Well, the first one was fucking ace. But, what's the deal with the aliens having conquered Earth? Didn't I already kick their arse?

>>21385

>Well, the first one was fucking ace. But, what's the deal with the aliens having conquered Earth? Didn't I already kick their arse?

It's probably an alternate universe where I was in charge.

Hey, get lost! I've dodged and weaved some would say I've had Lightning Reflexes, chortle, chortle through all but the earliest info about XCOM2 so when I do play it, it'll be the first game in a while where every button press is a fresh experience.

But also enjoy your thread, hope the game lives up to the hype, and the DLC is available for torrent.

>>21385

It got entirely retconned.

>>21385

The canon ending is that you lost, because the game is genuinely that hard. Most people didn't win and it is this they are basing the sequel on.

>>21389

Oh wow.

>>21390

My missus is one of those illustrious few, but she only managed it by save scumming her way through the entire campaign.

>>21389>>21390

If you look at most games on Steam a surprising amount of people haven't finished them. A lot of people haven't even started them.

A fairly odd bit of promo material here...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCgTKv7NHLc

Also the game's fantastic, although the performance is bad for most people apparently. Certainly is in my case, so I've had to turn down the shadow settings, go down to FXAA and disable the AO to get decent framerates.

>>21397

A disturbing crossover between two worlds that should never meet, like getting a blowie from your Nan.

I'm a little miffed that minimum specs seem to be creeping up, mostly because they've remained fairly level for so many years. Lately it's been feeling more like 2002, when a machine that was shit hot last year will be just shit by the next.

>>21398

The performance is bad but as it's just a turn based game it's still very playable so long as you sacrifice some settings.

I doubt specs will shoot up as fast as they did around the late 90s/early 00s ever again though. Sure there's been a bit of a hike recently, but any decent PC build from the last six years or so should still be grand (maybe given a GPU upgrade at some point).

Source: I'm still running an i5 750, I love this processor.

>>21399

CPU performance has hardly improved in the last five years. Moore's law predicts that the i7-6700k should be 400% faster than the i7-2600k, but it's only about 30% faster. Intel have reached some hard limits in semiconductor technology that can't be overcome by throwing money at the problem.

AMD and Nvidia are one generation away from hitting the same process node wall, which will strongly limit their opportunity for improvement. The GPUs of 2022 won't be noticeably better than those of 2017. They can go to ever larger die areas as with the Titan, but that just increases cost and the problems of heat and power.

Moore's law is dead. Where we go from here is anyone's guess.

>>21397
Bloody hell, he looks like he's hardly aged.

>>21398

Nvidia are creating a false economy by moneyhatting games and using tesselation to gimp AMD cards and their older models to stimulate the market and force people to upgrade.

Most performance problems in Nvidia sponsered games can be solved on an AMD card by forcing tesselation to a 16x limit in the control panel and using the AMD optimised shader in global settings so it affects all games. Nvidia users don't have that option unfortunately, so they get fucked if they have anything less than a 970 whereas 280s and 290s can still run most new games at the same level they could 3 years ago with a bit of fiddling. Even the 4GB 7970 is still a viable card and is usually the recommended minimum for 1080p in most new games that aren't made by Warner Bros or Ubisoft.

>>21402

I'm really not sure what you're on about lad, I've got a 760 from a few years ago now and it still runs everything at just about full. Haven't run into any problems as yet touch wood.

Considering the GPU is the only bit you need to upgrade much these days, if you had halfway decent RAM and CPU to begin with, I'm hardly seeing this entire big bad nVidia lassooing the market situation.

Moreover I'm not sure why people stick so stubbornly to manufacturers. nVidia currently bribe devs to make games run better on them so I go with them, if the situation flips round to what it was a few years back where AMD dominate I'd happily go with them too. As long as I can remember, AMD's drivers have always been a festering sack of shit, anway, so it's really just picking the lesser of two evils.

>>21403

Nividia's custom .dll files which they provide to make games run better on Nvidia cards set tessellation to 64x by default on all cards which adversely affects AMD cards because they can't tessellate for shit and older generations of Nvidia cards. I had horrible problems with my 780ti trying to play Arkham Knight and Ass Creed Unity and they weren't exactly ground breaking. AK is on Unreal 3, and engine which was master 5 years ago if not sooner, and Ass Creed have been using the same engine since 3, arguably 2. These games shouldn't be a problem to run.

