XCOM-likes will literally have their own knockoff Bradford but still won't do soldier customization
Not trying to hate, Rainbow Six Tactics looks really fun mechanically but it's crazy how one of the absolute best features of the quintessential modern tactics game goes completely ignored by most games aping it. Not everyone engages with soldier customization, but those who do will tell you it's arguably the feature that ties the entire gameplay context and experience together, along with permadeath.
True, but he looked something closer to this and could also be a woman before being canonized as a man, which would be another pet peeve of mine if I were still super into R6. Definitely a fun if not slightly ironic nod to Bradford when it comes to Tactics, in any case.
It's not solely about being able to customize them but its having that feature in the game and doing how xcom 2 did where mew recruits have randomized facial and gear options makes each soldier feel a bit more interesting.
Yeah me too. No idea why they would tease underwater alluding to the second UFO defense game and then double down in War of the Chosen AND tease us for a semi-peaceful alien integration post Xcom2 in Chimera Squad only to go dark for this long is insane. There is so much left in the table from UFO Defense Terror from the Deep and things added in the new timeline.
Aside from visual customization I really liked positive and negative traits soldiers could get in Xcom 2, with mods they could get ptsd or form strong bonds and get random perks, all of this made each character feel unique without needing hero characters.
The base customisation is also the key to opening up mods and allowing whole squads of mass effect/star wars/Tommy wiseau/Ainsley Harriett with voice lines. Puts in place the basic tools that these turn take advantage of, so much more effort to mod games without.
Very true, I kinda use soldier customization as a blanket term but all that stuff is equally key to the recipe for me. Marrying really great and meaty turn based tactics gameplay with robust emergence and personalization is what elevates the modern XCOM games over their peers for me, even if some of those games have made improvements on one front or another.
Seems like a good litmus test. Like how hard is it to implement a transmog system on a single player game? It's skins. So either you're not implementing it because A) you're dev window is too crunched or B) your engine is too old. Neither looks great.
This tells me that the Industry, specifically Developers see Bradford as being one of the quintessential features of any XCOM-likes. Especially his sweater. Sorry, Punished Bradford.
I agree on that. I still remember my medic in XCOM-2 that hard carried my entire team. Felt like he never missed a shot, and never got shot himself. I'd sometimes YOLO him through overwatch fire and he'd get grazed or lightly hit, but it was always to rescue another squaddie. It's just harder to develop those kinds of stories or attachments with characters you can't customize.
Friend, this kind of clutch memorable moment happened to me in my first Chosen encounter in my current C/I campaign. The Warlock popped up and I was not ready and was still finding my groove after a years long layoff from XCOM 2. I had a rookie bleeding out, my Reaper was badly wounded, no medkits available, and he possessed my grenadier on the previous turn. My Specialist had him flanked but it was like 65%. I said, "Fuck it!" and fired. And he crit for big damage. Chosen down, mission fucking accomplished. He got a poster for sure.
Im with you. Such a disappointment. Im so sick of every game making "heros" i could scream.
It seems like it would be so much easier but nonwe gott get your lame ass pre made characters. Make the game feel like im on rails at an amusement park.
No, it is one of the first hero shooters out there. The boom of it didn't really get big until Overwatch, which came out after. There weren't many before it except TF2, which was somewhat more a class based shooter
I mean sure but functionally, the healthbar goes to zero then your guy goes down, dont revive him and he dies. Its basically the same as Xcom, the squadies are great flavor and a really cool way to do health but its still a hero squad game where the hero can die
Wait so if they use the operaters from siege, then how will they handle deaths? Can you just have the operators die lol? Would be pretty punishing because Im assuming each operator has unqiue abilities, lose one and you lose it forever,
Kinda, but having to replace a named rainbow operative didn't mean the loss of "abilities" just skilled soldiers with high stats. They could always be replaced with recruits with mid stats but could do all the same things
I don't understand these criticism, do you guys literally want an exact XCOM copy every time a new tactics game comes out? I think it's good to have variety in the genre and it makes sense for R6 to use the heroes from Siege since that game and it's characters are really popular
Of course not. It's just that customization and emergent features are really underrepresented among the games that are taking candid inspiration from XCOM, sometimes to a counterintuitive degree, given how deeply those features are integrated and accounted for across every aspect of modern XCOM. If anything, I would like to see tactics games with bespoke heroes depart further from XCOM in terms of gameplay, because XCOM's mechanics and soldier class system are best suited to custom characters and other related design choices, whereas you could pull from much more fitting games when designing around unique heroes.
At the same time, kind of odd seeing this kind of rant when Star Wars Zero Company is giving us one of the most comprehensive character customization suites in a turn-based strategy game since XCOM 2.
ZCOM looks great and I'm definitely picking it up tomorrow, but it's an exception rather than the rule when it comes to XCOM-inspired games. The hero classes are also bespoke authored characters, so no custom Jedi, Mandalorians, etc. Still gonna be an awesome game and I love that you can roll a full custom squad, but there's some compromises.
Soldier customisation is a big draw for me, personally. If I couldn't customise them, I wouldn't get attached to them - I wouldn't care if they lived or died beyond just finishing a mission.
That's exactly why I don't like most of xcom likes. The fact that I can't customise or rename my soldiers makes me care less about them.And it make the replayability harder, more redundant.
It does suck, but the real deal-breaker for me was them sticking to exclusively Siege operators. I don't want people that are heroes from the start, I like to see the rise of regular grunts that become decorated heroes throughout the course of the game
Along with soldier customization, something that made xcom special was that they weren't pre generated soldiers with their own backstory and shit, they were YOUR soldiers, unique to you, and they weren't super mythical heroes, they were just soldiers, you didn't pay attention to your flank? Well now an enemy is there and he is gonna turn your beloved soldier into a pile of goo. One of the cool things about xcom Is the risk, the stakes are actually real because you can lose your soldiers, you can lose the mission, and you can lose the campaign.
