Tactical Indie RPGs - The sucessors of X-COM, Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy Tactics and Heroes of Might and Magic.

I picked up Xenonauts 2 and I gotta be honest... I'm not super impressed. Enemies feel like wet fish flopping over. I feel like the readability in regards to directionality and LOS is crap, the tutorial forcing you to click exactly as they want down to the tile is a nuisance, and every action just feels generally weak. Blowing someone up with a grenade has the feed of popping a balloon. And what's weird is I don't remember being this disatisifed with the in-game feedback for the first Xenonauts?

Menace still needs time to cook, it's still very rough down to the text boxes, but you can already "feel" there's something there. But I am not very captivated by Xenonauts 2 so far. A few things I think might help, would be some low end for the sound effects, and maybe don't display LOS for things like grenades if you don't actually have LOS around the corner. OpenXcom "feels" weighter than this and the ballistics simulation seems to be superior too. Pretty sure Xenonauts 2 are just straight up dice rolls. Objects in the way are just debuffs, and it only accounts for one at time, etc.

I'm gonna give it another shot, because I really thought Hooded Horse would be able to turn Goldhawk around, I want this to be solid because the first game was basically abandoned and left to the community to patch, but it seems even Hooded Horse's mark of quality isn't something I should just accept uncritically. If Goldhawk hadn't joined HH as their publisher I never would've given them another chance after the state they left the first game, and I'm gonna be honest, I'm not feeling it so far. I think Goldhawk might just be a shitty developer.
 
Persona Grata said:
Objects in the way are just debuffs, and it only accounts for one at time, etc.
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Despite, I think, the game being 3D, there is only half and full cover, if the line of fire beetween a shooter and the target encounters any half cover it will give a flat debuff of 40%, this stacks, it's half baked because this works for all items even when it shouldn't, like wooden fences being treated the same as metal boxes, and it also ignores wether or not the target is crouched or not.
The way they did shit seems very haphazard, maybe they were reimplementing code from the first?
As it stands, I like it, but theres so much stuff that feels half baked.
I got up to Third Phase, right now the biggest problem is wonky research and some more autistic bits that could be done away with like bases not sharing a resource pool, but I like the game so far, more than new X-Com games, call it vibes. Once I get more into the game I may make a more lengthy post.
 
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⋖ cørdion ⋗ said:
I really wanna get into these games but ironically I loathe losing members. Anyone fiddled with Last Train Home in that regard?
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Try Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark. It's a pretty good FFT clone with a robust class system, and you can choose to have permadeath, no penalty at all for characters getting knocked out, or a small penalty for characters getting knocked out. I prefer no penalty; just let me play the game.

In fact, the difficulty options are absurdly detailed; you can even decide if you want enemy units to be able to knock your characters into deep water (instant KO) or not, or decide what skill sets and equipment you want enemies to have access to.
 
Corette said:
Pillars of Eternity got an update which gives option for turn-based fights.
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I've been playing it. It's still pretty buggy and it's obvious the game mechanics weren't balanced around it. It's a fun little diversion if you've played the game before though.

I haven't done a full playthrough yet, just messing around with my existing high-level characters. My dual-wielding melee wizard regularly gets 5+ turns in a row so that's fun.
 
Persona Grata said:
I picked up Xenonauts 2 and I gotta be honest... I'm not super impressed.
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Frightened Rabbit said:
Once I get more into the game I may make a more lengthy post.
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I have thus spent around 20 hours in it, and completed X2 (Xenonauts 2) in the medium difficulty. TLDR, it's disappointing, but still good, basically, it feels like X1 but with some QOL.
It feels like the people who made this, really like UFO Defense, but have never played any of the mods for it, and thus make a sequel to UFO defense and are very scared of meaningfully changing it's formula. I still like it, in part due to it's aesthetic and tone, which carry it a lot more since it's one of the only in this genre to go into the military aesthetic without dumbing it down to ultra sci-fi-isms, and to not bog itself down with "humanity" shit in it's story. But with that being said it is quite shallow, if you were to stack it against new X-com games I'd say it competes pretty well but because it's closest relation is UFO Defense, then it fights with the mods for that game that have been iterated upon for years.

