places like you actually want to not depopulate a small nation I think that I brought more laser weapons than plasma simply to just endlessly dakka my way through a lot of missions.
A strong offensive push using real world tactics can definitely defeat the AI consistently. You will take losses, but you will also not need to arm the world with plasma rifles to do so
I used this holding skyranger strategy many times. My approach was usually building a super team and never accepting to lose good soldiers. I think I might try again someday using the Russian Strategy, it should be more interesting and realistic
@@lampostsamurai2518 I always put 4 noob soldiers at the entrance of the Skyranger as a meat shield and then throw smokes everywhere (no insta-nade-mod bullshit). Against Ethereals, I let all my soldiers lay their guns on the ground at the end of each turn (only costs 2 TU's), except for those with very high psi skills. The AI is too stupid to pick them back up when mind controlled and all they can do is run around an throw smokes at the rest of the squad, so I don't have to do it lol. That's how I play superhuman ironman and it works pretty well.
@@NinjaContravaniaManX I let AI take the first turn (when my crew is not in immediate danger).
@@gaborszarka7596 When I see aliens camping the skyranger right at the start of a mission, I let one soldier in the front drop a pre-primed smoke from the inventory and then pass the turn. Aliens always have full TU's at the start of a mission, but they won't react upon inventory actions.
I think part of what made the original great was its styling, the outlandish 80's Comic/Super Sentai intro and charachter designs, the cool craft and weapon designs and the ufopedia. Additionally it was the pace where you had time to make decisions both tactically and strategically and make plans with your large anonymous squads, upto 24 soldiers in a battle. The later games never captured that being all flash bang high speed action, reducing you to a tiny amount of characters to control usually 6-8 and sticking a massive doomsday clock in your face forcing you to rush. In the original games you could just hunt UFO's for the fun or it or to make a little side money, play around with your base design like having dedicated function bases even if you already had pretty good world coverage, in the later ones you were forced to concentrate solely on most efficent use of resources to complete the game ahead of the countdown.
Also the music, go lisen to the interception theme.
That was only XCOM 2, XCOM Enemy within and I think Chimera Squad didn't have global timer
What made the game great is how well it built tension. It was the John Carpenter of video games. The music plodded along to a rhythm like a heart beat, with accents of terror. Nothing, nothing, nothing, and suddenly BAM something happens. The game play did the same thing: walkwalkwalk, walkwalkwalk, walkwalkwalk.....nothing. Walkwalkwalk, walkwalkwalk, LASER SHOT! Even the limited tech helped build tension. An alien shoots from a distance. You tense up, and you have to wait as the shot travels from screen, to screen, to screen before you find out if you get hit. Always wondering what's around the next corner.
And the mission-based game play was addictive. What? Time to go to bed? Just let me start the next mission. Just one more mission. Best game ever.
Panhead49EL : So many times a roommate or my fiance would walk in and scare the crap outta me when playing X-Com. Terror mission at night with that music???? Chryssalids?
Thank God for OpenXcom!
Panhead49EL : oh I forgot, not John Carpenter....but the true master of suspense - Alfred Hitchcock!
I have literally jumped from unseen alien reaction fire at times. It happens so quickly and the events afterward can happen so quickly as well, it really does make every step feel like a tense action where your current soldier either lives or dies.
Absolutely! The music and sounds are just so important to the game. It's something I think the modern XComs dropped the ball on since they went more bombastic which made the feel much more like a Michael Bay film or an action cartoon
It's not just emotional attachment. In modern versions the difference between rookies and higher ranks is so vast and it takes so long to get there that losing your star assault or sniper can really ruin a campaign in lower difficulties, especially because there are not that many missions to recover. Long War solved this by just making your dudes tired and having tons of small missions, so you tend to need several teams and have the chance to send rookies on routine scout UFO cleanups to level them up.
Long war is it's own thing though
This same problem is present when you compare Total War: Warhammer to earlier Total War games.
Can't play vanilla anymore because of long war. I just cant go back. Same with open Xcom mod for UFO. But thats more for the UI improvements than anything. EW + long war would be perfect if they added mechanics of dropping equipment/picking stuff and bodies up and the free firing at terrain. In UFO I ABUSE THIS. See wall, no explosives, have laser rifle no problem. And Melee. I just want to see my little troopers beat down that secoid that resisted stun twice with their fists because thats what I would do.
Welp now I want do UFO again.
Perfect! I've always told my friends (when we discussed XCOM) that X-COM felt more like a War Tycoon, not just Base + Combat management and that emphasis on management of the organization was a really strong side of X-COM. Now I have a video to back me up, thanks! :)
The game Missionforce: Cyberstorm captured the ‘expendable’ idea too. You have literal clones with expiration dates so even if they survive many missions they will eventually age out just traveling the months it takes to get to later planets.
Many people overthink the attachment to your soldiers in this game. The reason for the attachment is that they gain experience and have made progress for your organization in difficult situations against the odds. If experienced soldier dies, you go a notch backwards in winning the war of saving humanity. The difficulty, which stems from vulnerability and unpredictable enemies, is the key reason why you care in the first place.
Also you get the whole psy training stuff late in the game which then becomes a bit more painful to replace when everything is ramping up. I think this is one of the cool balances of UFO: the experience of your troops vs the improved weapons and armour from your research. Both are important
On the other hand, it’s not like traditional RPG’s. They don’t just gain experience, advancement also depends on your total number of soldiers. If you have an advanced soldier who bites it, you almost always have another soldier who is already qualified to take their place, but wasn’t promoted because there was “no room” for another advanced officer.
@@chrlpolk XCOM is not like traditional RPG probably because it's not an RPG? 😂
Look I love XCOM Enemy Within and XCOM 2 but those games are NOT RPGs.
It's a huge misconception that skill trees=RPG when it's just not? What makes RPG an RPG is the *roleplaying* aka tons of choices of how you play the game and what choices you take with their own consequences.
You don't roleplay in XCOM games, your *only* role is that of a commander overseeing people squad fighting aliens, in real roleplaying games you would have a choice of siding with the aliens, or do what EXALT does and collect alien tech for evil. Or heck, you would have a choice to just not be a commander and let someone else take that role.
Regarding soldier attachment, the Firaxis XCOM games also provide you with far fewer effective soldiers, so losing one is a much bigger blow to your combat effectiveness. In Enemy Unknown in particular, if you were bring Rookies or Squaddies to missions three or four months in, you were probably in deep trouble, and most players finished the game with under 10 (living) soldiers ever having combat experience. Ultimately, this is another big part of why people were more attached to their soldiers in the remakes. Mods like Long War, or the War of the Chosen expansion with its fatigue system encourage much larger rosters of troops, and rebalance the game to be more forgiving of entering later missions with lower ranked (more expendable, more replaceable) troops, meaning the losses don't hurt quite as much.
