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« on: June 01, 2013, 05:41:02 am »
Years ago, I was sitting bored at a crappy job, and thinking about X-COM while some customer with an unimportant complaint droned on and on about how horrible a person I was. Specifically, I was thinking about the research tree, and all the various ways I would change it, if I could.
Now, OpenXcom is here! Finally, I can make my dreams a reality!
Of course, I had many of the same ideas as everyone else. Improved "alien alloy" rifles and cannons. Night vision goggles. I even wanted to redo the way grenades worked, by separating the detonator from the payload. Then, the motion scanner technology would lead to a motion sensor detonator. Motion-detonator + regular grenade = proximity grenade! Proximity detonator + stun bomb = stun mines! I thought about making Blaster Bombs and Stun Bombs interchangeable ammos. Blaster launchers that can shoot stun bombs around corners! Small launchers that can fire blaster bombs, but only in direct line-of-sight! (Though, the small launcher would have the inherent danger of inaccuracies...). I wanted to make it so that simply researching plasma weapons would let you use, but not manufacture, the alien weapons. In order to manufacture them, or research new weapons based on alien principles, you would first need the Plasma Weapon Theory project... Maybe a new helmet inventory slot that could hold a mind shield device. That way, psionically weak soldiers don't automatically lose half their number to a single sectoid leader, much less an entire ship of ethereals!
So. Now I can make all of those things happen. But as I look back, I find myself wondering what I could add that would be meaningful, rather than just "power creep". For example, I wanted to make a new class of weapons, a hybrid of terran and alien technologies. I didn't like the idea that X-COM was unable to out-guess the aliens, to innovate. I wanted X-COM to get creative. Alien-alloy rifles, for example. Using the alien technology in unexpected ways. Unfortunately, the alien tech already seems to have most of the bases covered. They have improved rocket launchers, long-range stunners, and the best direct-fire weapons available. Anything new would really just be redundant, and probably overpowered. Do I really need a gun stronger than a heavy plasma? Am I really going to claim with a straight face that heavy plasma isn't deadly enough? That I need more firepower, because the conflict isn't one-sided enough already? I suppose an argument could be made for having an arms race. Add new terran guns and hybrid weapon classes, and then the aliens can adapt and start making better weapons too. Would that be fun, though? Or would it just be the same old thing with slightly larger numbers in the inventory window?
Bleh. I started this post intending to share all these "cool" ideas I had way back when, but over the last 20 years, I've played tons of games that have ten different guns that all try to fill the same role, or that have five different tiers of guns, each more deadly than the last. As I pulled up my old text file and reviewed its contents, I didn't ask myself "What else would cool and awesome?" Instead, I'm asking "What does this add that wasn't there before?"
This morning, I was so excited about the prospect of modding, but something's gone horribly wrong along the way. So, my fellow X-COM fans... What's missing?
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