Their special ability launches a salvo of sorts, dealing AOE damage to all units in the area. The mobility afforded to fliers is already hard to deal with, given the necessity of maintaining cover against skybound aliens, but Archons will also have a Battle Rage which gives them a movement boost, allowing them to close long distances while ignoring obstructions, and clobber you with their elaborate staff weapon. You certainly could ignore the Shieldbearer, but it will almost certainly cost you numerous wasted shots per enemy you kill before it.īy contrast, the new Archon is a purely offensive enemy, established as an evolution of the well-known Floaters from earlier games. Instead, you’ll be highly incentivized to focus fire a Shieldbearer down because of his ability to create a personal shield for all nearby aliens, which offer huge damage reduction. The Advent Shieldbearer is basically a tank with high hit points and armor, but it won’t have a taunt ability per se. The panel actually had some new enemies to show off, which, despite being horrifying from a player perspective, look like they’ll be incredible additions to the alien menace’s roster. Solomon assured me that, due to extensive in-house playtesting and parcel tweaks, the high/low cover density situations are few and far between. The cover system is primarily handled within each parcel, rather than looking at the overall map, so it’s possible you’ll end up in dangerous situations where cover is sparse, or aggravating situations where there’s a tangle of cover to navigate around, but measures have been taken to minimize these corner cases. Unlike the maps themselves, the parcels are all hand designed, so the buildings and road segments will have the same well-designed feel to them, but they’ll be assembled differently each time you initiate a combat mission. Solomon explained that they had created a process which takes what they term “parcels” internally and snaps them together to form your encounter area. Asking a computer to do so in any meaningful way, however, is a far more arduous task. When combat maps are crafted by hand, it’s simple to check cover density by eye, and adjust it later to finer specifications. For 20 years now, keeping your soldiers behind cover has been integral to the entire XCOM combat system. The topic naturally came up while I was chatting with Creative Director Jake Solomon, who expressed the difficulty of creating a system that could intelligently piece together the pre-designed “parcels” of map into something not only cohesive, but navigable and survivable. XCOM 2 fixes this issue with procedural combat maps, which, it turns out, aren’t as easy to implement as they sound. It’s certainly effective to know the best lines of attack for any given map, but the surprise factor of a new map is more fun. You might not notice the repeats in your first or second playthrough, but you’ll see them after a while, and then you’ll see nothing but the repetition. Previously, every encounter map was designed by hand, so there wasn’t significant variation in combat encounters over the long-term. While replaying previous iterations of XCOM offered a unique experience, those of us who played through more than a couple of times are all too aware of the repetition of tactical maps. They went so far as to address folks who may never have lost, in that you’re cleaning up other players’ messes. It’s a redemption of your losses, rather than a retcon of your wins. XCOM 2 is based on those times – few though they may be – that you failed to fend off the invasion. ![]() The replayability of XCOM has always been important to the game, and being able to restart from scratch and have a wholly different experience lends itself to a parallel universe situation, where every playthrough is true in one of the infinite possible universes. ![]() It turns out, to very little surprise, that I wasn’t the only one to take umbrage with this, and the team at the Firaxicon panel took a moment to address it. Though I didn’t win every game, I beat Enemy Unknown and Enemy Within no fewer than a dozen times, so seeing the sequel predicated on failure seemed odd. While I’ve been excited for XCOM 2 since it was announced, there was one thing that’s bugged me about it from the outset the entire premise assumes you failed to fend off the invasion in Enemy Unknown.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |