XCOM 2 expansion + Long War 2: (11/7/17 UPDATE: See announcement thread)

LordYanaek
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Re: XCOM 2 expansion + Long War 2: Nothing to announce

Post by LordYanaek »

SonnyWiFiHr wrote: If Pavonis choose to make their NEW game first. They have right to do it and it will be right step to make. If putting price on Long War will help to make their own game. Put the price.
They can't sell LW2 not even use "support" systems such as Patreon because LW2 was comissioned by 2K - they were already paid for it by XCOM's publisher.
How much, i don't know, i hope it was a fair price for all the work they put in the mod, including the continued support. I doubt it was well paid due to the amount of post-release work they added but at least i hope it was decent.

What we still don't know is whether 2k commissioned them again to update LW2 for WotC. It would make sense given that LW2 and Vanilla XCOM2 are geared towards different groups of players and it can increase the sales of the expansion pack. If it's the case LWotC will probably be announced a few months later when WotC sales start to drop in order to create more buzz and benefit from free advertisement.
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SonnyWiFiHr
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Re: XCOM 2 expansion + Long War 2: Nothing to announce

Post by SonnyWiFiHr »

Is 2k bad or good guy?
If they terminate this mod they will have problem to sell me another DLC. How many of LW2 players exist ? If number is high you will have LW2. It is cheaper than commercials agency / promo stuff. Judging by number of downloads on STEAM/Nexus it is few milions of dollar/euros for 10 €/$ DLC Long war 2. They can earn money so what is the problem?
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SonnyWiFiHr
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Re: XCOM 2 expansion + Long War 2: Nothing to announce

Post by SonnyWiFiHr »

Forgot to tell.
Reviews of Long War are separate from XCOM 2. How many mods are reviewed ?
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JulianSkies
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Re: XCOM 2 expansion + Long War 2: Nothing to announce

Post by JulianSkies »

2K can't "terminate" the mod, I don't believe, particularly because it's a mod like any other and follows the same rules, I think it's Creative Commons? Do check the mod page.
I'm not sure at all what their contract with 2K was, I think it was just "make a mod", any further details we can only speculate.
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johnnylump
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Re: XCOM 2 expansion + Long War 2: Nothing to announce

Post by johnnylump »

Not quite. 2K hired us to make Long War 2 and other mods and the rights to it are theirs. They gave us a great deal of freedom to design how we chose, although I'm sure if we'd gone off the rails and tried to put in, I dunno, explicit material, they would have probably stepped in, but it wasn't a boundary we felt the need to test. They also gave us the freedom to grant or deny permissions for others to use our stuff, and we opened it up because part of our role was to kickstart the X2 modding community, and there's no reason a mod like Spectrum shouldn't be able to incorporate the lasers and coilguns directly.
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SonnyWiFiHr
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Re: XCOM 2 expansion + Long War 2: Nothing to announce

Post by SonnyWiFiHr »

Deleted million words because yohnnylump was faster

I like playing Long War and I think it is worth buying. Pavonis is thinking to publish their own game. They will be dedicated to their own game. So best way in my opinion is to put price on mod to avoid losing the mod and raise money for what they want.

Beer,Lock'nLoad and Demolition Expert

P.S. I like free stuff but they /you need to push foward for better future.
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Greslin
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Re: XCOM 2 expansion + Long War 2: Nothing to announce

Post by Greslin »

johnnylump wrote:Not quite. 2K hired us to make Long War 2 and other mods and the rights to it are theirs. They gave us a great deal of freedom to design how we chose, although I'm sure if we'd gone off the rails and tried to put in, I dunno, explicit material, they would have probably stepped in, but it wasn't a boundary we felt the need to test. They also gave us the freedom to grant or deny permissions for others to use our stuff, and we opened it up because part of our role was to kickstart the X2 modding community, and there's no reason a mod like Spectrum shouldn't be able to incorporate the lasers and coilguns directly.
In LW2's README:
----------------------------------------
------------- PERMISSIONS --------------
----------------------------------------

Free for noncommercial use: Modders are free to use material from this in their own works, as long as credit is given.
I read that to mean, "You can't commercially compete with 2K/Firaxis with this, but otherwise, if it turns out that we simply don't have the time to do a WOTC-compatible hobby release, please feel free to fork it to GitHub, change the name, and do it yourself."

