Xenonauts 2

Eh, played the shit out of it and happy to give them money. But holy shit is the late game kinda poop.

Check out Xenonauts 2. It's positioned as a spiritual sequel of classic X-COM, rather than modern XCOM, though so there are differences.

Probably the best difference, and I don't understand why modern XCOM did this, is classic and Xenonauts have larger squad sizes. This is huge, because the entire genre is about gambling on actions. If you only have four actions, taking a 50% shot, but potentially being in danger, is an issue. If you have 8+ actions (8 squad members minimum, and you'll often get multiple actions per member), a 50% shot is a lot less risky. It's more about setting yourself up to get many attacks, rather than one perfect attack. There's a lot more opportunities to mitigate risk.

It also has a much stronger strategic game, which I feel is largely lacking in modern XCOM. It's all about tactical battles. This game, in particular, I think is almost entirely tactical battles, with little strategic opportunity, and no strategic layer IIRC.

This is why I pirate most games unless it's from indie devs. Fuck any and every corpo entity. Like hell I'm gonna let them profit from me while stabbing those who actually did the work in the back.

Nobody should work for a ~~game~~ corporation.

My actual goal, anymore.

All devs should be entitled to royalties

It's like the movie industry, now. They only have a job as long as the game is in production, and all they get is the weekly paycheck.

When I was a teenager, I really wanted to work in the video game industry. Really glad I don't. I still want to learn to make video games, but I never want to work for any video game company. Especially any that have been around for say.. 20 years and/or publicly traded.

I saw it available on high seas

I wanted to be in the video game industry when I was younger and followed through with it by learning programming and pretty much everything I could with computers.

But then while I was in university, the story about EA's working culture broke. How they'd say hours were normal but they might need extra hours during "crunch time", which sounded reasonable until you learned that they just set deadlines such that it was always crunch time. The partners of EA workers did a class action suit against the company and won it IIRC.

That was enough for me to adjust my trajectory. I realized the suddenly obvious bit: people usually go into the video game industry because they have a passion for video games, which sets them up for exploitation like any other job that many people want to get in to.

I might still make a video game but I never intend to be a peon in the video game industry.

The corpo gaming industry, perhaps. I've seen various indie developers have a great time.

60-70fps with egregious cutscene pop-in even after the INI engine tweaks mod on a 5090 is criminal.

“Firaxis” developers create a working game challenge (impossible)