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25 Hours Later - Long War 2 for X-Com 2

1/23/2017

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​INTRODUCTION AND DISCLAIMERS
Relevant information to note before reading this early impressions / review:
  • I was not given a review copy.
  • I have no affiliation with anyone at Firaxis or Pavonis Interactive.
  • Specifications of the system used for this first impressions article can be found here.
  • At the time of writing this article, I had played the game for twenty-five hours.
  • I've played every release of X-Com going way back to the 1990s, some more than others. 

It's rare that a free mod generates months of pre-release hype and is looked forward to almost as much the release of a full game. That, though, is exactly the situation surrounding Long War 2, a mod developed by Pavonis Interactive for the Firaxis-developed X-Com 2.

Long War, Long List of Changes
Long War 2 is a complete overhaul mod. As that classification suggests, it makes sweeping changes to the entire game experience. There are mechanic tweaks, bug fixes, new perks, classes and features (for most people, more on that later). This mod aims to keep players entertained for up to 200 hours. Yikes!

The changes become obvious right from the start. Squad deployment has been completely redone. You now have to select a squad of soldiers (squad management has been introduced and it's the best thing since Storm guns) to infiltrate the target area. The Sky Ranger will drop them off, and they'll be left for several days to infiltrate. This means you'll have to wait several in-game days after deployment before the actual mission starts, while the squad works to reduce the amount of enemies they'll encounter.

As you get a couple of missions in, you'll find yourself having to make compromises. Do you go for large squads (you can deploy up to ten soldiers in some missions), who infiltrate slower but have more fire-power and flexibility in combat, or do you go for a small squad, which will infiltrate quicker but will be out-gunned occasionally regardless?

One positive change is that there's a real element of being able to pick and choose your battles, enhanced from the vanilla version of X-Com 2. There's no punishment for choosing to abort a mission if your squad hasn't achieved 50% infiltration (or higher, if you're more Custer than Wellington) other than the loss of potential rewards from the mission.
X-Com 2: X-Panded

It's clear that the folks over at Pavonis Interactive have been paying attention to AAA gaming trends, as a garrison system has been included in Long War 2. Initially, I was less than pleased at this idea, as I've yet to find one that I actually like. In Long War 2, my early impressions were almost positive, given that it appeared I could just set outposts to their tasks and then forget about them. These impressions were given a boost when I had to carry out a spy-catching mission with the resistance stationed at one of the outposts.

My enthusiasm dipped tragically when this small band of poorly armed, badly armoured civilians, plus one overwhelmed squaddie and a bugged-out recovered mec came up against two Faceless and seven or eight Advent troops. It dropped further when the third mission was exactly the same as the first two, even taking place in the same landscape. So this part of the mod, for me, is a miss. Garrisons are a mechanic used to fill in playing time in games that otherwise don't have a lot going on. X-Com 2 already has a lot going on, so this kind of busywork is just unnecessary at best, downright irritating at worst.

Some of the best changes, however, are mechanical - with one caveat. If you've been playing the game solidly since release, you may already have them installed as standalone mods.

My favourite change that’s bundled in is 'red fog'. This is a setting that makes troops, aliens, or both, less effective the more damage they take. This is the type of granular difficulty setting that I really enjoy, as it makes me feel like I have comprehensive control over how easy or hard I want my experience to be. Even better, I can change it from session to session, depending on whether I'm in the mood for something more relaxed or challenging.

If you're the type that really enjoys RNG on top of RNG (what's wrong with you?) and feel that X-Com 2 is just too predictable (presumably you also like making breakfast by letting someone else organise your cupboards and picking items out at random with your eyes closed), there are several options that will interest you.

'Hidden potential' gives soldiers random stat increases on promotion, while 'not created equal' instantly randomises stats above and below the baseline.

'Damage roulette', for the truly sadist among you, randomises weapon damage further around the baseline, with an accompanying setting to increase this effect. I cannot say how much I appreciate these being optional rather than enforced changes to the game.

The final option of note is 'default squad size', which technically allows you to attempt the early missions with up to ten soldiers. Again, for those who enjoy being miserable, it will also let you attempt later missions with as few as four. I do not recommend starting off with ten soldiers, as it slows the gameplay down massively.

