Video game thread

@Napsack  
Oh amazing, even more hidden bullshit in this game. Fantastic. >.<
 
XCOM 2 is a fun game in concept, but the way it’s put together almost ruins it entirely. I’m still frustrated by the fact that mods like Stop Wasting my Time and True Stealth are essential mods just to make the game work properly. Without them, you start to see just how poorly constructed the game is in terms of basic functionality and narrative context.
 
If you don’t install Stop Wasting my Time every action in the game has about 3-5 extra seconds with nothing happening. If that doesn’t sound too frustrating, remember that it happens with every single action. You’ll start feeling your life slip away as you wait for the game to finish registering an attack for the twentieth time that round.
 
True Stealth meanwhile, is a mod the freezes all mission timers until you break stealth. Without it, you’ll end up in a bizarre situation where the aliens are trying to destroy their own assets, despite the fact they have no reason to think they’re in any danger yet.

@FeatherTrap  
I used to have a small list of mods I would play with, but at some point I cleared my mod subscriptions for one reason or another and, since I still don’t own WOTC, it’s a pain to find functional mods that work with my game. Playing pure vanilla again made me realize what a headache it is. Like the gremlins activating another pod half the time, or not being able to see the entire perk tree or what you can safely sell at the black market.

Oh, that reminds me: Anyone who bought War of the Chosen, can you tell me what you think of it and if you’d recommend it?
 
From what I’ve seen, it’s another attempt at making Alien Hunters but also making the game into a zombie survival game. Also, the new hero types seem to completely undermine the point of the game, which is supposed to be about the soldiers you make yourself. I would spend literal hours customising each one, giving them backstories and an appearance to go along with it…by contrast the Reapers, Skirmishers and Templars seem content to have all that fun for themselves.
 
…oh, also Alien Hunters was pure wet, slimy arse-chocolate and I uninstalled that motherfucker as quickly as I bought it. Literally pay money to make your game worse. So forgive me I have trepidation of an “expansion” that seems to be built around a very similar idea.

@FeatherTrap  
War Of The Chosen actually adds a lot of content besides that. New enemies, new map types, new mission types too. It certainly makes everything feel fresh if you’ve been playing the game a while and adds way more variety, plus it makes the terror missions (or whatever they changed the name to, I don’t remember) more interesting with the locals actually fighting for once.
 
The chosen are a challenge, but they’re not an unfair one. They do however become more powerful as the game continues, so they can definitely screw you, but not any more than anything else. That and they only show up after a certain point in the campaign when you’ve already got decently leveled units with their own tutorial/story mission.
 
There’s a lack of customization and individual personality that you can give to your troops as far as the new units are concerned, but they’re actually a blast to play. Honestly Templars might be a bit OP from what I remember what with their ability to basically scythe through enemies and then shield themselves from all damage for one attack immediately after, but still. Fun.
 
One downside I believe is that the new launcher it also fucks up and makes it so it won’t activate older mods not patched for WOTC. It’s an easy fix though, since older mods usually work fine for WOTC. It’s just an annoyance to set it up because you basically have to sidestep the stupid thing.

@FeatherTrap  
War of The Chosen is supposed to change how the Alien Hunters enemies spawn too. I’m not sure how it works exactly, but they’re not supposed to start randomly spawning until you choose to do certain missions. How that’s any different from enabling the intro mission on game start and never touching it I don’t know.
 
@Napsack  
I hate when studios replace perfectly functional launchers with universal launchers. They’re always complete shit in comparison. The 2K launcher specifically will not close after launching a game unless I go through task manager.

@EverfreeEmergencies  
Don’t you want a useless window trying to sell you shit you either already own or don’t care about that stays on in the background to tie up your router accessing the company server every few seconds to download ads?

@Officer Hotpants  
I’m not even talking about running during the game. It doesn’t close after I exit the game.

@Napsack  
I suppose, I’ve never played it so I’ll have to take the word of people who did. The new units sound like they’d be really great in a different game, I just don’t think they really fit into XCOM, and yes the lack of customisation is a huge reason why. It way seem petty, but the XCOM narrative experience would be really bland if all your soldiers had a uniform look to them and no descriptions you could edit.
 
As I said, I had a blast just making little stories for every soldier: Like the Irish Pastor who fled ADVENT persecution and became a marksman. Or the love interest between an ex-yakuza brute and British sniper who both joined the cause around the same time. Or my loveable Yankee Grenadier Girl who is responsible for more “death by collapsing building” kills then all my other soldiers combined.
 
My favourite experience was playing on hardcore, following the stories I made for each of these soldiers. I usually played them quite conservatively, but after the ex-yakuza guy got strangled to death by a viper, I started playing his mourning lover more aggressively, focused less on her safety and more about killing as many x-rays as she could. In the end, she actually ended up heroically sacrificing herself, buying time to keep the approach to the evacuation zone clear…on the last turn before I could move her, she copped a grenade from an ADVENT Officer.
 
Without moments like this, XCOM’s story is a fairly boring affair of just checking off the boxes of plot gates the game askes you to pass to get to the next mission. I’m not saying those WotC hero units are bad, just that they sound like they belong in a different game is all.

Does Chimera Squad have customizable soldiers? From what little I ever saw, it looked like it was a game about a defined squad of characters.

@ANoobis  
No it doesn’t, it’s also quite bad and dripping with woke/intersectional politics. >.<
 
If it had come out a year later, I don’t think it would be been released at all…since you know, “All Cops are Bastards” after all. So I guess that makes Chimera Squad a bunch of race-traitors.
 
