Why all the hate for Xcom 2?

[Pliston]

I am aghast that at the time of writing that one in three people have given this exceptional game a negative review. I am not going to go into the usual "This is a turn based strategy game etc etc" as this has been done on numerous reviews. I simply want to make a few points as to why I feel that it has had far more negative reviews than it deserves.

Performance: This is the one area that I feel that there is a strong argument for the negativity and agree that it does not run as smoothly as you might expect from a AAA title. That being said, I have never felt that it has been a game breaking problem and to be honest, has not spoiled my enjoyment of my game at all. Being turn based it does not require 60+ FPS that is essential for first person shooters. Ideally, it would be better to resolve this issue prior to release as opposed to patching at a later date but I for one would rather have the game now rather than wait another 3 months because like I have already stated, it isn't game breaking.

It is too hard: What a load of hogwash. I remember considering myself an expert on the original xcom when I beat it on the top difficulty level until long war came out and I attempted to replicate this achievement on impossible difficulty. Needless to say I got wasted on my first playthrough and considered the game too difficult and unfair. A few months later I stumbled upon Beaglerush's Live and Impossible series and watched this guy make the game on impossible difficulty look at times stupid. I began to employ some of beaglerush's tactics and managed to beat the game on a notch below impossible. Xcom 2 is not hardcore in the way Dark Souls is. It is difficult but not unfairly so. if you cannot crack this nut, blame your poor tactics not the game.

Aiming percentages are not accurate: Rubbish. I placed an earlier review regarding my creation of snake plissken who was trained as a ranger. On his first mission he missed to sword strikes and an almost point blank shotgun shot. The sword strikes were both around 91% and the shotgun post 80%. This was without doubt extremely bad luck and even more so for the mighty Snake Plissken as he got wasted on his maiden operation. That said, anything less than 100% has a chance to miss and we have to accept that. On the other hand, a couple of missions later, with my team heavily wounded, my ranger achieved a team saving crit kill with a 22% chance and a laughable crit chance. Point is, luck swings both ways but luck alone will definately not win or lose you a playthrough. Moreover, it is these little idiosyncrasies that make the memorable moments in a given playthrough.

limited turns destroys the tactics of the game: Utter rubbish. It does not in any way remove the tactical aspect of the game. What it does do is force you to employ a different tactical approach compared to xcom. On top of this it makes complete sense as by definition, guerilla warfare is to be in and out before the enemy knows what has hit them. It does make the game in some instancies more difficult but much faster. This I feel is a welcome addition as I remember in many missions in long war being entrenched like being at the Somme and overwatching multiple rounds due to poor cover and neither party willing to commit. The added difficulty of this mechanic I feel is more than mitigated by the cover system at the start of most missions which allows you to place your troops prior to engagement which in most cases makes the first pod spotted irrelevent. It also adds a great deal of tension in a good way and admittidely punishes poor tactical decisions like for example when I first encountered an Andromedon in a mission to destroy a terminal. The andromedon had one shot killed my medic before my team had ground this beast down and my most beloved and trusted sniper "Hogan" got off the most beautiful crit to fell the beast. It really was as sweet as a nut. My team at this point were one man down and heavily injured and a new pod of enemies were enroute. I surveyed the battlefield and convinced myself that I had dealt with all the pods and with my team 1 dash away from the target building decided to dash Hogan into the building to scout and all being well, I would dash my remaining troops into the cover of the building to destroy this terminal. Low and behold, at the back of the building was another andromedon, an officer and a stun lancer. worse still the pod ship unleashed a robot and two stun lancers. After surveying my position for a quarter of an hour I realised that there was no alternative but to evac, any other decision would mean the certain destruction of my entire squad. Hogan, 13 missions and 28 kills in was cut to ribbons. as gutting as it was it was such a memorable encounter and incidents like these encapsulate what this game is about.