All that said, I still remember the name of my best soldier from my very first UFO:EU win, so despite the rather Russian World War II approach to troop lives, the ones that got through the meat grinder still made an impression.
what's the soldiers name
Chuck Norris
Ah same... Lyudmila Romanov....... Im still kinda in love with her
yeah I couldn't agree more but the flaws still there when Jake Solomon designed the whole thing based on satellite coverage which in my opinion are stupid. first time playing XCOM: EW remake I got my ass-kick out in June, aliens won I'm like WTF?! so most veteran players saying " dude you need to rush satellite strategy dude its the only way, losing more than 3 countries will be your defeat! " imo that wasn't fun, the original XCOM 1994 are much better than this, I mean like I get it the remake wasn't that generous with funding either but, everything is fucking expensive in XCOM even manufacturing stuff. oh well if Jake Solomon could balance this whole fiasco crap with satellite rush I'm certain I could have more than with the remake even though the Jullian Gollop XCOM are way better ahead of its time.
@@White_Tiger93 That and all the DLC requirements to get to the better content turned me off the new game. I bought Enemy Unknown, did not buy 2.
The rush, rush, rush feeling of having to do Satellites combined with some other stuff just annoyed me.
I think the more personal take with the soldiers makes sense in XCOM 2 since you're all rebels living together and there's comparably fewer people than an underground base. Heck, even your scientists and engineers have names and faces.
Anyway great video, you seem to have a knack for this. I'd like to see you make a video on Crypt of the Necrodancer if you're able to get something out of it.
I prefer the XCOMAPOC way of doing "limited" scientists and engineers.
Also that idea's ludicrous, the French and German rebellions during the 2nd World War had more members by themselves on comparison to X-Com 2's max.
@@harrietr.5073 yeah but we're they facing mind controlling aliens tho
I litteraly went "Why the heck is this is my notifications" when I saw it. Then I heard your voice remembered subscribing lol
Great video, really high quality for only your second video! Also I love your voice~ it's so nice
Same lol
Hahaha so I'm not the only one
Topea Vey same lol
Topea Vey same
As someone who has played the old xcom quite a while I can say that even once you know all the game mechanics back to front. It is still enjoyable. What made the game last so long is that random generation and fog of war is an integral part of the game. Even if you know everything that there is to know about the game. Everything is still randomly generated and its all obscured in a fog of war. Decisions must be improvised based on how the situation unfolds.
This.
My first Base was always my Hometown in Germany and I always named it "Fear Factory", as I named my other Bases after Metal Bands too. My most effective Soldier ever was a blonde Female who went through a Door in a UFO and faced 3 Sectoids. I thought "Fuck she is dead" (she had 12 Kills in 4 Missions until then). I made Auto-Shot on the middle Sectoid: First Shot: Middle one Dead, Second Shot: Left one Dead, Third Shot: Right one Dead. With a Rifle. Then she was my Hero. I didnt let her die. For 26 Years I am fighting these Alien Bastards!
Best solider I’ve ever heard of. Deserved a medal after that. It sounds like something that would happen in a movie.
@@hershloodu8925 She survived the War with over 260 Kills and took down the Base on Mars. Sadly no Medals in this Game, but I would guess they made Statues of her
Edit: And she gets free Drinks
@@grindcorejoe6661Damn I’m impressed. Drinks for all who survived the war.
@@hershloodu8925 And Drinks for all who died
Semper Fidelis
@@grindcorejoe6661 Of course
I used to savescum in situations like that, but stopped when I realized it just dulled the experience
now I live for crying
same; first two playthroughs were easy but also dull (realized 2nd time that savescumming is a bit too easy, at least on beginner difficulty)
@@oliverhees4076 superhuman minimal save/ironman is the way to go
@@Adam-nc6qg what I Usually do in the Remake is to Play through Ironman Classic with a second Chance Option from the Long war Mod that enabled Mission restart for Ironman, that way it was still tense, but I could consider retrying, which softens the smaller Missions Like abductions, but leaves Base assaults and Battleship raids still intense, since you would loose alot of time when restartimg mid Mission
@@eagleclaws1781 sounds intriguing
@@Adam-nc6qg Yeah, but due to the Lack of Autosaves in Openxcom/FMP I dont use the Ironman option itself, since a Crash would be fatal
For some of the points, one of the things that strikes me as different about "old school" video games whether we're talking X-Com: UFO Defense or the original Fallout is their source material of influence. Julian Gollop
was fond of tabletop wargames along with D&D. Similar case for Tim Cain and the other Fallout designers who designed the SPECIAL system (heavily inspired by GURPS).
UFO Defense plays and feels much like an analog tabletop wargame, even though its macro strategy aspect (outside of combat) is done in real-time instead of turns to put more emphasis on combat instead of resource and base management. The idea of your units being treated as expendable units you can buy correlates to the board game idea where your units are effectively expendable pieces/miniatures on a board/grid. Permadeath is almost always a thing with such games since the idea of being able to save and reload previous games would be completely impractical when playing a board game with friends. Even the most experienced units also have to be very vulnerable and prone to be taken out or killed in very few turns. They can't have like 3,000 HP and take 20 hits to kill while being capable of being healed repetitively, since that would be boring and repetitive as hell if players had to roll dice and move pieces and draw cards every turn.
UFO Defense is not too far beyond a board game. It takes advantage of a few things that digital can exclusively provide like being able to obscure some of the dice rolls and card drawing and rules and being able to randomly generate terrain, but they all feel like very restrained and deliberate design choices of a designer inspired heavily by tabletop who wanted to take advantage of just a few features that a digital video game can exclusively provide.
Meanwhile when I look at "new school" RPGs and strategy games, they're far, far more abstracted from the original analog roots that inspired the earliest CRPGs and strategy video games, and their inspirations are usually other digital video games, not analog tabletop wargames/RPGs and PnPs and the like. The end result is usually more cinematic and exploits far more of what a digital medium can exclusively provide, but many of them would likely be completely dull to play if they were presented in a slower and more deliberate analog format without significantly reconsidering the entire game rules/mechanics.
One of the reasons I'm kind of cynical about the idea of seeing a resurgence of old school games like these is that younger generations of designers might have never played the original analog games that inspired the old school designers. Most people these days into tabletop are usually in their 40s and above; we're all getting gray and old. It's rare to find young people into such games, but those are the games that inspired the classics, and if we want more of such games, I think they have to pay attention to the source material. Julian Gollop didn't set out to create a video game which is inspired by other video game ideas when he created UFO Defense. He set out to make a video game inspired by tabletop wargames like Squad Leader and Starship Troopers (analog->digital). Meanwhile the designers behind Enemy Unknown set out to create a game like UFO Defense (digital->digital).
If it's any condolence to you, I'm 16, and heavily enjoy the original X-Coms, despite my lack of skill with them. I love both the new and old XCOMs *because* of how different they are; depending on how I'm feeling, I can play the newer ones for a more action-hero, we're 100% the good guys, please-don't-kill-my-guys-or-make-me-fail-the-mission experience, whereas I can play the older ones for a grittier, analytical, tactial experience. And I'm also of the opinion that mods for OG X-Com should be able to (for the most part) fix any problems with the game or, better yet, expand the game to explore another idea that could be emulated within the engine.
