Or for "normal" people. Ick! I've played games on normal, I feel like I need a shower...
Kotaku have a "whats the big deal about a new xcom" article, might be worth posting a rant or 2 there:
Aliasalpha: I’m certainly willing to wait before giving formal condemnation but I can’t help but be pessimistic. The tendency to remake things usually results in a poor product (rather paraxodically since they have more resources spare from not needing to design a new world) and shifting genres is a challenge at best but even more so when moving from slow, thinking gameplay to a genre famed for being twitchy and reactive (Hello C&C Renegade, no you’re not forgiven, back in the basement!).
When you say: “You want to play the old X-Com so bad? Go play the old X-Com!”, we could just reply with: “You want to play an FPS so bad? Load up COD4″ (or failing that: “How appropriate, you fight like a cow!”)
You mentioned the issue of being unable to develop just for the hardcore which implies a streamlined mechanic and a lot fewer decisions which has much greater potential to be bad than it does to be good.
I also think that saying TBS games are just for the hardcore is a fallacy, there’s a major turn based strategy game thats massively successful and appeals to way more than the hardcore: Civilization (there’s also loads of board games).
All they’d need to do is get xcom pretty, exciting and fluid enough so impatient people aren’t bored with waiting for units to move, thinking that things are ugly or being frustrated by clunky controls, nothing that can’t be solved by good design. It can control like a turn based strategy game and when you tell the characters to move, they move with the fluidity and intensity of soldiers in gears of war.
Now combine that with difficulty levels that increase the amount you have to manage rather than (or in addition to) increasing the actual difficulty. Easy just has set action points and automatic research, medium has variable action points with the amount of equipment carried by your troops (so you have to decide if the plasma cannon is worth slowing down your squad) with selectable research and hard is proper xcom where you have to manage everything down to unit stamina and has research where you need to manage staff and resources & facilities.
There’s also the undeniable fact that WE HAVE ENOUGH BLOODY FPS GAMES! By the divine carbohydrates of the flying spaghetti monster, give us OTHER styles of game! And I don’t just mean gears of war or god of war ripoffs. I like FPS’, 3rd person shooters and action beat em ups but there’s a limit to my tolerance for sameness. A modern remake of xcom is exactly the kind of thing we need to spark interest in something beyond the 3 ‘holy’ game types. Variety is the spice of life but at the moment we only have salt, pepper and basil, lovely and all but sometimes you just want a curry!
THAT is why I’m feeling a bit negative, I’m seeing enormous potential to not only live up to the gameplay legacy of the franchise but potentially spur interest in other varieties of game in people who’ve never tried a TBS, potentially even reviving a commercially endangered genre and it seems likely that its all going to go waste. The worst part is that it’s probably based on the assumption that console gamers don’t want slow thinky games but are in love with instant gratification and pretty explosions but unless someone releases something different, there’s no way of knowing.
Wow, quoting myself in the same post that the information was originally in, I can't decide if thats rampant narcissism or an expression of awesome
