BossWeapons

I fully second this. The camera can be quite restrictive by not allowing the player to freely zoom in or out, nor angle the view, to get the best possible picture of the situation. Loosening up the strict camera controls would let the players view the battlefield from a much better vantage point while strategising their approach and let people, such as I and many others, marvel the detail you put into the guns, characters and the enviroment.

You're probably right on that. This is pretty much what I was thinking as well. It makes sense from the design perspective of how the game seems to be built, but manages to rub me in the wrong way regardless.

Ryzen 7 5800X, RTX 3080 here. The game runs flawlessly with no abnormal fan noise or heat. Everything maxed out. Though I'm using DLSS (prefer the way it blurs out jaggies over the other options) and only play in 1080p because of my monitor, capped at 60 FPS. I later dropped shadow details down to high. I think it kinda looks better that way. Less sharp, slightly more blurred on the edges which in my eyes lends to a more "realistic" visual feel. Some people have suggested reducing reflections and shadows settings for a better performance, but I cannot vouch for that, since in my case the game runs without issues on all settings.

The unique looking mercs have grown on me as well. I was initially a little miffed that there was no change to the visuals depending on what you are wearing, but in the end it's alright for the most part, even if I love my "tacticool" gear visuals. Still though, it would have been nice to see helmets and goggles, etc. at the very least. Unrelated to the gear visuals, but I like oggling at my mercs up close. The game just doesn't let me zoom in on them enough. The camera should be able to zoom in all the way into Buns's buns if I so desire. I've seen people complaining about not being able to zoom out far enough to get a good look at the action. I'm complaining about not being able to zoom in close enough unless I have my mercs sitting on a higher elevation while the camera sits on a lower elevation and is not focused on the mercs. I'm also a weirdo who thinks the camera tends to zoom out too far when the enemy is taking shots at you. There are other smaller things I've noticed while playing. Especially when it comes to stealth and LoS. My default play style in JA has always been stealth first. Stealth gameplay seems to work, even if I don't think I fully understand it yet. For example, the first Outpost fight with Pierre. I was able to snipe half of the people while never coming out of hiding with all but one of my 5 mercs and took no hits during the whole fight and was able to "stealth kill" soldiers left and right as I pleased. Even Pierre went done in one shot in the arm. But my issues come from not understanding why are my mercs staying in hiding with loud weapons then, when other times I'm being spotted just by being vaguely close to the enemy in combat who is not even focusing on the particular merc. Which brings me to the line of sight in the game. The maps aren't very big. They are infact quite cramped or they feel cramped for the most part even while they are not, kind of. This could be because every character seems to have 360 degree vision around them (yours included) which restricts your approach big time unless you abuse stealth like a champ. There are no "vision cones." Or I don't think there are. For example, when you sneak, you can attempt to close in from the front or the back and there seems to be no difference in the spotting timer. I suppose the system they have in place wouldn't play well with more restricted vision cones and stuff like that. This ties to the weather system in the game. In foggy weather your vision seems to be greatly restricted. Honestly, the mercs couldn't see 5 feet in front of them. I had my best sniper duo on a roof and the enemy was literally a grenade throwing distance from them, yet they just couldn't see the enemy no matter what and had to take shots at "ghosts." This wouldn't be so weird, but the visuals for the fog are so... diluted? It doesn't really feel THAT foggy. I fully understand why the visuals for the fog aren't as drastic as its effects are, but it feels like the game just constantly lies to you about the visual information on screen. Weapon damage is also something I personally dislike slightly. I feel like wounds should introduce penalties. It is very disencouraging when you turn a spongy enemy into a swiss cheese with up to 4 wounds and they aren't penalised for it AT ALL other than having the health cap lowered. Unless I'm completely misunderstanding the underlying game system, the enemy is still fully capable and able to move and do whatever as if he was completely unharmed. All the disabling effects come from limb shots and specialised ammunition and/or weapon specific attacks. Once again, I understand why they chose to go with it like this, but if you shoot somebody 7 times, they should probably be just a little bit not-able-to-fight-back-like-they-were-completely-fresh. This is especially annoying if you put a round through the enemy's skull without killing him and he just turns to burst fire your ass off. Maybe I'm just not understanding how damage works? Maybe allow us to set which fire mode your guys use during overwatch interrupts and run and gun/mobile shot actions as well. Burst fire wastes so much ammo especially when your guys aren't hitting anything when it would be a lot more beneficial to just take single shots. This has gone off the rails though on my part, turning into a personal list of complaints and unrelated to the discussion at hand about top priority needs.

