I’ll be upfront about it, I used to save scum a lot in XCOM.  I didn’t mind the damage so much, but some enemy placements were simply unreal and were more or less a mission failure.  This was compounded by timer missions, where it was nearly impossible to set up the team without putting 5 guys in the open.  WotC changes this up.  2 mission examples follow.

Example of a Lost Swarm mission

Mission – Relay Destruction

One recent mission required me to destroy a transmitter.  There were high odds of Lost attacks as well.  (Lost come out like crazy when there are explosions – such as grenades).  I started the mission on an elevated platform (subway train) and moved along trying to inch closer.  I had 17 turns, and the relay was about 3 full moves away.  That’s not so bad, especially since my squad was concealed.

A side note, concealment breaks when you are within ~5 squares of an enemy, at even footing.  By being elevated, I was not going to trigger a concealment break.  More on this later.

I notice 2 MECs, 2 soldiers and a Viper around the relay.  I set up the grunts, shoot a grenade to shred some armor and hit a bunch at once.  The things get fun as I get a message that Lost swarms are inbound.  A few close shaves (Templars are OP to start with Bladestorm) and I take down 4 of the 5 bad guys in 2 turns.  Turn 3 starts with 3 swarms running to my position.  That meant 15 new targets, ranging from 2 hit points to 8.  The fan sure did feel like it was hit.

Creative use of pistols, reloads, and the Templar movement blocking got me through that rush.  It was a nice adrenaline kick to be quite honest.  A few turns later I destroyed the relay and was still required to clear out the remaining ADVENT forces.  I put my Ranger into concealment and started walking around.  Sure enough, I found them in a building and I lost concealment due to the distance issue I mentioned before.  This is a larger issue when in tight corners, as concealment loses  most of it’s value.  I am of the opinion that if I am hugging walls, and concealed, I should not be detected…but the game has a different opinion.  Ranger took a couple hits but I still finished the mission.

Mission 2 – Retaliation

A terror strike on civilians, with some rebel forces there to help out.  Seems simple enough.  A couple turns in, I am able to clear some sectoids and a beserker/muton mix, which free up 5 of the 6 rebels.  They go off like rockets to the civilians.

Where the base XCOM2 required you to physically go next to civilians to rescue them, potentially out in the open, WotC simply requires you to protect them.  This is a good thing, since there is always at least 1 Faceless hiding in their masses.  Staying back lets you clear the map before 10hp flyswatter comes into play.

The rebels start shooting all over the place, but the fog of war prevents me from seeing exactly how many enemies there are.  I take a couple of safe turns to get closer and set up my sniper & reaper. I put a Ranger a bit closer and somehow manage to trigger 3 groups of Mutons/Berserkers.  At the same time.  I couldn’t help but start laughing at the incredible bad luck.  My wife even noticed.

Thankfully Berserker AI has them go after the nearest enemy, and Muton AI will run away if they are not in cover, and throw grenades when soldiers are within 3 spaces of each other.  Destroying cover with grenades and moving the soldiers apart helps break up the groups.  The Templar can “tank” a Beserker too, since he can melee, retaliates with melee when someone moves near him, and can shield fully against melee (partial for ranged).  I took 2 points of damage over 4 rounds of combat, which is really quite nice!

I’ve covered the big three – the Lost, the Chosen, and the Rebels.  At least in the context of tactical/map play, and some of the strategic impacts.  Now it’s time to cover some of the smaller system changes.

Covert Operations

I covered this a bit, but it bears more detail.  After the 2nd mission, you get to build the Ring facility in the base.  This allows you to run 1 (or more with upgrades) Covert Operation for a given faction.   You are presented a list of options, with various rewards – roll back Avatar progress, find a Chosen, get intel/supplies, get new items, get scientists/engineers/soldier, or even new contact options (yay!  no more massive resistance comms).

