JAAHAS: four times or more the number of soldiers per mission
JMich: Why on earth would you need 24+ soldiers for a sweep? Try playing JA2 with that many mercs in one sector, half of those will be sitting around twiddling their thumbs, even if you do give the enemies one-shot weapons. The soldiers in XCOM (notice the lack of dash) are not the faceless rookies of X-Com (notice the dash). You don't need to command dozens of them to be able to do a proper tactical sweep.
And X-COM's biggest difference in tactical play compared to other games is the fact that it had those faceless rookies to use as cannon fodder and you didn't expect that most of them survived through their first mission. One death in XCOM "equals" 4 in X-COM in manpower, on the other hand just two soldiers in X-COM can shoot more shots than the whole team in XCOM per one turn.
JMich: Po-ta-to, Po-tah-to, both systems can work, and if you won't be playing it because the system you wish for isn't here, nothing I say will change your mind.
Two action per turn is so big change from the original that it would serve better in a spinoff game or at the very least XCOM should have retained the large squad size of the original.
It feels like two guys came up with different ideas unknown to each other to cut in half the time the tactical missions take and nobody wanted to favor one solution over the other so they implemented both although that practically divided the tactical scale of the battles twice. Two major changes that individually would not have been so unreasonable changes for a X-COM remake, but as together should have gone to a spinoff game.
JAAHAS: ability to carry multiple grenades per soldier
JMich: Available as a perk, so specific soldiers will be able to do so. Grenades however do lose their usefulness later on, so even the one may be one grenade too many
Okay, I guess that in a game without time units the perks like "25% less TU's for an action" are not feasible so lets simplify the inventory management so that we can offer perks to allow extra grenades...
JAAHAS: and target walls, floors etc
JMich: I'll accept that shooting at objects make sense, and hopefully Firaxis will add it later on. Again though, see point about action points.
Does the game's engine and map design even support free destruction or is it limited to predetermined spots like you can't destroy a corner of a building, but make identical holes one meter apart form each other on the sides?
JAAHAS: as this game is named like it is a remake/reboot of the original.
JMich: The original game was called "UFO: Enemy Unknown", since it was a European studio that made it. In North America, the game was called "X-Com: UFO Defense" (notice the dash), while the PS1 version was called "X-Com: Enemy Unknown". The Remake is called "XCOM: Enemy Unknown" (no dash, all capitals), so they did change the name. On the other hand, X-Com: Interceptor and X-Com: Enforcer kept the naming scheme, but changed the game.
So mixing together the many names of the original while simplifying many aspects of it's game mechanics was the best course of action to take instead of using any other words after XCOM and be free to scrap things that you think are not fun? Would you like Civilization X to be a game where the society doesn't progress beyond the bronze age, is limited to a small island with three tribes and the only way to win is warfare? Or would Civilization: The Bronze Age be a more accurate title for it?
On the other hand it also would have been preferable that AC2's sub-sequels would have been named AC2 part II: Brotherhood and AC2 part III: Revelations to not confuse them with any possible spinoff games that are not a canonical parts of the main story. Or just name them AC3 and AC4 to keep the three character acronyms. At first I thought Brotherhood to be just a multiplayer spinoff and automatically ignored it until I happened to saw some comment about the single player.
JAAHAS: As I need to prioritize what games I have time to play the next group of games to be dismissed after the ones that are just bad in every way, or belong in one of the few genres that I actively dislike, are the remakes that I feel to be too different to be related so closely to the originals. It is as good metric as any, as I get to experience more diverse games in different settings when I skip the ones that can't honestly call themselves as spinoffs instead of sequels.
JMich: Out of curiosity, what games would you pick over XCOM: Enemy Unknown for a squad tactics game?
Any other TB tactical game that has at least 6 soldiers in the squad and doesn't unreasonably diminish major elements of it's predecessor. X-COM without financing multiple bases and sending a big squad with blaster launchers to annihilate a crashed alien scout may not have interested me enough to even try out other TB tactical games so that may explain why I feel that messing with that delicate balance should have been left to spinoffs if the developers find themselves unable to remaster the original game to it's full glory.
And I also meant that I rather play anything else than something that I feel is using a well known name to profit without proper care to either stay true to the original or distance itself by creating a sub-series that can explore other ways to use the setting.
JAAHAS: to describe the emphasis on faster play
JMich: Faster play? What faster play? You mean that missions take ~15 minutes instead of 30? Or am I missing something?
Well 4x faster turns at least, although it seemed like you need multiple turns to even kill one alien so the overall length of the missions is hard to tell. Of course the aliens get to use all kinds of instakill attacks against you and don't even try to analyze what a one Chryssalid infected soldier means in this game compared to the original.
If the original would not be so prone to crashing or at least had a working autosave feature to recover from that, I would not be so annoyed that yet again the "huge fans of the original" are not really interested about enhancing it's features instead of replacing them with their own ideas. At the same time adventure games get graphical and interface updates with remastered music all the time while also including a classic mode too.
Those games rely on their story and dialogue so the new enhancements are mostly superficial, while X-COM is all about it's mechanics so even some bugs could be argued to be needed as an option in a remake to preserve the experience. And if preservation is not the goal then don't name the game so ambiguously that it can be mistaken as a remastered version of the original.
TL,DR; We are arguing over the
"fact" that as long as publishers don't understand that tampering a bit too much at once with game mechanics of any previous title is best left to clearly labeled spinoffs, we are going to get these debates that go nowhere. So lets unite and demand them to make a stop to this madness, we could all be playing their games right now if their naming policies would not cause these
http://xkcd.com/386/ kind of moments amongst us! ;)