The game could really use some streamlining when it comes to the setup of stealth takedowns. It is really frustrating to fiddle with the UI to get the take down ready for closing in, even if all you do is click on an enemy, click how much aim you want and click which body part you target and then walk up to the enemy and hope for the best. I almost feel like stealthy knife strikes should always aim for the neck with full aim by default, because that's what you do 95% of the time. There seems to be some sort of very slight slow-down, bullet time type of a thing going on when you aim at people in exploration mode, but it's not nearly slow enough to give you enough time to click through all the actions when you need to do it in a hurry if we take into account how unresponsive the UI can be sometimes. The game should probably just pause itself automatically any time you've clicked an enemy with a weapon action selected, or just have an actual pause where you can give commands to all of your mercs. There should probably be an automatic pause for when you discover stage hazards, such as mines or when you're being discovered while sneaking, as well. It makes no sense for your merc to discover a mine and then just run directly into it. The mercs already sprint everywhere so fast if you're not constantly crouching and in the case of a miss-click they just zoom off like insane Usain Bolts. The constant sprint running doesn't only look kind of silly, it also feels wrong. Running works in combat, but in exploration mode I'd much prefer a nice jogging pace instead of this overly fast, overly silly looking "Help me! My ass is on fire!" pace, unless you choose to run that fast in the first place. It's a personal nitpick, but they run like ducks do in real life. Just put the Deja Vu! meme song in the background and you're all set. I hate it. Talking about animations. The game could perhaps use a few additional "death" animations. There are really cool ones such as that one animation where it almost looks like you sweep the enemy off its legs and he just slumps down like a sack of potatoes, but I tend to get the "Oh! Egad! I'm dying! Let me just slowly go on my knees and... put my hands on the ground while I'm finding a comfortable position to die in!" one when it doesn't fit the situation at all. For example when I shoot through their skull with a rifle. I also kind of agree about not seeing the gear on enemies. I know we didn't see gear on them in the older games either, but one user here pointed out that so many times you're taking a shot at a guy who is only wearing shorts and a scraggly t-shirt on the avatar, but if you don't look at the stats, which you might not always do, you can miss out he's actually wearing a state of the art full body ballistic protection which your piddly gun is not posed to compete with. It's not too bad, but it is kind of annoying. All in all though I'm really liking the game so far. There are just a few visual things that give me a headache occasionally. And maybe the uncanny accuracy of enemies with burst fire that seems to always get me.

This was a great little article. Had fun reliving some of my JA1 memories while reading it. Only 2 more days to go before the wait is over and we finally get to play your game. Been waiting for one worthy of the title for over 20 years and even if the game ends up not being everything I wished for (though it looks extremely promising!) I'm sure I'm going to have fun with it regardless. At least the impression from all the dev diaries, streams and what not paints a picture of people who truly love the games and did their best to make a worthy successor. The later release of mod tools will only make the game better in the long run too. I can't even imagine a situation where this game doesn't get tons of really cool, new mods to spice it up with once all the original content has run dry for the fans. Can't wait for friday!

That old dialogue window looks actually really great. I'm liking it way more than the current in game dialogue window, style wise. The text could perhaps use a background box or something for contrast and to make it pop out a bit more, but it's less clunky looking to my eye than the current one. Nevertheless looks like you've got quite a bit of progress done UI wise. Especially the current satellite view is so much better than the old version in the pictures. It is always cool to see how things have changed over time. I often keep snapshots of my game projects as well so I can go back to the older designs and see how things have progressed for the better or worse.

This is pretty much how I feel about it too. Knowing your chances to hit radically change the way you approach combat situations in a game and would most likely turn it into a hunt for that magical 95% where you never take anything less than the absolute best. It works in X-COM because the game is very simple in its core combat and so much of the missions and how they play out are seemingly designed around those hit chances. One shot is usually enough to take down your guys while the enemies can be hulking behemoths that require several turns of tactical planning before you can land the killing shot. In that game you NEED to know your chances, otherwise the experience would be about as unfun as having your hair pulled. JA3 doesn't seem to play anything like that despite there being loads of similarities between the titles. The fun in the game is partly in not knowing. And I could predict doing the opposite would throw the gameplay balance out of the window, unless the AI cheats and always knows where to take the best shot against your weakest guys, which really wouldn't make the game a whole lot of fun. I partly feel people are fighting over CtH so much because they're trying to pull off headshots and such and end up missing the target entirely every time and end up feeling extremely disappointed after the fact when they felt it should have been a sure shot from 2 tiles away with full aim against a seemingly "immobile" target.

