New XCOM trailer - *looks* awesome, uses michaelangelo font.

[Chardok]

From Games Radar (with embeded preview video)

I am tentatively optimistic. Something that worries me just looking at this preview footage is that it *looks* really linear, and that's not what I want in my xcom game. I don't want a daggoned set tech progression. I want to be able to have my dudes in power armor slinging thompsons. I also want to have the ability to choose my venue and perhaps even have procedurally generated environments for the regular (non bossfight) missions.

[2000AD]

Nifty, depite being a fan of X-COM I've been looking forward to XCOM since it was first announced unlike half the internet it seems.
The new aliens seem interesting, though the cube design thing doesn't seem to fit with the black oil things seen in the first trailer.
And the earlier previews and this trailer put together seem to indicate a continuation of the X-COM tradition of starting off weak and fragile, then you research some alien tech and turn it against them and suddenly the boot is on the other foot.

[Darmalus]

We're being invaded by Tron!

Fingers crossed that it turns out well, but I'm not holding out hope till I see some proper gameplay footage.

[doom3607]

As long as Earth can be defended by blowing the shit out of it, I'll be happy. For that is the X-COM way.

[PeZook]

This actually looks really damn cool. Looks like they care about immersion.

I hope there will be a decent strategic layer, though. Without it it's gonna be a cool little FPS, but nothing more.

[SylasGaunt]

Well it's good to see Ramiel's still getting some work after they killed his character off in Rebuild of Evangelion.

[FaxModem1]

Looks like Clu got to invade Earth after all.

Anyway, I do like the aesthetic of the American 1950s, but the alien choice doesn't seem to mesh. This would be a place where having the grays as the invaders would work perfectly. If we were going to go with the Tron style aliens, go with the 1980s, they would fit there better and it would still be during an era of 'American prosperity'.

[Mr Bean]

Looks like Clu got to invade Earth after all.

Anyway, I do like the aesthetic of the American 1950s, but the alien choice doesn't seem to mesh. This would be a place where having the grays as the invaders would work perfectly. If we were going to go with the Tron style aliens, go with the 1980s, they would fit there better and it would still be during an era of 'American prosperity'.

Pretty much nailed my feelings, nice 50's aesthetic and oh shit it's Tron! So many crazy whacked out alien concepts you could have gone with and you picked the cube people? I don't mind the Monolith style ships, or the giant floating death rays. I don't mind the glowy eye possessed humans all that looks good. It's what they turn into that looks weird. However the rest of the game has got my attention, that's destructively I see? I always through XCOM could only be built on a Frostbyte 2 style engine because nothing takes care of foul xeno scum like dropping a barn on their heads (My traditional X-com tatic is to arm everyone with rocket launchers or heavy canons and simply level everything in the surroundings, night missions I use incendiary rounds for extra benefit. The only time the plasma rifles or laser rifles comes out is for terror missions.

If I can't burn down the town to save the town, I have no interest in this XCOM game.
But if I CAN burn it down... well sign me up Tron aliens and all. Lets start the testing for aliens, the ones that down burn to death horribly must be those damn xenos.

[doom3607]

My traditional X-com tatic is to arm everyone with rocket launchers or heavy canons and simply level everything in the surroundings, night missions I use incendiary rounds for extra benefit. The only time the plasma rifles or laser rifles comes out is for terror missions.

If I can't burn down the town to save the town, I have no interest in this XCOM game.

You mean there is the possibility of tactics other than simply obliterating everything in X-COM's path with mountains of high explosives and collateral damage in Death Star-style bulk?

[Nephtys]

Okay, so E3's got some more details and uh... oh...
http://www.destructoid.com/e3-max-gives ... 3405.phtml

Basically, this dipshit says 'Seriously old fans of the series, it's not as bad as you think!' before confirming it's precisely as bad as you think, possibly worse. For example, gems from that snippet:

'It's not a First Person Shooter!'
Really? Why the hell then is the gameplay about running around in first person, shooting things?

