Free DLC for XCOM: Enemy Unknown DLC launches today, adds slew of new options
By Tim Colwill on January 8, 2013 at 4:33 pm
The ‘Second Wave’ DLC for XCOM: Enemy Unknown is set to launch today, bringing with it a bunch of new options to allow you to customise your game.
Many of the options have already been discovered by anxious modders poking around in the innards of the game, but activating them always caused something to break. Well, break no more! Lead Designer Jake Solomon said in an interview with Polygon that the idea of the changes was to allow players to play the game closer to the original vision, with many of the options simply not being balance-able in the time before ship.
The full list of options can be found below.
- Damage Roulette: Weapons have a wider range of damage.
- New Economy: Randomized council member funding.
- Not Created Equally: Rookies will have random starting stats.
- Hidden Potential: As a soldier is promoted, stats increase randomly.
- Red Fog: Combat wounds will degrade the soldier’s mission stats.
- Absolutely Critical: A flanking shot guarantees a critical hit.
- The Greater Good: Psionics can only be learned from interrogating a psionic alien.
- Marathon: The game takes considerably longer to complete.
- Results Driven: A country offers less funding as its panic level increases.
- High Stakes: Random rewards for stopping alien abductions.
- Diminishing Returns: Increased cost of satellite construction.
- More Than Human: The psionic gift is extremely rare.
The following four options are only available once the game is completed on Impossible difficulty:
- War Weariness: Funding goes down over time.
- E-115: Elerium degrades over time.
- Total Loss: Lose all soldier gear upon death.
- Alternate Sources: The power source cost to build facilities increases dramatically.
If that’s still not enough for you, why not check out this roundup of the top XCOM mods?
Source: Polygon
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Interesting, but I think I’m pretty much done with the game. I think I’d need actual new content and not just tinkering to want to go back.
None of these really change the game from it’s anti-sandbox design unfortunately.
Mmmm… a makeover of the strategic layer would be nice.
Anyone whinging about the game who hasn’t played Warpspace Extension, go do it. (when it has been updated for this new patch that is) It’s the deeper, less casualified, more sensible game that should have been released for PC gamers from the start.
Exactly why are people whinging about the game? Anti-sandbox design? When was it supposed to be a sandbox game? All the whining about the game not being hardcore or strategic enough strikes me as a bit Mass Effect 3 fanrage-ish, to be honest. I’m pretty happy with the game.
Still loving the game here. Gotta re-edit my personal mod now but that’s no biggie. hopefully I can have more fun with a proper feature DLC if they can manage it ;)
Stealth satellites? Never seen a satellite shot down in 3 CI games. Labs? 100% useless building those. Scientists? Also useless. Want to send 3 weaker ships at once to take down a big UFO? Bizzarely, XCOM don’t have the know-how. Multiple bases? Alien infiltration? Base attacks? The strategic layer is very, very thin compared to the first 2 games.
Just because XCOM was one of my favourite games of 2012 doesn’t mean I can’t see its faults. So wanting some depth added to the strategic side with a patch, instead of “lets make impossible impossibler for the 0.5% of the player base who have finished it”, is a pretty damn fair call if you ask me.
Though I do understand these options were already in the code and required little effort.
ooshp,
Yeah, it’s possible I overstated things, but what I really meant with the original response was that I found it puzzling that someone would expect the game to be a sandbox style game. And the slew of people who go on and on about hating it because it’s not enough like the original game for them are just annoying.
That said, I have my own little nitpicks in the game, like why there are only American voices for all your characters, even if it’s a South African assault lady who is awesome with a scatter laser.