And you've got to assume that a really big portion of your audience is gonna come back and they're going to be familiar with Enemy Unknown. "We had a very big audience for Enemy Unknown, and it's a strategy game. You're trying to offer the player things that are all beneficial things that the player wants, they just can't afford all of them at once." Then by the time they buy that one, we've added two more which are also cool. You give the player five options, all of which seem viable and seem cool and seem necessary, but you only let them pick one. it's a standard strategy design, it's in XCOM particularly but Sid does this too. "If you're not spending more than you're bringing in. The base-management aspect of the game has been singled out by some as particularly unforgiving, with its high costs and apparent hard choices related to unlocks and upgrades. Personally as a designer, my experience is that all feedback is factual, so when you do hear feedback like that my instinct is not to say 'you are incorrect.' My reaction is always to say 'ok, does that have to be at odds with the other people who are enjoying the difficulty, and if not, how do we find a way to make both people happy?'" "Obviously some people respond really positively to the difficulty and others say 'it's too much', and that's something we're thinking about. There are cases where it's difficult to imagine getting through a mission without somebody dying." XCOM is not actually a puzzle, it has all these much more unpredictable elements to it. "That's fine, it's certainly fine to think that's the way you want to play the game, but that I think has led to some frustration in people if they view XCOM as a puzzle - that there is an optimal path so that if you do things right nobody dies. "Some of them think that the right way to play is to beat the mission without losing anybody," said Solomon. Solomon acknowledged that XCOM "is definitely more difficult" than its predecessor XCOM: Enemy Unknown, but felt that some criticisms of its challenge stemmed from how players approached the game. So I remember thinking 'wow, actually this game would be improved if everybody had a much more challenging time of things.'" "Let's say the cost of recruits - that's a very small example, but there are a lot of things where the player was just breezing through the game. The player just doesn't have to engage with the systems. "On the one hand you've got all these developers who are super-hardcore XCOM players, but then on the other hand I was 'if we don't make the game hard, a lot of the design systems don't engage.' If the player isn't put under pressure, then on the strategy layer a lot of things don't kick in. But it's pretty easy." And I started to get kinda worried. But very, very late in development all the team was playing the game and they were coming back saying "yeah. "I had been pushing the mantra for a long time that we need to make Normal or Veteran difficulty basically an 'I want to see the cinematics' mode, an 'I want to see the story' mode, and the player can get through it and it shouldn't be that difficult. "The difficulty's actually one of those things that can be traced to a particular conversation pretty late - very late, actually - in development," project lead Solomon revealed in an interview to be published in full tomorrow. "I made a mistake, I think, by calling the lowest difficulty Rookie". Solomon also felt that the presentation of the game's difficulty settings might be to blame for this frustration. "There were definitely moments of 'is this too much?' and how do we cater to people that maybe don't want that experience?" However, he acknowledged that some players might be struggling with the game as a result.
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