'I know old people really liked that click-go-here sorta game'
So you never played the classics yet say it's 'not as bad as it seems'... kay.

'It's squad based! You get to pick a squad in the bunker! Then you take two men and fight aliens.'
Two men is now 'squad based'. Urrggghhhh.

'It's very cool and stylish, like 1962 and cold war. They're wearing like, neckties.'
Man. Now if only I gave a shit about the necktie quotient of my games.

'It's got a cool story mode that you'll love. Like, you go do these missions in the bunkers and talk to people, and then get side missions'
...so it's a goddamn LINEAR game, with SIDE MISSIONS. That's the worst thing yet.

'You get to talk to your people and they're really serious. Like. Chainsmoking in a bunker'
Wow, is that really the highlight of this game? That you can talk to NPCs who are smoking?

[Covenant]

--edit--
I was just about to post that! Took the link out because, well, redundant.
-------

All fears, and more, are confirmed. XCOM confirmed to be more similar to anything else than it is to X-COM.

Check out the destructoid douchewad fumbling through a narration of what he saw. The big standouts are a first-person narrative rather than expendable soldiers (at least that you control) and a linear storyline with side-missions that you can do or opt out of.

So there's no realtime element, no non-linear structure, no chance to 'wipe' a mission deployment, and there's likely going to be no flexible technology development because there's no overworld map time elapsing. So if you recover tech at all I can't imagine it's anything more than a required mission objective or some kind of side-mission bonus objective which seems... strange? Wrong? It's certainly not X-COM.

At this point it's as much Dead Space as anything else, and there's nothing of the original game left. There's no functional difference between getting the Rocket Launcher in Level 3 and 'unlocking' the Rocket Launcher in Mission 3, so it's not worth pretending. No nonlinear elements means there's no strategy. Controlling some mooks does not a strategy game make.

[JonB]

*weeps tears of blood*

Also, that guy in the video needs to learn how to practice his presentations, or at least read off a dang cue-card.

[Stark]

Anyone who is surprised by this is really just too innocent. A modern UFO game is arguably more likely on 3DS or Wii than PC or a major console; similar games already exist there.

But seriously guys, have you watched game industry videos before? Even those that are professionally produced by marketing departments feature stammering pale overweight beardos in polo shirts struggling to form sentences. The 'live' (ps cheap) ones are just a laugh.

[Agent Sorchus]

http://www.gamestar.de/index.cfm?pid=1589&pk=18593 (In german) From the comments section of the article you posted, a actual video of gameplay. And it looks just as bad as is suggested. At least there is a campaign map right? Otherwise it looks like a mix of FPS RPG and a squad based shooter. Not interesting as an X-Com strategy game, but might've stood well on it's own merits.

[HMS Sophia]

This sounds like a good game. It actually sounds like it could be really good fun. However, it is not XCOM... I would love to see XCOM with these graphics, and realistic (ish) weapons... but no, we get an FPS

[Covenant]

Eh, honestly it seems like a more boring Mass Effect clone.

I watched the video and it seems to make it even look worse. Your allies have rapidly regenerating health so long as they aren't being shot at for that moment, you have a number of Mass Effect style 'powers' that you can fire, with little to no emphasis being placed on the gun you're using or 'tech' you're holding aside from what funky backpack you have on. So far I've seen Disrupt and Shield Barrier, two near clones of Mass Effect powers, and someone using a Taunt power called Diversion. Not exactly innovative here.

Characters are leveled, with experience points, set special powers, etc. They're not randomized and they don't have skills. You don't even recruit them from a pool, it seems like you get at least some of them from conducting those missions--which further linearizes the gameplay, which is another no-no. Given the way they're recruited and the way they regenerate health I'm not even sure they can die on-mission. That might have just been a safety measure for the demo to keep things going, but equipping my daring Johnny Reporter morons with Master Chief regenerating shields feels like a direct assault on the X-COM feeling of paranoia and danger.

