Phoenix Point is a new X-Com like game from Julian Gollop. There was a new demo a few days ago. Features shown: >time units >no pods, enemies are always active and ready to attack >abilities, which cost a resource (willpower), meaning that overwatch can't be spammed >classes - assualt, sniper, heavy so far, may be more >squad size up to 16 (not shown yet) - soldiers will probably be disposable >realistic ballistics (each bullet is treated as a physical object) - also means you can shoot your own people in the back >cover that doesn't offer a binary defense boost (i.e. +20 def for half cover, +40 def for high cover) - all that matters is how much of their body is exposed >inventory system >damage to individual body parts is tracked, can target individual body parts using more AP >destructible environments
Still about a year to go until it's complete. What are your thoughts on how the game is shaping up, and how it compares to X-com and Xcom?
I've actually been looking into it recently after I saw a thread about it on SB. It looks pretty cool, but we're in 2018 so I expect them to derp out and fuck it all up somehow. Still, what I've seen so far looks nice, like they added the things that were missing in the new xcom remakes which I never liked.
Nathaniel Thompson
desu the aliens look really boring and generic
Brandon Roberts
They're not aliens, they're mutants infected by an alien fungus.
But yeah, I don't expect them to do anything we haven't seen before. I'm looking forward to this looks because it might be a compilation of xcom elements I like, not some amazing newfangled innovation.
Also, the enemies are supposed to be pretty varied and adaptible and the demos only have crabmen and humans.They said they would add something particularly interesting as the game develops but I wouldn't count on it.
Jayden Martin
>Time units No. If anything, is an abstraction of that system. Try to shoot twice with your TU
Eli Gutierrez
I'm waiting for a geospace video. Gollop is always shilling it, not the battlespace. It sounds fucking dope
Angel Collins
>another nucom but with slight modifications
Blake Martin
I really like the initial premise of the game with the human society being mostly destroyed. I love those non zombie, non nuclear war post apocalyptic games
Jayden Martin
It's OK, Solomom. I'll buy your game, don't worry
Michael Kelly
I like new xcom but don't understand why movement and combat is did this way and why this game is copying it. Points are much better and not much more complex either. And I don't really like postapo.
Dominic Gray
I really like how the setting is all about how the game starts at what would be any other game's "bad ending"
Jason Morris
>>time units dropped >>no pods, enemies are always active and ready to attack dropped >>abilities, which cost a resource (willpower), meaning that overwatch can't be spammed dropped >>classes - assualt, sniper, heavy so far, may be more dropped >>squad size up to 16 (not shown yet) - soldiers will probably be disposable dropped >>realistic ballistics (each bullet is treated as a physical object) - also means you can shoot your own people in the back dropped >>cover that doesn't offer a binary defense boost (i.e. +20 def for half cover, +40 def for high cover) - all that matters is how much of their body is exposed dropped >>inventory system dropped >>damage to individual body parts is tracked, can target individual body parts using more AP dropped >>destructible environments dropped
terribad game, ill go back to XCOM
some features sound very good, specially willpower, which is just brilliant, however i fear friendly fire might be a terrible idea, particularly for overwatch since its 360 degress, imagine if an enemy sneaks up from behind and your assault accidentally kills one of your soldiers, you cant play around that, in X-COM you could atleast face your soldiers in a particular direction to make sure reaction fire wont kill your other dudes, a good solution would be to turn overwatch into a fire cone ability, similar to the "killzone" ability in XCOM 2, that would also mean setting up overwatch requires some more thought, as you can only cover an area of the map
Owen Gutierrez
Tbh I don't get how to play around having no pods. Since enemies are always ready to attack, they can just come out of fog of war to attack you whenever they want right? So you're basically always flanked, because you're always surrounded by fog of war. e.g. when he stood on the bridge in the demo there was no way to make that a safe position, since there was fog of war on all sides. Seems like there's no way to defend against this since you can't use overwatch as much. Imagine how annoying it's going to be to have troops die after aliens you've never seen just come from out of vision and kill them without giving you a chance to react
Liam Hill
Hello Beagle.
Benjamin Allen
The guy in the demo was playing carelessly because he knew where the enemy will come from. On top of that, the demo had 4 dudes, while you will have a lot more than that in the real game, so people dying is not a huge issue. Attrition is a feature, not a bug. The final game is (supposed to) have tools we can use to handle that like armored vehicles. What I'm wondering is whether we will be able to have more missiles in the backpack because one of the things you could do in xcom and xenonauts that you can't do in the new xcom is spam missiles in order to clear the terrain and make sure the enemy has no cover to use while advancing upon you. The demo mentioned that they will have an inventory system and backpack, so I wonder if that will make it possible.
