one thing that did disappoint me, though, was the limited camera freedom. from what I'd seen in the videos, I thought it was a completely free camera. as it turns out, you can only turn the camera in 90°-steps, and zoom in and out in five or six steps. the camera only closes in in the "action-view" (when you want to perform an action with a soldier like shooting, the camera drops in for an "over-the-shoulder" view, looking at the target), and you cannot look around in that view, the camera direction is always "at the target".
Note that the scroll wheel only changes the height level, to zoom you have to hold down the middle-mouse-button and drag, and you can zoom in/out a fair bit (to the point you can see outside the tutorial map edge because they forgot to disable it there
).
If you disable the third-person mode, you'll remain in "regular camera" and can keep moving around when aiming at enemies.
EDIT: oh, and >5GB for a demo? and one that's this limited in functionality? come on. people have already started dissecting the files, and found a lot of spoiler info in there... I think if you bring out a demo, you could at least put a little more effort into it, like removing all unnecessary game data. from what I've read, there are probably all of the autopsy reports in there, and even the end movie...
I think it's a general developer's rule that you shouldn't remove anything that you're not absolutely sure it's not required by the game, because even the slightest thing might break it.
also, the keyboard shortcuts work nicely. wasd for scrolling, q and e for turning the camera, f and v (or was it g and b?) for zooming in and out, space for entering action mode and using selected action. if you want to play quick (i.e. timed multiplayer...), you can just tap spacebar twice as soon as you spot an enemy and your unit will fire on the enemy in sight.
and yes, the options menu is very interesting 
the "Disable Enemy Health" button reminds me: I have yet to check whether that also disables the "damage dealt" numbers that float up when you hit an enemy... do you know if it does, SupSuper? I don't know yet if I want to use that option, though. It certainly will make the game a little bit more challenging, forcing you to plan more carefully...
Yes, it also disables the "damage dealt" numbers when you hit an enemy (you still see damage dealt to your soldiers though).
Looking around online, I find it interesting that a lot of people are complaining that the tutorial demo is too linear, and proceed to miss a lot of options because the tutorial didn't specifically tell them.
For example, here's all the different ways to select a soldier I've found so far:
- Click on the Prev / Next Soldier buttons.
- Click on the Tab / Ctrl-Tab hotkeys.
- Click on the Back/Forward buttons on your mouse (if available).
- Click on the soldier on the Battlescape screen.
- Click on the F2-F5 hotkeys to select a specific soldier.
And all the different ways to attack an alien:
- Click on the Fire button.
- Click on the Alien Spotted indicator on the bottom-right.
- Click on the alien on the Battlescape screen.
- Click on the 1 hotkey to switch to Fire mode.
- Click on the Space hotkey to switch to Action mode.
So there's no lack of options. Some people on the 2K Forums even found out how to
change the difficulty level (the demo defaults to Easy) and
various game options (watch out for spoilers) if you wanna get more out of the demo.
Actually, that's a *huge* difference when it comes to tactics--It's not that the level becomes more visually interesting due to the rearrangement, it's that it changes how you play.
With a set level you can generally rely on a "most effective" path to complete a mission, and that would get boring much faster than a map where that path keeps changing, and doing so exponentially because it's not just one building that moved, it could be all of them, which means there may or may not be aliens on the other side or not.
This game's not going to have the same replayability, but they obviously had to go that route to appeal to a slightly more casual audience (consoles...), not to mention it's much easier on the technical side.
I believe they've said it may be possible to unlock the entire game using just the demo (and an update?), so you don't have to download it again. So yeah, there's a lot of stuff in there for a reason.
They talked about this design choice, it ends up being a pros vs. cons kind of thing. Procedurally generated maps have the advantage of producing thousands of unpredictable map combinations with a few elements, and worked well for the original X-Com's simple graphics and hardware limitations (they were definitely not
visually interesting
). But you have the disadvantage of having very little control over the result because you're leaving it up to random chance. You can end up with really hard maps just because the game decided to put a lot of open fields between you and the aliens, or really weird bizarre layouts due to the randomness, specially with 3D graphics.
So they weren't happy with the results and settled with just making hundreds of randomly-selected hand-crafted maps. It's a lot more work to make every map individually (the game has been 4 years in the making), but you have full control over the results, and they said there'll be enough to "not see the same map after two playthroughs". Spawn points and mission elements are still randomized anyways, so there won't be a "most effective path".
it appears that this is made to prevent those never-ending games like in the original when you had all the tech, 8 bases with two or three avengers each and completely dominating the airspace, crashing battleships for fun and milking alien bases for supply ships regularly... although jake solomon hinted at the possibility to delay the final mission for fun in order to complete the tech tree. I guess we'll find out what is possible and what isn't.
It has been confirmed you can still have never-ending games if you can manage it.
That won't be so bad then
Yeah, I understand they designed it this way, but it's not "believable" (I'll avoid "realistic" given the context of the game). Are you telling me that with all the money they have, they can only afford 4-6 soldiers and can be in one place at a time?
Also, it's a "forced loss". By which I mean that regardless of choice, you "lose" on the other. In the original, you could theoretically respond to several terror missions at any given time. If you can't, it's your fault (as the player) for not having enough ships/units/equipment, and that, to me, is much more powerful.
I was playing UFO:EU not long ago, I sold one of the fighters to buy some more scientists. Later on, I got 3 large UFOs, and I only had my single fighter to defend. That was *my* fault.
Actually, I'm assuming you're allowed to recruit more soldiers at any point? or are you fixed?
You can still recruit soldiers freely. I think they're just trying to balance out things with the new design. Like you said, in the original game you could have multiple bases and Skyrangers and their "downtime" was the only thing restricting you. Going to one mission might keep the craft from going another. In the new one you always have the one base Skyranger available as far as I can tell, so they have to do something else. From the streams only the alien abduction missions seem to force you to choose anyways.