The game bests Xcom in every aspect and the added fluff like the character creation pool and custom options gives each soldier an individuality and as a result it matters more when they fall in battle. The icing on the cake is the company's decision to embrace modding and I feel that people will be playing this game for years to come.

I cannot bring myself to call it a masterpiece in the vein of games like the original Rome total war or CIV 3 which eclipsed 6 months of my life, but it is without doubt an exceptional tactical game which can hold it's own with all the tactical Behemoths of the last 10 years. with the upcoming DLC and the modding potential it could potentially become a modern masterpiece a few patches down the line.

Stands down from soap box

[NewYears1978]

This is a very well thought out post. I was one of the "defenders" of this game when it first came out, but have since changed my mind. Being near the end and forcing myself to play through the horrible performance has turned me around. Yeah, so I managed to play it but I totally disagree with your "doesn't take from the enjoyment" comment. Maybe it's a subjective thing that really depends on the user, but personally it probably took about 75% of the enjoyment that I SHOULD be having from the game, for me.

The_Mess eredeti hozzászólása:

Oh and what amuses me about the performance whiners is they seem entirely unwilling to change settings or disable certain bits of eye candy in order to find a sweet spot of performance. Let alone jump into the relevant ini files and tweak graphics stuff, which with Unreal 3.0 games is stupidily simple to do.

Yeah, because I didn't do any of that....oh wait, I did. I tried MIN settings, and all the ini settings I found..none made ANY difference at all.

There's something wrong with this engine or game, it behaves like no game I have seen before..it always appears like a bad stream or like it can't keep up with what it's trying to do.

That'd be find if graphical options made any difference but other than AA (which helps on menus and overall) nothing does anything. There are FPS issues on the freaking map and in the Avenger, where there is NO reason for there to be.

[zadd75]

SouthLane eredeti hozzászólása:

We hate Xcom-2 because people keep making post telling us that if we don't love it, we are scum of the earth, bottom-feeders, mentally challenged, and all that other stuff.

But you ARE mentally challenged bottom-feeding scum of the earth if you don't love XCOM.

Yes. I am kidding.

But seriously. The game is what it is... and this one is more true to the original than the last. It has its bugs and flaws, yes... but I LOVE the premise. They added a LOT of new abilities for the enemies, and it is actually a CHALLENGE.

If you can't get past the "its not pretty enough" piece and appreciate the substance of the game, I genuinely feel sorry for you. That is incredibly sad. I will STILL play the original titles (XCOM & TFTD), in spite of their god-awful graphics and terrible battle interface. I do it because I ENJOY the gameplay, in spite of the shortcomings.

The games are classics, and though they may be obsolete by modern standards, it really shows how far games have come.

[Stoibs]

The_Mess eredeti hozzászólása:

Oh and what amuses me about the performance whiners is they seem entirely unwilling to change settings or disable certain bits of eye candy in order to find a sweet spot of performance. Let alone jump into the relevant ini files and tweak graphics stuff, which with Unreal 3.0 games is stupidily simple to do.

Because god forbid we haven't actually already done all that to no avail.
I guess jumping onto the forums and passive aggressively attacking us is the only other logical step as opposed to admitting that maybe the game isn't optimized all that well even with the 'fan fixes'

[NewYears1978]

Stoibs eredeti hozzászólása:

The_Mess eredeti hozzászólása:

Oh and what amuses me about the performance whiners is they seem entirely unwilling to change settings or disable certain bits of eye candy in order to find a sweet spot of performance. Let alone jump into the relevant ini files and tweak graphics stuff, which with Unreal 3.0 games is stupidily simple to do.

Because god forbid we haven't actually already done all that to no avail.
I guess jumping onto the forums and passive aggressively attacking us is the only other logical step as opposed to admitting that maybe the game isn't optimized all that well even with the 'fan fixes'

+1 (I would type some crap, but I already said it a few posts up)

[The_Mess]

Stoibs eredeti hozzászólása:

The_Mess eredeti hozzászólása:

Oh and what amuses me about the performance whiners is they seem entirely unwilling to change settings or disable certain bits of eye candy in order to find a sweet spot of performance. Let alone jump into the relevant ini files and tweak graphics stuff, which with Unreal 3.0 games is stupidily simple to do.