When they killed the Turret (that's it's actual name... kinda boring if you ask me) it spawned a Floaty Ball and you can go over to it to pick up "Turret Tech," which sounds pretty much garbage to me. Instead of hauling back stuff to research it just drops an Experience Ball? And being able to drop in alien technology as-is seems extremely boring to me as well. I know some people may really like it but I would have preferred to see the fun X-COM hybrids of alien tech being used rather than just click-and-spawn a turret or a deathray ring. Yes, they're dimensional enemies. But it seems like a cop-out.

There's no strategic map like we'd hoped, there's just a map of the US with clickable missions. Not cool. You may or may not be able to wander the base freely, not like this was a big deal, but it woulda' been nice. You may but it's not confirmed. I will say that some of the environments look nicer than before, but what I really mean is that I liked that image of the wormhole tearing up the room and the cube terraforming that house, and it appears that at least the aliens are able to destruct pieces of said houses, which is nice to see. We haven't seen anything in the hands of an X-COM agent able to do that, but it would be hard for them to justify not having a Bazooka or Hand Grenades available. Still, it would be hard for them to justify any of this bullshit and here it is.

All in all, bad. The game may have been minorly interesting to me if it had been a standalone product, though I gotta say I would have been pretty annoyed to see another Mass Effect control-style stinker in the pipes, but as an XCOM game this is just offensive. It may end up being fun but I'm still really upset about everything they've done to date, and it will take some really great writing to pull this one out of the muck.

[HMS Sophia]

I watched the gameplay thing... well, I watched a mini trailer for battlefield 3, then skimmed the gameplay thing. I'll give you my two reactions:
XCOM: that... looks a bit dull. Might try it, once the price drops to like a tenner, or rent it, but I don't like this powers thing. It doesn't feel like humans with human tech battling aliens. It feels like commander shepherd on earth... so mass effect 3?
BF3: That was fucking cool. I want that game. Give it to me. Now. Hell, I might pay full price for that, and I saw 15 seconds of teaser.

See the difference? One is fucking cool. The other looks kinda shitty. A pre-vid teaser shouldn't do better than the video...

[Chardok]

Soo......I should just go download the completely free UFO game off sourceforge and realize that's as close as we're going to get in the forseeable future, yeah?

[Zaune]

You know, I really had hopes for this game at one point. A squad-based tactical shooter in the style of Hidden & Dangerous or Ghost Recon set in the XCOM universe? I'd have loved to see that. I was even prepared to live with the 1950s setting and the different aliens, at least as an Elseworld where the alien threat from Apocalypse stumbled upon our universe a century and a half early.
But an on-rails shooter explicitly described as Half-Life meets Mass Effect, the two IPs that every other FPS on the market is looking to emulate? Bloody hell.

[Psawhn]

Soo......I should just go download the completely free UFO game off sourceforge and realize that's as close as we're going to get in the forseeable future, yeah?

Yeah, there are those open-source games. UFO:AI, XCOM:TTS, OpenXcom, and Xenowar. (The last one is a lightweight game for PC/Android, if anyone's interested)

If you want something where people are spending money to make a game, one I've learned about recently is Xenonauts. (I'm really looking forward to this one.) The open-source games are cool (and I try to contribute to UFO:AI) but there are so many more things you can do when you can pay a team for work.

As for the on-topic: Why are they even still calling it X-COM? It has nothing to do with the original storyline, nothing similar in style, and nothing similar in gameplay. It appears that the demographic they're aiming for with the gamplay/mechanics (ME-like FPS) barely overlaps with the demographic who'd have played or even heard of X-COM, so it's not like name-recognition will be much of an advantage at all. So why bother calling it X-COM? Just because they have the rights to the IP?

[2000AD]

As for the on-topic: Why are they even still calling it X-COM? It has nothing to do with the original storyline, nothing similar in style, and nothing similar in gameplay. It appears that the demographic they're aiming for with the gamplay/mechanics (ME-like FPS) barely overlaps with the demographic who'd have played or even heard of X-COM, so it's not like name-recognition will be much of an advantage at all. So why bother calling it X-COM? Just because they have the rights to the IP?