Each takes a few days to run, and requires 2 soldiers of a given rank.  There are bonuses applied after the mission to those soldiers – promotions or stat boosts.  Each mission has a risk of injury and requires a 3rd item to reduce the chance – supplies, intel, material, or another soldier.  Running more missions increases faction gain, and unlocks more missions.  You never need to actively run the mission, it just goes on in the background.

But there’s a chance for failure.  Either they get captured and you send a rescue mission, or they need an emergency ex-filtration.  This last one is quite fun as you’re only given the 2 soldiers assigned and an entire map to traverse… all while being chased by the enemy and trying to avoid fire.  I’m sure some people would try to gun it out, but I just ran for the hills.

Monthly Orders

At the start of every month, you can issue orders to the various factions which provide a monthly passive benefit to rest of the month.  You can only assign a given order to either the faction it belongs to, or to the generic XCOM faction.  There are slight upgrades to them as well, so that one may give 10% more intel and the next gives 15%.  It’s a nice strategic layer, but at the early point of the game, it’s really not a tough choice.  You want to slow down Chosen progress, and increase overall gains.  Maybe there will be harder choices later in the game.

Research

There are two changes here – breakthroughs and insights.  The former is a one-time chance to research a unique benefit to the team.  Could be more damage for a single class, reduce build costs, add upgrade slots – all very useful.  It takes 5 days to research one of these and if you skip it, you lose it.  Or at least, you need to wait until it comes back into the rotation… which could be at the end of the game.

Insights are simpler.  They just reduce the research cost by 50% but only projects that are already available.

It does make for interesting choices, from time to time.  Maybe you need to choose between a permanent buff to Ranger damage, versus getting magnetic weapons.  Or an immediate research of Sectoids to unlock Psionics.  I find that in most cases, the Insight of Breakthrough is the better choice – but it is really a hard choice to push off fundamental units upgrades (armor/weapons).  The more interesting bit is that it appears that you can attain similar power levels to Plasma weapon research, with the appropriate breakthroughs.  This really means that there’s no longer a “perfect research” path, or even more importantly “a wrong way to research”.

Mission Types

I have not seen them all, certainly, but what I’ve seen has left me quite happy.  One of my main gripes in the main XCOM2 was the missions with an artificial timer that forced you into very complicated situations.  I understand the purpose – making missions shorter and more mobile – but the end result felt like artificial difficulty.  In particular on some maps where the enemy placement was very tight.

WotC still has time missions but they are very generous and quite varied.  Maybe you have 12 turns to take out a general, or 4 to hold your ground, or 6 to take out a relay.  Odds are there are ways to increase that timer during the mission as well.  The urge to move forward is still there, but it doesn’t feel punishing as you no longer need to use all your AP in a single turn.

Missions themselves fall into a few general categories – Guerrilla (where you chose one of multiple), Council, Retaliations, Assaults, Raids, and Defense.  These include killing/rescuing someone, finding and holding onto some materials, attacking facilities to reduce Avatar progress, protecting civilians from Advent attacks, or just defending the Avenger itself.  Map types have been expanded and include more variations than before – the sewer run is a pretty neat tileset.

This is not a massive change, but more of a quality of life change.  Things seem simply more varied and balanced.  Each mission can be tweaked by Advent bonuses – say a bleeding effect from bullets, or all enemies are shielded…so making choices is quite important.  Some even sound simple, until a Chosen suddenly shows up and starts taking you to town.

Soldier Impacts

This one is somewhat subtle to start, but can get hectic.  Each soldier has a fatigue meter, that drains after each mission.  You can re-use someone that’s tired, but that risks them being in recovery mode for a longer period of time.  Soldiers can also acquire negative traits – such as a fear of Sectoids – that can make you go bananas when it actually triggers.  You can remove these traits, but it takes a fair chunk of time.

The result is that you need a much larger and varied squad than before.  There are missions where you simply have no choice in the soldiers to send due to outstanding recovery times.  That “perfect” squad is a thing of the past, and you’ll be continuously adding Rookies and Squaddies to each mission… just to pad out the roster.  It certainly removes a lot of the anxiety of save scumming to avoid injuries, since no matter what, people are going to be benched on the next mission.