Brody Long
if its like X-COM your troops are going to be MUCH more expendable than in XCOM, thats one think i didnt like so much about the original compared to the remake
so yeah you might get your troops torn to shreds, but there will be plenty of redshirts left to fills the gaps in your ranks
Jeremiah Garcia
>wow, this game looks like a clone of the Firaxis games, right down to the UI >UHH NO THE CREATOR OF THIS GAME INVENTED XCOM STUPID, HE CAN'T RIP OFF OF HIS OWN SERIES
Jacob Roberts
Yes, that's how it works, what's the problem here?
Ethan Bell
Gollop told his priority is to make an advanced AI. I don't know how it'll work, but the demo had a several lack of promised features
Zachary Campbell
>but the demo had a several lack of promised features I expect the game to come out 70-90% done sometime late this year and then for the rest to be filled in through patches and DLC. Then we'll probably get additions and balance fixes on top of that for a couple of years along with more DLC. That would be consistent with how Firaxis and Paradox did things, so I don't think we'll see that list of promises filled out until mid 2019.
Brandon Hill
Considering the gameplay we saw, it seems that getting hit by enemy gunfire is something to be expected while melee is something you absolutely want to be hit by. My guess is that this is how it will look like early on, especially once you get some armor. Not to mention as the other guys said you're going to be totting a larger squad than that, and we haven't seen stuff like smoke, deployable or moving cover, vehicles or drones designed to absorb fire or any types of scanners.
It seems like it will require some adjusting if you only ever played the new XCOM games but once you're past that the lack of pods shouldn't be too much of an issue and chances are you won't miss the damn things.
Christopher Richardson
Finally an actual x-com successor that isn't like the retarded nu-xcom
Joshua Bailey
>Finally an actual x-com successor that isn't like the retarded nu-xcom
right... nothing at all like the remake
btw i dont know if you are aware but gollop loves the remake
Thomas Roberts
>fixed squad size >physical bullets >free aim If they add a real inventory system, my checklist is done. Classes are still dumb and don't belong in the game, even if the willpower system covers for it somewhat, but I can live with that.
Daniel Diaz
The alien queen makes me diamond.
Brody Jenkins
I can't tell if you're legitimately challenged or not, but if he liked it so much then he wouldn't try to make this game and instead would've made another. You goddamn SJW avatarfag.
Isaiah Rogers
When I originally saw it, my first question was how many of the degenerates here will want to fuck it. I naturally assume all or almost all of you. I wonder when the first mutant queen waifu mods will come out.
Adam Sanders
so much unecessary shit copied from XCOM
Why no free cam? Why that shit with only 4 angles again?
Eli Walker
>another nucom but with slight tweaks Sign me up, I love nucoms >focus on the strategic layer like geoscape Sounds pretty good.
Jason Hughes
>degenerates I just want some love, how is it wrong?
Brandon Jenkins
Strategic layer has King of Timers to rule over all other timers! How turtlerbabbies are going to react to this?
Ayden Myers
Oh, there's definitely going to be fuckers waifuing this. Especially after they said she'll be able to give birth midbattle.
Ryan Anderson
Not a fan of the utterly alien look of the landscape in the demo
What I love about XCOM is that you basically play in realistic cities. Near future sci-fi cities at best.
Oliver Lewis
>Especially after they said she'll be able to give birth midbattle. They spit out larvae out of their abdomen. It was featured in one of the other demos.
>implying you don't know
Grayson Perez
>No plans to include multiplayer
And into the trash it goes. I love the XCOM formula to bits, and it's a fucking travesty that I have to resort to mods to play co-op with a buddy.
Ryan Hughes
wait what, you can play XCOM in co-op?
Isaiah Fisher
I'm not loving the art direction/enemy designs but everything else looks good. I think they tried to make the enemies unnerving but the ones with the human heads just look plain generic and all the environments could tone down the brown, add some alien colors to make stuff pop-up.
Owen Walker
There's co-op mods? Does it work well?
Camden Perry
you know you can like something and still do something different right?
since you are so stupid heres gollops going on record saying he liked it
yeah the brown&bloom in the OP vid surely is better
oh wait, there's not even bloom, just brown
Mason Garcia
shiet
Hudson Miller
>>physical bullets >>free aim
well free aim certainly aint available in XCOM but missed shots would often destroy cover in the new games, its not exactly physical bullets but somewhat similar, as for fixed squad sizes, theres long war
Juan Morgan
Is there a good beginner's guide for X-Com?
Oliver Allen
I'd be surprised if their ballistics simulation could top Silent Storm.
