The Shrine

Pre-emptive thread for this game that releases on Friday. Excited to get the chance to play it in a couple days. The reviews have been REALLY good and even the preview build that came out a month ago the people were saying how finished it felt other than glitchy animations, but even those sound like they've been fixed.

I'm really jazzed about this game and I'm not going to make the mistake of learning the game on iron man mode this time although I certainly intend to end up finishing the game on it.

The new setting wherein we've already lost the war and the XCOM project is more about rebellion instigation/guerilla warfare sounds super intriguing. I've been doing my best to ignore everything else about this game so I can go in blind. I've only been looking at the actual release scores as opposed to reading the reviews lol. I broke down and watched ten minutes of gameplay on a stream, but it ended up being about one minute of a throwaway mission and 9 minutes of the guy making his team look like douchbags (backwards baseball caps, aviator glasses, etc.) and I just closed the stream. Looked good though. And the soundtrack sounded epic but nothing that really grabbed me like the soundtrack to Enemy Unknown.

I was a little confused about it getting a Friday release but I'm just telling myself that the game would be out next Tuesday if it weren't for the Friday release lol. Apparently Friday is the normal release day for games in England. Interesting. I think I remember hearing Tuesday was when things typically got released in the USA due to that being the beginning of the sales week or something but that's a fairly annoying reason to release games on an arguably inconvenient day. In any case, still no information on when there's a preload available or an actual release time but its not like that's terribly important.

While there is a 100% chance I will be trying this, I gotta say...

The whole spiritual successor / sequel craze for old masterpieces (planescape, wasteland, xcom wannabes, guild, etc) has me pretty bummed. They've been ok, but have looked like ass and show zero innovation. As current games, viewed entirely on their own merit, they kinda suck.

Xcom is probably the exception (as is fallout) and I guess that has to do with budget. Most of these games are kickstarters.

I dont know why I am bitching in this thread...I think the early access of Torment has me depressed (thing looks and plays like 1999). Xcom will probably be badass and make me happy again...

A lot of what interests me in XCOM 2 and Torment (and Wasteland 2 for that matter) was the story. XCOM 2 basically looks like more of the same from Enemy Unknown/Within (with obvious changes from certain things) which, while not unappealing, isn't something that I necessarily feel a drive to do more of. Instead, the major interest for these games is their story/setting - that is after all what keeps even something like Fallout 3/4 going despite having such god awful main story quests.

Torment is no stranger to this - I actually quite disliked playing through a lot of Planescape Torment but the story is so good that if anyone were to ask me my favorite game it would be Planescape Torment and I would shit myself in glee if that ever got overtaken by another game. To make the upcoming Torment game more appealing to me, the story has been contributed to by Patrick Rothfuss, author of The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man's Fear, and Chris Avellone, who has arguably written for some of the best American video games ever. Patrick Rothfuss is the shit.

The unfortunate thing about these Kickstarter games is that they are 'low' budget - but there is obviously a major audience FOR that. If it isn't something you find yourself enjoying I would sadly suggest that you just aren't their market any more. They have admittedly said that they market these games to the people who really don't care that it doesn't have any bells and whistles - they just want more from franchises that publishers have left behind.

Gearbox has done some interesting things with this since they're a pretty major studio at this point, namely in the resurrection of Duke Nukem (kind of a failure) and Homeworld (probably a success). The games may be hit or miss and this may not be the best time in terms of innovation in the industry, but if you take a look at movies it's pretty much the same schtick of churning out sequels and remakes.

It's all pretty hit or miss in the end. I do like that I'm getting more of stuff I've missed, though. Even a flawed game using the themes established in Planescape Torment is highly appealing to me.

Off topic (and that's my fault) but the thing is....Torment: ToN will *never* be a masterpiece because it is low budget and because it is catering to nostalgic fanboys that don't care about "bells and whistles". Imagine if Planescape: Torment (1999) set it's standards to 1985 technology on release. Do you think you would remember it nearly so fondly? It would be a forgotten DOS text adventure.

I don't want these games revisited in such a half assed manner (despite the fact that *I* will still enjoy them). I want a new masterpiece. I recognize some of these games would not get made otherwise...but some franchises (like Shadowrun) deserve better treatment.

And if you can't tell, I was disappointed by the EA for Torment. I, at the very least, hope there is a lot more voice work and sound effects added to the final game.

There's a fair amount of disappointment with Torment going around but none of it (from anyone I would call credible) in terms of the story/choices. There's, luckily, a lot of time to improve it. Wasteland 2 and Pillars of Eternity betas both released to a fair amount of dismay as well and improved a lot. I don't think it'll improve in the ways you in particular are hoping for unfortunately. I imagine it'll see more voice work, but it's probably inconceivable to receive full voice work, not that you suggested that's what you want but it has been announced it won't be and with the sheer amount of text it would probably be 80gb+. I'm content with what I've heard about it so far, but I have zero interest in paying to beta test this game. I backed it with the one of the bundles that didn't include beta.

XCOM 2 preload was enabled yesterday and the release time is midnight Friday EST. 25gb preload that apparently will end up being 45gb installed, making it over twice as big as the original XCOM EU/EW.