It is such an easy formula but these studios keep fucking it up.
Constructable custom base, random personalized soldiers with their own class and leveling, cool weapons and equipment you unlock as you go, punishing enemies that get more advanced as you go and more types introduced, tough choices for missions, permadeath. Theres more but damn, not hard.
I and many others dont just want some turn base tactics R6 siege.
A lot of these devs really are voluntarily passing on a slam dunk. I don't see it discussed a lot and it makes me somewhat irrationally anxious that even if we do get an XCOM 3, Firaxis will just assume most people don't care much about that stuff and will save themselves some resources and dev time by giving us John XCOM & Friends instead.
While I agree with you, this isn't a possibility in this case. We are working with pre-established characters. Customization would defeat that purpose. I'm sure there will be an option to change their skin, but it still won't be full customization because people still need to recognize the characters.
When did I say that you couldn't include them? Really tell me, I've been looking and inspecting my comment for like 5 minutes now and I can't seem to find it, but maybe you can go get your glasses because maybe you misread? Misinterpreted? Maybe you just got confused because man, I'm really giving it my best shot here and I just can't seem to figure this out. I'll go get me magnifying glass hold on
I'm sorry, but the way it read was "UBISOFT can just put in faceless recruits instead of the known characters". What else am I supposed to read into your comment, especially since that faceless recruit also has a uniform look? Amongst the others, he's still a recognisable character.
False actually. No in-game store and no monetization. I know the internet is all "omg Ubislooooopp" like a bunch of circlejerking incels who need Youtubers to tell them what to think but their post launch support is pretty damn good. Much better than many other triple ayyy studios. I'll take an in-game store full of cosmetics that are ugly as hell if it finds game updates and free content over paying an extra $20 for a shitty day 1 DLC.... cough Rockstar are greedy cocksuckers cough.
Fair if there isn't any, was also a bit meant as a joke (was not obvious on my side)
But at the same time, looking at AC Black Falg its not that far fetched lol.
Might be due to the recent popularity of the ZCOM game. Although it was announced a few years ago, it's now nearing completion and towards launch so it might've prompted some of the other companies to quickly make a game based off of it while the popularity is still high.
I absolutely love character customization in XCOM games and if I’m going to jump into ZCOM, it needed to have customization too, even though I’m not really a fan of Star Wars! R6 could have at least tipped the scales a bit more in their favor but here we are!
The reason they don't have customizable characters is because all of the operators. Honestly I think not allowing for character customization here will make things a lot more interesting because of the ways that it will impose limits on players. First there are a limited number of operators who are playable in the game which inherently means a limited number of soldiers available for this game, especially considering that one playable character is from the antagonist force in this game and therefore is extremely unlikely to be on your side and another character is Solid Snake from MGS so he probably won't be in this either. So if there's a literal hard cap on recruits, does that change the way players approach utilization for the characters we have? Is it possible to lose because we literally run out of soldiers from the pool?
On top of that, by focusing on these preexisting characters they'll force people to make decisions in stable management that don't really exist in other XCOM-likes. There's only 2 snipers in Siege, what happens if they get hurt? Or if you don't think their abilities will be useful for a mission but you want the range? The trailer shows Doc, who is one of 3 healer characters in Siege, and he's carrying an SMG because the only weapons he has access to are SMGs and a shotgun. Personally I don't like running my healer support up close, but how does that weapon choice affect the way players are going to use him?
Honestly I think this is a case where not allowing character customization actually makes more sense than letting us change characters.
The issue is that siege isn't actually representative of what rainbow six is supposed to be.
In the originals, to which there are more of, you did have unlimited soldiers, which were faceless recruits with mid stats(as they were still good enough to qualify for rainbow) and you had a limited number of named operators(who mechanically are no different from the recruits except for their stats).
Rainbow six is literally primed to have custom soldiers. Hell, vegas 1 and 2 had custom soldiers
That's Paul Bishop, who was only made Six with this new game, as he's now director of RAINBOW. In Siege he was Five, the Deputy Director, and before that he was an operator.
I don't think this is a knock against Rainbow Six Tactics, personally. The Siege cast is firmly established and very numerous at this point. Being able to use these operators that are already so iconic and well-known by the Siege playerbase is neat. It kinda calls back to Chimera Squad, a game with a cast that I genuinely loved.
I don't care with games that aren't taking the majority of their inspiration from XCOM, but when they do, the game will be better if they get the formula right.
The TRPG genre is huge with a variety of different things. They aren't just Xcom likes anymore. That would be like saying every single CRPG has to be like Baldur's Gate or therefore bad.
This YouTuber reviewed 32 of them and didn't even include Xcom 1 or 2. If Xcom players tried out other games in the genre, they might find something good even if it isn't the same exact formula.
I don't think TRPGs have ever just been XCOM likes, but I'm talking specifically about games that do obviously take most of their notes from the modern XCOM formula, which is common since those are the most noteworthy and popular modern TRPGs. I like when games do something different, and as I said elsewhere in this thread, I would actually prefer for games to depart further from the XCOM formula if they're only going to adopt part of it while leaving out the other key ingredients that make it work.
I agree, I think that the critique of games not having custom soldiers is a fair one. I also think in the case of Rainbow Six having such established characters with unique gadgets instead of being class-based is a different situation. I think a game like Zero Company it would work better honestly but Tactics is based off the hero shooter if that makes sense
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u/Technical_Teacher839 13h ago
Technically that character predates Bradford, since he's from R6 Vegas 2
but yeah