Overall

I think that covers the majority of the obvious changes in XCOM2.  There are big ones and small ones, but the underlying foundation is relatively the same. It integrates very well with all the existing systems, including the DLC released previously.  Where the base game had an optimal path that felt you slowly losing over time, WotC has so many viable paths it seems to stretch out the game even farther than before.

It is really a borderline expansion/sequel, and I find myself continually impressed at the amount of options and things going on at any given time.  A super game and highly recommended.

I’ve talked about the Lost, and the Chosen, two pieces that have a tactical change to the way the game plays and make maps a bit more engaging (and stressful).  Now I’ll talk about the Rebel factions.

In matching with the Chosen, there are 3 factions.  Reapers, who are more like super stealthy snipers.  Templars, who are quite good at psionics.  Skirmishers, who have good movement skills and can pull enemies out of cover.  (sidebar here – Skirmishers work absolute miracles on fast/covered enemies)  They apparently hate each other, but I can’t see any game-impacting effects of this.  They appear to simply be 3 factions that you can need to gain favor with.

Now it gets a bit more complicated.

You can recruit members of these factions, and rather than have a left/right skill tree, they have more of a talent grid that unlocks over time.  You get skill points (AP) per mission, those are used to unlock the items in the tree, once you gain appropriate rank.  You can eventually get all those skills… making for uber soldiers.  You get 1 of each soldier per faction, and late game you can recruit a 2nd per faction (with appropriate favor).

Reaper skill tree

Let’s talk Reaper for a second, since that’s the first one you get to use.  Super sniper, can stay in stealth after attacking (% chance at least), similar skill set as the regular sniper.  Heck, they can go back into stealth after attacking with another skill.  They can even unload an entire clip into 1 target.  More like shadowy death to me…

Each faction has favor (reputation) to gain.  More favor, more benefits.  You can run Covert Ops for a given faction, using your soldiers for “passive” missions.  These missions allow you to increase the rank of soldiers, gain intel, resources, or additional tactical missions (like recovering a taken soldier).  Ideally, these should always be running.

Each faction also unlocks a scanning target for Intel, so long gone are the days where there’s nowhere to scan on the planet.

Each month, you have what amounts to a deck of cards to deal to the various factions for additional benefits (Resistance Orders).  Could be cheaper soldiers, damage boosts, additional resource gathering, reducing progress on the Avatar project…but you’re limited to the amount of bonuses (cards) based on the total favor with the factions.  This is quite useful, and adds a good layer of strategy to the game.

Clearly, there are nothing but benefits to gaining favor with Rebels.  But wait, there’s more!

In the base XCOM2 game, there were terror missions where you needed to protect 12-20 civilians from Advent forces.  I had a heavy dislike for these missions as the civilians had next to no HP, poor AI, and it was like shooting fish in a barrel on the other side of the map.  An early map has a similar mission (the Faceless unlock) but it also comes with Rebels under attack.  If you can save them, they in turn help you by attacking the Advent.  Their aim is terrible, and the damage is small, but they essentially become target practice for the enemy.  This gives a lot more room for your soldiers to do their work.  From a mission type I tried to avoid, to one I thought was a ton of fun… that’s an achievement.

Overall, Rebels add both a strategic and tactical change to the game, in nearly every aspect.

The namesake of the expansion, the Chosen are a set of 3 alien champions that you encounter throughout the game.  There are 3 of them, a hunter/sniper, a close ranger assassin (with stealth), and a psionic warlock.  They are sort of like Orcs using the nemesis system from Shadows of Mordor, in that over the course of the game, they develop weaknesses and strengths based on play against you.  They are quite deadly.

One of the earlier missions has you fight the assassin, who does not trigger overwatch, has super stealth, and what seems double movement range.  Long story short, she will hit one of your soldiers.  On my map, she disoriented one (needing someone else to come by to stabilize), then hid on the 2nd floor of a building.  I need to launch a grenade to break down the wall in order to give my sniper a chance at hitting her.  Thankfully it was a set map, so there were no other enemies during that time (Lost came out afterwards).  She then captured one character (again, planned piece) though apparently she can continue to do this in other encounters, which triggers the ability to recover that soldier.