If you ever have a chance, play Space Hulk. I bought the board game a few years ago, since they made a new edition and, in my opinion, it's probably one of the biggest influences on X-Com. The combat system is strikingly similar.
For what it's worth I'm a game designer in my early thirties and I'm heavily invested in intricate tabletop systems such as you describe, and have been for years. I use everything I've ever seen, digital and otherwise, to inform future designs. I often build paper or tabletop simulations to feel out ideas for video game designs.
There are people like this out there, but often they are not the ones who end up working on these projects. Sometimes when they are, they aren't granted the creative freedom needed to make that meaningful. We were and remain something of a minority, even as gaming expands.
There is a lot of opportunity now in the Indie Gaming scene for these things to play out without such constraints, and we are already starting to see good things come of it. Darkest Dungeon, Rimworld and others are rising stars in various niches taking a stab at deeper forms of play.
What you are concerned about is a problem of course, but time will sort the wheat from the chaff.
I have to make a game before I die. It is of course based on the best table top game ever created.
For what it's worth, "new XCOM"/Firaxis XCOM was actually completely redesigned this way during development on the advice of no less a game designer than Sid Meier himself. From the 4th pre-release RPS interview of Jake Solomon, lead designer of XCOM (2012):
"So I went to Sid and said "look, I'm lost. I've made two bad prototypes, they're not working, they don't feel like X-COM." So he said "let's just start over."
So he and I started on paper - we drew the world, we had dice, we had little army men and he was saying "look, let's just make a strategy game from the ground up." We wanted it to be like X-COM so we used a few of the original rules, and we worked on it every afternoon for about two weeks, continuing to make this boardgame version of XCOM..."
The full interview is worth a read, I can't link it directly because UA-cam bans comments with links, but Google "RPS Interview: Firaxis On XCOM's Secret Origins" and you should find it.
(This is a principle something I've seen echoed elsewhere by other game designers as well, for what its worth: make a cheap prototype of your game as a board game or something, and iterate rapidly based off that. The ideal is to spend less than a hour between coming up with a feature & being able to test it out and play around with it, modifying it on the fly. Failing that, the recommended max seems to be less than half a day between concept & experimentation.)
It opened up new ways of thinking for me as a child. Very few games ever do that. That's what made it feel real. Consequence and responsibility for your actions.
Older xcom series’ sound effects and musics are so eerie matches the theme of the game perfectly
Even back before OpenXCom and its Commendations/Diary mod, I cared about my soldiers. I used to put an * next to the first fourteen soldier's names so I could keep track of them and follow them through the game, trying to keep them alive without savescumming. I don't re-load saves when soldiers die, but I will admit that I've restarted the whole game a few times after some disastrous missions.
One of the things that always brought me back was not only the atmosphere, but the absolute mercilessness. No matter how good you are, a lucky shot can turn a mission one way or the other... One of my most successful games saw me all the way to the end, then I got greedy and went for one last landing site... and my entire squad got wiped via mind control when entirely armed with VERY heavy ordinance. It was hilariously FUBAR'd when my entire squad wiped itself out with blaster bombs. To add to the hilariousness, there was one guy who survived it all but got stuck in a loop of getting mind-controlled and breaking free so he could never get close enough to fire a shot with his sidearm but the aliens wouldn't do anything other than just mind control him again and again!
Saying "a lucky shot can turn a mission one way or the other" is too big of a stretch. Unless you blow yourself up with a rocket/torpedo, 1 shot does not affect much, and if it does that's because the player made blunders earlier. And that's by definition is affected by how good the player is.
@@kane_lives reaction fire from the back of the skyranger can wipe a squad. Eventually I learned to face my heavies away from the ramp until the squad was spread out.
@@seanpeacock4290 smoke grenades in front of the skyranger ramp on the first turn will prevent this
As another commenter also stated, the original DOS game interface was horrendous and made playing the game very rewarding when you just mastered their meanings (heck, my friend told me that the game is shit, because after a while your soldiers can't move any more - he didn't find the "end turn" button).
And the OpenXCom "remake" while add some QoL streamlining to the interface, just keeping everything pixelated as hell, keeps the feeling very well.
I love this game, and I love that people ported it as OpenXCom and made mods to it.
OpenTFTD is also a thing and it's pretty amazing, especially the mods.
I 100% disagree with your first point. When I was a kid, I never let my soldiers die. What I enjoyed was the random maps, skill growth, researching, manufacturing, and deploying new and more powerful technology, building up a powerful squad, and realizing how much more profitable it was to attack landed UFOs rather than shoot them down.
Yeah... Same. I've done ... Don't know, like 10 superhuman Ironmans runs now... And yes my goal is to try and bring everyone home
I use a lot of HWP (expensive but oh well) as scouts smoke and explosives to minimize risk
That being said ... Just a couple of bad moves and blammo or blaster launcher to the skyranger or a psy attack to the guy with the rocket launcher and...... That's it
And that's the beauty of the game it really keeps you on your toes, few games can achieve that atmosphere
@@productunited Did you mod the game? The game is always on easy. It was a flaw in design. Once you saved the game was set to easy. There was no harder mode. It was all just an illusion.
I used to love my squad when playing xcom. I remember I always put the names of my friends and related in my whole squad. And I always felt very sad (sometimes restoring an older saved game) to come back with a deceased soldier.
I am a fan of the old good X-COMs myself and had several discussions about what makes it so great that people still tend to play it 20+ years after release. But hell, this is an excellent video. You got a new subscriber, mate. Excellent work!
Thank you!
Same as for Morrowind and Warcraft3 the low graphics enhance the expierience, rather than aproaching the uncanny valey everything you see is distinctly not real, and you are left to imagine what everything would look like imagining it to be completely real.
So for what it's worth the AI in XCOM is actually extremely dumb, and does one of several things based on pure random dice rolls. This is according to the game's designer.
The randomness makes them harder to predict then. They definitely make some smart moves too, but hard to say if it's an illusion of the dice.
If the enemy AI played well the game would be impossible
No wonder why they always attack my untouchable soldiers
I've had some pretty wacky stuff happen though that i could not predict, like sending out 4 dudes and leaving the rest in the avenger to take out aliens on a small ufo... then an alien mind control my soldier took a grenade out and drop it right in the middle taking out everyone. That was pretty shocking.
Then you have the aliens that hide in buildings and don't want to come out, and run away when you find them. Feel bad shooting those ones :(.
All that stuff is missing from the newer games, it's just run to cover and shoot.
