Saturday!
Less than a week away from XCom 2.
If you are one of the olds out there, you remember the original XCom: UFO Defense. A brilliant game that had the simple conceit of “aliens are invading and they’re so much more advanced than we are — we’re all going to die oh my gosh we’re all going to die”. So you get lucky here or there, kill a straggling alien, take their guns and armor and begin to reverse engineer them… and, if you’re lucky, not too many of your best soldiers will die fighting these aliens.
In 2012, they came out with the Official Reboot of the series. It was awesome. The Mindless Diversions 2012 Game Of The Year, back when that was still a thing. I played the ever-living heck out of that game.
Well, they’re coming out with a sequel next week… and it’s PC only. Nothing for the PS4 or XBone. The argument is that they’re relying on procedural maps and the AI needs the biggest/best CPUs in order to properly fight back against the player. (Other arguments include “hey, you see how bad AAA companies mess up ports to the PS4/XBone, they didn’t want to do that” and “the PC XCom sold millions of units, the console one sold about 100,000”.)
So I probably won’t be getting it until after the “awesome for 2010” PC I currently use becomes a “awesome for 2014/2015” one.
But this looks pretty awesome:
So… what are you playing?
(Picture is “Untitled” by our very own Will Truman. Used with permission)
Given my pc is from 2006 i doubt I could run this game now, but it’s 7 dollars on steam. Worth a shot after the new comp is set up.
We’ll see about the new one.Report
My friend who’s seriously into the Long War mod runs it well enough on a last-generation laptop. The graphics aren’t set to maximum coolness, camera rotation isn’t particularly smooth and the quicktime events stutter, but it’s functional. Another big problem with a real old computer might be the OS you’re running and if it supports a recent enough version of DirectX.Report
So excited. I’m playing XCOM again in anticipation of the impending release. I’m playing on Classical difficulty, a level I beat only once, and only by save-scumming the hell out of it, and being so stressed out by it that it was work rather than play to beat it. I tried my hand at the Long War mod and I loved all the changes Long War Studios implemented. They created the game all us old-school XCOM players really wanted (don’t get me wrong–I LOVED the 2012 reboot). Long War was a bridge too far for me, but the lessons I learned from trying my hand at Long War have definitely improved my game play on Classical.Report
Arrgh! I just had a very frustrating Fallout 4 experience!
Speaking generically: I was given a mission from the (spoiler) and I accepted it. The options were then “do the mission” or “tell one of the other teams out there about the mission”.
When I opted to “do the mission”, I was told “if you do this, you’ll be making an enemy of the other team for the rest of the game… you sure you want to do this?”
So I backed off. There were still some missions I wanted to do for the other team.
So I went to the other team to do a mission and, after I accepted the mission, I was informed that the other team was now my enemy. Like, not only did they not give me a warning about the consequences of accepting the mission, they didn’t include the option of telling them “hey, so-and-so is working against you.”
At first I thought “oh, I must have screwed up the conversation… maybe there’s some way to decline…” and, wouldn’t you know it, after you agree to have the conversation, you will be accepting the mission and there is no option you can take that will *NOT* end with you making an enemy of this other group.
Which is kind of a jerk move, really. They should have offered a way out of the conversation *OR* warned “hey, if you start this conversation, you’ll be making a permanent enemy.”Report
X com is one of those games that really wants a PC.
Then again, I’m generally of that opinion.Report