And yes, Chimera Squad drops the stakes from a struggle for survival against an alien menace, to a buddy-cop comedy.

@FeatherTrap  
I didn’t know about it being a comedy. All I saw was that all the material had the same few characters, so I dismissed it. I have around forty soldiers with pretty deep backstories in my X-COM 2 lineup so far. I wasn’t interested in a game about Firaxis’ ocs.

@ANoobis  
Firaxis’ OCs is such an excellent way of phrasing it. Since I didn’t play WotC and it was the last content made before Chimera Squad, I was naturally skeptical of the hero units from that expansion…this ‘Insert Your OC Here’ retcon from the trailer really did them no favours in that regard.
 
Oh also, with Chimera Squad: You’re not allowed to loose a single one. If a squadmate dies on mission, you get a Game Over and need to restart.  
Because you know, loosing squadmates just isn’t part of the XCOM experience…nope, not at all.

@ANoobis  
As long as you aren’t expecting anything out of it it’s alright for what it is. It’s far from an Xcom game, research and manufacturing is extremely dumbed down, the strategy layer is nonexistent, the game doesn’t allow you to lose soldiers, and of course you have a grand total of 11 human and alien OCs with backstories, “personalities”, and relationships baked in in your roster, only 8 of which you can recruit per campaign, with one being essential in all cases.
 
Ambushing via the breach mechanic and encircling enemies to beat the shit out of them is fun, though. I hope they keep the melee action in the next game, if for nothing else than as a last resort.
 
Really the whole game just made me want another XCOM Apocalypse.

@FeatherTrap  
iirc the game doesn’t actually fail you for losing a squadmate. It only fails you completely if you have a teamwipe. Instead, if you lose a team member, it just says they’re knocked out and revives them at the end of a mission. Which really removes the point of keeping squadmates alive, along with all the tension you might feel from that.

Basically all of that sounds terrible. I’m glad I ignored it. To be honest, I wrote it off as soon as I saw the viper waifu recruit. It felt like Firaxis was aware of how much traction the vipers had gotten on e621 and decided to cash in. I had no expectations from that point on.

@Napsack  
Nope. Squadmates go into bleedout guaranteed, but if the timer expires you instantly lose and have to restart the mission.  
@ANoobis  
Worse. It’s a dommy tsundere viper waifu.

@EverfreeEmergencies  
Huh. Guess I remembered wrong then.

@EverfreeEmergencies  
Worst archetype. And what the Internet went into RE8, with pants tented, hoping Dimitrescu was going to be.

@Napsack  
What @EverfreeEmergencies said.
 
 
@ANoobis  
It is terrible, save your money and don’t buy it. XCOM: Diversity and Inclusion Squad can go suck dicks in Hell for all I care. Even if the gameplay was up to par, the story is such cringe my spine was bending into a pretzel shape.  
Remember: Humans need to be tolerant and accepting of the Genetically Engineered Slave Races, bound to the will of the Ethereals and made to conquer their homeworld, force them to serve and be harvested by their conquerors for biomass. If you have any problems with them, you’re a bigot. Obviously.

Overall, I enjoyed the game, but I can’t call it good.
 
@FeatherTrap  
Maybe I managed to ignore the politics pushing, but I figured they were just trying to make a goofy alternate universe. There’s no way in hell the aliens in the main games are capable of allying themselves with humanity, much less integrating into society.

@FeatherTrap  
That’s actually a story that could work, if the developers didn’t agree with their own premise. If I wrote it, the game would be set shortly before XCOM 2. The cringe would be self-aware and Chimera Squad’s quisling status would be front and center. Also, they would spend the game dressed in ADVENT uniforms.
 
The final mission would be an unwinnable fight against XCOM. The twist/retcon being that it was Operation: Gatecrasher and Chimera Squad were the faceless goons that Bradford steamrolled while rescuing the Commander.

@ANoobis  
Yeah, but that would actually take talent to write and you would have to make the point that Diversity and Inclusion are being used as a cover by nefarious actors to lull humanity into submission…and God knows Firaxis writers just can’t allow that now, can they?

@FeatherTrap  
Ooooh, so there IS a mod to remove the retarded delays on everything! Does it also speed up or skip pointless bullshit animations like pod reveals?
 
@Napsack  
>They do however become more powerful as the game continues, so they can definitely screw you, but not any more than anything else.  
Does it even matter, given vanilla XCOM2 difficulty curve slam dunks into cheesecake halfway through?
 
>It’s just an annoyance to set it up because you basically have to sidestep the stupid thing.  
That’s normal for any game launcher though. They’re all stupid and obnoxious.
 
 
@FeatherTrap  
Sounds like Ethereals won the beam-o-war and took over XCOM and are now deluding the humanity into thinking DAISquad is fighting for them when it’s actually wiping out the remnants of real XCOM.

@Barhandar  
No sadly. It’s nice the first time, but after seeing that same “Look out, it’s XCOM!” animation for the fiftieth time you can feel it start to drag.
 
 
That sounds like a bigoted Far-Right conspiracy theory you’re pushing, I don’t see a blue-checkmarked source there friend. Sounds like you need to be transferred to the Muton Slums for some cultural enrichment.

@FeatherTrap  
The description says there are separate mods for removing the other idiotic animations, apparently. Wonder if there’s equivalent of all those for Enemy Within.