Slow gameplay is one of my biggest issues with Long War 2. You'll find yourself tippy-tapping around far more than in the vanilla game, especially as you get to grips with new enemies, which so far have been constantly drip-fed into the missions. Yes, there are still timers to limit this behaviour - they no longer really work properly. They're too strict. In the base game, if you had a short timer, you could take managed risks to push progress along a bit. In Long War 2, especially with the poorly equipped troops you have at the start, all this does is result in guaranteed failure.

The timers also don't jive with infiltration. There have been a couple of missions where I've gotten above 150% infiltration - and yet my squad starts off miles away from the objective with two full squads of Advent between them and the objective. Either the timers need to be lengthened in general, or infiltration needs to put you reliably closer to the objective.

What Could be Better
Onto my two biggest issues with Long War 2. The first of these isn't really Pavonis Interactive's fault, although it is something that will happen to a few players, so it's worth mentioning. Most of the best mechanical changes have already been available to players for over six months as standalone mods. The Long War Toolbox adds the game options changes, including 'red fog' which I talked about earlier. The new soldier perks have been around since summer 2016, as have the new laser weapons.

This meant, for me, that much of the 'new' experience of Long War 2 was absent, and the game quickly felt like more of what I'd already essentially finished with last year.

The game's performance is still poor. (As always, specs of the rig I played on can be found here). Now yes, it's a turn-based strategy game and therefore performance isn't as big of a concern as with a FPS or third-person action game. That being said, it's still not nice when a high-end rig is struggling with low settings, even if it is at 4K (something that this setup rarely struggles with even on near-highest settings). The suppression animation and fires are the biggest offenders here, especially on maps where you have ten soldiers deployed, and I've frequently had to just put up with not just dips, but solid chunks of time below 30FPS. When you go into a mission with four troops on a new map and get back to 60, the wave of relief is palpable.

Wrapping Up
There's no denying that Long War 2 is an awesome undertaking. It offers a staggering amount of new gameplay to an already solid game for no extra cost. It puts most paid expansion packs to shame (that's expansion, too, not overpriced and meaningless DLC). If you dipped out of X-Com 2 after a couple of playthroughs, or never finished it, I strongly suggest giving it a look. If you're a die-hard who's a bit bored of the vanilla game, this gives you more to get your teeth into.

However, if you've already been playing with the separate mods mentioned earlier, or the thought of dedicating another 140 plus hours to a single game puts you off, you might be less enthused.

Either way, Pavonis Interactive deserve to be commended for a stellar piece of work.


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Diablo 3 is in a rut

1/6/2017

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Rose-Tinted, Pixelated Spectacles
I’ve just finished Diablo 3’s 20th anniversary content. I’ll give a very brief summary of it before getting into what I really want to talk about.

The new content is basically a greater rift with a unique pixelated filter applied. Everything looks like it came from the early 90s, the sound quality and animations included. That’s cool. For a couple of minutes, then you realise why you don’t go back and play ancient games on your high-resolution display all that often.

It took me just under two hours to get through. If you go into it not expecting a great deal, you’ll probably enjoy it – until the ending, that is.

Diablo is just a normal fight. An easy one at that, too. The rewards you get are bafflingly bad. Killing Diablo gives you a legendary gem, for your helm, that stuns you – at random, combat or no combat – and casts his multi-directional fireball spell for an OK-ish amount of damage. 

I’m having a hard time coming up with a way to convey just how frustrating it is. It’s at the same level of getting to the bottom of a really nice meal and then finding a long, greasy hair in it. The stun lasts about two to three seconds and it triggers infuriatingly often when you’re trying to get from one part of a level to another. I had it equipped for fifteen minutes before I’d had enough.

The Bigger Picture
Back to the bigger picture. Back at Blizzcon last year, the hype going into the event was that there would be big news for the Diablo franchise. A new expansion - or perhaps even Diablo 4. the people hoping for that were left sorely disappointed. What we got instead was the announcement of this anniversary content (this taking up a big part of Diablo’s time at Blizzcon shows that the game is really not currently a priority) and the announcement of the Necromancer class.

