Oh, neat. I'm a sucker for a good tactics RPG. The art looks a bit same-y but I'm willing to overlook it if the gameplay is good. I'll definitely keep my out for this when it comes out.

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Quoting: BeamboomIt's a working game without, but did you play Xcom (1) before and after the Enemy Within DLC?

No, it's still a complete game. Calling it otherwise assumes that content was ripped away which has no substantiation in reality at all. This is why the portrait analogy is terrible. And saying that it was meant to be played with all the post launch content distorts the development process.

I played both XCOM 1 & 2 at launch and at no point did I think there was anything missing from the experience that made it unfulfilling. Yes EW added interesting toys to play with but both the mechanics and the story of the base game were more than sufficient to create a strong following for the game before that. I played dozen of hours enjoying the original experience without ever feeling that I *needed* what was to come later in the expansion (and obviously didn't know about). That developers improve upon their game with time and availability of additional resources should not be taken as an indication that they're selling a game piecemeal but rather that continuing success allows them to strike out in new and different directions.

Any game that has had more content added for free or via paid dlc months or years after launch falls into the same category. Terraria is a very different game today than it was at launch and a whole slew of new content exists for it that I don't think even the biggest fan would have imagined possible. Is it complete now? Was it complete a year or two earlier? If so, when did it become complete? With the PDS games of the last few years you can ask the same question: at which point does the extra development time made possible by the success of the game stop qualifying as part of the 'complete' experience and when does it start counting as extra? Surely players of CK2 at launch had no expectations that India would one day be added in an expansion or that there would be a start date with Charlemagne.

Ultimately if you feel something is not worth your money, you're always free not to buy it. It's just that the claim that something is missing or otherwise removed and creates an otherwise incomplete experience without having evidence of intent is spurious reasoning at best. Especially when the basis of those observations comes from hindsight rather than from criticisms at the moment. If you're unhappy with a game when it launches, it's fair to criticize it for not living up to your expectations. But to criticize the original product for things that were added later and no one expected really expected them to be there in the first place? That's just outright illogical and unfair. While it has a lot in common with its predecessor visually and mechanically, XCOM 2 is very different in terms of presentation, classes and with a lot of its core gameplay and so you can't assume a 1:1 translation of content.

Here's a tortured analogy of my own to cap off my point: if you go to a cafe and have a slice of delicious pie, you'll probably be all good and happy. If the next time you're around they offer you the same pie with a scoop of an equally delicious ice cream on top for extra money it doesn't make the basic pie any less tasty or not worthwhile :P

With all that said: there's plenty of room for debate as to when something is just a cashgrab or not. And plenty of developers abuse their customers and provide subpar experiences without all the extra bells and whistles. But that's a whole different can of worms to open and the assumption here is that the basic product is great by itself.

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Quoting: blukpunI wrote that exactly because of what i felt reading those articles and watching shiny new video from them about DirectX 12 and Vulkan. I have this card for two years and still can't make proprietary driver work with Gnome. And it seems like it will never work. Looking at the amd drivers statistics here only proves my feelings about them. Just like 'GamingOnLinux' don't believe in crowdfunding projects (if i'm correct), i just can't believe in amd anymore.

That's unfortunate, but the proprietary catalyst drivers are pretty much abandoned. AMD is directly contributing to the kernel and Mesa with its new driver strategy. Though their main focus is AMDGPU PRO and new cards, there's a common codebase with Mesa and as a result Mesa has improved quite a lot for AMD users. If you need help figuring out how to get things working right, I suggest you pop into our IRC or post in the forums.

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Quoting: blukpunThis is the best example of positive and audience friendly advertisement.

Thank you for posting about that game, it's linux release and all that during the game sale!

This post made me registered here and i'm looking forward to submit my part of the statistics.

By the way i have amd r9-280x and it's first and the last amd product i'll ever buy. Just do not believe they will ever be able to treat their linux customers correctly.