Because god forbid we haven't actually already done all that to no avail.
I guess jumping onto the forums and passive aggressively attacking us is the only other logical step as opposed to admitting that maybe the game isn't optimized all that well even with the 'fan fixes'

Daaaawwwwwwww

To add to my quoted post - and of course they can't take the next step from there, which is to see if any third party programs are behind the issues (i.e. overlays, video recording, anti-virus), something that is all too often a common source of performance issues. More so with XCOM 2 since it only uses 2 cores for some reason. And so they blame the dev's for something that isn't actually there fault at all and demand fixes that aren't the dev's concern.

But hey, that just means more popcorn for me and others.

*grabs popcorn*

[DCBenton]

It seems like some people are having trouble running it, and some people think it's too difficult and unfair, due to mainly timers, Codex and Vipers. :D

For me it's just about right on Veteran.

[Big Daddy]

Because everyone has different opinions. Some people dislike slow paced games. Why does it matter? That is the real question.

[flinker2012*****]

Playing with Nvidia Card: after 30 hours -> constant CTDs and corrupt savegame
Playing with Radeon: after 15 hours, now there a more and more CTDs and sound issues

The game is great, but it's beta.

[Stoibs]

The_Mess eredeti hozzászólása:

To add to my quoted post - and of course they can't take the next step from there, which is to see if any third party programs are behind the issues (i.e. overlays, video recording, anti-virus), something that is all too often a common source of performance issues. More so with XCOM 2 since it only uses 2 cores for some reason. And so they blame the dev's for something that isn't actually there fault at all and demand fixes that aren't the dev's concern.

But hey, that just means more popcorn for me and others.

*grabs popcorn*

Uhuh.
So it's the consumer's job to go through every single piece of standardized software like anti-virus and the like to take constant stab in the dark guesses and trial and error to see if these are having any random clashes with this particular video game, despite the thousands of others on my steam account having no such issue or this not having a precedent at all for me personally for the others I'm playing currently?
And, you are still sitting here defending this and holding such a stance, still implying that it is the end user who is in err?

Ok..
Well even if that ended up being the case and were true, that in no way shape or form would change the fact that it was a coding error and a fault on the behalf of the developers to have regular pieces of software clashing with this and only this particular video game.

[The_Mess]

flinker2012***** eredeti hozzászólása:

Playing with Nvidia Card: after 30 hours -> constant CTDs and corrupt savegame
Playing with Radeon: after 15 hours, now there a more and more CTDs and sound issues

The game is great, but it's beta.

Playing with an AMD HD6850 card, win 7 on an old socket 775 motherboard with a xeon CPU hacked in + 8GB of DDR2. Only one crash, and that was a failed load killed by task manager. Runs okay aside from long load times.

The difference is probably due to my vigilance on making sure I have no hardware, OS or driver issues and having the experience to troubleshoot any issues that do occur. And in your case, something is very much probably up with some part of your system, check the event log messages for potential diagnostic information r.e. the faulting module. Hopefully's it's just a software issue rather than a potentially expensive hardware problem, though if the crashes are confined to applications it could just be a simple (and cheap) replacement of a faulty RAM stick.

[DCBenton]

I must be lucky, I only had one crash in 53 hours whilst I was loading a savegame.

[$$Billionaire Trash$$]

Because people expect they don't actually have to adapt how they play in a core way. Even the timed missions are often tied to an objective you can complete while concealed, and once that's done you can take as much time as you need to clear out the rest of the aliens.
People don't understand probabilty,or seeding
Performance does blow thanks to poor optimization
This game has a lot more variety and soul in it than the previous xcom, I think. Or it's soul with a bigger budget.
There are more pathways to research, more replayability, and it's better than xcom in practically every way, except for optimization.