One could be forgiven (well, I'll forgive you, at least) for assuming it would be coming either with this update or very close to it. No - sadly even that small hope is dashed - as it now seems that the Necromancer won’t be added to the game until the second half of 2017, per senior game designer Wyatt Chang.

What Now?
Now that I’m on the other side of the anniversary content, I’m left to reflect on the state of Diablo in 2017. I can’t help but think this content would have been a great way to introduce the Necromancer, in the form of a pseudo-tutorial. New Necromancer players fighting through the retro-styled content before bursting out into the new age of Diablo 3 makes a much better story than randomly hopping about on an existing character to a new icon on the map.

I hadn’t played Diablo 3 since the start of the season – even that brief fling didn’t last long. Am I supposed to just wonder off and ignore the game again until the Necromancer drops? Or was this content somehow supposed to rekindle my and others’ love for the game? If it was, it’s done the opposite.

It feels like the team currently working on Diablo 3 is tiny. As if the game has been repurposed to allow for a series of automatic or set-and-forget mechanics to keep the hardcore players happy while the developers are off working on something else.

If we assume that they are working on major new content in the Diablo franchise, then the timing of the Necromancer doesn’t make sense to me. If something of substance is coming reasonably soon, why release the Necromancer separately as DLC for Reaper of Souls? It makes me think the worst – that nothing is coming soon.

It makes me think the worst — that nothing is coming soon. The Necromancer is Blizzard trying to mop up a leak with toilet paper; desperately trying to keep players around while they try to get the Diablo team out of the malaise they find themselves in.


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5 Things I want from Valve in 2017

1/5/2017

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Hello there! Welcome to 2017! Aren't we all glad that 2016 is behind us? How are you exploiting your yearly dose of irrational optimism? I decided to waste mine and project it at Valve. 

I'm going to try and stick to eventualities that are at least vaguely possible, even if I would love for them to kill the harmful and exploitative economy that's growing around trading cards. Let's get into it.

1 - Make the curator system useful
"Maintaining that curator page is incredibly difficult and the feature set has not been properly updated since its inception almost three years ago."

Those are the recent words of John "TotalBiscuit" Bain, owner and operator of the largest curator group on Steam.


Like so many initiatives that Valve drop on us with little warning, the curator system is another in a line of good ideas crippled by either laziness or a lack of caring. Despite being given a small update a few months ago (which Bain states did nothing to actually help manage his curator group), the system is languishing and slowly slipping into a puddle of uselessness, with major curators abandoning it altogether. 

He went on to say: "It seems that nobody at Valve really cares about the curator system and can't be bothered to make it as powerful as it needs to be."

2 - Get a grip on Greenlight, Early Access and your store in general
I could write thousands upon thousands of words about the unethical practices that go on in what have quickly become Steam's Wild West of asset flipping, customer abusing, false advertising and bribing. 

The two platforms, which were both introduced to help aspiring developers get their projects to market in an industry where they traditionally wouldn't have a chance, both saw their fair share of controversy in 2016.

Let's start with Greenlight. Steam have a set of rules for developers who want to enter a project into the voting process. You can see them here.  The two that I'd like to bring particular attention to are the very first one, which states that you must have a functioning core of a game that you can show off with a video trailer, and the very last one, which prohibits a bunch of stuff - including racism, soliciting and begging. 

I mention these two rules in particular, because if, like me, you follow Jim Sterling's YouTube series, "Best of Steam Greenlight Trailers" you'll have noticed that these rules aren't exactly strictly enforced. What this means, then, is that "developers" (yes, the quotes are necessary) will often launch "games" (again, necessary) cobbled together in MS Paint promising free keys in exchange for Greenlight votes. They do this openly, and Valve do nothing about it, even when it's been brought to light by one of the biggest critics in the gaming industry. This is also despite them coming out and publicly telling them to knock it off in February 2015.

Here's an idea - that one-time fee that allows for an unlimited number of submissions - make it per submission. Or per three submissions, if that's too harsh.

Early Access has its own problems. Some games are abandoned with little warning and no way for customers to get their money back, as happened with Starbase DF-9. Other developers think it's perfectly fine to launch an Early Access expansion for their game, which is also in Early Access. Valve give them free reign to do so. It's a service that allows unscrupulous developers to take advantage of naïve consumers. Now yes, consumers should be more careful. However, they should also still be protected from predatory business practices.