Where the Hunters expansion had ultra hard bosses with permanent effects, the Chosen grow in power with you.  You can chase them from a map, but they always have a chance to show in any future map within their influence “zone”.  You only ever get rid of them later in the game by taking them out at their base.  And if you aren’t paying enough attention, then can eventually attack your base.

This makes them a rather permanent threat throughout the game, rather than acting like a boss character. I’m still early, so I’m quite curious as to their rate of attendance in maps, but it’s one more thing on the map to stress about.  And they make it so that there is pretty much no chance of a perfect play once they do show up.  In the base XCOM2 maps, it was entirely possible to have multiple map clears with no injuries or casualties.  I am not seeing that as a possibility with these buggers.

It’s quite hard to find an analogy in gaming as to what these characters represent, aside from the previous SoM reference.  It feels like a customized AI opponent, that continues to tailor the response over time.  Where the original had a rather nebulous end goal of saving the world without any arch-villain, this time there’s some additional motivation within.  They are not the end goal by any means, but they certainly add a personal touch to everyone’s game experience.

One of the more interesting aspects of strategic RPGs is the character growth… and XCOM is no slouch in this matter.  My end-game sniper from my last playthrough could take out an entire 6 man rookie squad solo.  Going from that mindset, to starting fresh, well it’s quite jarring.

The last mission I did involved most of the new mechanics (rebels, chosen, bonds, new skills, mission types, research boosts), but this post will only focus on the Lost portion.  The mission started with me splitting my 4 man team into 2s, then doing two separate maps with a guest character to add to the team, each.  Once those maps were done, both teams joined up for the next mission.

The Lost are a zombie-like faction, with low hit points, but they attack in a swarm of 3-6 at once.

1 of 4 swarms this mission

The neat feature here is that if you successfully kill one you get a free action back.  That’s useful when you have a rather large squad, with solid aim and a lot of ammo.  I have very little of that at the start of the game.  Aside from one guest character (sniper) everyone is at 60-70% aim chance, even at point blank.  Those aren’t exactly top odds.  And grenadiers only have 3 ammo –  another resource that needs to be managed.

The good news is that I have grenades.  Lots of grenades.  And each does enough damage to take out a Lost, but I don’t get the action point back.  Choices.

I forgot to mention that Lost are attracted to noise, so the more noise you make, the more swarms come towards you.  Even more fun.

All told, I killed a few dozen enemies in that set of maps.  Thankfully it was all Lost and no other types.  A solid mix would have made it a pile of pain.  It was certainly an entertaining set of mechanics, feeling more like “horde mode” from other games.  I’m quite curious how that will work out in later missions, where ammo isn’t so scarce, and my aim% is much, much higher.

I can still clearly remember playing the original XCOM back in high school.  I was completely fascinated by it.  The computer I had at the time didn’t have a working mouse driver, so I had to make one.  I was a little nutso for it, and still get chills thinking about Cydonia and losing nearly every member of my squad.

Terror from the Deep was the original on steroids.  Apocalypse was a try at real time battles, with an interesting take on city-scape management.  I skipped Interceptor, and Enforcer, and I was looking forward to a future entry – but they were all cancelled.  The XCOM reboot in 2012 happened 17 years later. It had some flaws but overall was a solid game.  The Long War mod addressed a lot of them, and brought back the strategic play from the first game in the series.  I never had a chance to finish it though.

XCOM 2 was a significant step forward.  It used the same engine, sure, but the tactical combat was much improved.  Melee was viable, as was stealth.  Ship combat was finally gone.  Maps were better designed.  More mission types, motivation to move out of the Overwatch syndrome, and generally improved chances to hit enemies and be missed.  It felt harder as well.  The psionic portion was a little too weak/late for my tastes, though the steam workshop (amazing mods!) fixed that pretty quick.  I played through twice and had a pile of fun.