Part of the strategy though is the fact that the AI has moves that can be exploited tactically. If you don't know what the AI is going to do, or the AI always behaves optimally, then there's not really much depth to the game. Not to mention it'd make abilities like untouchable and the mimic beacon totally useless if the AI was just like "Yeah we know that's useless, I'll attack someone else"
I have been quietly working on a little fan project for quite some time, and I think that there are some things worth pointing out here. Looking back on decades of playing this game (It's 30 years old now!) my sister and I used to play the game and become attached to our soldiers not because of how they looked, but because of the absurdity that could take place in the original game. I think that the big thing that no other game has gotten right since the original and TFTD (Apoc included!) was the tension. I can't tell you the number of times this game had my pulse racing, especially in the late 90s/early 00s. The pulsing gated bass and piano keys thumping out a steady beat as you walk through the inky blackness, not knowing if a blast of plasma is going to come from the void. Even the boxed mouse cursor letting you peer through the shadows, seeing vague outlines of things in the darkness.
A lot of remakes want to constantly engage you, they never let you lull into that false sense of security. There's no gradual build up, there is just rigid structure and a philosophy of doing "more with less." Xenonauts is the biggest offender of this. That game is incredibly off putting, it doesn't have the right atmosphere, and Xenonauts 2 makes it even worse with the immediate presentation of human/alien human hybrids as the main aggressor force.
There is still a lot of thirst for a turn based alien invasion simulator. Open XCOM mods have proved this, and have made the original XCOM everything and more that it could be, and then some. I won't say that my project is going to be that change, but I do know there are a lot of people out there that still feel that X-COM still hasn't struck gold twice, and are willing to prospect for it.
I really appreciate your disclaimer at the start acknowledging that the modern XCOM titles are trying to be their own thing. It helps encourage people like me who appreciate the new direction, and no longer having to manage the inventory of 14 or 26 soldiers every mission, etc. This is the first video of yours I've found, and hearing something reasonable right away helps keep me around to listen more. It also helps that I've discovered OpenXCOM, which is the old game but with about a billion quality-of-life upgrades that fix some of the nagging issues with the old masterpiece. Not to mention it even made Terror from the Deep playable for me, fixing the research tree bugs and other annoyances.
"Megumin has been killed."
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
(great vid btw subscribed)
Biggoron and she didn’t even die in an explosion, like she would want.
@@InquisitorThomas just walked through a room and was instantly shot before she could even turn or blink.
As an extension to your comment on can't make lightning strike twice', I'd suggest looking into a game called UFO: Aftermath. It attempts to stay as rooted to the original style of UFO Defense as closely as possible, complete with the strategic management of your bases and production, while still leaning more toward an importance of making highly-specialized soldiers, similar to more modern takes on the genre. Plus, it used a real-time free-pause system, where instead of you and the enemy take turns, everything happens in real time, but you can pause at any point to plan and strategize(This was actually the company's second attempt at incorporating such a system into old genres, as they did the same thing for an RTS. All this back in the very early 2000's.) It hit really close to me in comparison to the original, while still feeling as if it was advancing the genre.
Also, when are you going to make a video on OneShot? I really want to see your take on it :^)
You're doing a great work here, dude. I'm loving your videos
God, I can't believe I'm still playing this game 30 years on.
Great video.
One of the biggest things that UFO Defense does that many others don't is try to treat the battlescape as a simulation of a world that enables combat, rather than a series of combat mechanics with a world painted over them. The limitations of the engine definitely do make it a janky simulation (luckily in an endearing way), but it's a simulated 3D world rendered in 2D graphics.
In 2012 XCOM, you have some RPG characters that start each turn with a choice of chest high walls to travel between during the-movement-phase(TM); and go in search a series of interactable objects that look like aliens, which enable the use of the gun mechanic, letting you watch a shooting animation associated with the hit/miss calculation.
UFO Defense doesn't tell you what you should do, it's just a sandbox to do it in. You start each turn with however many solider are alive and conscious, each of them having so much time, effort and whatever is in their inventories. They can spend that turn doing whatever is within their power to do. Your troops can run up and throw a stun gun to the guy close enough to use it on the alien commander, they can deadman switch grenades to kill the cryssalid that kills them, they can blow holes in a house to gives someone else an opening to shoot an alien through.. If they're holding a gun, they can use it to shoot out a bullet/plasma burst/rocket in as specific a direction as skill and circumstance allows (usually in the direction of an alien); once that shot is out in the world though, intentions go out the window, and it will do whatever it does to whatever its trajectory finds first.
Exactly this. I develop attachment to my veteran soldiers in old X-com games and I like 2012 game (and love it with expansions), but new games lack that pure sandbox feel. In old games we have all the world to pick precise spots for numerous bases, to send patrols and interceptors in whatever numbers we can afford. And being NOT limited to 4-6 unit teams allows much wider choice of tactics.
And of course that thing when operative misses he can (and will) hit something or someone else, which never happens in new games.
4:03 - "Don't hurt my babies" = "Savescum" = "Less tension" - Um, even though I know it'll make me "that guy" in the comments... isn't that what the Ironman mode is for? So that you specifically *can* have a playthrough with more tension? Maybe it's just me, but I personally think "player psychology" would more gear towards the idea that all those cosmetics are just fun little extras *secondary* to the fact they can adjust and optimize the gameplay itself to be as harsh or forgiving as they want - whether it's lo-res or high-res has no bearing on that.
IMHO, this doesn't even seem like something connected to the customization or resolution options, much less something the older game has as a strength over the new one - because honestly speaking, it's not; the other game doesn't lack any of those mechanics as opposed to them being optional now. Then again, I'm a person who thinks a lot of the things you called "strengths" for UFO Defense were actually either detrimental and/or frustrating and tedious to the game, so take my words with a grain of salt.
U can easily cheat Ironman in modern XCOMs
@@l1b3d74 Why would you? Just don't check that box and play the way you want.
@@l1b3d74 You can probably cheat or mod a godmode into UFO. You can even savescum as hard as you want.
If you do it and complan aftterwards that its the games fault, you are acting like you don't own any personal agency.
If you use it as an argument against one game over another, although the possibility is present in both (and cheating always is) then you are simply disengenious.
@Vladimirs Kacs
There is a issue of willpower here. Some people can't help themselves and "playing the way they want" will lead them to ruin the fun of the game. The added inconvenience of exiting the game and fiddle with folders to savescum, plus the symbolic commitment of agreeing to Ironman in the first place, is the only thing that allows some of these people to play the game as intended. For others even that isn't enough to prevent them spoiling the challenge. It's true that removing the savescum option is one way to solve this conundrum, but present some technical challenges for single player games.
@Mitchell Baran
> the other game doesn't lack any of those mechanics as opposed to them being optional now
It REALLY does. It is missing a lot that was there before. But if you didn't like those mechanics and the challenges they posed, you won't miss them. Others will.
And now I know what the magic of this game is supposed to be.
I hopped on X-COM Enemy Unknown and enjoyed how visceral the whole experience was. Trying to keep my squad alive and finding even more alien variants kept me on the edge of my seat.
