Wait? What do you mean it's March already? What in the world....?!
The first quarter of the year - most especially March - is always a thing of nightmares. That and November. The only difference between the two months is that in March we try to keep our claws sheathed. Try...
But I digress.
Because of the insanity, one must have some way to relax. To get rid of the stress.
Shooting aliens and zombies (L4D2 ftw!) really helps.
So in this post I'll ramble about one of these relaxing methods by talking about:
Following XCom: Enemy unknown, XCom 2 starts off with a rather unexpected turn of events. The XCom project failed. Now, 20 years after that defeat, humanity has found itself co-existing with the seemingly benign alien rulers who have supposedly gone out of their way to improve humanity's way of life. The rebellion lives on, however, and XCom is still providing some resistance, now as the guerrilla underdogs sticking it to the man... er... alien.
XCom 2 is in some ways controversial with the immediate struggles gamers face in attempting to get it to run. This has sparked a substantial amount of gamer rage - with good reason, I believe. And hopefully Firaxis will see to those problems bloody soon, or else...
You will also find that people are conflicted about their views of the game itself. Yahtzee delivers some very solid reasons as to why some are unhappy about it - in his usual crude way... though not as a crude as usual.
So why do I like it so much?
I suppose it comes down to expectation.
I love XCom. I still actively play it - to the point where I know all the maps, which is a little annoying. All I really wanted was more of it.
And, in some sense, that is exactly what XCom 2 is. It doesn't really have enough variety to make you feel like you're transported into a different game altogether. It feels more like a very complex add-on pack. Which is pretty much what I wanted and so I'm playing the hell out of it and not getting anywhere because I die far too much before gaining much in the line of victories.
XCom 2 offers some variation in your monsters - mostly appearing as an evolution of what you had faced in the previous game. The classes are mostly the same though the advancement options are slightly different. The maps have enough variety that it takes you quite a number of hours before you recognize where your people have been dropped and how they've changed the angle - a nice way not to make the maps feel terribly repetitive.The game is basically a build on to its predecessor. Which to me is fine if not necessarily the ideal of a brand new game one had to wait four years to see released.
Usually, one shouldn't be happy with 'more of the same' when it comes to sequels, but I am... maybe that just shows how delighted I was by the first one. I still get a massive amount of satisfaction when my ranger shoots the shit out of an alien at point blank range. But then I also curse and face palm when he doesn't hit the bugger at POINT BLANK RANGE!!
So whenever I play the game there are a lot of cheering, mad cackling (I kid you not) and swearing that goes on. All of which can be good fun.
But there are quite a few problems and some of them are rather surprising.
Firaxis dedicated itself to PC gaming with this particular project. And yet, for that statement, the game has come out with a lot of hiccups. One of which is performance lag. When gamers have to start fiddling with files and add/modify things to get the game to work better, there is definitely something wrong somewhere. In my case, while the game still pauses every now and again, I have very little lag problems if I turn my internet off altogether. By that I don't mean to switch Steam to offline mode. No, I mean disconnect my internet connection. I also need to wait until two particular notifications come up informing me about this lack of connection before I know I can load up my save file (or start a new game) and start playing the game relatively bug free. If I don't do that, buttons start disappearing, cut sequences freeze and I have to go to the ol' faithful Task Manager to turn the game off before starting again.
Maybe the fact that I discovered the 'work around' so quickly has made my acceptance of it a lot easier. In the case of other gamers, they don't have that simple ways of 'fixing' the problem.
And honestly, these are problems that are not supposed to be there when you've worked on a game and dedicated it to one platform. Actually, I think we've gotten far too understanding regarding the products we buy. These are things that shouldn't happen and yet we do and go 'oh well'.
So yes. Gamers are raging and with very good reason.
I'm not really going to ramble much more about it. I think Yahtzee nails all the annoying bits and I clearly haven't developed enough writing stamina to truly ramble. I'd say, all in all, the game is engaging me at present. It is a challenge, though one I fail a lot which can get very frustrating. The existence of the problems haven't gotten to me all that much yet, but I hope Firaxis pulls finger pretty darn soon. The longer they wait, the more annoyed people are going to get. That's something they should know by now.