The DLC never really took my attention.  Alien Hunters lacked balance, and Shen’s Last Gift added Mechs, which couldn’t take cover.  Long War 2 was released but since I never finished the first one, I didn’t really see the need.

War of the Chosen recently came out and that’s a heck of an expansion.  New enemies, new classes, new maps, new objectives, new weapons, new mechanics.  There are negative traits for characters (like Darkest Dungeon).  There are rebel factions to join with, zombie hordes, as well as bonds between characters that increase their skills.  I’ve seen sequels with less content.

So far, I’m a few intro missions into the game, trying to remember what I did last time.  Grenades are still your best friend for low levels, given that they 1 shot weak enemies, and break cover.  There’s nothing worse than an entire squad missing an enemy 4 spaces away.  I’m quite excited for this playthrough!

I picked it up during the summer sale.  Haven’t really put a lot into it yet, or at least it doesn’t feel like I have.  I picked Corvo and I’m up to mission 4 – the clockwork tower.

I really liked the first one.  There was a lot of freedom of movement, and you could approach nearly every mission from multiple angles.  There were only a few “hard walls” that required you to take a different path, and after about half of the game you had all the tools you really needed to move forward.  I played relatively safe, with only a few kills.  Plus the art/style was neat.

Dishonored 2 is different.  The skills are similar enough, two for movement, the rest for attacks.  The teleport/pull skill works well enough, making some portions easier to move through.  The shadow walk skill is less fun, since it changes your view point, slows you down, and enemy suspicion seems inconsistent.  It does allow passing through grates, bypassing some sections, but rarely to any benefit.  The art is still really solid, and the story/characters are better than the first.  Atmosphere-wise, it hits all the right notes.

I am not a fan of the map layouts.  Rather than have multiple paths that meet at certain points, this one feels more like a maze of dead ends.  There are generally less enemies, but there are more locked doors/paths, forcing your hand at specific puzzles.  I would rather entirely avoid the 3 guards than try to distract/stun the bunch and run through in shadow form.  There’s one part in the clockwork mansion where you slip between floors then are given 5 paths to take.  Two were locked, 2 were dead ends, and one was the way forward.  I must have missed something there.  I also seem to spending a very large amount of time in buildings, rather than outside of them.

I also dislike the clockwork robots, since you can’t take them out with stealth moves and they hit like a truck.

Exploratory/stealth games are measured by player failures.  Your ability to recover from a mistake.  I may just be worse at it, but I find myself reloading a lot more here than I ever did in the first game.  I really like trying out new ideas/paths and seeing what happens.  I just find that the timing is off and some places are designed for a single (or minimal) solutions.  It feels as this is a rogue-like game more than an exploration game.

I don’t necessarily regret the purchase, it’s just not what I had envisioned.  I’m sure I’ll end up completing it at some point, but over a larger span of time.

My answer in 2017 is much different than it was 20 years ago.

Diablo 3 is the simplest example of a skinner box at hand and I am playing it in spurts.  Pretty much every game today has some form of “grind” within in order to artificially extent the end of the game.  Most are built on the concept of logarithmic power curves – that is, progress at the start is much more pronounced than at the end.

D3 has this in spades.  It takes relatively little effort to be able to clear T6 content.  A fresh player may take 4-5 hours.  An established player can get someone from 0 to T6 in about 20 minutes.  Getting to T10 can vary, depending on rolls for gear and some luck.  Let’s say another 10 hours or so.  T13 is another ball game, as it required near optimum pieces of gear and rolls.  Not only do you need the proper item, you need it with the proper stats.