Then LW2 (or whatever) becomes a community project, possibly even a forked alternative to the main Pavonis line. It's happened before.
dethraker
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Re: XCOM 2 expansion + Long War 2: Nothing to announce

Post by dethraker »

johnnylump wrote:Not quite. 2K hired us to make Long War 2 and other mods and the rights to it are theirs. They gave us a great deal of freedom to design how we chose, although I'm sure if we'd gone off the rails and tried to put in, I dunno, explicit material, they would have probably stepped in, but it wasn't a boundary we felt the need to test. They also gave us the freedom to grant or deny permissions for others to use our stuff, and we opened it up because part of our role was to kickstart the X2 modding community, and there's no reason a mod like Spectrum shouldn't be able to incorporate the lasers and coilguns directly.
Still no mention of anything related to whether or not 2K maintains an NDA or whether or not a LWotC is being considered. I think these careful comments by JL are proof that there is something in the works and 2K wants to keep a lid on it still. Also...eww restrictions on modding *puts back on tinfoil hat*
Phaseless
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Re: XCOM 2 expansion + Long War 2: Nothing to announce

Post by Phaseless »

From a purely commerical standpoint it could also mean that they're not allowed to discuss not planning to work on LW2 support for WotC so people buy the expansion "in advance" because they (the buyers) hope LW2 support will be added in the future.
Saying that WotC will remain vanilla might have hurt sales. Considering there are so many people very happy and content with LW2. Who don't want to trade in LW2 features for additional content from the expansion.

Another possible scenario in my eyes is that pavonis wanted some time to work 95% on their own game and dependent on how far they have come towards completion in that time, they announce not working on LW2 support because they want to direct attention towards the release of their own game - or are happy with dev progress and want to divert manpower towards LW2 support.
LordYanaek
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Re: XCOM 2 expansion + Long War 2: Nothing to announce

Post by LordYanaek »

SonnyWiFiHr wrote:Is 2k bad or good guy?
Neither, or maybe a bit of both.
They are publishers, their primary goal is to make money. They allow games (or in the case of LW2 : mods) to exist but they aren't doing it for free. Whether it makes them good or evil depends whether you consider the entire economic model good or evil and that's a discussion i'd carefully stay away from.
Greslin wrote:I read that to mean, "You can't commercially compete with 2K/Firaxis with this, but otherwise, if it turns out that we simply don't have the time to do a WOTC-compatible hobby release, please feel free to fork it to GitHub, change the name, and do it yourself."
You're probably interpreting it too much from a legal PoV but from a practical PoV i doubt 2K would complain if the community decided to port LW2 to WotC (in case Pavonis doesn't do it first) as it would ultimately increase the sales.

However, until jonnylump comes here to tell us it won't occur, i'll consider it's only a matter of time. :)
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SonnyWiFiHr
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Re: XCOM 2 expansion + Long War 2: Nothing to announce

Post by SonnyWiFiHr »

It is not just to make money. This is like factory. They need to sell product to run factory. If they do not achive that. Lots of people will lose their jobs. It is just money managment / future planing. Every new project needs funding. Right now most of big games are 5 years future planing.
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sarge945
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Re: XCOM 2 expansion + Long War 2: Nothing to announce

Post by sarge945 »

To get a little back on topic, now that the WotC version of the X2 community highlander is out, which implements all the hooks that Long War 2 needs, does this mean seeing the mod in WotC could be closer than we think?
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8wayz
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Re: XCOM 2 expansion + Long War 2: Nothing to announce

Post by 8wayz »

Can you please provide a link to that mod?
sarge945
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Re: XCOM 2 expansion + Long War 2: Nothing to announce

Post by sarge945 »

8wayz wrote:Can you please provide a link to that mod?
You mean This one?
Phaseless
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Re: XCOM 2 expansion + Long War 2: Nothing to announce

Post by Phaseless »

Do I understand right that this community highlander is some sort of compatibility tool for the most used mods? I still don't fully understand what it does.
sarge945
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Re: XCOM 2 expansion + Long War 2: Nothing to announce

Post by sarge945 »

Phaseless wrote:Do I understand right that this community highlander is some sort of compatibility tool for the most used mods? I still don't fully understand what it does.
It is a mod that doesn't actually change the gameplay, but it adds a bunch of new functionality to the game in ways which are mod-friendly. To achieve the same functionality without the highlander would usually be very incompatible or messy.
LordYanaek
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Re: XCOM 2 expansion + Long War 2: Nothing to announce

