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Author Topic: What do I do to make the game more challenging?  (Read 21901 times)

Offline Solarius Scorch

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Re: What do I do to make the game more challenging?
« Reply #30 on: September 20, 2022, 05:27:54 pm »
I think the best way to avoid it is to not act like a damn clown and ruin your experience for yourself, then blame the game for not stopping you. :P

Offline NancyGold

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Re: What do I do to make the game more challenging?
« Reply #31 on: September 20, 2022, 06:54:49 pm »
I think the best way to avoid it is to not act like a damn clown and ruin your experience for yourself, then blame the game for not stopping you. :P
Well we have to think what is the point of XP system in RPG games. Initially experience was a lazy game design method to lock out the higher level abilities and dungeons in D&D games, which had a dungeon master, who punished players for role playing clowns. Basically getting level 3 meant just that instead of module level 2 you should now move to play the module level 3, as opposed to explicitly linking the dungeons together in a linear progression. Now XCOM is not really a D&D RPG and has no DM, while the tech level and the end game is locked behind research, money and base building, instead of experience. So what is the point of soldiers having D&D like progression at all? Will the soldiers becoming higher level open previously too high level dungeons (UFOs) for them, which are accessible from the beginning? Is XCOM a World of Warcraft wannabe, where you first grind to the level 99, and only then the game begins?
« Last Edit: September 20, 2022, 07:00:04 pm by NancyGold »

Offline Meridian

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Re: What do I do to make the game more challenging?
« Reply #32 on: September 20, 2022, 08:35:02 pm »
Xcom is not an RPG, fullstop.

If the features I have added make it look like RPG, then I'd have failed completely and would have to declare this project an utter failure.

Offline mutantlord

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Re: What do I do to make the game more challenging?
« Reply #33 on: September 21, 2022, 02:22:21 am »
What’s wrong with making it more RPG? It will be nice to have missions with very limited dialog interaction with NPC in battlescape, like trade items, follow XCom soldiers to exit points.  Expands the scope of mission types.

Offline NancyGold

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Re: What do I do to make the game more challenging?
« Reply #34 on: September 21, 2022, 01:15:55 pm »
What’s wrong with making it more RPG? It will be nice to have missions with very limited dialog interaction with NPC in battlescape, like trade items, follow XCom soldiers to exit points.  Expands the scope of mission types.
Then you will also need the big alien boss villains, and the cellar "alien rats" mission for lv1 characters, instead of proper terror missions. And skyranger will get unlocked only half-way through the game, with early game being limited to a single area.
« Last Edit: September 21, 2022, 01:21:13 pm by NancyGold »

Offline Solarius Scorch

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Re: What do I do to make the game more challenging?
« Reply #35 on: September 21, 2022, 01:31:40 pm »
Then you will also need the big alien boss villains, and the cellar "alien rats" mission for lv1 characters, instead of proper terror missions. And skyranger will get unlocked only half-way through the game, with early game being limited to a single area.

Yes, but these are trivial and already doable. The difficult part would be adding all those features OXC was not intended to have, from dialogues to trade UI, map transitions and all the rest...

Offline Vakrug

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Re: What do I do to make the game more challenging?
« Reply #36 on: September 21, 2022, 03:43:57 pm »
It will be nice to have missions with very limited dialog interaction with NPC in battlescape, like trade items, follow XCom soldiers to exit points.
This is all very secondary. The main theme of RPG is different characters with different skills, that cannot be altered by a player freely. This game needs random soldiers! Right now the only rpg-like stuff in XCOM is psi-strength.

Offline NancyGold

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Re: What do I do to make the game more challenging?
« Reply #37 on: September 21, 2022, 03:51:57 pm »
Yes, but these are trivial and already doable. The difficult part would be adding all those features OXC was not intended to have, from dialogues to trade UI, map transitions and all the rest...
XCOM had a trade system since the beginning, it is just that you sold stuff on the global market, like an agency does. As a Microprose game, XCOM just goes at a very different scale from an RPG game, or even say Jagged Alliance, so RPG elements go into conflict with the idea of soldiers being expendable in the first place, as opposed to typical RPG, where characters interact on a local scale and are expected to reach the end of the game. Baldur's Gate did allowed for characters to die but it had some hacks where the newly recruited characters matched the level of the one the squad, and losing more than a few would have made game impossible, it also had the protagonist character, which could no be lost, which was really annoying. Icewind Dale had similar system, but the new characters started at level 1 and were basically useless, so the the feature was removed for the enhanced edition, meaning one had to reload on permadeath of a character, and these games were relatively forgiving since only a few enemies could permed a character. In Final Fantasy Tactics, losing a character wasn't such a disaster, since the game regularly filled the pool with the new ones with higher level, albeit with different abilities, and one could always grind a level 1 character to higher level, which was a kind of cheating, so everyone agreed that proper game should have a per chapter turn limit, so player wont have time to grind super soldiers, and there are even mods giving this turn limit.

So maybe XCOM missions can have a turn limit too? If player takes too long to salvage an UFO, it gets lost, because aliens got a backup, finished the repair or got evacuated by a larger ship? A terror mission can end because due to player taking too long the aliens were able to complete the objective. That will also force the player to advance, instead of cheesing the AI out. Like I seen one beating Terror from the Deep on superhuman by just skipping the turns till all aliens got killed by the fire of opportunity, or one player just side inside the ship, opening door to shot the aliens. Really tedious and super retarded way to play the game. Games like Panzer General had a turn limit for a reason...

Offline Solarius Scorch

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Re: What do I do to make the game more challenging?
« Reply #38 on: September 21, 2022, 04:28:57 pm »
Yes, you can set a number of turns to finish the mission in OXC. You can also (in OXCE) do more, for example reinforcements.

The rest of the subject is a bit too broad. ;) Even this conversation is pretty much off topic...