I have ammassed a small list of grievances on Xenonauts 2, stuff I don't like, and stuff I would've liked to see, as well as a general explanation of it's progression flow. I'll be hiding them on the spoiler tags one by one for anybody to read at their leisure.
The game feels kind rushed, despite being a slow paced one, it's balance is wonky and after Phase 4, Phase 5 is anticlimatic. Basically, the story is cut down into 5 parts, or Phases to the Alien Invasion, I will now explain the phases in detail one by one and how they differ.

Phase 1, the Cold war phase, where Aliens are influencing and seeding chaos in the world through infiltrators, in this phase you will only fight the cleaners, who are lobotomized humans working for the Aliens in secret, Generals who have been brainwashed to think the Xenonauts are actually the ones working for the Aliens, and very few low level aliens. At this point the Xenonauts low funding is explained by the world at large no actually believing in the existance of Alien life as the war is kept on the underground, and Xenonauts is actually a clandestine organisation who would be classed as terrorrists had any of the governments found them.​
Phase 2, where the aliens openly broadcast to all public channels that they are going to invade the planet and ask for earths surrender, which formalises the creation of the Xenonauts organisation, thus they start to receive funding like in X1 where the chaos level of each continent works into the calculation of funding from each country, and the aliens start flooding the world to scout targets and generally be a nuisance, in this phase you also locate the base of the Cleaners and wipe them out, which completely eleminates any of the human enemies in the game, throught Phase 2 you will be introduced to most alien types bar most end game of them.​
Phase 3, construction of a space megastructure starts along with more heavy incursions into the surface by the aliens, at this point, the aliens start fielding more armored and trained soldiers to fight against you as well as establishing bases in the surface to not have to fly all the time, in this phase you also study the more varied designs of the alien ships, upgrading your crafts and learning the ins and outs of the Alien teleportation tech.​
Phase 4, construction of the megastructure is complete, which turns out to be a Gigantic Orbital Laser for bombardment, at this point, the aliens have started pushing their most elite troops and will actually start directly attacking your bases, which introduces base defense mission (which really fucking suck). In this phase, you will need to research and complete 2 operations to destroy the Orbital Laser, or as they put it, UOO-1 (Unidentified Orbital Object 1), one to steal data about it directly from the aliens and another to assault it's command deck and destroy it for good.​
Phase 5, after the destruction of UOO-1, the aliens start sending out battleships with the most elite soldiers and a single of the mastermind race as a coordinator, you will need to capture one of these guys and interrogate him, which reveals a suprising lot, including their intentions, the location of their home planet, using the technology of teleportation from Phase 3, a team of 16 operatives is sent to the homeworld of the aliens in 2 basic missions to completely end the game.​