The enemies do look a bit goofy, I must admit. But, I'm giving the devs the benefit of a doubt and blindly accept the unproven fact that there will be more actual military looking goons in the late game, and how in the beginning we're just fighting some radicals who have nothing better than simple weapons and face paint.

Yes, please consider making this a feature. I mean, it's one of those things I can live without even if it's not in the game, but I think it only makes sense that you can miss an aimed shot and still hit somewhere else in the body if the bullet just happens to go that way.

One thing creeped up in my mind while reading this, something I've been wondering about for a while actually. When you take a shot at a certain body part (head, arm, leg etc.) and miss, is there a chance for that particular shot to hit anything else or will it always just miss if the initial shot is a miss? I don't think it is entirely unlikely that you could hit somebody in the chest accidentally while aiming for the head for example.

Yeah, I noticed the same. People try taking difficult shots when the character cearly says "Not gonna happen." in the background. Many of the people playing don't seem to understand the range indicator either. I don't know how much range makes a difference in this game, but shooting from outside the effective range in all the previous JA games severely diminished the changes to hit anything.

The effect really only begins to bother my eye when there are multiple overwatches overlapping eachother. Naturally it could feel completely different when you play yourself instead of just looking. The cone is fine, I just reaaaally dislike the extra effects in it (the hatched squares not withstanding) Though, I'm fairly sure some of the overwatch footage I've seen looks the way it is because the effect is bugged. I don't think the pulsating glowy effect and the wavy-scan-detaily-looking thing is THAT horrible generally speaking, but the gameplay area gets really busy looking once you have a few dudes doing that. Just to hammer in my point, this effect here is what I mean at 4:51. I think it's only supposed to play once per activation and not repeatedly like in this little clip here.

Yeah. There's very little in the game that in the way of indicators and other such things that pop out visually. I also like this approach. Less is more... well, at least in some cases.

I wouldn't call this an issue really since I can't say how people generally feel about this, but to me personally the overwatch cones are way too flashy and distracting. Constantly pulsating and giving out fancy animated effects. It's not the worst I've seen in video games, but it is somewhat bothersome when there are multiple overwatches going on at the same time, especially when they overlap eachother. I generally dislike excessive visual noise when it comes to effects and such. Think about this the same way some people dislike the new damage numbers being too distracting, which is something that didn't bother me that much.

I was actually wondering the same thing the other day. That voice line is so iconic to me. 😺

Yeah, I fully second this. Looks absolutely awful how explosions from grenades and other sources don't seem to knock people down. But I think this is one of those cases where the fault is in unfinished features. I'm willing to believe they just didn't have the knockdown animations and such ready to be put in so they just opted for the next best solution: Raw damage with combat starting.

I hope they introduce proper penalties for getting wounded. In JA2, if I'm not completely talking out of my butt, when enemies got shot and wounded they generally got slower, might have dropped their gun, started bleeding, were unable to spend as many AP as before and stuff like that. The same naturally applied to your guys as well. Right now it seems like the only penalty for getting wounds is Health reduction (not a bad thing), but I'm kind of left wondering if there's much more than that. I don't think I've seen bleeding outside of weapon specific weapon status effects either. Getting a lot of shots in, while if it didn't cause massive wounds, would completely exhaust any enemy or your own merc if they got shot too much. We could argue, that JA1 didn't have any of that stuff either beyond bleeding and getting the wind knocked out of your mercs, but we should probably try to progress forwards and not backwards. It would also be really awesome to have proper wounded animations. Right now everybody still sprints around like they were completely fine, even if they only had a single HP left. Enemies don't look like they're hurt, nor do your own mercs. You can't tell if a character is hurt or not visually at all. Though there are bloody marks on the body where the bullets hits. I can live without the underlying mechanics being as complex as they once were, but the animations at least need to convey the well being of a character on the field. We've got nice graphics this time around, but it's not a reason to skimp on stuff that would make it more immersive to look at. I want to see characters limping when they're wounded. I want to see them bleeding. I want to feel like getting shot matters when I look at the action on the screen as well. It needs to show without having to check out how many hit points a guy has or if he's "Near Death" or just "Wounded" according to the status text.

My guess would simply be that it's easier to avoid misclicks and the like when the target is moving around under the cursor. While the enemies aren't moving around too much, they're hardly static. I'd also hazard a guess it'll make it easier to play on a controller for the eventual console port, though I don't know if the game is about to be released on consoles as well. Personally I don't see this as an issue as long as the option I choose from the target column gives me enough feedback that I'm indeed taking a shot at the center mass and not, for example, the arms. Maybe the aiming reticule could just change locations on the target character while you mouse over the options instead of being glued to the chest area like it seems to be doing right now.