I'm not blaming the whole thing on Nvidia, devs are a hive of incompetence these days with a few exceptions like Rockstar North and CD Project who despite Nividia's tessellation fuckery managed to have their games run almost the same on all comparable cards.

>>21400

>Moore's law predicts that the i7-6700k should be 400% faster than the i7-2600k

No it doesn't.

Moore's law predicts that the number of transistors per cm^2 will have increased by 400%, which it has.

>>21405

You're technically correct about the definition of Moore's law, but useful transistor counts haven't increased nearly as quickly as the law predicts. Also, the raw transistor count hasn't kept pace with Moore's law - a quad-core Sandy Bridge chip has ~1.1bn transistors versus -1.75bn for Skylake. Moore's law would have predicted over 4bn transistors.

Yields are dropping, so a large proportion of that additional count goes into redundancy and optional features like cache and iGPU cores. The transistor count of the execution pipeline has barely increased.

At least as significant is the problem of hotspots. As features shrink, the most active parts of the CPU get hotter. Some of this has been mitigated by lower voltages, but Intel are spending increasing engineering resources on managing thermal issues. AMD are absolutely floundering in this respect, as manifested in the dismal performance of Bulldozer.

>>21404
There's an article in this month's PC Gamer about how Bethesda was right not to develop a new engine for Fallout 4, because as the cost of making games continues to astronomically increase, developers who may be very small teams of people are dispensing with reinventing the wheel when they are more comfortable just polishing the wheel up real nice. I think it mentions Assassin's Creed on Unreal 3 amongst its other long-lived examples like Unity and Source.

XCom have been forced into this position.
The council is a legitimate political party.

I just found this elsewhere and thought it was good.

>>21409
Best inhale a bit more helium there, m7.

>>21410

^{XCom have been forced into this position.
The council is a legitimate political party.}

>>21411
... which supports terrorism.

(A good day to you Sir!)

I... have to complete Long War once, just once, before I can allow myself to buy XCOM2.

>7 missions a week including a bomb and a terror mission

I'm never gonna make it. Tell my wife I love him.

So have they fixed this yet? I've got a GTX 670 and I'd rather not fork out if it's going to run like shit.

PC exclusive, too, it's downright shameful that so many people are having problems. I've heard of hard crashes (on otherwise stable systems), for fuck's sake.

>>21436

The performance is poor on my system, so I've turned off most of the graphical effects, but it still looks good with just the textures turned up. Not sure how the 670 compares to a 750ti but it should perform better.

I've not had any hard crashes after 40 hours playing and what few bugs there were that caused crashes have been fixed up this week.

This character creation stuff is brilliant.

>>21446
Needs a bit more purple, I think.

>>21446

When he's psychic he'll be bloody scary.

>>21448
Agreed. Quite close if so.

This game is much better with Jeremy Corbyn.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=629421405

>it reminds me of playing FTL, a slightly more fun game

Shots fired...

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/116803-XCOM-2-Review

>>21452

Its 88 metacritic score and 74% positive on Steam are utterly decimated by this video game blogger's review.

No, wait. It has problems which need patched, but overall it's a solid game that wont be everyone's cup of tea, because it's hard, and a blogger has no real responsibility to be impartial other than what they impose on themselves and are expressing their opinion and not offering an objective review.

If PC Gamer had shit on it like that, It would have warranted a "shots fired". As it stands, this game has received almost universal critical acclaim while the user base continues to play it religiously, albeit while crying out for patches due to frame rate shitting the bed in areas and glitches which make no sense.

>>21453
I presume you didn't actually watch the video. He liked the game, his issues were mostly that they've gone with the 'safe sequel' route i.e. more of the same but without the novelty that made it good the first time. The fact that it was such a nit-picky review in itself shows that it's fundamentally solid.

Also, "shots fired" is clearly just an off-the-cuff comment. Though having said that, I do indeed take more notice of what random vloggers think of a game than anything the high-profile gaming media produces - have you learned nothing?

PANIC

The only critic I trust thumbed up Xcom 2, I'll wait for payday and a sale


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5MC9oN1NAk

>>21384

better than the 'original' in most respects, a worthy sequel