Post by LordYanaek »

sarge945 wrote:
Phaseless wrote:Do I understand right that this community highlander is some sort of compatibility tool for the most used mods? I still don't fully understand what it does.
It is a mod that doesn't actually change the gameplay, but it adds a bunch of new functionality to the game in ways which are mod-friendly. To achieve the same functionality without the highlander would usually be very incompatible or messy.
The name "Highlander mod" designates a type of mod of which you can only have one and comes from the movie with the same name.
In the case of XCOM2 it designates a mod that changes the code for the core of the game itself (at least what's written in Unreal Script, i think parts of the code are in C++ for better optimization and those parts can't be accessed by mods at all).
As sarge945 said, the mod on his own does noting (maybe attempt a few bugfixes, AFAIK the non WotC did) but it adds new "functions" to the core of the game that can be used by other mods without requiring those mods to include their own core modifications as that would make them "highlander" mods, and thus incompatible.
It was originally forked from LW2s own "highlander" (core) mod and implements all the additions Pavonis brought to the game, and more. The more part is both a good thing and a possible source of additional bugs which is (i think), the reason why Pavonis kept their own core modifications rather than add a dependency to the Community Highlander.
sarge945 wrote:To get a little back on topic, now that the WotC version of the X2 community highlander is out, which implements all the hooks that Long War 2 needs, does this mean seeing the mod in WotC could be closer than we think?
In theory it could mean Pavonis doesn't have to port the core modifications as they are already ported, they could just make LWotC depend on WotCCH or they could "backport" WotCCH to LWotC. In practice i think if LWotC is planned they are already working on it and that won't change (much) the release date.
tracktwo
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Re: XCOM 2 expansion + Long War 2: Nothing to announce

Post by tracktwo »

The LW2 highlander is distinct from the community one because the community one didn't exist when we released LW2. We specifically wrote all the LW2 changes in the highlander to be backward-compatible with Vanilla and to not encode any LW2-specific stuff in it. Like I posted on Reddit back around the original release of LW2, a community highlander spawning was sort of what I had hoped would happen from our version, and they've added a ton of stuff to it on top of what we needed for LW2.

For a variety of reasons we didn't split LW2 into a distinct "highlander" mod and a "LW2" mod and have LW2 depend on the highlander, although this is how the community mods tend to work depending on the Community Highlander (and in a perfect world, I think that's a better model for everyone in general, but it does come with some risks).
sarge945
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Re: XCOM 2 expansion + Long War 2: Nothing to announce

Post by sarge945 »

tracktwo wrote:The LW2 highlander is distinct from the community one because the community one didn't exist when we released LW2. We specifically wrote all the LW2 changes in the highlander to be backward-compatible with Vanilla and to not encode any LW2-specific stuff in it. Like I posted on Reddit back around the original release of LW2, a community highlander spawning was sort of what I had hoped would happen from our version, and they've added a ton of stuff to it on top of what we needed for LW2.

For a variety of reasons we didn't split LW2 into a distinct "highlander" mod and a "LW2" mod and have LW2 depend on the highlander, although this is how the community mods tend to work depending on the Community Highlander (and in a perfect world, I think that's a better model for everyone in general, but it does come with some risks).
So if there was hypothetically a wotc version of long war 2, would it hypothetically make sense to use the community Highlander this time around, since it is a successful, established mod, and since there are already mods that rely on it which would require manual file adjustments to get them working with LW2? Would it make hypothetical sense to use it as a dependency rather than incorporating it?

This is a hypothetical situation of course, we all know no WotC version has been announced as of yet.
mastroego
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Re: XCOM 2 expansion + Long War 2: Nothing to announce

Post by mastroego »

Hi all, new user here.

Just my thoughts/my experience about this situation which is rather unique, I guess, as far as games go.
I'm a gamer since forever but past are the days when I'd wait in trepidation for a new release.... or so I thought up until now?
I buy games on Steam basically only during sales.... gaming time is limited and the backlog is big enough not to feel the pressure to buy brand new stuff.

Yet, sometime ago I read about Long War... intrigued, I dug deeper and looked for more information, ended up reading the Ufopaedia about classes, strategies and so on. I was hooked. I was away from home and, believe it or not, I read most of the wiki as pass-time while in a hotel.
On my phone!
When I got back home, first thing I did was open Steam, buy the complete XCom package (full price, to this day the ONLY full price game I've ever bought on Steam) and then download Long War.
485 hours (and counting) of playing later, I can say it was a worthy purchase.

Then I saw XCom 2 on sale... not a spectacular sale, but after so much fun with the first (modded) title, I felt even a mild discount was enough. So I bought the game, thinking "as soon as I'm done with the current campaign, I'll go with LW2".
I didn't know any specifics about the status of the mod, I just bought the game since I knew LW2 was out.
Then the last expansion came, and I honestly now feel a bit stuck. I know that it fixes some glaring issues with the engine (issues people have been complaining about since release), but I also know that LW2 - so far at least - doesn't cover the expansion. So, both are needed (imho), but together they aren't available.
I ended up starting another LW1 campaign (good thing that it's still great!) and I don't know if or when I'll play LW2.
Now I'm certainly not complaining about my purchase of XCom 2: I didn't do any research out of a combination of laziness and excitement about the game, and BTW, even combining the two, I still got more than my money's worth with LW1 alone. That's honestly true.