So no surprise it's really good. But it's arguably even more punishing than before. The combat is much more difficult. At this point I can't even imagine switching to iron man mode (the mode that has permadeath and (almost) no save scumming depending on if you cheat). It's terribly optimized though. Load times are atrocious. It's the first game to REALLY chug on my PC since my upgrade and I'm not alone on this, people with even better set ups and who are running on the game on SSDs (I didn't have the 45gb available on mine) are experiencing, from what I can tell, the exact same amount of chugging. So, yeah, imminent patch to make the game run better some day, I suppose. (Edit: The poor optimization apparently mostly stems from the game not utilizing the GPU during certain screens (like loadout and the loading/briefing before a mission when you're in the dropship to the mission). The loading times are still pretty staggering for a PC game, though, and using an SSD doesn't soften that.)

The game leans on time limit missions a lot more often. In order to reach objectives you can only really spend one to two turns setting up positions and ambushes because if you aren't constantly pushing to get to the objective it will either be destroyed, or killed, or whatever before you get there. Even civilian rescue operations are much more tricky.

They did take out panic (the mechanic where if a region got too panicked you lost it forever) which was an excellent move. It is instead (so far) replaced with an alien countdown that you have to do missions to disrupt/delay. This is pretty tricky, though, and like the missions I wouldn't want to deal with it in iron man mode. They definitely made that mode super hardcore this time around. While the game does lose a certain amount of panache while not in iron man mode, the tactics to get through these new levels without having your team get decimated is challenging and fun enough to make up for it.

So far I've had two really interesting little fights that I had to save scum 4+ times to get through relatively cleanly. One was a fight where the enemy was firing through the roof at my squad. At one point the enemy actually destroyed the ceiling and my soldier fell through lol. Another fight where I essentially got into a rut with not being able to kill the particular enemy combination with the shitty cover I was in was made trivial by dashing all of my soldiers out into strong cover and then overwatching on my next turn when they inevitably followed.

You really just can't brute force the game like before. I also can't really tell if turtling is possible any more. In Enemy Unknown/Within it was possible to tech up to the most powerful weapons before tackling any of the even mildly difficult missions, but it really feels like that's impossible this time around.

Edit: Some tips that people may have forgotten about playing this:
1) When advancing you really, really do not want the enemy to see you when your team has already used their turn. Ideally, the enemy will move into YOUR range, giving you an entire turn to deal with them rather then them getting an entire turn to deal with you. At the very least, you want them to have to spend their turn getting into position rather than firing on you.

2) Don't clump together, you're asking to get AoE poisoned or grenaded. Even two soldiers within a 3x3 block during a fight will probably get dicked over by an AoE.

3) If you don't need to reposition, reload THEN fire so you don't use up your entire turn and you delay having to reload in the future when it could be problematic.

4) Melee can rush for days and still get an attack off. If you're fighting a melee opponent, don't get anywhere near them.

So while I did love my experience in general with this game, if you have other games on your plate this definitely gets filed under "Tell Friends to Wait for a Sale."

I beat the campaign in about 35 hours, including the two or so hours I wasted because of saves that got corrupted. There are also some fairly major (depending on how you look at it) design flaws besides the optimization issues I mentioned. This game will be brilliant after a month or two of patches.

I quite liked the story and what they revealed about the aliens was usually quite interesting. It's too bad they left it so open for the (now) inevitable sequel. Unlike the original XCOM I'm already quite interested in playing through the game again with what I learned.

They did a much better job giving each class something cool to approach certain situations with. And the psionic soldier class was a blast to play even though I unlocked it too late to train more than like 15% of their skills.

I only played the "intro" level. My first impression is actually:

The earth looks pretty badass now and seems to be flourishing. Why are these rabble rousers blowing shit up and killing innocent human hybrid soldiers? Our new overlords seem to be a good thing.

I am sure I will be made to "hate" the bad guys soon enough, but the intro leaves me a little confuzzled...

So I've been playing this game over the past month.

I'm at the point where I think I have one more communication link to establish.

Really like the game, always loved tactical turn-based isometric games. I'm playing on the second difficulty level.

I love all the customization and loadout options. I really like that the game forces you to progress - as Shin said, can't really just pump up all your tech and roflstomp missions due to being overpowered. You have to move, at a minimum, as fast as the pace of the various countdown timers in the game.

I'll admit, I save-scum a bit (although the game basically encourages it by creating an auto-save at the beginning of every turn, at least on my difficulty level). Very frustrating to move your soldier into position only to find they don't have LOS on who you are trying to kill. Maybe there's a better way to determine that prior to a move, but if so, I haven't found it. Now that I have mechanisms to make my soldiers heal faster after getting injured in a battle, however, I'm less determined to get 'flawless' ratings for battles. It was a real bitch when a soldier had to take a seat for 24-28 days when getting really fucked up in a fight.

Unlike Shin, I unlocked the Psionic soldier as soon as I could. Currently have 2 psionic soldiers I take into almost every fight who have maxed-out psionic skills. Mind control seems a bit overpowered - my first move is to usually mind control two enemies. Takes two out of the fight which I no longer need to kill, and allows me to use them as cannon fodder to shield my soldiers and as additional DPS. Then I primarily use them to stasis out an enemy that I can't manage to kill before the turn is over or give my real DPS dealers another move. Null lance, however, is a huge DPS ability than I like to save for the right situation (e.g. this enemy who has tons of armor needs to die NOW, or several enemies are lined up in a row for huge DPS).

Game has definitely delivered for me. Never played the original, but this one stands on its own fairly well.