Some primers about the campaign (some links to part of the reasoning behind those decisions):
- Commander Ironman difficulty
- Grazing Band set to 0
- Aiming Angles reenabled via ini
- AWC perks revealed
- For the first few missions the Yellow Alert System was disabled, then returned to default values
I created a spreadsheet showing all the missions, mission types, squad sizes and infiltration % here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... edit#gid=0
This was a somewhat blind playthrough - I did a test campaign playing the first few missions to get a general idea of the game. I chose Commander because the general suggestion was to pick Veteran if you played Legend in vanilla. Resource wise I read through the Archives and the thread with “Tips that were provided to the press”. I avoided any more in depth guides like the “manipulating mission spawn” guide.
I made good use out of the Squad system, keeping some fixed squads together through most of the campaign so that the officers of my primary squads had around 25+ missions served with the main soldiers of these squads. It felt like a rewarding and interesting system.
With 1.3 just around the corner and addressing most of the concerns I would have brought up I’m gonna save you and me some time and not write lengthy feedback on classes, stealth missions and 0% supply raids that will most likely be outdated by the time you’re reading this. I’m just gonna write some lines on a few topics that I just want to talk about. Headlines might be complete clickbait titles with a good portion of “tongue in cheek”.
The Biggest Disappointments
- Finding an “Elite” weapon attachment, thinking that additional tiers of weapon attachments were introduced only to then find out that it was just a needless rename of Superior Attachments
- Seeing people refer to the final mission as “Waterworld”, expecting a fully reworked final mission, only to then find out that it’s still the same (good) old Leviathan
- Stealth Missions
- Flamer Spec Technicals
Tradecraft is the worst Perk in the Game
… because it doesn’t tell you what it actually does. I’m aware of the constraints when it comes to translations and tooltips, but the complete lack of numbers in some perk descriptions is somewhat disappointing. Why do I have to go to the wiki to find out what the perk actually does? I’m not going to just take the perk and test it with the draconian respec times that are currently in the game. If the game expects me to make meaningful decisions then it should provide me with the information that I need to make this decision. Other areas where the information is not available in game and you’ll just have to doublecheck the wiki on a 2nd monitor:
- Enemy counts on missions (Is “Somewhat Light” now more or less enemies than “Kinda Lightish”?)
- Results for proving ground projects
- Lots of perk descriptions
Redundancy of Debuffs
Of the 3 damaging debuffs (Acid, Poison and Fire) the Fire debuff seems to completely overshadow the other two. Completely disabling enemy ranged attacks is huge and allows for an absurd amount of crowd control. I feel like Fire was in a good spot in vanilla, being a 100% counter to melee attacks, but the current implementation just seems way over the top. I can see some attempt to balancing it by adding a rupture effect to acid and reducing fire application, but I don’t think that this solves the issue and I wish the 3 debuffs all had their niches instead of one of them being this superior.
“Balancing” via RNG
XCOM2 is a game where the outcome is heavily dependant on RNG. The great thing about it is that you as a player can usually make decisions that influence this RNG. This is also an important aspect of the game where individual player skill matters. One annoying counter example to this was Skulljacking. This always had a flat 70% chance to hit, no matter how good or bad your soldier was. You could not modify this by proper positioning, choosing the right equipment or perks for this job or by assisting with abilities from your other soldiers. It was a fixed percentage and you were at the mercy of RNG and it felt bad. Especially since it was such a strong ability that could take out any uninjured Advent Trooper.
Flat percentages that can’t be modified by player action feel bad and take away player agency, and I’m concerned that LW2 is introducing more and more of these, especially on high impact abilities. Having an overpowered ability only work 50% of the time doesn’t make it balanced, it just makes it overpowered 50% of the time - or 75% of the time if you’re lucky and only 25% of the time if you are unlucky.
I’d rather have a balanced ability that works 100% of the time than an overpowered one that depends on a coinflip.
Carrot on a Stick
Despite doing a good amount of 0% Raids/Columns in the first part of the game it still felt like LW2 was showing me lots of fancy toys that I could build but wouldn’t be able to afford. It felt like there were way too many items for which I did the proving ground project (to find out what it does in the first place….) only to then never build a single one of them. It will always be more important to upgrade weapons and armor so that it’s hard to justify the cost for some of the more niche items. Also: why are SMGs more expensive than Rifles of the same tier?
So, I hope this didn’t get too ranty at the end. To stress it again: I had a great time, my only regret is that I played on Commander instead of Legend, but then I would have probably lost to the new strategic layer and the doom clock.
Looking forward to 1.3, I was just hoping for having more time to catch a breath before that hits.
Thanks!