A 4 part play in 3 parts is an odd play. It’s sort of like Lord of the Rings without The Two Towers.  Either you simply miss the opportunity to grow the story or the story simply ends in the middle of the growth.  XCOM feels that way.

I finished the game in about 20 hours, under a fairly casual pace.  I do have the experience of the previous XCOM to guide me as well as a good understanding of strategic games.  I would guess most people who want to blow through it to do so in about 15 hours, those who take their time might want to go for 30. Slight spoilers ahead.

There are 3 main missions in the game. First to collect a specific alien, second to infiltrate a specific area and finally, the enemy stronghold.  It can take time between them as there’s as you need to live-capture some folks, which can be quite tricky.  Anyhow, the enemy presence gets stronger, better enemies and whatnot.  You get stronger.  The “story” as it is, moves along at a decent pace. When you get access to the final mission, you don’t think it’s the final mission.  You think, awesome, this story is getting bigger.  The actual in-game cinematics reference this multiple times.  Even the last cut-scene is a massive opening for a sequel.

And this unfortunate.  There is certainly closure to the story but at such a quick pace (1 mission out of ~70 I took) that you blink and you miss it.  I want more.  I need more.  I’d like to see some new enemies, so different enemy tactics (the last ones are damn cool), so extension to the story (follow them to their base/planet/dimension).

In the end, I am not so much disappointed as I am hungry for more.  There’s a great opportunity here to add more and I’ll be the first in line with my wallet to take a piece.

Games tend to come in two flavours – strategic and reactive.  There’s a saying that says the best laid plans go to crud once the first shot is fired but there’s still always the need for a plan.

MMOs have a basic strategic element.  You are given a finite toolset and resources to accomplish a task.  You might not know what that task is exactly but you have an idea of what the enemy toolset is.  The challenge in PvE combat is learning the pattern of that enemy toolset.  Since the penalty for failure is time, there’s no real need to develop great reaction skills.  PvP games however, the penalty for a loss is an equal loss of power/prestige, reaction skills are important.  Think of the FPS games like Call of Duty.  It’s next to impossible to properly guess what the enemy is going to use but a strong clan is going to wipe up nearly all competition.

XCOM follows the adage from above.  You can plan as much as you want but if the enemy decides to through 3 mutons, 2 berserkers, a cyberdisk and 6 thin men at you, at once, your plans are out the window.  The game is paused though, so you do have time to think of a strategy but your odds are drastically diminished.

When you are entering an unknown area you turtle – ie take the most defensive position possible to survive while analyzing the enemy’s attacks.  Some games penalize this, some are neutral but a few actually reward the playstyle.  XCOM’s Overwatch ability, where you sacrifice movement in order to take a reaction shot on any nearby enemy, allows you to play in a defensive mode while shooting. Other than grenade launching enemies, your best bet is usually to find cover, wait a turn, then use 1 guy to explore for enemies, find them, then bring them back to the trap.  It’s Super Effective!

Then you get missions where you have to be offensive.  The Terror missions task you to save civilians from enemies.  You need to move through the map, find them, save them, and not die from the enemies trying to murder everyone.  This is a challenge as most enemies take 2-3 shots to kill while your guys die in 1-2.  The bomb diffusing mission is altogether different.  You have X amount of turns to move across a map or the mission fails.  You can gain more turns along the way by disabling power sources but again, you have to expose yourself to massive enemy numbers.  My recent example had my 6 guys against 18 Thin Men.  Who spit AE poison and when they die, release AE poison clouds – which you have to move through to get to the end of the map.

I find this a good mix though, as most missions are defensive and you get the odd offensive minded one thrown in to mix it up.   Plus it’s always fun to mind crush someone from outside of grenade distance.

I always find it interesting to play a game with no-name protagonists.  XCOM’s generic (though customizable) platoon of soldiers never say much, don’t interact with you and can die at a whim.  Still, they somehow manage to become a part of you – more so than the CO, Doctor and Engineer do at any rate.  You’re not so much the commander of the squad as the squad itself, which is certainly entertaining.

Now I’m a decent chunk in, when compared to other games, and feel I can weigh in some opinions.  First, the Tutorial is great but then sets you up for a massive challenge based on the limited choices.  Best bet, run the Tutorial, then restart a new game.  Second, and this is a personal thing, but save often.  This game might list RNG numbers (say 60% chance) but it is never RNG.  I reloaded a saved game 5 times in a row and made the same 17% shot, 5 times in a row.  This is cool in that is prevents you from saving and reloading to get a percentage to work but also a pain if you know that 5 of your guys are going to miss the shotgun-to-the-face attack on the enemy.

The pace of combat is interesting as well.  Things start off easy enough, then suddenly ramp up to fighting 3-6 enemies at once.  Moving a single square too much can unleash holy hell upon your squad, especially if it’s your last guy for the turn.  More often, it’s worth ending a turn with 6 guys around a door so that the next turn, one guy can open it with 5 others backing him up with guns.  Or, you could get a grenade lobbed and kill all your guys in 1 shot.  Your pick!

If I do have a gripe, and I always do, it’s in the balance between research and engineering.  The former only has a cost in time, not in power.  1 research guy can do everything you need, it will just take time.  The latter has a cost in time, power and resources.  Building a gun requires X engineers, Y materials.  Building a sattelite takes 20 days, no matter what.  Upgrading your base may need 60 engineers!  This essentially means you never need to build a lab, if you prioritize your research properly.  You do need to build workshops and link them.  Not only does this increase your engineer count but also massively discounts whatever you decide to build.