The jump from Phase 4 to Phase 5 seems to be a very big leap, although progression meets it's pace, it doesn't feel like it was earned, going from barely defending earth to, in 2 normal missions, completely stopping the entirety of the Alien Invasion. It also strikes me as strange that such a big thing as taking the battle to the Aliens World wasn't met with a complete gameplay shift to signify a invasion on part of the Humans rather than a defense. It feels like they wanted to finish the story as quick as possible and threw together Phase 5 which is a shame as going to the Alien world proves to be quite a change of pace in the maps looks.
I feel like, in a game like this, you shouldn't include a Phase like Phase 5, as the bare minimum to justify this would be 1. The world is protected, 2. The humans have enough Space supremacy to mount incursions into space and hold their own, 3. The humans have enough supplies and bodies to fund and move an entire offensive spearhead against the Alien World, this completely supercedes a conventional X-Com game, for this, you'd need something more like Terra Invicta, (which is a true Autists Game with a capital A, as it follows a full 100 hour campaign where the player slowly takes control of the world while meeting the Alien threat, slowly builds their own space bases and spaceships, and eventually leads to full space battles with the aliens, all of it in full Autistic detail towards space physics), this to say, in an X-Com game where the main focus is the defense of earth, you cannot have the invasion of the Aliens planet as a satisfying conclusion unless in the middle you shift the game to being a battle for space supremacy beetween planets, and the end is a full on attack on the planet where the roles are reversed. You especially cannot do this if you are like X2, and fear mechanical depth.
Having said this, I quite like the Phases up to 4, which feel like a natural progression of an invasion that you need to defend yourself from, however, the concept feels shallow and not delved upon,
In the overworld, you accumulate OP(Operation) Points, you use this on a variety of things like refreshing the recruit pool, reducing panic in a region, requesting additional funds or materials ASAP, or build a base.
The bases seems to be balanced around a slow progression curve, but the game's progression seems to overpace this curve way too fast, as the game seems to push the player to create multiple Bases, not just to cover the world but also have bases for the sole purpose of research/training operatives/engeniering. However, building bases is prohibitively expensive, and also a time sink which also cut into your OP points which, at this point, you use mainly to reduce panic so as to not lose regions. The cycle of I need to use my OP Points to lower Panic because I can't protect other continents than the one in my starting base -> I can't build a base because I don't have OP Points and thus can't protect other continents, is a meme you will constantly fall over in this game. To me it seems that they want you to immediatly cover all regions of the world with bases in Phase 1, but, if you do this you most likely won't have cash to upgrade your troops equipment nor will you have OP Points to stop panic from rising further due to alien infiltrators in cabinets, I assume this is what they wanted for balancing to make you make tough decisions on what countries to support and what others to just leave to die, but that doesn't work as, if 2 regions go into full panic you lose the game, so if anything it feels like I'm punished for just playing the game as there is no win solution.
This problem is exercebated further, as in Phase 2 or 3, some downed spaceships start requiring OP Points to scavange and fight in, meaning you will have even less OP Points to create a base and effectively protect the world.

The inventory mechanics also seem needlessly obtuse, not because of depth but because of how basic they are, in short each base has their storage capacity and don't share resources beetween bases, this creates annoyance when in Phase 3-4 you start relying more on producing your alien materials in-house as opposed to from ships as despite costing money it's overall more stable, and since the game encourages you to have multiple specialized bases, you will need to coordinate sending specific resources to specific bases though a really archaic UI which after a few times turns tedious, as you also need to wait around for the other base to receive these materials. A shared resources pool would be better in this case.
What also swamps your storage are the countless useless trinkets you get from UFOs, basically, you can get a variety of items, however, these aren't used for anything but to sell and get money, which just leads to me question why they aren't instantly sold as soon as you get them, or why I can't break them down into resources to aleviate the earlier problem? This problem is also felt from captured enemies as they don't do anything aside from take up space after they're interrogated, leading to a wasted mechanic (it would've been interesting if we could put them to work for us over a chance of betrayal or random events, or something).
This leads to another problem, that being airborne vehicles and how obtuse they are, as in, if I have a tier one jet and have just researched tier two jets, I should be able to flag that tier one jet to be replaced by a tier 2 immediatly, but the game shuts this down, it needs you to have a free hangar which takes a long time to build as well as valuable cash, which leads to a very annoying inevitable state of your playthrough where you will be slowly decomissioning one of your jets at a time to build the next tier continuously.

