I don't know much about the original X-coms or the nu-Xcoms but I've recently been checking out some gameplay of 2 recently out of curiosity and it looks kinda fun all things considered.
I remember Holla Forums shitting on it and laughing at it not performing as well as it could've many months ago; what was wrong with it? Were the devs jews or what?
also Xcom thread kinda, recommend me XCOM or XCOM clone games to play if I'm a newfag to the series
You can start with nucom if you want, that what I did. Then I played oldcom and had a much better appreciation for the series.
For Classic xcom I would recommend openxcom, bug fixes and a ton of other shit that helps it run on modern hardware.
It is not a bad game, it just wasn't as good as EW with LW and had completely garbage optimization
XCOM 2 kind of suffered a bit from a shortish development cycle. XCOM was 2012 while XCOM 2 was 2016.
It doesn't seem short until you realize they also released an expansion for 1 in 2013 and 2 itself wasn't radically different from the previous game, it essentially just continued the story from the previous game albeit by wiping all endings except the one they wanted to continue
It wouldn't be a huge stretch to guess that they probably started developing XCOM 2 a few months or so after or during the expansion for XCOM then rushed the release because they thought they had learned their pitfalls from the release of XCOM.
Instead they got an unoptimized mess and, rather than working alongside the dudes who created LW to have it as a launch experience Something that, in my opinion, not only would have caught far more of the optimization issues but also given them a huge boost in reputation they waited until the game released to pay them to make a second LW mod.
It really should have been released and priced as a $40/50 expansion to XCOM 1 but I suppose the marketing visibility was better for them to release as a new game.
Embed related is a good starting point. It's official Firaxis design philosophy that their games aren't fun to play if you're not playing them one very specific way and the answer to that problem isn't that their games need to be redesigned but that they need to "encourage" players to never try to play their games except by their own very specific way.
Of course, though, that's the issue with Firaxis' design philosophy in general, not the more specific issue of X-COM - or the issue of what X-COM represents for the broader state of strategy game design. X-COM is a very old game, from 1994, that was very, very innovative for 1994. Then by around 2000 developers were really starting to innovate on top of X-COM's innovations with games like Jagged Alliance 2 and Silent Storm. Then eighteen years after X-COM's release a certain studio releases a game with X-COM's name and likeness whose developers seem to not only have completely missed all the innovations made by other developers building on top of X-COM's design concepts, but seem to have forgotten all of the innovations of X-COM's design concepts themselves, and thanks to their influence (read: marketing) - thanks to the influence of Firaxis!X-COM, that wonderful game that's simpler, more barebones than its prequel that came out eighteen years before it - now the state of strategy game design is more primitive in 2018 than it was in 1994.
I loved nuXcom1 but this game was complete nofun. They dropped the ball so hard I can't accurately convey it.
So:
Play X-COM. Play Jagged Alliance 2. Play Silent Storm.
By the way, yes, Firaxis are sleazy kikes. Off the top of my head, there was a fan-made multiplayer remake of X-COM, with one player controlling the aliens and the other player controlling humanity, that was scheduled to come out shortly before the first Firaxis!X-COM before - guess what, it got D&C'd.
This user posted a very good argument and video on HOW the game is just much less fun than the previous iterations of it (including nuCOM EU/EW). The entire game wants you to play very risky and aggressive when the game doesn't give you enough flexibility (on higher difficulties) to actually let you do much more than grenade spam your way to victory (although taking more chances is what they intended). Destruction in 2 is actually way better than in 1 but to base the entire game off of it missed the point. Because of this timer, everything was balanced around it. Aliens had to die in 1-2 turns otherwise it will drag on for far too long and your soldiers had deal enough damage to take them out. It's why the power creep in 2 is WAAAAY fucking harder in 1 because every perk is an active that gives soldiers way too much utility to get them out of every situation on their own rather than combining every classes kit to become dependent on each other. The game feels completely unfair and unsatisfying in the early game when you do have to take those risks not because you can't take a few turns to negate or trick the AI into a certain strategy and even more so during the mid to late game because you've probably learned that grenade spam is the best way to go because grenadiers is the strongest class in the game.
Funnily enough, nuCOM EW already solved this issue with having the player take more risks by hanging the meld carrot in front of them. You can simply ignore the meld and play safer, losing out on that sweet precious orange resource for MECs and gene modding or you can be a little more aggressive and take that meld canister right in front of a outsider. It was more organic and allowed the player to make the CHOICE in how they go about the situation.
If you honestly enjoy the nuCOM games but wish there was more to it (like me) then seriously consider trying LW with both games.
I haven't played enough Wot(((C))) to see if they solved any of my problems with it but from what I can tell from my time with it, they didn't do much.
It's a bit of a shame but if you already have a pretty strong base from which to work off of (which 2 did use code from EU/EW if you check the Unreal script files they used) then it shouldn't be that much of a hindrance.
It was certainly more of a marketing thing by 2k which was a massive shame. I'm not sure if the LW team were really interested in making a sequel to LW but they were probably more than fine with doing that when they were going to be paid. Hopefully their own game will be alright.
Both generations suffer from being repetitive and ending up boring as all hell once you know what's what. Nice cuckch filename.
WOTC solved the optimization issue easily but came with it's own issues. The intel system allowed you to make super soldiers so powerful even the special agents they give you can't compare in power.
Imagine a Ranger with abilities from both trees, or a sniper who could use both pistol abilities and sniper abilities with a sniper rifle that doesn't need both actions to fire who could *teleports behind you* as a free action. Imagine a system so broken it lets you make characters more powerful than a psychic warrior and a grenadier combined. That's WOTC.