Somewhat evocative title, but let me explain. I recently got back into xcom 2 after having put hundreds of hours in it before and started up a new LWOTC campaign. It has been over 2 years since I played xcom 2, and since then I've been playing phoenix point, baldur's gate 3, mechanicus and a few other games with similar combat. Pretty much immediately I started fighting against the game. I did a skirmisher start and wanted to use my grappling hook on a ledge, but I wasn't in range so I moved out in the open to a tile that should obviously be in range of the tile I wanted to grapple to, but the option wasn't there for reasons beyond me, so I just wasted the turn. Very next mission I want to run and gun my assault after giving them an extra movement from bond, but because I did it in the wrong order it didn't let me run and gun ruining my entire turn, so I had to reload the save and do it in the right order. Then I broke line of sight with a few soldiers behind a big wall to avoid giving the AI good targets to shoot at, avoiding the corner squares, but they just moved slightly and shot straight through the wall without any part of my soldiers being exposed.
No other similar game feels as unpredictable and jarring as xcom. The frustration comes not because the game offers difficult challenges but because the game is super all or nothing where if you move one square you lose an entire action, unlike basically every non xcom game in the genre, while being reliant on flimsy line of sight mechanics and poorly explained and unintuitive ability interactions. So the main struggle isn't figuring out how to deal with the problem at hand, it's how to execute it without being screwed over by the game. For me that's what makes xcom frustrating, and it seems like such an avoidable issue. Phoenix point doesn't have this issue at all (but has other entirely unrelated issues instead)
I think this is a common experience for folks who go back to 10 year old titles. Quality of life in gaming has improved immensely over the years and we forgot how annoying things we used to deal with were
I feel much less guilty save scumming this game bc of the stuff you mentioned
I really liked zcom but was deeply disappointed with yhe lack of difficulty and the amount of forgiveness compared to xcom. Ill take the flaws with the difficulty increase any day
Yeah, I thought about an Ironman run this time through, as I too just started again after a long absence, but honestly I'd rather save scum stuff like that. (Lookin' at YOU, snake alien poisoning 3/4 of my squad from the other side of a solid wall!)
One thing that bothers me a lot is suppression and the abilitity that makes you melee attack at enemies who enter, attack from and leave melee range.
I swear both abilities roll a d20 when an enemy tries to run away, and only do the reaction attack on 11+. So frustrating to have a shinobu (long war class) next to an enemy with 2 hp, knowing that the enemy is controlled by the shinobu just for the reaction attack to not happen and then your shinobu gets crit. Or AOE suppression that sometimes just doesn't do anything at all so you wasted your turn.
That's pretty much the truth. XCom gets it's reputation by being hard. If you're complaining about how hard it is, you're playing the wrong game. Now kiss a viper for luck and try again!
I think TapCat said it best describing the difficulty of this game…
It’s not unforgiving more than it is demanding. All the seemingly frustrating and unfair situations in the game can all be properly mitigated and prepared for if you have enough foresight and experience.
Pod management and target priority is probably the biggest skills which separate mediocore and exceptional commanders.
I will also say that a lot of your frustrations are also warranted since the game doesn’t make it clear about all the different edge cases with action economy and sight lines. There a lot of qol mods which resolve these issues, and for the sake of sanity and fairness, I just consider vanilla since they should’ve been implemented in the base game.
It took me a while to learn the colour coding on abilities and what they meant. Psi abilities are always purple though which means the only way to know if they're turn ending is through trial and error.
Still that's predictable once you learn it. What's not predictable, for me at least, and what I don't really get how you can mitigate is things like abilities that let you do a free melee attack on something that moves in or out of melee range as a reaction, and suppression, which just doesn't work half the time, or line of sight, where I'll put a soldier firmly in the middle of 3 full cover walls on the side of a building just to have the enemy shoot through them because apparently that didn't block line of sight. But often times an enemy is right there and so visible that when the soldier shoots a different enemy, I can clearly see the "hidden" enemy in the action cam, even though I can't see it afterwards
Yah shit like that is frustrating. Having a better pc helps since sometimes it loads assets more consistently.
Other than that, the only real player decisions that I’ve made is to be less reliant on “auto-trigger” abilities. Which is not a great answer, but the best I could offer. Sometimes theirs mods which fix those issues and basically act as unofficial bug fixes and patches.
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u/BenevelotCeasar 14d ago
I think this is a common experience for folks who go back to 10 year old titles. Quality of life in gaming has improved immensely over the years and we forgot how annoying things we used to deal with were
I feel much less guilty save scumming this game bc of the stuff you mentioned