I remember emulating this game to see where the whole series started and I just couldn't get into it. It felt like I was playing an operation system than an actual game. And that was even after I looked up what the controls were for everything. I was initially intrigued by the Time Unit mechanic for doing actions and moving around but I just couldn't get past those controls. Oh and one of my soldiers straight up died as soon as they walked off the Skyranger, so that was nice. I'll respect this game for what it is and how it went about doing it's strategy gameplay and money management. I'll just hop on Enemy Unknown to see what the ending looks like since it just felt miles better to play.
Great video man!
Try OpenXcom Extended - a modern engine does wonders for UFO.
Good to know you're still at it! After your last video I was really hoping to see more and surprised that was your first video.
Love this. I'm always on the lookout for new or relatively unknown UA-camrs with good content.
I didn't even know this game existed but i still thought this video was really interesting
Buy it. Its dirt cheap on steam. It still has a very active modding community too. Look up openxcom.
For what it's worth I still go out of my way to rename every soldier just to feel that bitter sting when they inevitably die.
I cannot reccomend playing the X-Com Files mod enough. It does an amazing job of capturing that feeling if olaying Xcom for the first time again, while also building on top of it in so many ways it's almost a completely new game of its own
Normalize audio. It wasn't a killer, but there were times where one new recorded sentence was louder than the previous. I loved the video and its contents. Keep up the good work!
When I saw this I thought 'who do I subscribe to plays x-com' but then I saw the name.
I hope you can get much more popular, and if you do, here's some advice. Balance popular things with things you like. That way, you always stay true to yourself and you aren't always doing something you don't want to. Whatever your outro catchphrase is, be sure to say it after the content ends, about 9:35
Also, don't forget to establish what the game is. You could go very technical 'year name ect.' Or very a vague, but all we need to know is that x-com is about fighting aliens from space and you control the force to fight back through top down turn based strategy game. This would be helpful for anyone unfamiliar.
Jesus, such a great video and it’s just the second one, my god... dude, keep going, we need more smart well researched content on UA-cam like this
a spanish streamer recently did a full playtrough of xcom and it was an awesome time for chat, almost 1k people tuned for the ending in cydonia, and the soldier names were chosen at random from viewers, and while it was a bronzeman run (no savescumming to save soldiers, but reloading to avoid taking missions that are doomed) it was genuenly brutal trudding trough the slaugther of viewers as they screamed in chat but the campaing kept going it was somewhat a sweet point of, attachment, but also knowing this shit is doomed, because if you got lucky you got to experience what it feels to be thrown to the aliens to die and be replaced quickly
Stuff I miss; tactical base defense missions, time unit usage flexibility (though the current two-phase turn isn't bad either), the OG Sectoid skin. Stuff I don't miss; putzing around the battlefield for ages trying to find that last alien who's just running around at random, turn two blaster bomb into the skyranger.
Ah yes, last alien issue. It's even more outrageous when he's dropped his weapon and didn't trying to shoot your soldiers
Have to say, I was a bit confused when I saw a video from someone I didn't remember in my subscription tab. Had to check your channel to remember who you were. Now I'm happy to have subscribed after watching your first video. Looking forward to the next ;)
The stand-out feature of UFO: Enemy Unknown for me has to be the nighttime terror missions which were absolutely terrifying for me when I first played it as a kid.
Ending a turn often meant hearing the aliens' creepy movement sounds but you couldn't see them, or if you saw them it was pitch darkness in a building with something moving in the shadows for less than a second.
Then the plasma shots starts mowing down civilians and your soldiers like flies. By the end of the first turn you've lost maybe two or three soldiers and the rest of them are losing morale fast.
If there were Chryssalids in the terror mission and my guys didn't have flying suits, I often kept one guy in the Skyranger so if everyone outside goes dark for good (which can happen rather quickly), I can abort the mission and not lose the Skyranger.
So happy I found this channel. Extremely well done I'll be watching way more :)
Spot on with the stuff about simulation and keeping things intentionally obscure.
I really hate the modern idea that not having all your numbers out in the open, especially in a single-player strategy game, is a bad thing. This kind of taking hundreds of small gambles and trying to maximize your chances of victory gameplay is much more intense not to mention multitudes more immersive than simply choosing the right reaction to an enemy action based on an excel spreadsheet.
Part of why the old Total War games are so good: it's not just action and reaction; you have to account for damage control in case things don't go perfectly, keep a reserve on hand for the attack you didn't see coming. That level of uncertainty adds a realistic additional dimension to the strategy.
I miss this intuitive simulation-style approach to game design.
What I loke the most is the constant tension during the missions. There are so many things that can go wrong that you *must* stay alert no matter what.
That and the music gives it this unique horror vibe that I haven't seen anywhere else.
I savescum in UFO defence all the time exactly because i get attached to my soldiers. Despite being so pixelated my immagination fills in the blanks
Great video! Looking forwards to seeing more of this type of video.
I got just as attached to my pixely soldiers as my mind filled in the blanks.
Had "Silver" raising up to captain, I really liked her. She had great stats. I protected her as much as I could. Then an alien threw a grenade into the ship at the beginning of the mission.
Did you at least avenge her?
Amazing video, really enjoyed it! I played UFO Defense (or Enemy Unknown for me) in my childhood, both on the Amiga and later on console on the first Playstation. I felt that nothing really captured the atmosphere of the original but you nailed it.
Another great video about a topic I wasnt expecting. Great job
Loved the video dude! Im loving your work. I was a bit confused when I saw you in my notifications, but once I clicked on the video, I remembered subscribing. I guess I just need to get use to seeing you in my sub box! Anyway, once again, the quality of the video was fantastic and the video itself was cool and interesting! Seriously good work
And yay for catchphrase outro
i think the most important difference is every crash zone map automatically randomly created depends on the map location and time... the new remake does not have it, it s also said by the game designer, he mentioned about it in one interview....
Nice work! I'm looking forward for more content :)
My soldiers never die. Because I keep loading my previous saved files.
Perfect luck in retrospect. Why does everything think this alien killing thing is so hard?
@@arcanimagames4448 Because Ironman exists where you can't savescum? ;)
Best game ever made. Equally popular today as back in the 90's. Amazing
Xcom is one of the most fascinating games I played when I was a Teenager. My older brother had a PC 486 and we got the game on a floppy disk. I think the game needed to be installed and it came on a 3 or 4 floppy disks and it was installed on DOS. The sound, graphics and gameplay were amazing. The game had an incredible atmosphere. Then It came the second game which I also enjoyed and played a lot, but I don’t know why I didn’t play as much as the first game. A few years later we also got the game for the PS1. It was nice to see the additional cutscenes, but the loading time on each mission was damn long. Nevertheless, the PS1 version is probably the version that I played more hours. Than I got say that we waited for years for another decent game. I remember a lot of conversations with my Brother that we dreamed about a new x-com game that never came. I never liked the apocalypse version. We had to wait for years until the release of the Xcom made by 2K games
I played Terror From the Deep first, and then only some years later Enemy Unknown. Even though TFTD is essentially a reskin of EU, it still had more atmosphere in my view. I played TFTD a lot, and EU only a little. Maybe had I played EU first, I would then have been a little disappointed at how similar TFTD was.
