[Feeback] Leaving LW2: my reasons
Posted: Thu Mar 02, 2017 8:28 pm
Preface: I am really impressed what Pavonis Interactive did with LW2, especially the new strategic layer, the coil weapons, the many small additions the classes and so on. My main issue with LW2 is that it amplifies mechanics and design decisions that i did not like in vanilla nor in the predecessor; although in XCOM1/LW1 it was a lot more bearable.
Just so you know where i am coming from, i primarily play RPGS, ARPGS and strategy games (mostly paradox titles these days), i played since the dune2 and the original ufo defence days.
My issues:
1) Merging of genres: strategy and rpgs
I think all my time playing these games in these genres left me with two lessons:
1a) Strategy: Your troops/units/spaceships etc. are fodder!
They are mass produced and used to grind the enemy into dust, no tear is shed when i loose them (even experienced ones). I had no problems with loosing soldiers in the original ufo defence from the 90ties. Higher ranks were just some stat bonuses and soldiers were plentiful, loosing the equipment hurt a bit though.
1b) RPG/ARPG: You loose a character or wipe your party, you loose!
If i die with my character in an ARPG i loose him/her (hardcore) or take severe repercussions (normal). If i wipe my party in an RPG i loose the game and have to reload.
You can see that merging these genres leads to very contradictory playstyle/approach. On one hand LW2 gives me a lot more customization than vanilla XCOM2 and even character trees on character trees (awc perks, officer training). I level up my soldiers throughout the playthrough and nurture them from mission to mission. As soon as i loose a soldier or even a whole squad im basically trained by decades of playing rpgs to reload.
On the other hand on the strategic layer, it is one soldier/squad out of many. rookies cost very little, equipment is not destroyed i can even buy high level soldiers on the black market or get them in mission rewards, they are replaceable.
LW2 intensifies this dichotomy even further: On the one hand you have a lot more soldiers and squads and the game is balanced around loosing a few missions/soldiers, on the other hand we not only have the class skill trees but soldiers level slower (at least it feels that way) and we have additional perk trees (officers and awc) to even further customize and invest in our soldiers.
2) The necessity of alpha striking the enemy
Personally I don't like strategy games where the outcome is dictated in the first turn/few seconds of an engagement. I like to react to my enemies or being able to react to them. I would love to see drawn out fire fights, pinning the enemy with some soldiers while slowly flanking with the rest, etc.
Vanilla XCOM2 was quite bad in that regard, your first pod was always a non issue due to the concealment mechanic and the rest of the enemies i usually just blasted to dust with my 5 grenadier 1 specialist squad. cover? suppression? flanking? planning? strategy? all meaningless. It also pushed you in that sort of gameplay because you did not have any armour hit points like in XCOM1, i.e. any type of damage means the soldier gets injured.
In LW2 this was made better and worse at the same time. It was made better by introducing more abilities and swarms of enemies. especially on swarming missions, you can't get away with grenade spam (although it helps). i usually found myself in situations where i had multiple turns of combat and needed to lock down enemies by other means, i.e. suppression, overwatch, sacrifice, poison and smoke grenades and so on. It was also made worse because the high density of enemies in combination with the absence of items like the scanner in LW1 means that you can not really flank or move up, because the risk of triggering a new pod was far too high, which means combat over multiple turns was mostly static long ranged fights.
3) pod activation:
This is something very specific to XCOM1/2. the way pod activation works leads to very strange gameplay, i.e. use one concealed soldier with phantom to scout, move your soldiers up close to the vision range of the enemy and put them into overwatch. this will basically waste the enemy turn because he moves to cover and kills a lot of enemies. On the other hand acitvating a pod during your turn, especially i you already moved with some soldiers means problems, especially the famous -i just move up my last soldier and he somehow triggers a new pod- experience that most players made. I don't have a good solution, but i think this play around gameplay mechanics is really tiresome.
It does not help that point 2) reinforces this issue. If fights in general would last a few turns, you would be much less bothered if either the player or the enemy gets a bonus turn.
4) the deadliness of combat/lucky shots:
I guess from a lore/immersion perspective it is appropriate that any shot can be deadly. especially in the beginning you play with soldiers that wear cavlar are inexperienced and go up against plasma and coil weaponry. In that context it is understandable that shots that connect are deadly. From a gameplay perspective it can be frustrating, all the planning, all the training, all the strategy, in the end you are at the mercy of random numbers. When i look back at strategy games there was often rng involved, e.g. in warcraft3 all units had damage ranges, yet it never felt that your rolls on the damage numbers decided the battle. in XCOM1/2 it is the other way around.
Some ideas:
What if missions were mostly attrition based with longer firefights, e.g.:
-Aliens and XCOM personal would start with a lot of armour and similar hit points as of now and but all weapons would shred (the amount depending on the weapon). The first hit would rarely be important, the combats would last longer and you would have to plan combat over multiple turns. The more a soldier/alien gets hit the more dangerous the next hit becomes. You don't loose soldiers out of the blue due to some lucky hits of the enemy, on the contrary you would know when a soldier is bound to die (was hit a few times and got his armour shredded) and can actively plan to protect him instead of praying to rngesus.
-Reduce weapon and sight ranges and movement speed, this would effectively enlargen the map and give you more room to manoeuvre your soldiers.
Together both these changes would make alpha striking less important and extend the combat duration. Basically instead of having combats of 1-2 turns you subdivide them into 3-6 turns. In an rts this would be equivalent of running the game in a slower speed.
-Reduce the number of pods and space them out more, so you don't run into the almost certainty of activating a new pod. To compensate either buff the enemy individuals or increase the pod size. i.e. on a swarming mission there might be just one or two large pods (although the individual pod members should not be all next to each other but spaced out over a screen or two), or just activate all pods on the map at once, if you trigger the first one by breaking concealment (the enemy has communication devices). This way you would rarely worry not trigger additional pods, being much more free to actually move soldiers to flanks or melee.