Valve need quality control. They used to be very strict about it, arguably too strict. It's as if they were so badly stung by criticism they received from not letting certain games on Steam that they got into a massive sulk, said: "Sod it, we'll let everything on" and proceeded to sit in a dark corner glowering at us ever since.

Here's a sobering statistic: Steam has been in operation since September 2003. The releases in 2016 account for 40% of its entire library.

How many of those were utter dross that aren't fit for sale? How many were decade-old titles that nobody missed, dumped onto the store in great batches to take up the entirety of the new release front page? And how many that fall into those two categories stopped genuinely good games from getting the release spotlight that could have made the difference between a developer giving up on their dreams or realising them?

3 - Put an end to the Half-Life 3 misery, one way or another
Here's something that's been dragging on for over a decade. Half-Life 3. Does it exist, or does it not exist? Did it ever exist, or was it quietly cancelled several years ago? This is the gaming equivalent of Area 51, with reported sightings and slips cropping up from time to time in unexpected places.

Half-Life 3, at this point, has become a chain around Valve's neck. Every time they announce something new, even if it's something completely unrelated, like hardware, they're asked: "What about Half-Life 3??"

Just get it over with. Either tell us it's in development or, and this is far more likely, just come out and admit that you canned it years ago. There's no need for it to drag on any longer.

Please.

4 - Get your customer support sorted outThe recent kerfuffle that Valve had with the Australian government, where they were fined for not adhering to the country’s laws on customer refunds, brought to light some interesting details (thanks, /u/Donners22).
​Valve are a $4 billion-plus (at least) business. They have just 325 staff. There are regional businesses that have more. Further, they actually do have their own support staff — 50 of them. This was news to me, as I assumed they exclusively farmed support out to the cheapest company they could find.
Steam processes a massive number of transactions with what is one of the largest game libraries in the world. For that, they have fifty people plus two-hundred-ish dealing with every possible complaint (aside from refunds, which are now automated).
​Wait times on Steam are still too long. That article was published a year ago, with vague promises that things will get better for end users — albeit with a worrying disdain toward actually hiring people to handle it — I certainly didn’t see much sign of that happening up until now.

5 - Make Sales Great Again
Easy puns aside, the Steam sales are not what they once were. There are a couple of reasons for that. When they first started in earnest, it was the first time that major titles were going on deep discounts reasonably shortly after launch. It was also a time where most of this current "generation" of PC gamers had a lot of games to catch up on. The pool of great games that could go on sale for the first time was dramatically bigger.

Fast forward to 2017, and the marketplace has changed. It's been a long time since I've bought a game from Steam during a Steam sale. Mostly that's because they haven't been offering titles I didn't already have.

Steam are no longer the only digital retailer in town. They're no longer the cheapest, either. In fact, they're often among the most expensive - especially in my region of the world. 

Here's an anecdotal statistic that I feel isn't an unusual case (do feel free to agree or disagree in the comments). During the just-ended Steam Winter Sale, I bought five games. However, I bought none of them from Steam. I found them all through Steam (well, through /r/gamedeals' summary of the Steam sale on Reddit). I then went to isthereanydeal.com (great site) to see if there were better offers. The answer was yes. For every single one of those five games. 

Steam is no longer the underdog. It is now the monolith. Smaller digital retailers are stealing Valve's thunder. Good old Games have a far better approach to refunds and customer service, as well as regional pricing. Their take on Early Access is controlled tightly. WinGameStore has a fantastically simple layout with extremely competitive discounts on recently released titles. Even Origin, much maligned in its early life, has a better store and customer service than Steam. They even have live chat support. Actually, a lot of the tiny (not referring to Origin, obviously) digital retailers have at least live chat support. Ubisoft's uPlay is... still awful. Small mercies aside, it feels like Valve are resting on their laurels.

What would you like to see from Valve in the coming year? Am I talking a load of old rubbish? Let me know in the comments below.

​Note: I completely missed the bullet about third party support. Updated relevant section.
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