For example, for one build I am trying, I need to equip a Ring of Nailuj Evol.  This ring has never dropped for me, and I’ve seen hundreds of legendary/set rings by now.  I had to craft around 500 to get 1.  And rings can roll pretty much any and all stats, whereas I need 3 core – crit hit chance (1-10), crit damage (10-50), and a socket.  I can make due with 2 of the 3, since I can enchant another part.  If I don’t have those 2, then I need to actually re-roll the item entirely.  That requires Bounties (clearing 5 quests per act, for a total of 25).  Each Bounty clear allows me to reroll twice (at T10).  It was about 30 runs before I had the 2 minimum stats, and each run is 15-20 minutes.

That was for 1 piece of gear.  I have another ring, an amulet, gloves, and a weapon that are hyper dependent on stats, all pulling from a large pool.  I’m drawing the line at 30 hours here.  I may hop in here and there, but I think my D3 time is done for this season.  Can’t really complain for 30 “free” hours of gaming!

I’m finding that diversity of grind has an impact on me.  Seeing the same stuff non-stop, pressing the same keys again and again, that’s not much fun.  WoW’s legion invasions and activities kept me going a whole lot longer than I had expected. I stopped WoW not for the grind but because I had done all the content I cared to do, and maxed all that I thought useful.

I am not against that grind.  I understand why it exists – content locusts are all over the place.  Heck, I spent weeks camping the boots in EQ, and I raided in WoW for extremely marginal gains for a long time.  I’m certainly not asking the game to change, more than I am realizing that my threshold for the grind is so much lower than where it was before.

I am trying to keep up to date on the Destiny 2 news.  I know what’s involved, I’ve seen enough streams.  I’ve read numerous places that the end-game activities are lacking, which is the main reason I’ll be looking at the PC version rather than PS4.  I’m somewhat hopeful that the staggered released approach will be mostly completed a month from here.

I guess it’s rather official.  I am way too busy with life during the summer to make even moderate attempts at a blog entry.  With a cottage about an hour’s drive, I’d much rather be on the lake, with a fishing rod in one hand, and a beer in the other.

Still, life does go on, and the squirts have both started school today.  We’ve put them into a few sports programs to keep them as active as possible. Getting all that sorted out is it’s own mess of fun, but will pay off in the end. My own winter hockey starts up next week, so that should be fun to get back out with the guys.  All told, I think we’re in a good enough spot for the fall rush.

Final Fantasy 12 TSA

I picked this up in the summer sometime and put in a few spots here and there. 12 has been a go-to version for me for some time, as I find that both the mechanics and story work.  Zodiac Age is a bit harder since it’s based on the earlier re-release.  You can’t all be super-human, instead you need to pick 2 of 12 jobs per character.  I would guess that it would be hard to mess that up unless you were willingly handicapping yourself (say, everyone white mage) but there are optimum spreads.  The rest of the game (gambits, loots, gear, bazaar) all seem intact.  There are a few minor tweaks and balances, but it seems mostly intact.

There are 2 massive quality of life boosts though.  First is the auto-save feature whenever you zone.  There are some parts of FF12 that are absolute death if you’re not paying attention, and then can string together.  This is compounded by the best feature – double and quad time.  With quad time enabled, everything goes 4x as fast.  Everything.  That makes for some interesting battles where you really should be paying more attention to the minutia rather than just watching it happen.  It works great for most level grinding spots, or farming a specific item.  It is near death on bosses and hunts.

Diablo 3

Fits and spurts.  It didn’t take too long to get my DH up to snuff and clearing T10 with ease, and T13 with effort.  Multishot has a cap it seems, and I need to move into impale to go farther.  So.

Necro is ok geared, clearing T10 but barely stepping foot into T12.  Where a DH is a glass cannon, a Necro is a wet tissue/nuclear bomb.  Either you one-shot everything, or you die.  It’s a weird class compared to others, as at top levels it’s much more about the mechanics than it is about movement and target placement.  Where some classes get by with passive boosts that increase overall damage, the necro needs what seems like every piece to work with another, and a specific skill setting to get the best results.  It reminds me a bit of the EP monk way back, where math was very important.

That said, he looks neat, the skills are interesting, and there’s a nostalgic bit thrown in as well.  I can fit in bits of game here and there, but the concept of eternal grind is not at all appealing.