A final gripe, and one I had with the original, is that by the time you can train in Psi combat, your best guys are more than likely going to be crap at Psi, so you have to re-train a whole new set.  It feels really weird to take your colonel and say “Well, I know you did 30 missions, but Joe-Bob there, when he’s not picking his nose, he can open that can of soup with his mind.  See ya!” It’s a rather massive disconnect in gameplay.  I was kind of hoping I could train them in Psi, even if that meant benching them for a month.

All in all, this is a “just one more turn” kind of game, where 5 minutes can turn into 1AM in the blink of an eye.

This seems to happen every year around this time.  What is it with the huge quantity of super quality games in the fall?

What do I have now?

• Borderlands 2.  Finished first playthrough, portion of 2nd.  Holy crap a good game.
• Torchlight 2.  What D3 should have been.  Completed 2 playthroughs, fooling around with other builds and mapworks.
• WoW:MoP.  Taking my time here.  Monk has the mechanics a Rogue should have had 5 years ago.  Pandaria leveling is better in pacing, pretty bad in execution.
• XCOM: Enemy Unknown.  Reviews seem great.  Can’t wait to get in on this.  Next to Civ 1, the original XCOM holds the record for most hours played.
• Dishonored.  Talk about off the radar.  I like the stealth genre, to a certain degree.  This seems to have all the components I love about it plus the likelyhood of a series.

Not to mention a brand new 2 week old baby!  Holy Batman, what a great time to be gaming!

I’ve added a timeline section to this website, going over the MMO games I’ve played over the years and a quick synopsis of why I played and perhaps left.

I’ve been lucky on three fronts.  First, I’ve been in the beta for nearly every MMO I have played over the years and some that I didn’t.  WoW and Rift have been my best experiences in those regards.  STO and TOR were my worst (and incredibly similar).

Secondly, I’ve been writing guides for games for many years. I have some on popular websites for free, others on paid sites (Killer Guides for one).  These guides have paid for my computers, my entertainment area and my subscriptions for nearly 10 years.

Third, I have made money playing games.  UO made me quite a lot selling characters and houses and gold.  I’ve done it all the way through WoW and in D3.  I’ve always felt I could play a game more efficiently that the average player due to time constraints and figured I could make a buck selling that service after selling the items became taboo.

I can honestly say that games are better today than they were back in the day.  15 years ago, you had a choice of BBS games or UO.  13 years ago, there were about 4 MMOs on the market.  This year so far, we’ve had 3 AAA launches, 4 F2P conversions and 5 expansions. While there are certainly more lemons today, there are many more quality games to choose from.  It’s fairly easy to find a game that fits your style.

I’m Canadian, so by definition, I play hockey. Thinking about sports as a whole and how today gaming is somewhat parallel to the mass appeal of sports 20+ years ago.  While sports always have an elite level, only recently has it been as much about the psychological aspect as the physical.  This paradigm shift is also seen in gaming.  Games today are much more complex systems than simple muscle memory.  You need to see 12 different things at once and act accordingly.

Professional sports are an interesting read on people.  Single player sports, as games, focus on muscle memory and repetition.  The psychological aspect is personal, self confidence and learning to achieve greatness.  You can see this in tennis and golf fairly easily.

Group sports are different, as are games.  People have roles to fill and the demands of any given role are vastly different based on the sport.  Baseball is pitcher vs batter, with the fielders as a backup.  They only play if something goes wrong.  Hockey, soccer and basketball are group games where you need to pay attention to everyone on the field at all times.  Individual skill is still important but the ability to read a play makes champions.  Football (and rugby) is the outlier.  It’s the only professional sport that the average person cannot play past 30.  Each role has a different task and other than the quarterback and linebackers, no one really needs to read the play.  They simply follow instructions to the letter and success comes.  New Orleans is a great example of how not having instructions (as they have no coach this year) leads to failure even if you have a solid set of players.

Transfer that thought to gaming now and team based e-sports.  FPS games are more akin to hockey, where situational awareness of both sides is key.  The best Halo players are certainly individually solid but the team only wins if everyone plays as a team and looks out for each other.  PvP group games are more like football.  Players in EvE have specific roles to fill and if you try to fill another one, you will likely fail.  The success is based on the leader’s planning.

PvE groups, raids for most games, are a hybrid of both models depending on the game and difficulty.  The simplest of raids are like football, follow the plan and you win.  The harder ones (like Heroic Raids and Challenge Modes from WoW are a good example) require not only solid planning but great situational awareness.  Each game uses it’s own metric for this and gamers tend to flock to the one that best suits their need, baring social connections.

I will keep this thought in my pocket for future posts.  There’s definitely some more to be said on the topic.

I have young daughters and a wife who love Disney movies (long live the USB drive).  Watching the Little Mermaid made me think of how that story line was included in Kingdom Hearts and the sequel.

The first game was a rough take on action RPG with a decent challenge level.  The systems worked well, if not very well integrated.  The mermaid sequence was 100% 3d combat, which was (and is) pretty cool.

The second game went a different route, a fanboy route.  That version’s Ariel was a sing along.

So where the first game took a middle path for difficulty and content (enough challenge), the second one bifurcated.  Half the game was a cakewalk, the other half an exercise in frustration.  Gummy ships, Ariel, the tutorial and a few other spots could have been played by a 4 year old.  Most XIII bosses and the Pride Lands (to me) were frustration builders, even for someone who at the time played a lot of games.

I understand why they did it, some parts were to appeal to other player types.  What happened was that the people expecting the easy game reached bosses they simply could not kill, while the people expecting a hard game found very boring spots.  Those expecting the challenge of the first game, well they were simply out of luck.

To top it off, the game sold like hotcakes. I would guess only a fraction ever finished the game.  Probably why game companies are still using the business model of appealing to multiple player types.  Who cares if they finish it or not, as long as they pay you right?