@@itskarl7575 Indeed, TFTD is so similar to EU that almost looks like a reskin. But I think the first time you see an Xcom game you will definitely be more impacted, right? Since you played first TFTD it will always have a special feeling for you.
@@itskarl7575 one thing that maybe a like more in EU is that I feel more diverse environments to play the tactical phase (desert, jungle, ice, farm, city) while the TFTD What I remember more is being to much time playing the underwater. Although there are the terror coastal cities and onboard the terror ship as well.
I agree that the meat grinder is a core component of what makes XCOM great. I don't really buy your argument of fidelity contributing to that. There are several other factors that define XCOM. It was one of the first games to combine strategic and tactical elements. The art style is another core part of the appeal. The original XCOM also did such an amazing job of incorporating popular culture around UFOs, in a similar way that Fallout did with the post war era. Something they largely recreated with the XCOM remake, but they totally botched with XCOM2 IMO. To me XCOM2 seems to be more inspired by Stargate and is a huge minus in my books.
2:50 Back then aliens were viewed as an insurmountable threat.
Vast technological superiority, only to be overcome by another vast superiority
which Earth does have. Manpower. Not meant as disposables, but at least readily available.
I always kept my team in one piece which leads to much better in combat performance.
Once they get their ambush skills up they can take out anything that comes from an alien vessel.
Also, capturing intact ones instead of shooting themd own (last option, not first)
helps increase the tech much faster, but also boosts income.
A great way to boost income is by manufacturing motion scanners and selling them.
This keeps the guys busy making money, while still being available for when something
needs to be manufactured, which then happens really fast.
My bases employ roughly 200 engineers for that purpose alone, which are
auxilliary product plant bases with minimal defences but lots of engineers.
If all the surface connection is done through one elevator in the corner with only
one defence turret next t that, the aliens can only enter through the elevator or
it's connected defence battery, which then leaves two avenues of entering.
Either one side of the elevtor left or right, and one side up or down,
which is then basically a firing squad that drills anything foolish enough to be in the elevator.
This is why reaction is about the most valuable attributes for any soldier.
They spot an alien, before the alien spots them, and start blasting.
Alien down, next.
Endgame usually means start round, get into position, and let the turns fly by.
Once the remaining aliens go bonkers and fail their courage tests, they start blasting stuff
or drop their weapons, but they won't have any TU's left to react.
Time to get some easy prisoners. High TU commanders run in with their stunrods,
and keep poking till they go naptime.
The initial funding is like 5% overall of what you can make each month,
after some initial investing. Captured whole vessels pay off many times of a downed one.
And yes, save scumming. lots and lots and then some.
(It's about the longevity of the men.)
Ge the high stats, increase survivablity, save scum less play faster.
In the beginning pain, but the payoff is great.
Also, kneel before shooting.
I've come to really appreciate the minutia of stocking up and fiddling with inventories, it really helps sell the idea that its a simulated war rather than the streamlined heroic adventure feel the newer games are going for. XCOM feels like a real organization that exists as more than a way to give your dude better stuff
Neat video! I remember playing this game as a kid, i have recently watched play through videos and would love to play it again myself but i would not know where to start to even find it 😢
Youre right. I should add this game to my to play list.
I forgot I subscribed to this channel keep up the Good work, can't wait to see more videos from you!!!
Great analysis! Hope we will see the simulation approach more often in the future.
The fog of war mixed with the awesome sound effects. The music. The frustration! Ahhhh the good ol’ days
Your videos are so good and you have so much potential! Keep it up 👍😁
This is the sort of discussion I live for. I love hearing the takes on what makes things different and sometimes better or worse in various games, and how people internalize their experiences. Love this sort of thing.
For my personal take, however, I've not really run into the savescumming makes things less tense. This could just be my history with Fire Emblem bleeding over into Xcom, but when a unit is low on health and thus more vulnerable, I find myself getting even more tense than usual. Perhaps for the wrong reasons though. Instead of "Oh no, that guy's gonna die" it's "Oh crap, I'm gonna have to do this mission over, defend him at all costs." Though it's also because of that mentality that I find myself being more cold and calculating about when I allow a death to stick in Xcom than in Fire Emblem. Because yeah there's faces and more character attached to them than their pixelated counterparts, but at the same time they are still - essentially - the impersonal soldiers that you don't really interact with on the same level as in Fire Emblem, making the "I really don't want to restart, and I've got another Assault guy waiting in the wings... I'll just sell something so I can get better gear for the newbie and catch him up" decisions more palatable than having a character with their own side story and relationships that are very much touched on removed from the story going forward as if they never existed.
Anyway, that's just my take on that one point. Great video and I'm definitely looking forward to more of this sort of thing!
Original Xcom is best Xcom! ^^
no. X-Pirate is best
@@Sammasambuddha no, x-com files
Does final mod pack count as the classic?
@@jemperdiller lol, that audio track where the little girl suddenly chants "Hiiiitler!" - that was... something. But the balance was killing it for me. All the time, you get missions where you only kill 1 creature.... then suddenly, multi-stage mission with 50+ spiders and you can only bring 2 guys and have to kill every single spider! Which is doable, but takes forever and isn't fun at all. When I got my third spider infestation, realizing that this will probably be something I have to do over and over again, I just stopped playing.
Also, those cringy anime pictures that you get for research results etc. ... get that weeb shit out of XCOM!
28 years and it's still the one i remember most fondly.
big-enough squads
good-enough support
stylish if simplistic visuals
engaging management of your forces from the location of your outposts to the arming of your individual troops
base layouts that directly affect you if/when counter-attacked.
time units and hidden aliens allowed some flexibility but sometimes a body can do what 1 hours of planning can not
and an economy that made some sense, you had funding but anything special you would have to find your own side income to pay for.
primary issues with it to this day remain are the UI and how you get ambushed when leaving the dropship too often. maybe once in a while offer the opportunity to land the ship further out at the cost of a slight delay?
So... about that One Shot video...
Hahaha great to see another video from you. Keep the good work!
I'm reminded of a part in the X-Com UFO Defense novel (There are many novels based on the second series but AFAIK the original games only got one. Its awesome IMO and there should have been more) where the protagonist is wondering which countries are going to be facing very well armed rebellions in the near future thanks to the high tech weapons X-Com doesn't need any more which are being unloaded on the black market.
I didn’t even know about this game but by the end of the video I understood completely. Nice job on your 2nd video
Ever considered jumping into the crazy world of X-PirateZ?
Its the original with an improve engine (OpenXcom Extended Plus) shoved into the crazy imagination of a visionary mod creator that forces the player to work from extremely backward tech (flintlocks and swords) up to take on a crazy post apocalyptic world.
Cheers, Ivan :D
Ivan THE Dogovich? :D
Man I'm loving the Area 51 mod (doing a let's play of it now), and I promise you the next thing I'll take on will be the X-PirateZ!