Welcome to our little community :)

I don't want to hijack the comments for this article but AMD on Linux these days isn't so bad. The old proprietary (catalyst) drivers are trash but if you have a recent Mesa version, things are overall smooth. Performance lacks in places but is getting better pretty quickly. I say that as a fellow AMD user. You may also want to see the recent articles which are pretty encouraging in terms of support from them. We're not quite there yet but I'm cautiously optimistic. Hopefully we'll have more benchmarks in the future.

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Quoting: chui2chIf any one could give me some advice on how this runs on AMD FX processors. I was thinking about picking this game up, but under the requirements AMD processors are not listed. I just want to make sure I wont regret purchasing this.

Works fine on my FX-8350. I think it's more GPU dependent.

Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: BTREPretty weak list, Liam :P

There's plenty more obviously as pointed out there's thousands, these are just the choice picks I am using for now not to tip the balance too much in my own favour. It's also aimed at creating discussion as usual :)

Excuses! :D

But yeah, I also use the days wounded one. All the mods I use are for streamlining, showing more information in places, or just cosmetic stuff - I haven't actually tried any gameplay mods yet. Maybe after I beat the game on Legend.

Edit - forgot they renamed 'Impossible' difficulty to 'Legend'

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Pretty weak list, Liam :P

Here's mine:
Lifetime stats
Lets you know how well have performed over the course of the game time.

international voices pack
More voices including Russian and Polish for that immersion.

evac all
Gets all units in the evac area out with a single click.

show me the skills
Lets you know what soldiers have which skills when deploying without having to go into the bio.

blackmarket usage
Lets you know if the items you're selling still have any other use.

new countries
Who doesn't want Czech and Peruvian recruits?

stop wasting my time
Skips over obligatory cutscenes and dialog in missions. As well as weapon pauses and speeds up movement animations.

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Yep, won't be backing this unless Linux is integrated into the main campaign instead of a stretch goal. Been burned too much by devs who treat Linux users as low priority. I know it's arguable that it's justifiable given our market share but, with so many other games I could throw my money at, they've got to do better. If they want my support, they have to be more firm about supporting us.

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Quoting: adolsonWhere do we give feedback like he asks? Will he read the comments here?

Hopefully. I've let him know about this article but your best bet to communicate with Paradox is through their official forums. Developers are active there and regularly engage the community.

Since the topic of core-utilization came up, here's a definite and recent confirmation that their games use multiple cores and that optimization isn't so straight forward.

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Quoting: ShmerlYou should have asked them if they plan to release their future games on GOG and other DRM-free stores rather than keeping them Steam exclusives.

There was no point to it. They used to release all their games without needing Steam but then moved to Steam-exclusivity. I can't find the old thread in their forums but the reasoning was something along the lines that the non-Steam sales were so miniscule (single digit %) that it didn't make sense to spend a disproportionate amount of resources maintaining other versions on other stores. This was a bit after CK2 launched. Every time the topic has been brought up since, they've said they won't do it. On the plus side, their games tend not to be Steamworks dependent so you can just copy them wherever and run them without having Steam open.

QuoteAnother minus to them for not submitting bugs to Mesa, and another major minus for trying to justify why they aren't releasing 64-bit versions. The later was really weird.

I know that Paradox seems really big and successful, but these games are also made with like 4 core people teams sometimes. Others come and go as they need between other projects. At least judging by the dev diaries I've read. As a Mesa user, I do wish they'd support Mesa more directly but, let's face it, most people use the proprietary drivers: it doesn't make that much economic sense to allocate manpower for a small sliver of a still-tiny linux market. Hopefully that'll change but it is what it is.

Not sure that 64 bit versions of their games would help much either right now. Sounds to me like they need to offload more work to the GPU to make their games less CPU-bound first. Which is why I hoped that the Vulkan question would have had a more exciting answer.

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Quoting: rkfgI don't really your question.

I accidentally a word, is all :)

Fixed in brackets.

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