Just so you know where i am coming from, i primarily play RPGS, ARPGS and strategy games (mostly paradox titles these days), i played since the dune2 and the original ufo defence days.
My issues:
1) Merging of genres: strategy and rpgs
I think all my time playing these games in these genres left me with two lessons:
1a) Strategy: Your troops/units/spaceships etc. are fodder!
They are mass produced and used to grind the enemy into dust, no tear is shed when i loose them (even experienced ones). I had no problems with loosing soldiers in the original ufo defence from the 90ties. Higher ranks were just some stat bonuses and soldiers were plentiful, loosing the equipment hurt a bit though.
1b) RPG/ARPG: You loose a character or wipe your party, you loose!
If i die with my character in an ARPG i loose him/her (hardcore) or take severe repercussions (normal). If i wipe my party in an RPG i loose the game and have to reload.
You can see that merging these genres leads to very contradictory playstyle/approach. On one hand LW2 gives me a lot more customization than vanilla XCOM2 and even character trees on character trees (awc perks, officer training). I level up my soldiers throughout the playthrough and nurture them from mission to mission. As soon as i loose a soldier or even a whole squad im basically trained by decades of playing rpgs to reload.
On the other hand on the strategic layer, it is one soldier/squad out of many. rookies cost very little, equipment is not destroyed i can even buy high level soldiers on the black market or get them in mission rewards, they are replaceable.
LW2 intensifies this dichotomy even further: On the one hand you have a lot more soldiers and squads and the game is balanced around loosing a few missions/soldiers, on the other hand we not only have the class skill trees but soldiers level slower (at least it feels that way) and we have additional perk trees (officers and awc) to even further customize and invest in our soldiers.
2) The necessity of alpha striking the enemy
Personally I don't like strategy games where the outcome is dictated in the first turn/few seconds of an engagement. I like to react to my enemies or being able to react to them. I would love to see drawn out fire fights, pinning the enemy with some soldiers while slowly flanking with the rest, etc.
Vanilla XCOM2 was quite bad in that regard, your first pod was always a non issue due to the concealment mechanic and the rest of the enemies i usually just blasted to dust with my 5 grenadier 1 specialist squad. cover? suppression? flanking? planning? strategy? all meaningless. It also pushed you in that sort of gameplay because you did not have any armour hit points like in XCOM1, i.e. any type of damage means the soldier gets injured.
In LW2 this was made better and worse at the same time. It was made better by introducing more abilities and swarms of enemies. especially on swarming missions, you can't get away with grenade spam (although it helps). i usually found myself in situations where i had multiple turns of combat and needed to lock down enemies by other means, i.e. suppression, overwatch, sacrifice, poison and smoke grenades and so on. It was also made worse because the high density of enemies in combination with the absence of items like the scanner in LW1 means that you can not really flank or move up, because the risk of triggering a new pod was far too high, which means combat over multiple turns was mostly static long ranged fights.
3) pod activation:
This is something very specific to XCOM1/2. the way pod activation works leads to very strange gameplay, i.e. use one concealed soldier with phantom to scout, move your soldiers up close to the vision range of the enemy and put them into overwatch. this will basically waste the enemy turn because he moves to cover and kills a lot of enemies. On the other hand acitvating a pod during your turn, especially i you already moved with some soldiers means problems, especially the famous -i just move up my last soldier and he somehow triggers a new pod- experience that most players made. I don't have a good solution, but i think this play around gameplay mechanics is really tiresome.
It does not help that point 2) reinforces this issue. If fights in general would last a few turns, you would be much less bothered if either the player or the enemy gets a bonus turn.
4) the deadliness of combat/lucky shots:
I guess from a lore/immersion perspective it is appropriate that any shot can be deadly. especially in the beginning you play with soldiers that wear cavlar are inexperienced and go up against plasma and coil weaponry. In that context it is understandable that shots that connect are deadly. From a gameplay perspective it can be frustrating, all the planning, all the training, all the strategy, in the end you are at the mercy of random numbers. When i look back at strategy games there was often rng involved, e.g. in warcraft3 all units had damage ranges, yet it never felt that your rolls on the damage numbers decided the battle. in XCOM1/2 it is the other way around.
Some ideas:
What if missions were mostly attrition based with longer firefights, e.g.:
-Aliens and XCOM personal would start with a lot of armour and similar hit points as of now and but all weapons would shred (the amount depending on the weapon). The first hit would rarely be important, the combats would last longer and you would have to plan combat over multiple turns. The more a soldier/alien gets hit the more dangerous the next hit becomes. You don't loose soldiers out of the blue due to some lucky hits of the enemy, on the contrary you would know when a soldier is bound to die (was hit a few times and got his armour shredded) and can actively plan to protect him instead of praying to rngesus.
-Reduce weapon and sight ranges and movement speed, this would effectively enlargen the map and give you more room to manoeuvre your soldiers.
Together both these changes would make alpha striking less important and extend the combat duration. Basically instead of having combats of 1-2 turns you subdivide them into 3-6 turns. In an rts this would be equivalent of running the game in a slower speed.
-Reduce the number of pods and space them out more, so you don't run into the almost certainty of activating a new pod. To compensate either buff the enemy individuals or increase the pod size. i.e. on a swarming mission there might be just one or two large pods (although the individual pod members should not be all next to each other but spaced out over a screen or two), or just activate all pods on the map at once, if you trigger the first one by breaking concealment (the enemy has communication devices). This way you would rarely worry not trigger additional pods, being much more free to actually move soldiers to flanks or melee.