Mason James
>missed shots would often destroy cover in the new games It's based on some weird unpredictable RNG, I wish it wasn't in the game honestly. I prefer to be able to have reliable predictions of all outcomes
Luis Hughes
>goatse is love kill all the gays and the faggots
Austin Kelly
>If they add a real inventory system Don't they say in the video they're going to do that? At least some kind of pack you take time to take stuff out of and put back in.
Adrian Rogers
XCOM Enemy Within sort of let you do that, since the MEC troopers had terrain destructive abilities, and heavies could have three missles and two nades if you specd them right.
Jace Adams
Yeah, I'll write you one right now Step 1. git gud Step 2. git gud for real now Congratulations you won the game.
Asher Wood
>I prefer to be able to have reliable predictions of all outcomes
tough i agree its unrealiable and you cannot play around it, RNG is actually great for strategy games, it forces you to think on the fly, which is actually closer to a real life battle in a sense, even the original game had tons of RNG, and in my opinion one particular bit of RNG that was just plain bullshit, each time you downed an enemy ship there was a 75% chance the elirium reactor would blow up, depending on the kind of ship, the chances of getting any elirium at all might be lower than 25%
theres not much you can do to improve your chances and the only way to know if the thing blew up or not is to waste your time and check for yourself
Connor Watson
Yeah I like RNG + risk management, I just want to know what the chance is that a missed shot will blow up cover, or set the car I'm hiding behind on fire
Easton Phillips
The thing with new xcom is that they didn't just remove physical projectiles, they also made it so every gun only shoots once, even if the animation involves a bunch of shots. Since it only shoots once, it also only rolls once, so misses are afwul and devastating, forcing you to take extra risk averse unfun strategies. On top of that you had small squad sizes, so losses were extra crippling. In the original, every bullet your gun shot out was modeled and had a chance to miss or hit, so bad luck was eventually drowned out by the weight of fire and statistics did their thing. In the earlier demos of phoenix point, there were no misses at all, although in this most recent demo, the bullets seem to impact cover. The important part is that having individual bullets means that misses aren't so awful and infuriating and you can make proper tactics instead of just hiding and waiting for the alien to stroll into your killzone.
user, it's not 2001 anymore. I'm expecting them to make some retarded inventory system with dumb limitations that make sure you only get 2 missile shots from each heavy weapons character. I'm also expecting them to reach issues with the tactical game being slow as shit when they scale it up to 16 squad members (as opposed to the 4 we see in demos) and then come up with some stupid system to try and work around that only to fail miserably and make it all shit.
A possible way to play was not to shoot them down at all and instead wait for them to land. When you get the hypercomm decoder, you can decide whether to shoot or wait depending on the ship type, which makes elerium acquisition much more reliable.
Michael Jackson
Extremely hyped for this game.
Aaron Gutierrez
is that game ever coming out? it seems like vaporware at this point
Oliver Morris
>you cant play around that Yes you can, why wouldn't you be able to, you're in full control of where you explore and where you position your guys.
Carter Long
Ignore this fag, he's just being epic. While XCOM is largely trial and error, you can mitigate the severe assblasting you'll get from it by remembering the troopers are expendable at the end of the day. Also, try to circulate different rookies in lineups, that way you have a fairly even spread of troops in the same level range (I usually run four veterans and two rookies/squadies) and won't have a massive hole in your roster when you send a full veteran squad out and the mission goes horribly wrong. Also, try to balance your research, good weapons and armor go a long way.
if you don't play ironman just save before every risky action and you'll learn the game soon enough
I don't even need to think about risk management in turn based RNG anymore because I've become so intuitive about no matter the game
Brayden Sanders
Not that I know of, but there's no doubt one on google. Actually the original xcom manual had some uncharacteristally good tips about the use of explosives and proximity grenades.
Oh, also, proximity charges appear to be class-bound to infiltrators in phoenix point for some reason. Can't remember where I saw that mentioned.
Samuel Wilson
looks slightly better than xcom, wonkier though
cons:
1. forced diversity, no one wants to play as a token nigger
2. shit ui (millenials will love this though so it's a pet peeve of mine)
3. zero innovation
4. shitty art direction, awful lighting, no atmosphere as a result
pass
Daniel Jenkins
>Since it only shoots once, it also only rolls once, so misses are afwul and devastating, forcing you to take extra risk averse unfun strategies. On top of that you had small squad sizes, so losses were extra crippling.
i honestly prefered this over the red shirt legion of the first game, besides another aspect of RNG from the first game i found more enfuriating than anything in XCOM, is the damage spread, your best soldier clad in the best armor can still be one shot and theres hardly anything you can do about it, just the way the dice rolls, in the new game i believe that to be impossible unless you are being flanked perhaps
>A possible way to play was not to shoot them down at all and instead wait for them to land. When you get the hypercomm decoder, you can decide whether to shoot or wait depending on the ship type, which makes elerium acquisition much more reliable.
the problem with that is you couldnt tail them forever due to fuel consumption, so early on how do you know where the ship will land or whether it will fly past you base?
