The Firaxis XCOM Series

This is why a Phantom Ranger (or a Reaper from the expansion) can be the most valuable soldier on a strike team, even if they go the entire mission without firing a single shot. Having a permanently-Concealed soldier on point lets you know where the enemies are, reducing the odds of you accidentally triggering another enemy pod while moving a soldier in for a flank shot against a first pod. Or it can let you know precisely when to set up an Overwatch trap to cut down a group of patrolling enemies between turns.

Of course, there's a whole art to keeping that point man in Concealment, moving them in a way that prevents them from getting revealed and caught on their own well away from their squadmates. And avoiding misclicks that send them crashing through a window to alert the horde. And reloading an autosave because why the fuck was a civilian just standing next to the top of a ladder on a highway support pillar, Jake fix your bullshit.

Also, there's mods like "Gotcha Again" that add indicators if moving a unit will activate a pod you know about, in addition to quality-of-life stuff like "you'll have a flank shot against this enemy from this tile" indicators.

Edited by Tacitus on Oct 7th 2022 at 4:07:16 AM

I bring you a tragic necro to this thread, Jake declares he will never fix his bullshitSoloman is leaving Firaxis Games.

And studio head Steve Martin and producer Garth DeAngelis have left recently as well. Best-case scenario, some big names in the old guard have decided to move on after successful careers and let new talent step in. Worst-case scenario, someone in management is lashing out after Midnight Suns' flop.

Either way, it's not making me optimistic about XCOM 3, when/if that happens. And even if it turns out decent without those key figures behind it, there's still the redshell spyware incident, 2K Launcher bullshit, Midnight Suns microtransactions, etc. to make me leery of giving 2K my money.

The recent talk where he'd said he hadn't heard any talk on XCOM 3 heavily foreshadowed this. A shame, but at the same time his work has led to a bunch of game following XCOM's mold, fans of Xcom are eating well nowaday.

It's never good sign when several important figures leave at same time

I’m sure they’ll be coming back from the bathroom soon…

Yeah I don't wanna doomsay the end of XCOM or anything, but you lot are making distressingly fair points.

Jake Soloman said that XCOM 2's Xpac was originally intended to have giant mechs in it (as well as bringing back air combat), but the original vision played havoc with the camera and map so they had to scrap that.

That sounds kind of excessive, considering the existing Sectopods were already large enough that a modified model could probably take two passengers. The mecha would also have to be pretty much overpowered to make up for the loss in flexible action economy by not letting the soldiers run off on their own.

Yeah, I'm not all that surprised it didn't pan out the more I think about. As you mentioned, there carries the risk of the mechs overtaking the gameplay and removing the elements of positioning and line-of-sight the game normally has...and let's be honest, we have all cried blood in confusion to line-of-sight not working as expected in our XCOM battles so it probably would have sucked if soldiers still had to consider LOS from atop the mechs.

I'd expect air combat probably got canceled because they had to improvise something else from their original plans.

Air combat sounds more like an XCOM1 mechanic. I don't think there is anything in the XCOM2 lore that could justify being able to actually contest the aliens in the air when stolen tech like the Avenger gets owned by a single small interceptor. It'd have to be some total ass pull like them suddenly discovering Shen or Vahlen left behind a cache of next next next next gen fighter jets.

That or just strapping guns to the Avenger.

It'd take more than just strapping guns to the Avenger. They'd need to ass pull some kind of armour/shields upgrade so to justify it not getting chumped by one shot this time around.

I personally wouldn't expect writing to have been much an impediment to them there considering Raymond "I created artificial-actual-intelligence" Shen and Moira "I inadvertently became a Mad Scientist supervillain living in a volcano base" Vahlen.

Incidentally, I lost interest in those characters because of those plot points.

If the series ever somehow manages to recover from that gacha embarrassment, I think Firaxis should just give the keys to the series to the team that did Chimera Squad.

That's a lot of discussion for an April 1st tweet.

Edited by Medinoc on Apr 4th 2024 at 12:15:13 PM

Nah, he said it was serious.