When not in deployment, and if facilities are available, your soldiers will train in their base, as long as you have a training center, however, this feels too inconsequential and there is no feedback to it and thus it feels like this isn't happening, (I believe a greater control on these facilities would make for a more interesting and smoother time as even if you lose a trained soldier you will know you can train another that isn't as good but can hold its own up in the late stages, thing's like controlling their exercise regiment's with buffs and debuffs on fatigue and such would be better, alongside optional cybernetic enchancements that can make a soldier better at the cost of money and facilities), one of the reasons this system feels so inconsequential is because of the lack of feedback shown to the player, (the game should have a optional weekly report that would tell you what's happening in each base as well as the progression of your soldiers).
Soldiers can be awarded Medals for their performance on the field but these feel inconsequential as all they do is level one stat up by a mere 1 point a Medal, they should be made to level your character more so there is an incentive to bring low level cadets to missions and babysit them to bring them up to speed faster.
When deciding wether or not to go on a mission, a complete overview of the space the mission is taking place in should be given, as I have for too many times, taken too many CQB Assault operatives to a jungle map whose sightlines are wide and cover few, because I thought it was going to be like every other map, where cover is abundant and CQB is plenty.
The biggest departure from X1, the game is now in 3D, however, the game doesn't take advantage of this in anyway way, still using all previous systems from 1 with minor tweaks, which feels completely astounding when we had fully 3D based cover accuracy systems back in 2005 with E5 Brigade, as it stands it appears to me like they grabbed X1 and adapted it's systems to a 3D project as opposed to taking inspiration from X1 and redesigning the entire system, as a result...

- There is only 2 kinds of verticality when it comes to a soldier, crouched and standing, even when it could benefit from a more options (like prone), this extends to the obstacles as they only exist as in full and half cover. Not taking advantage of the game being 3D to dynamically calculate line of fire against obstacles of varying heights.​
- Materials beetween the shooter and the targe all act the same, they have a health bar and wether or not a projectile is stopped doesn't come down to the penetration factor of the projecting stacked against the volume of the obstacle, but wether or not the projectile has more damage in it than the health of the obstacle, in which case it goes through (sometimes) if the damage is higher than the obstacles health, which feels archaic, and downright retarded in levels like the jungle where leafs can stop laser blasts from going through them.​
- In the game you have access to Vehicles that can fight with you, however, these feel very restrictive and like limited use buffs rather than actual support vehicles, for example, a Missile Launching Rover can only carry 6 missiles at a time, it cannot reload and once it has used up all it's ammo, it's useless, (I feel like it could've opened many possibilities if these drones and robots had direct interections with soldiers, like having a soldier whose only objective is carry the missiles to load on a rover and have it act as a entrance creator, or have a rover act as a mobile backpack that supplies ammo to all operatives to save on the operatives backpacks).​
- Along with their restritive actions inside the fight, these little guys also feel restrictive in progression as there is only really 2 types of them, one with a Missile Launcher and a Autorifle, and one with a Autocannon and a Autorifle, thus it feels like a wasted opportunity to not introduce multiple types of these like mortars or mobile medic units that overheal or radars etc.​
- The options for operatives feel largely redundant as the main 3 ones that are needed are the Shotgun, the Rifle, and the Machine Gun. The Shield isnt upgraded nearly fast or continuously enough to be a contender for CQB (as you also cant stack up with it, meaning that you will always need to do positioning shenanigans if you want to have a shield and shotgun/rifle squad doing pointman duty), the sniper rifle is useless in about 90% of scenarios as most maps are heavy CQB based, the only ones not being, are the jungle ones. Grenade Launchers are used as entrance makers for making dynamic plays but are quickly made old by the vehicles that can do the same and have a autorifle has backup, with the only downside being you cant reload the bot. And thus it feels like there isn't enough weapon variety as the only thing you do in the game is do tiered upgrades of the same weapon archetypes you have been using since the start of the game.​
- The collossus suit, the endgame bulky exosqueleton of the game, is too restrictive in it's use, as it only allows the use of a Machine Gun with it, meaning that a shield (which would be a good pairing for it) or a grenade launcher aren't available for it.​
- Despite having armour, a shot can go throuugh said armour and completely one shoot a operative which feels very frustrating when done against someone with a vanguard heavy suit or a collossus suit, both end game suits that should logically, be lot sturdier but in reality act as any other suit.​