That last fight was pretty intense. Looking good. Just one thing that I only noticed now. The game doesn't seem to have suppression mechanics? Was that a thing in the unmodded JA2? I seem to remember people being forced to dive down if they got shot at enough which also reduced the amount of AP during their next round or was that a mod thing.

I suppose it comes with the territory. To many people X-COM (the modern reboot) is the only thing they can compare the game against. It's been such a long time since the previous actual JA title (I don't really count Back in Action or any of the other weak attempts of trying to benefit from the name of the franchise) and I don't think even back then JA 2 made much of an impact when it came to how popular a video game was. It's a gem, but seems like nobody's heard of it. When people throw this argument, they usually only see the outside visuals and completely fail to understand the underlying mechanics that drive the game forward. People just don't pay attention before they start foaming in the mouth. The game has lots of X-COM-like systems in place judging from the videos that I've seen, but calling it X-COM is just wrong, because the games simply don't play similarly at all.

After looking more through all the gameplay videos, just as many people have mentioned, the game could probably use some sort of pause functionality when you want to setup an ambush on the enemy since the game doesn't automatically put you in the turn based mode when you spot an enemy. In at least one of the videos the player had issues initiating the combat from a position where anybody could have gotten the perfect sneak attack on the enemy, but they couldn't fiddle through the UI in time to issue all the orders before the enemy just turned around and spotted the merc. I knew exactly what the player was going for, but the execution looked so painfully clunky. Enemies are also very static when they get shot. Infact, everybody is. There should probably be some sort of reaction animations, fluff and stuff to make it more believable. In older games getting shot would sometimes put you off the aiming stance (which would require more AP to fire off a shot later since your gun was down), sometimes the shot would make the target turn a few steps, putting their aim and facing off or knock the merc down and make soldiers play wounded animations when they were hurt. The amount of hits mercs could soak was very high as well while the easier enemies only had like 20 points of health to lose in comparison before they went down. It's not that bad when you think about your starting gear. Wouldn't be very fun probably when it takes 6 shots to put a basic mook to sleep, but it felt wrong anyway. I didn't see any "downed" or "dying" enemies so I suppose it's not a thing in this game where if somebody is knocked down to low health they are incapacitated and bleeding out? Not sure if it would really make things any different in the long run. I can't remember the AI ever trying to patch up dying soldiers in the older games anyway. But I'm all for the grittiness of combat and things like that help with the immersion. Really all my issues so far seem to lie in goofy animations and little visual things like that. Overall I'm still quite pleased with how the game looks and plays. I guess I just want better animations for that glorious visual feedback, damn it. 😺

Have to quote myself because I can't edit the post anymore. But, yeah. The movement animations are kinda placeholdery looking when the characters do that weird sprint run. There are good looking movement mixed in there as well, little dives, crouch moving while covering from side to side weapon at the ready etc. But with that one, I can almost hear the cartoon tippy-tappy-tippy-tappy sound from Tom and Jerry when they run. I also wish the mercs would be more dynamic while taking cover behind things. I mean instead of just standing in place they could position themselves better to fit the cover they're in for example. Give little peeks around the corner and so on. That's one thing I think the devs should steal from the modern X-COM games.

I'm quite excited myself. The game looks a lot better than I thought it would. The only things I'd be nagging about are some minor visual things, mainly animations. Something about how the mercs run outside of combat, for example, looks very goofy to me. I'm also one of those people who keep complaining about Unity as a game engine, but it is what it is. I also don't know if I like the X-COM esque "Enemies get a free turn to reposition when the fight starts" thing. Not because I think the game looks like X-COM. I just dislike the mechanic since it can get pretty annoying/unfair when you have the perfect ambush going on and then the enemies get a sudden get out of the jail for free card when one of them spots a dude. Still I think the game looks pretty neat and seems to play well. I can't wait to try it out myself once it's finally released.

Damn it. Shouldn't get hyped, but I'm getting hyped. Great to know they've got series veteran(s) working on the game too. Having Ian aboard is truly golden. Almost can't wait to find out about how the mercs have been written this time around and how many unique interactions one can find in one playthrough. The new gameplay snippets look very nice too, though if I had to nitpick about something, knowing the game is still very much WIP, the amount of blood being sprayed on hits is quite excessively cartoony and some of the animations look seriously stiff. Regardless, I am still excited, very much excited. Especially since... since there seems to be a sneaky I.M.P page hidden in there! Oh, don't tell me it's what I think it is! 😄