(or, how I learned to stop worrying and uninstall)

So, having watched a bunch of gameplay videos of War of the Chosen and heard people talking about it here, I had a bit of a think and then decided not to buy War of the Chosen, but I did reinstall the vanilla game to give it another go.

A couple of things have happened since the last time I played the base game, and—in what I am coming to recognize as the Signature Firaxis Thing (in much the same way that noticeably rushed/unfinished-at-ship games are the Signature Obsidian Thing, crashes to desktop are the Signature Bethesda Thing, or lots of high places to fall off of and die are the Signature RavenSoft Thing)—those things seem to consist mainly of DLCs that added enemies who cheat like absolute motherfuckers and make the game no fun at god damn all.

I stopped playing the original base game mostly because of the super-annoying Skies of Arcadia interruptotron world map, but that wasn't an actual ragequit in the strict sense. I didn't abandon the last session in frustration at that, I just didn't play it again after that session was over.

The Viper King? The Viper King made me genuinely ragequit. So let me get this straight, he has a million hit points, has all the already irritating Viper abilities cranked up to 11, and he gets a free action anytime anyone does anything? And there are two other enemies in this pack who are just like that but are based on even worse aliens? And they pop up whenever the fuck they feel like it to ruin any other mission you might be trying to do later on? No, fuck you guys, to hell with that. I'm done with this shit.

And those guys are the prototypes for the Chosen, evidently. (Not in-story, I mean in a sort of meta game-developers-are-thinking-along-these-lines way.) "Hey, we finally optimized this damn game engine, a year after release, and we've added a bunch of cool tweaks to the soldier mechanics. This patch is shaping up to be a really solid quality-of-life improvement across the board. How can we ruin it for everyone?"

"Zombies?"

"Good thought, but it's not enough. Let's kick it around the table, brainstorm it. What else have we got?"

"Remember the godmode NPCs from the Alien Hunters DLC? What if we did another set of those, only even worse, and gave them really irritating VOs that even pop up constantly and rant at you while you're trying to work on the Avenger or pick up your monthly supplies?"

"Perfect! Let's run with that. And the zombies, fuck it, the more the merrier."

Christ almighty. I'm so salty right now, horses would be lining up to lick me.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.