Just completed my first play through of X-Piratez. Overall, I had a blast! Again and again I found myself amazed at the level of depth Dioxine has added to an almost 25 year old game. I started last fall with 99H1 and upgraded to 99I2a to finish it, with a several month break in between. I wanted to share some thoughts I had about it, in no particular order. Warning, has some spoilers.
- I’d played a few missions in, and I had gotten the hang of the “raid the church” missions. I’d learnt that killing people on those missions was generally punished, and that sometimes prisoners were nice to have for robbery. So I set out with harpoon guns with stun bolts on what I thought was another routine temple raid.
Fortunately, out of sheer laziness, I had a number of other weapons that I’d left sitting in my airbus, so after racing the survivors back, tossing their weapons aside, and grabbing the various swords and bats I had, managed to defeat my foes. Being thrown a curve like that really got me hooked.
- I appreciate that there’s a lot of written backstory as to what’s going on, even if I wasn’t always sure about how it all tied together. With the limited tools available, Dioxine manages to use Bootypedia & workshop to give a strong sense of a living world, all the more impressive given the limited ways in which the game engine permits storytelling.
- One small disappointment - the ending.
The game never really answers these questions, but I gather that Dioxine is still working on the ending, so I should probably shut up and be patient.
- Like others, I found the endgame can drag a little. With over a billion dolaros, via my
I found that Ivan Dogovitch’s QoL mods helped shave some time off the waiting game. I had enough manufacturing capacity that I could basically ignore everything and still have a monthly score in the thousands, plus piles of cash coming in. I took missions that seemed like they’d be fun, or good practice for the gals, and ignored things I thought might be dangerous or simply tedious.
- Speaking of cash, I rarely have more than 2 or 3 bases in a regular game of X-Com - in my X-Pirates play-through, I ended up with the full 8 bases: My first science base, my first industrial printer/spa base, my factory base, my “build the conquerer” factory/printer/workshop base, and 4 interception bases. The very different interception & manufacturing game in X-Pirates really drives you to expand your operations - there’s simply no way you can do all the things you’d want to do in one (or two, or three) bases.
- One aspect of the game I never really explored much were alternate soldiers or tanks. The Gals, particularly once trained at a spa, seemed to be pound-for-pound the best fighters I could get. I guess I can see some value in tanks
for fighting enemies with strong voodoo, but I’m not sure I get how slaves, Lokk’Naars, or the new peasants fit in. Likewise, I never really experimented with hiring veterans, freaks, etc. Am I missing something, or do other people not find them particularly compelling?
- Another thing that bugged me - and this is probably more an engine limitation than something Dioxine can fix - was finding out where to source things. I went with the grey codex, and could theoretically build sorceress suits, but I was never able to figure out how or where to source a Tome of Lightning. Likewise, sythmetal mesh, magischen motors, force crystals, etc. always seemed to be in short supply, and it took a lot of digging to figure out how to get parts. I see in the latest build that when you’re looking at the fence list you can see what uses a particular item has, which is nice - I suppose you could use that to work backward to see what you might disassemble to get parts, but not everything can be disassembled, and you have to have one of the items first. Likewise, getting all the components in one place can be a hassle - the “all vaults” will show me all vaults, but it gives me no idea where those items are, which is kind of tedious when you have 8 bases! Again, though, this is an engine limitation, and not Dioxine’s problem.
- There are perhaps too many trappings, and I frequently found myself struggling to figure out exactly what to equip my gals with. Part of that is probably bad inventory management on my part - toss the old crap out! - but I found myself having to constantly consult the Bootypedia to figure out what to have the gals wear.
All things considered, though, X-Pirates is absolutely breathtaking in it’s ambition and depth. If the new XCOM games are all about taking the old X-Com and purifying it to it’s simplest elements so everyone can enjoy it, X-Piratez goes in the opposite direction: adding complexity - and meaningful, game-affecting complexity! - to an old classic.
Oh, and lots of cartoon boobs.
Definitely worth the donation!
https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,4604.0.html
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