Because of the shoddy progression and the limited weapons available, the tatics you employ throught the game do not evolve as you go through it, meaning that you will be pulling off the same moves in the first mission as you do in the last mission of the game, because the only difference beetwen, the starter shotgun and the endgame shotgun for example, is the damage they do, same going for the suits of armour.
The mission variety is also very bad, you will be doing the exact same missions over and over again, that being, Eliminate all Aliens, and the only variation in these are some specific story missions where you need to Steal all Alien Data, where Alien reinforcements will pour in if you linger too long.
Aside from the lack of Mission Objective variation, the maps all also feel the same, despite having a very big difference in looks and aesthetic, as all of the maps revolve around short sightlines with lots of cover and blindspots that can nail you in the ass, and very little verticality. This is a constant for all maps wether you are fighting in an alien base or a farmstead in the suburbs, it will roughly be the same, the only difference to these being jungle maps as I stated before and the semi-frequent terrorist events, where they use a junction of a city that has wide streets with little cover along with tight corridor offices. The layout of all these maps will quickly become a staple for you as they don't seem to have made a lot of variation of maps, nor does it appear like they have a randomised map system, constantly flipping through the same set of maps and tiles.
One of the cool things about the game is that the aliens will invade your base, and when that happens, the map of the base will be 1:1 the base itself, and all operatives and machines within the facility are invited to kick the aliens ass, the problem with this is that the game doesn't account for if the base is too big. Let's imagine you have a big base, it uses all the squares available, good luck going through the entire base to find the last alien to kill, this seems to have been caught by the developers, as if the base defense goes on for more than 10 turns, they will highlight all aliens to help you, but my first question would be why no do it from the beggining, OR why not do it if you are currently holding the bases control room (likely because there isn't one curiously enough).
Despite being 1:1, there is zero variation on these rooms, making all rooms look the same which is disorientating, as it looks like the same tilemaps copypasted amateureshly.
Another thing about these events, they are just another type of basic mission, where you're task to kill all Aliens, there is nothing more to it, despite them being in your base, I would've hope for there to be more to it like, stopping the Aliens from ruining the base too much or the Aliens trying to get to a specific part of the Base and extract information from it, etc.

However, the worst thing about the base defense missions is by far, the performance and pathfinding issues, these are also apparent in the endgame and seem to be linked to the navigation mesh and the quantity of operators in a mission, however they are at their full power here, in the Base Defense missions, to put it bluntly, the operators seem to have fully forgotten how to walk anywhere as the (good in every other map) pathfinding shits itself raw and tries repeatedly to walk through walls and stops multiple times in a simple run, along with this, the mission is incredibly choppy and hitches a lot, and every turn end scares me as there is a hang up that makes me believe it will crash, though it never does.

This is what makes me believe they did nothing more than slap X1's systems on a 3D Project, because, otherwise, why would your game be strugling doing navigation mesh on a very open and basic level, and why does the existance of a mere 30 characters make the game hitch like a donkey on bath salt's despite only needing one active at a single time. This is where I remind everyone that Xenonauts 2 is using Unity, it's the same engine that is running Menace, another new Tatical game that fully utilises it's 3D enviroment and has way way more depth in it's systems, and doesn't shit itself sideways when faced with 30 characters on a single map, despite being a fully 3D game going for realism with a lot more going on in the screen.
The point here being that X2 feel's like an amateurish expansion pack to X1, dealing with it's tech debt.
 
ATOM RPG's sequel, same name but with a 2, is now on Kickstarter with some quite ridiculous stretch goals. Seeking at least 50k.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/atomrpg/atom-rpg-2
Their tiers are confusing and petty, I dont think they'll get much, they also seem to be using the old GSC trick of "We'll scan your face if you pay us enough, just dont ask when it starts being used by Meta", complete with tiers for 1k, 500 and such.