I'd say the storyline has more in common with X-Com than it doesn't. It's about a special organisation trying to fight off an alien menace and going by the trailers said aliens are trying to infiltrate human society. The organisation starts off drastically unprepared to face this new threat but through experience and reverse engineering alien technology they start to turn the tide and take the fight to the aliens.
To me that sounds a lot like X-Com.

It's a franchise reboot, they're keeping enough to still call it X-com while changing things so they can put a new spin on it. I'm never one to jump on a "They changed it so it sucks" bandwagon and I'm not starting now, in fact I'm quite looking forward to XCOM. And for anyone wanting a classic X-Com experience, as you pointed out there's at least 5 alternatives in various stages of release.

[Nephtys]

And all the x-com remakes kinda suck. That's the problem. They either went too far in what they changed and are meh (Like the UFO:AfterX Series. Not bad games, but their entire real time combat system really limits any strategy)

The other remakes (UFO-Ex, UFO2000 and FreeUFO) and others suffer from 'too little' in many places. UFO-EX was a pretty good AFTER it was modded to be more faithful a recreation. Even then, it had the world's shittiest art design that made the 1994 game look better by comparison. Other fan projects often just clone the exact same game, which is okay, but I think most people want a little more. Oh. And UFO-Ex was way too long with 5 tiers of tech. But good try!

And finally most open source games suck and never see the light of day. They finish a pretty geoscape and then vanish.

[Srelex]

As someone who neither knows or cares much about the previous instalments of the franchise, this does look somewhat interesting if only for the setting and design. Can't think of much '50s scifi throwbacks in games except for Destroy All Humans.

[Covenant]

If you want 50's throwbacks there are other games to get it in. This isn't a 50's sci-fi throwback either. The game is set in the early 60's, this has no elements of that era's stylized aliens (not even UFOs), and the only thing that even looks 'old fashioned' are the hats and crappy outfits. Semantics yes, but if you want the 50's you'll need to find it somewhere else.

As someone who neither knows or cares much about the previous instalments of the franchise, this does look somewhat interesting if only for the setting and design. Can't think of much '50s scifi throwbacks in games except for Destroy All Humans.

But like you said, you neither know nor care about the original series, so you wouldn't really care when people bring up the fact that this isn't the setting the X-Com games were set in at all. I mean hell, we went from am multinational, multicultural strikeforce of men and women to an all Middle-Aged Doughy White Mail press pool.

Honestly though, aside from that, nothing in this game should be interesting. I want it to fall on it's face so abysmally hard that they'll just bury the franchise and never release another abomination and name it X-COM... so I may be a teensy bit biased. But even so, it's just Mass Effect with less free-roaming, the RPG elements mostly stripped down, and slathered with a 1950's fake butter topping. It's a cheap cash-in and it's not even a cheap cash-in that does so by pandering to me.

If they wanted to just eat my money they could re-release X-Com with updated graphics. Hell, make a single game called "X-Com: The Alien Wars" that combines UFO Defense and Terror From The Deep into one extended-length title broken up into sections and given just a basic graphical update. That would be easy. That's all people want from a new X-Com game really. And yet they refuse. They refuse. And instead they make a game that's going to take longer to do everything wrong and accomplish nothing. Why.

I'll probably play it at some point--either rented or bought used, to deny 2k Marin any semblance of my support.

[Stark]

It's a laugh to me that all the 'fans' who make 'remakes' can't get them feature-complete to a game made by two brothers twenty years ago, and certainly none of them resolve any of the strategy level problems or the fact that Jagged Alliance 2 is a better tactical game in every respect. Compared to other open-source or hobbyist games, they're extremely embarassing.

I'm pretty sure UFO-Ex is the one that has amazing fluff codex entries for every single gun. Point = missed, forumgoers = happy.

Frankly, I think a Destroy all Humans remake is more interesting than UFO in the modern world of 2011, but I'm not recalcitrant.