While fixing bugs and getting X-Com running on modern systems is all well and good, there’s always that part of us that wants more. That keeps coming up with ideas whenever we play a game. Of how we would’ve done things even better if we were in charge.
So in an attempt to get some more discussion going, tell me. How would you fix X-Com? What kind of crazy ideas do you have in mind? What improvements could the gameplay use? What extra features would make your job easier?
Great question. 🙂 For me, the core gameplay is damned near perfect so I personally wouldn’t want it messed with too much. Some interface tweaks to pull it into the 21st century would be useful though. For example, scrolling the mouse wheel to zoom in and out. If this was implemented well it could be used to quickly get an overall view of the battlescape and to easily switch between squad mates.
The only gameplay element I’d like to see added is for the automated selling of manufactured items, as available in the X-Com CE version. The idea is that, to make some extra cash, you can automatically sell manufactured items built in your bases.
How about I18N?
Can you make it translatable? I tried with the original and was really hard to do.
@Tim: Some nicer controls would be cool, although I’m not sure you can zoom in/out the battlescape without looking funny with the current graphics.
As for stuff like auto-selling found in fan-patches, I plan to include it eventually. 🙂
@Fajro: Yes internationalization (I had to look that up) is planned. Technically the game already supports multiple languages fine, it just needs to be more user-friendly for translators.
Can uou mix the globe of Enemy Unknown with the oceans of TFTD?
That’d be pretty tricky, as TFTD’s oceans don’t match up with UFO’s oceans (and vice-versa), and both use different color palettes.
I really like what some of the other projects are doing to improve X-com gameplay. I think when I play X-com as it is, ignoring my nostalgic feelings for it, ( though those are good ones), there are some things that just kind of bug me. If you look at what Seb76 did for X-com CE with his patcher program, I think most changes are really helpful. Also on the UFO ET Scene forums, GreyFiend’s mod for UFO : ET has features that I would consider a really good expansion pack to X-com if something like that existed. Though not all changes there apply to X-Com. Some try to make UFO: ET more like X-Com but those aren’t the ones I mean to draw your attention to. Most could be adapted easily since that game is so similar to X-com.