Matthew Lewis
Doubt it. You could get lucky kills from stray rounds ricocheting just right in that game.
Julian Williams
>Yes you can, why wouldn't you be able to, you're in full control of where you explore and where you position your guys.
but you cannot predict the location of the aliens, hell in the demo, one big ass alien spawns directly behind your team, imagine you set one of your guys in the front on overwatch, suddenly an alien appears right behind you and your soldier accidentally shots the soldiers behind him
other than not using overwatch there was no way to avoid that shit
compare this to the original X-COM, your troops could also deal friendly fire, but they would never shoot at a target they werent facing, so if an alien appears behind me, my guy at the front facing forwards wont shoot the soldiers behind me, and its up to me to set up my troops in such a way that i cover most angles of attack with reaction fire troops, but i dont place my soldiers in such a way that they shoot each other, here i can play around overwatch friendly fire
Ian Edwards
>soldiers will probably be disposable
That's not true. Julian said death will be rare and units aren't disposable people.
Jaxon Lopez
>besides another aspect of RNG from the first game i found more enfuriating than anything in XCOM, is the damage spread, your best soldier clad in the best armor can still be one shot and theres hardly anything you can do about it, just the way the dice rolls, in the new game i believe that to be impossible unless you are being flanked perhaps Statistics work both ways. Just as you will over time always get your shots in, so will over time some alien find that lucky shot he needs to kill your best guy. If you're that concerned over keeping your highest ranking officers alive, presumably because of the way the morale system works, you keep him in the skyranger and treat him as a commander instead of a soldier. The real infuriating thing was when the alien dropped an elerium grenade on a group of your soldiers, but that just teaches you to play it smart and look for good positions.
>the problem with that is you couldnt tail them forever due to fuel consumption, so early on how do you know where the ship will land or whether it will fly past you base? Build more bases to get more coverage. It's an issue in the early game, but you have a bajillion issues to get through in the early game, that's the whole point.
I suspect we'll see something related to that in the final game. If we don't get a solution, we'll just have to spread our guys out and hope the map gives us good positions.
Hudson Torres
Man, these nuxcom games are the definition of atmosphereless, soy product. There's no horror, no fear of violence, they're not even campy.
Chase Robinson
>Statistics work both ways. Just as you will over time always get your shots in, so will over time some alien find that lucky shot he needs to kill your best guy. If you're that concerned over keeping your highest ranking officers alive, presumably because of the way the morale system works, you keep him in the skyranger and treat him as a commander instead of a soldier.
i dont like that solution, i want to play with my guys
>Build more bases to get more coverage. It's an issue in the early game, but you have a bajillion issues to get through in the early game, that's the whole point.
but just because you have other issues early game doesnt mean it stops being cheap
besides a bad roll here involves preparing your troops, sending your skyranger, risking them on the field only to discover the ship has nothing of use
after if you miss or the aliens get a lucky shot in XCOM you get over it quickly
>I suspect we'll see something related to that in the final game. If we don't get a solution, we'll just have to spread our guys out and hope the map gives us good positions.
i think my idea is much better, you can play around it and it requires the player to put some thought into it, give overwatch a cone of fire like the killzone ability in XCOM 2
i mean shieeeet, you could even give different weapons wider or smaller cones of fire
William Ward
I like how original XCom had logical environments while this new shit games are just a shitshow of concrete benches and fences put everywhere for no reason
Even Gears of War had better map design
Ethan Myers
>the state of nu-com fans
Matthew Williams
>i dont like that solution, i want to play with my guys user, that's how risk works. If you consistently expose your soldier to risk, he will eventually succumb to it. Same goes for the new xcoms, if you want your soldier to live through the whole game, you have to be extra risk averse. And even then, if the game goes on for long enough, the soldiers will eventually die to bad luck.
>but just because you have other issues early game doesnt mean it stops being cheap I mean yes, but what's the problem here? Looting shit from the aliens is a major aspect of the game. Personally, I never had issues with it. It makes you be careful about how you use your looted resources for manufacturing, unlike the guns and munitions which you loot in droves.
Logan Walker
SOY XD HAHAHAHAHA SOY XDDD SOY SOY SOY I SAID IT AGAIN SOY XD