Xpiratez might be a bit too much for newer X-com players. Imagine them trying to sort out the 50+ melee weapons in X-piratez. The there is the night vision mechanics and side stepping.
X-Pirates RULEZ !!!
Heard Tomorrow by Kevin Penkin in the background near the end of the video. You have good taste in music.
The only time Ive savescummed to save soldiers is when me and my bother as 6 to 10 year olds named 2 after ourselves and gave them 1 assistant each. We and our asistants where true superhumans by the end of the playthrough the rest of the crew where propably rookies I dont even know, they didnt matter they where just replaced if they died.
This might be four years late but my most memorable playthrough of Long War was definitely only so memorable because I chose the base option that gave you extra recruits. It captured that feel of having expendable soldiers really well and you only got super attached to the ones that managed to survive like ten missions. I actually never renamed any of them because there were so many but I can still remember the death of my star medic Santos more clearly than maybe any other video game death just because she had survived so many missions and saved so many teammates to become really memorable. What the Firaxis style loses in creating memorable soldiers from the outset is the soldiers earning memorability from their actions in the missions. Not saying it's necessarily worse but I much prefer when the memorability is earned through gameplay.
Absolutely. I've had a few soldiers in Xenonauts who single-handedly saved the mission, or gotten a ridiculous number of kills at the start of the game when all they had were good ol' bullets against big, tough, regenerating lizard aliens. Those who survive and make a name for themselves get remembered, the rest who show up, accomplish little, and die are just an annoying loss of resources, a grunt with a gun tossed into the meat grinder. I had one game very early on in X-Division (sorta Long War but for Xenonauts) where everyone died except one bleeding, nearly dead Private First Class heavy weapons specialist who had previously panicked and thrown away her MG somewhere. She got her shit together, grabbed a medical kit and a shotgun from the breacher who died on the first attempt to enter the UFO, patched herself up, stepped through the door to the UFO, and systematically blew apart every alien inside. She was the only survivor, and ended up with a promotion, three medals, and 9 kills from that one single mission, having 10 kills and 4 medals total across the first three missions of the invasion, that one being the third. Cpl. Camilla Romano, absolute legend.
Don't entirely agree about the Firaxis version - I love the original and agree nothing else is quite like it, but even in the Firaxis version of X-Com (I haven't tried Xcom2 yet) I have had my share of memorable soldiers, many of whom have eventually come to a sad end. When you have a sniper with a plasma rifle that almost single handedly saved the base defence mission from being a total wipeout only to have her casually wiped out the next time she goes out, that stings!
You are going to blow up....AND I’M JUST SO READY
A friend of mine bought this game when it released in the UK for Amiga 500 . I didn't even know it existed, it was on 10 x 3.5 floppy discs, this was one of 3 games that blew me away on the Amga, the other two where Civilisation and Dune 2: Battle For Arrakis.
I think another key detail is the intent and focus to make sure the player never really feels safe.
Just earlier today, I'm on my first real playthrough on beginner. I admit, I've been save-scumming a fair bit. And got a good monthly review, certainly...
...Then I find that the UK signed a secret pact, and withdrew funding. The UK, who is right next to my base in Switzerland!
hell yeah! another Rycluse video! i just added your name to my computers dictionary my dude, i hope youre hyped!
You’re not wrong about the character-stuff. Being able to personalise them makes for attachment that definitely causes savescumming.
It may also have something to do with having a 100% shot but still missing for whatever reason.
What’s funny is that I often customise my characters to look like a swat team, with face masks and helmets so you can’t really know what they looked like, but even then I have trouble letting them die.
It’s both good and bad that they aren’t just a commodity. If they don’t matter, you don’t have to care, but if they do matter, you won’t explore the options.
I’ve many times risked the whole team, or savescummed, when a member of my squad gets mind controlled. If taking them out was a better option, I should do it. If they posed a bigger threat, maybe, but it’s just easier and less risky for me to shoot the alien and have my guy back. It really should be better to just take out your squad mate, or at least they should be able to do real harm.
My favorite thing about original xcom is the fact that I completed it on my phone.
It's interesting to see you contrasting xcom with modern iterations. Much of what you're finding didn't feel that way when we played it back in the 90s. I guess that's part of the evolution of a classic.
For anyone that played X-com in the mid 80s, this was a game changer. This and Doom were and still are special.
I blame gamers for it.
XCom: Enemy Unknown was a good game. It had unique soldiers, skill trees, and, as you discribed, a lower mortality. It all fittet toghether nicely, but it was more stargate then starship troopers. So, of course, gamers whined about not being chalanged enough.
XCom2 tried the make soldiers face danger and even death more often, by making aliens more deadly and adding countdowns to nearly all missions, so players can't just overwatch-crawl through the level. So, of course, gamers whined about being pushed out of their comfort zone. The most used mod at this time was "remove timers"
XCom2 War of the choosen removed most timers, but keeped the voice lines unchanged, so now we have "We have to move fast commander!" while there is no time limit. And it also made soldiers more unique with friendships and an additional skill tree, but they also keept the "soldiers getting random one shot killed" even behind full cover, with full hp and best gear. It's a mess. But still one of the best turn based games^^ Would addvise going into it with the expection of an rambo style action movie, where the main cast can change at any second.
I like Enemy Unknown, but UFO Defense is obviously the OG. My dad actually got me into it when I was 12, and we even enjoyed its sequel Terror From the Deep, as well.
I think what makes this game so good is that is beautiful and has character, among the other things you mention, like Master of Magic and games of that era with similar art and creativity.
Probably the best reviewer I’ve come across.
Beaglerush did a brilliant mod that addresses the problem of games becoming increasingly brittle as advanced soldiers become more invaluable in XCOM2. It's not finished, but it's available on Steam under "Operators vs. Aliens".
He borrows a lot from Battle Brothers' specialization system. There's only one class, the Operator, and that class can use any weapon. Perks are weighted to be more valuable up front, so even a new recruit is pretty potent. Veterans are *more* potent, but the advanced skills are more about nuance and niche specialty, rather the base game's increasingly superpowered abilities that you can't afford to lose.
I really love the concept and wish it had been finished. I know Firaxis would never depart so much from the successful formula they've already laid down, but man... I'd love it if they did.
When I played the original XCOM games some 25 years ago, losing anyone wasn't an option. I saved often and re-loaded the mission if the loss was unacceptable. I renamed the soldiers by adding a grade to them (C,B,A,A+ and so on,based on stats like e.g. time units and accuracy). I 'binned' the soldiers right after hiring, not keeping them if their random initial stats was a 'bad spin'.Soldier characteriazation in late XCOM games is also a great way to train specialists for different types of missions, which eventually leads to less KIA solders. For example, rescue soldiers will need special training right off the bat, they have to be though guys with 'run'n'gun' skill as they must run to get between the alines and civs, shooting the aliens while taking shots to defend civs.
HO Hi! i didn't expected you to post a new video anytime soon !