[Pat]

Rich Homie Brandon eredeti hozzászólása:

Because everyone has different opinions. Some people dislike slow paced games. Why does it matter? That is the real question.

I don't know a single person who buys a new game without research and complains aboot it being slow. There's no way people are that dumb

[The_Mess]

Stoibs eredeti hozzászólása:

The_Mess eredeti hozzászólása:

To add to my quoted post - and of course they can't take the next step from there, which is to see if any third party programs are behind the issues (i.e. overlays, video recording, anti-virus), something that is all too often a common source of performance issues. More so with XCOM 2 since it only uses 2 cores for some reason. And so they blame the dev's for something that isn't actually there fault at all and demand fixes that aren't the dev's concern.

But hey, that just means more popcorn for me and others.

*grabs popcorn*

Uhuh.
So it's the consumer's job to go through every single piece of standardized software like anti-virus and the like to take constant stab in the dark guesses and trial and error to see if these are having any random clashes with this particular video game, despite the thousands of others on my steam account having no such issue or this not having a precedent at all for me personally for the others I'm playing currently?
And, you are still sitting here defending this and holding such a stance, still implying that it is the end user who is in err?

Ok..
Well even if that ended up being the case and were true, that in no way shape or form would change the fact that it was a coding error and a fault on the behalf of the developers to have regular pieces of software clashing with this and only this particular video game.

lol

It's your system kid, the dev's can't do anything to control what software you have on there and how it interacts with their product without expending stupidly expensive resources on testing every third party software and other software for negative interactions.

Heck, I can cause Grim Dawn to crash every time if I leave avast anti-virus on while playing it, but I know that it's not Crate's problem, rather it's how avast interacts with Grim Dawn. Otherwise I've had very unstable gameplay sessions in other games due to an error on my part with overvolting RAM and a dodgy nvidia chipset motherboard and the knock on effects with that install of windows that lead to constant BSoD.

So grow some reproductive organs and deal with the easiest, most likely issues, such as overlays and anti-virus and test the damn settings. And if you can't be arsed with that, perhaps consoles are where you should be spending your gaming time and not PC's where the shear diversity of hardware, OS configs + drivers and interactions therein can and does cause performance issues.

Are there performance issues dev's can fix? Obviously, yes. The best examples are i.d. Tech games where i.d. have been screwing over ATI and later AMD users due to an internal cultural bias towards nvidia, resulting in players having to use modded dlls and ini/config file editing to get the games to play smoothly. Stuff that i.d. could just do themselves, but don't. Then there's also the latest Batman game, Black Ops 3 etc. And in the case of XCOM 2 there are probably some minor performance gains still to be made, although it's use of only 2 cores is an issue for older systems like mine (hello stuttering on the Avenger).

[flinker2012*****]

The_Mess eredeti hozzászólása:

flinker2012***** eredeti hozzászólása:

Playing with Nvidia Card: after 30 hours -> constant CTDs and corrupt savegame
Playing with Radeon: after 15 hours, now there a more and more CTDs and sound issues

The game is great, but it's beta.

Playing with an AMD HD6850 card, win 7 on an old socket 775 motherboard with a xeon CPU hacked in + 8GB of DDR2. Only one crash, and that was a failed load killed by task manager. Runs okay aside from long load times.

The difference is probably due to my vigilance on making sure I have no hardware, OS or driver issues and having the experience to troubleshoot any issues that do occur. And in your case, something is very much probably up with some part of your system, check the event log messages for potential diagnostic information r.e. the faulting module. Hopefully's it's just a software issue rather than a potentially expensive hardware problem, though if the crashes are confined to applications it could just be a simple (and cheap) replacement of a faulty RAM stick.

Sorry, but XCom 2 is the only game making trouble. Witcher 3 perfoms without any problems. Rise of the Tomb Raider, no problem. Mass Effect 3 no CTDs. Alien Isolation, Rome II (Total War), Mad Max etc. It's only XCom 2.