So what can I say. XCom 2 for me is on hold for the time being. I still haven't bought the expansion. This is not meant as a provocative statement, it's just what I'll end up doing as a customer/gamer: if and when LW2 will be made compatible with the expansion, I'll buy it immediately even at full price (which would make it my second full price purchase on Steam :) ). For now at least I'm not interested in the vanilla experience so... I'd buy the expansion (priced as a full game, incidentally) even for the engine fixes alone but I'm just not playing the game at the moment.

Sorry for the long post, just wanted to add a perspective that's perhaps shared by other players :)
Cheers and thanks for all the good work on these titles.
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Re: XCOM 2 expansion + Long War 2: Nothing to announce

Post by Greslin »

mastroego wrote:For now at least I'm not interested in the vanilla experience so... I'd buy the expansion (priced as a full game, incidentally) even for the engine fixes alone but I'm just not playing the game at the moment.
This is kind of where I'm at right now with WoTC.

There are so many good aspects of it. The performance is much better, and the Lost fights are lots of fun. I could give or take the Chosen themselves, as they're a bit cartoon-y for my tastes. And overall, I think with the new covert action system, there are WAY too many things going on at once in the strategic layer for me to be too invested in any particular one bit of data. Too many ideas all crammed together. A lot of lost potential.

What finally shut down WoTC for me was a workstation hack mission that I stealthed exceptionally. Three-man team, five enemies down, fast hack and get the hell out of there. By LW2 standards, smooth and textbook. I was happy.

Unfortunately, I wasn't playing LW2. Turns out there was still a pod on the board and so I failed the mission, because even though I met the main objectives, I didn't risk my team by sweeping every square inch of the map and making sure that every living thing was reduced to dog food chunks. Because, yanno, if you leave behind the bloody corpses and shattered ruins of an ADVENT position, without living witnesses the ayyys will never suspect that the resistance is behind it. Maybe the ADVENTs all shot each other.

So.. after the swearing subsided, I checked Workshop to see if anyone had ported the partial mission completion mod over to WoTC, couldn't find it, and so said, screw it. Done. I'll boot the game again when there's an LW2 version or a close facsimile of one. But I have much better things to do than roll back to the nonsensical vanilla experience. I'll go back to LW1 first.

Truth is: I can't play WoTC right now without automatically thinking about what an LW2 version of it would be. And that's the version I want to play, not the one that Firaxis actually released.
JulianSkies
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Re: XCOM 2 expansion + Long War 2: Nothing to announce

Post by JulianSkies »

For what's worth the guerrilla ops in base game if you do the objective and extract you still counter the dark event, but don't get the material reward. And it makes sense, if you're not clearing the area to lot the damn place for stuff/make it safe to look for sympathizers then you're not going to do it.
Also the base game goes way out of its way to throw every enemy at you, it's a miracle you didn't kill everyone.
Hellraptor
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Re: XCOM 2 expansion + Long War 2: Nothing to announce

Post by Hellraptor »

I am an old fan of xcom in general and long war in particular. Though long war totally spoiled me, in a good way, so I never even played the vanilla version after getting a taste of LW. So I am just playing WotC right now and damn its good. I really enjoy all these new things introduced, especially the chosen themselves. But I can't help but think how much better the long war version of the game could be, for it could be truly glorious. Hoping that you will find time to make a LWotC a reality but I am totally in love with your previous work, so when you finish your own game, I am totally buying it. Best of luck in all of your current and future endeavors :)
FireWolf
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Re: XCOM 2 expansion + Long War 2: Nothing to announce

Post by FireWolf »

You all are missing the point. The "we still have nothing to announce" statement is like over 9000 times better than "hereby we announce that you won't see LWotC ever!"
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SonnyWiFiHr
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Re: XCOM 2 expansion + Long War 2: Nothing to announce

Post by SonnyWiFiHr »

Right now I play LW 2. I even do not know how to properly build soldiers. But I play it on Legendary like LW1. 10 turns mission can be 2h long. Sometimes you literally do not know what to do. Then you start thinking. How many games encourage thinking ? Perfect overwatch ambush - 8 soldiers. No graze or hit and you know that you are in trouble. After 6 grenades you are still in trouble. Then you start taking risks. This is like football/soccer game you start cheer for your soldier and you also start worship god of RNG/RND. I can't compare vanilla with LW2 for me they are separate games. Vanilla small teams is one way to play game, big squads is another way to play. I prefer big squads with higher risk factor. That is all. WoTC is new game. Right now I just do not have time to play it. Even if WoTC LW2 is out tomorrow I will finish my LW2 1.5 campaign first.
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