Having played the original recently but having learned on nuCOM, I have to say that I heavily agree that the increased graphics and customization does mean that nuCOM shifted dramatically in how you treat your soldiers - and that's /before/ we had XCOM 2's character pool preset! In Enemy Unknown I usually didn't bother too much other than maybe changing the primary color as XCOM's "faction color" that playthrough, mostly because while it was fun it was kind of a hassle. XCOM 2, I've got it all pre-loaded and thanks to mods I can even save other armor designs to them or make sure they're the class I intended. It really gets me attached to them, particularly since quite a bit of the pool are characters from other mediums that I liked.
I mean it can lead to great stories - I've got an XCOM 2 one where Kim Possible got shot to pieces saving a bunch of civilians against multiple ADVENT pods because she was tip-of-the-spear in there, survives by the skin of her teeth as the rest of the squad moves up, only to be zombified by a Gatekeeper that blatantly cheated to know her location with it's Null Lance. I still save scummed (mostly because it was cheating - if the game cheats, I have no compunctions about returning the favor or at least cheesing the AI), but it didn't have the same feel since she wasn't gone the rest of the playthrough. Mostly because I just don't like playing Ironman since it means all it takes is one game-breaking bug to eat your game alive.
TBH, that's also probably why when I finally tried oldCOM, the only name customizing I did was attaching a designation tag as to whether they were rocket troopers, a heavy gunner, scouts, snipers, etc. because of their stats, otherwise I just left it as is. I still had some attachment, but honestly the desire to save scum was even less despite that. Plus you know, giving a woman's name to a guy :P (I may be slightly OCD like that)
Another aspect is that nuCOM reduced the squad size dramatically, which means that by the late game you just can't bring a half dozen rookies as your plasma fodder because you just don't have room for them. It also tended to mean you had a small group of superelites rather than a broader organization. WOTC helped mitigate it by introducing Fatigue, but the main effect was you had two or three squads rather than a massive roster... only time I've been able to get anywhere comparable to an oldCOM roster was when I used a mod to majorly kick up the squad size, along with increasing difficulty to keep up with it, but even then it's clear the game just wasn't built with a large squad size in mind.
And that's just with soldiers. That said, I do think that nuCOM made the right choice to ease your logistics at least in terms of remembering to bring enough clips and the other details. Is it a touch of realism that you also have to R&D and buy the ammo? Yeah, absolutely. It's one of the few games that really gets across just how much of a nightmare logistics can be. There's a reason why standardization is done IRL, and so in XCOM you want to have standard kit that you just mass produce and make extra as you need it. But it's just one more hassle that can bite you hard, especially since now the soldiers are a lot more complicated which means another thing to track. It's probably why Long War is so memetically hard - it just adds more and more complexity along with a quite frankly elitist attitude towards the game and some highly questionable design choices (Removing the cover-removing trait of grenades, really? Showing which guys have loot and massively upping the amount of it you need to grab already disincentives casual explosive use)
Honestly, the only real thing that I think oldCOM would be dramatically improved by that nuCOM had was the cover system - or perhaps how soldiers and aliens interact with cover - the oldCOM cover system is quite frankly a pain in the ass and not at all intuitive. That's probably the biggest thing to bring over, but otherwise nuCOM should be taken as its own thing. And I think that was even part of why nuCOM was what it was - IIRC Jake Solomon's earlier builds were a hell of a lot more like oldCOM but it was just too sluggish and juggling too much, which was why it made the change.
Overall though, great video that hits the nail on the head.
Heh, I was board and named a whole bunch of them after game of thrones characters and then sent them on a series of missions which were then used as my season 8 predictions, the last 3-4 were the ones that I hoped would survive, I don’t remember most of the results but I do remember a few so here’s a list starting with the first to die and then relative positions
(Highest difficulty mind you)
1. Jon snow, killed by a gray after disembarking the sky ranger on the first mission.
2. Mel, also died on the first mission while breaching the ufo.
3.davos, died early I don’t remember to what though
4.arya, ripped apart by one of those bug aliens ( it’s Been a while)
5. Dany, killed in a friendly fire incident involving Theon Greyjoy and a live grenade... yup.
6. The Greyjoy’s, all died while saving a city, although we later abandoned the mission because casualties were far to high.
7. Gendry, M.I.A left behind to save the others
8.cerci, M.I.A also left behind
9.sansa, despite outliving all her family members, she meet her fate at the hands of a plasma grenade.
10. The night king, killed by a gray
That’s all I remember, I do feel sorry for leaving operatives behind during what was maybe my fourth or fifth terror attack.
All I can say is it was pretty funny.
I recommend trying out X-Com Files, it's not a perfect experience, but it's the only time I've been able to really experience the joy of a first time run through X-Com again, the mystery is all there and lasts a surprisingly long time. It's essentially the same game, but it shows that even now we can produce more content like X-Com.
To be fair to the recent XCOM games you can always just play on Ironman mode, so you can get to keep tension and keep the personal attachment to your soldiers.
Inquisitor Thomas This. First play through was iron man. Lost a colonel in a random mission--my best sniper. Had to sacrifice a soldier to obtain an energy crystal. Not being able to go back and find the 'perfect outcome' made the game visceral and engaging.
Isaac Blouin of course Ironman has its problem, the one personal example that makes my angry even thinking about it was when one of my favorite soldiers was bleeding out and I was surrounded by the lost and vipers, so I couldn’t get to him till he had one round left, I ran the only soldier in range to pick him up... and the tile wasn’t perfectly aligned so I couldn’t extract him. I rage quit that campaign.
Inquisitor Thomas Yeah, glitches and bugs are definitely more irritating in games with permadeath.
On the last one finished it on the Ironman and I suffered when my veteran from the first mission was cut off from the rest of the squad by the forgotten and I needed to leave him behind.
Ironman is the way to play (new)XCOM.
In my opinion I disagree with what you said to a degree, rather it was things like the Sectoid Commanders being able to Mind Control and screw over your entire team. Chyrslids being nightmares from hell.
I feel it was the fact the game was just unfair. Even if you knew what you had to do... it could be completely impossible.
Other games try to be fair, give the player control... and this means our failures are our own. The original game would screw you over simply because of dice rolls being so important.
That being said, as you said greed was a large portion... a dead high ranking soldier means time and money and risks retraining them. This means Save Scumming is MORE important because it costs you a resource which could potentially stop you from doing something. If anything with how slow and painful it is to gain stats I feel like save scumming is even more important compared to later games.
Dragoonsoul7878 savescumming is discouraged and you're not supposed to do it (but admittedly we all still do)
It's perma death done right. It doesn't make everything threatening for the sake of being perma death, but makes a few real threats that makes retreating a legit strategy.
Man. Nostalgia hitting hard. I played this when it was new and for decades afterwards. I love the new games (was playing WOTC earlier today, actually) but there are lots of things I must as about the first one. The medium size squads. Electro lamps. Real base design. Sigh. I can still bear the snakeman scream.