Be Excellent To Each Other

Odd how it is only announced for PC so far. No doubt PS4/Xbox One/iOS/Android versions will be in the pipeline too.

Rumour is that PS Vita is getting a port of the previous game too. Probably will be announced at E3.

Ooohhh that's something to look forward to, the last one was a bloody awesome game.

Not much in the way of replay value though, once it was done, that was it.

I disagree. I loved my second playthrough! Ironman FTW!

Did you not create hulking great Mech suits when the update came out? I sure as shit did.

Holy fuck, that looks good.

Snakemen!

Also, that looks like some sort of megapolis in the beginning of that trailer there - is this going to be a cross between XCOM and X-COM: Apocalypse?

I've just had a look back at the old XCOM thread, I did a full playthrough on Normal and was sort of bemoaning my decision not to switch to Classic towards the end as I was stomping it a bit.

Did then start a Classic playthrough but couldn't find the motivation to do it all again, and didn't get the DLC either. I did have Borderlands 2 on the go by then though so that probably had something to do with it.

(The mere concept of Ironman mode made me rather upset, no chance I'd ever actually play it......)

Got about 40 hours out of it though and really enjoyed the whole experience, so no cause for complaint.

Will deffo be all over the new one.

Woohoo, you can never have enough XCOM.

Hopefully I will have finished my Long War campaign by then.

Rrrrrrrgh

PC exclusive, I saw somewhere. Citation needed.

By the looks of the Tux and Feral Interactive logo on the bottom of the trailer, it'll be at least on Mac and Linux eventually too.*



* Yes I know that "PC exclusive" != "Windows exclusive."

As I said, it's only announced for Windows/Max/Linux so far, but I struggle to believe it won't get ported to PS4/Xbox One/iOS/Android down the line. Why wouldn't it.

Maybe a digital only release.

PCGamer headline, I think is where I saw it, and a search suggests that's what I saw. But now I read the articles...well, this sentence from Forbes.com is excellent, and probably nearer the truth; "There’s no guarantee that this will remain a PC exclusive, of course."

Why use, like, language to just express what you mean straight off. Paid by the word, perhaps. In an age where people say 'pre-book' or 'we did well in terms of our pace', why not refer to something as exclusive - for a while. Muppets. So yes, I'm sure you're right Lewie.

Apparently the levels will be procedurally generated, which is excellent news. Now i just want the stupid alien spawn system gone and a better interface. And then we might have the perfect game.

Conspiracy theory time:

There is a big focus on modding this time around. That's the kind of situation that only occurs if the suits upstairs are happy with it, since people are far less likely to buy DLC when they can extend the game with stuff provided by modders free of charge, typically modding support is fairly low down the list of priorities.

One way that the suits upstairs would be more likely to consent to a big focus on mod support would be if mods were to be sold, and they were to get a big cut of the revenue. Much like what Valve tried to do with Skyrim not all that long ago, and would (currently) only be possible on PC.

I reckon 2K and Valve had/have some sort of plan for XCOM 2 to have paid mods, but following the massive backlash against paid mods for Skyrim, they're either not talking about it right now, or the plans have been axed.

If it's been in development since work on the original was finished, it was probably too late to add other platforms into the mix on the same timeline as they are planning to release on PC.

I guess we can wait and see, but I really struggle to imagine it won't get a PS4 version at least.

It's also possible they are in the middle of negotiating with (probably) Microsoft to swap a big bag of money in exchange for not doing it on PS4, or doing it on PS4 at a later date than doing it on Xbox, but if that were the case they would have probably not announced it for PC yet.

Question: Is that different from "randomly built from a set of tiles"?

Not really.

Well, it's not entirely random, is it? If it was you'd have a half a petrol station merged against two tiles of a Quik-E-Mart and five tiles of grassland. So the trick is doing random shuffling, but only of parts that make sense in proximity; random enough to have enough depth, not so random as to produce nonsense. That can be quite a hard trick though, which justifies a different name to my mind.

TLDR: Not really

TBH I'm a bit wary of 'procedural generation', I'd rather have a good, solid set of levels designed by human beings with specific elements/goals/problems/etc in mind.

Yeah with procedural generation you've got a potentially infinite number of levels to play, but then again a lot of them will be total shit - a bit like when you ask Worms to make a random level for you which, technically speaking, is a complete and cohesive Worms level, but a couple of pairs of human eyes take one look at it and say 'Fuck that'.

Suppose we'll just have to wait and see how it pans out.

The maps on the original game (as in, UFO:EU, not XCOM2012) were procedurally generated, but used "mini maps" so that things could be kept consistent - the arrangement of the mini map blocks within the full map would be procedural.

If they do something similar this time around, that's the best approach. I believe XCOM2012 used maps that were entirely handbuilt, which was great until you started getting frequent repeats.

Spelunky is the go-to poster child for superb procedural generation.

Early gameplay vid:

Enmoisten mode engaged.