I don't really mind, I just don't think anybody is going to buy this shit, I trust them enough to deliver on most of these things (bar the physical rewards).
But another thing entirely are their stretch goals which I find hilarious.

  • 75 000€ Base Building
  • 100 000€ Advanced World Map Management
  • 140 000€ Mobile Train Base
  • 170 000€ Mounts
  • 200 000€ New Minigames
  • 250 000€ Post-Game Mode
  • 350 000€ Full English Voice-Over of Key NPCs
  • 400 000€ Metro Expansion
  • 500 000€ Roguelike Mode
  • 600 000€ Combat Racing
  • 750 000€ Platform Releases
  • 850 000€ Free Spot for Backer Voting
  • 1 000 000€ Companion Relationships & Romance
  • 1 250 000€ Secret Stretch Goal
  • 1 500 000€ Atom RPG Online

I can't see them getting through even Base building, much less 1 500 000 Euros to make Atom RPG Online. :story: And I especially like that they will sell you very crucial shit like Base Building andAdvanced Map Management, over putting Romance in the game, I respect that!
I have played through all of their past games, even Swordhaven that has gotten even less attention than ATOM RPG and Trudograd, I like them and I think the studio has really good chops for this kind of game but, the rewards and stretch goals? Im almost expecting this to be a rug pull.
Well I've see worse deals by bigger companies....
 
Corette said:
Here's new Youtube trailer for ATOM 2.
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Lol, 0:58. Why do you include that in your trailer? A fucking bazooka shot into a guy's face does nothing. Really makes me want to play your fucking game.

Yes I know I'm a retard who doesn't know about the finer intricacies of the game, and the point probably was to showcase the armor, but still. One would think you'd wanna impress a few retards too.
 
Frightened Rabbit said:
I can't see them getting through even Base building, much less 1 500 000 Euros to make Atom RPG Online. :story:
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Technologically, you absolutely can run a large-scale online system on a budget like that. It's just always over-engineered and always implemented by fucking morons who don't quite know how to build a large-scale system like that without falling back on bulky "frameworks" and half-baked off-the-shelf shit. Not enough confidence, balls and skill to roll their own in Erlang (or Elixir if they really need that "more modern Web Chic" feel, since it runs on the same VM anyway). What does an online RPG even need, anyway? A per-player state machine to track quest status and character progress. Comms to enable players to talk to each other. Game world rules enforcement. NPC reactions, including enemy AI (which can be internally deterministic following a server-generated random dice roll, see Factorio for an example). Movement tracking (nothing even approaching the "near-real-time" requirement of an FPS -- where an FPS allegedly needs a "60Hz" server "cycle" for a satisfying player experience, an RPG or space sim can likely get away with one tick per second or less). Not much else.

Pay me a $150k salary, gimme a year, and your MMORPG design, and I'll hand you a working system that can handle a million players smoothly with no "login queues" or other retarded bullshit, no shards (i.e. everybody's in the same world a-la EVE Online) and minimal (if any) dilation. And it'll need about $2-$3k a month in rented servers on AWS or whatever "cloud" infrastructure. The bandwidth bill will be higher than the "infrastructure" bill.

Of course they won't do it that way, and they'll waste money trying to make fucking Unreal Engine do it instead of something more optimized for high-concurrency low-compute stable state systems. It'll be fun to watch, I guess.
 
moocow said:
Technologically, you absolutely can run a large-scale online system on a budget like that.
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I don't doubt you, I'm always reminded of that Guild Wars MMORPG that is said to be so cheap to run servers, that they just include the servers in the same servers for the sequel and run both at the same time at no cost to the company.
I just find it funny that, they say they'll do it, if you give them 1 500 000 euro.
Realistically, it's only there as a joke, along with the romance shit, it ain't going to hit that number, as funny as having FOnline 3 would be.
 
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