Replayability?

[Mojo Amok]

I suspect the origin stories will have a limited effect on game choices. Its mostly there for flavor text, much like it is in Tyranny (great game).

Outside of the story missions, the campaign is an endless sandbox mode. Just like xcom, i can almost guarantee there will be mods to make the campagin longer and more difficulty. And people will do all kinds of ridiculous changeling modes, such as sticking with the subpar mechs like quickdraws and dragoons and seeing if you can win. Someones going to be trying out 4 Jenner lances.

With experience the campaign will become as predictable as Xcom's but Xcom still sees a lot of replays and I can see the same for battletech.

I definitely second your post and feel very similar, but I would amend it by going a little bit further.

I actually think Battletech will fare substantially better than XCOM in the replay department, at least for hardcore players.

The biggest thing is the initiative system: Battletech's is much more supple and creates protracted firefights with flow whereas the team based activations of XCOM - especially when combined with pod activation mechanics - produces more binary and predictable gameplay. After 700 hours with the XCOM franchise, I just feel like 99% of the problems you face on a mission gone badly are driven bad by pod activation and how that ties into the all or nothing initiative system. And then oddly enough, the XCOM firefights that take place when you mess up and activate too many aliens are actually more entertaining than playing well (ie. surgically picking off pods one by one). Unfortunately, those open firefights against three pods aren't particularly survivable in the long run. Battletech has basically solved this problem already, which is my biggest issue with XCOM.

Plus, XCOM's emphasis on RPG-like character progression with wildly powerful late-game skills detracts from the purity of the tactical decision making in the latter portions of the campaign. I'm eventually just going through a fairly rote decision-making tree, like "yeah, I think I'll use this OP cooldown ability from behind cover again" or "yeah, I'll just blow up their cover with a plasma grenade rather than flanking like I did the last 1000 times." The only squad member I'm forced to really babysit in most situations late game is the designated scout (which ties into the pod trigger issue above).

There's a lot of good ideas in XCOM - don't get me wrong - but some of this ground floor stuff just stands out after a while and doesn't really get fixed with mods. At least in my experience (and I don't mean to be overly critical as I spent 700 hours in the games, for Pete's sake ).

Long story short, my big fat opinion is that Battletech has a better foundation for replay value based on specific design decisions in the tactical game. It does need more refinement and additional systems brought in like XCOM has had over the years, but a number of the fundamental design decisions made by HBS look better to me than the ones made by Firaxis.

 

[GenTask]

700 hours across the "Neu" XCOMS (XCOM: Enemy Unknown/Within and XCOM 2), or also the original X-COM: UFO Defense and X-COM: Terror from the Deep? The originals still play a lot better I think for replayability, since they lack RPG-lite mechanics (skilling up characters), have more RNG, and there is more freedom to build across the geoscape compared with the new ones.

 

[Mech it so!]

Hopefully, Battletech's easy start will go on to scale upwards in difficulty as the game progresses rather than XCOM's difficulty cliff-followed by a plateau.

I enjoy returning to games after 6 months and playing them on a harder difficulty. I found increasing the difficulty on XCOM (and particularly XCOM 2 WOTC) simply gives you a bigger cliff to scramble up in the first 3-4 months, once the cliff is crested, it doesn't matter how much health the aliens have if the game has basically given you the Avengers to play with.

 

[Mojo Amok]

700 hours across the "Neu" XCOMS (XCOM: Enemy Unknown/Within and XCOM 2), or also the original X-COM: UFO Defense and X-COM: Terror from the Deep? The originals still play a lot better I think for replayability, since they lack RPG-lite mechanics (skilling up characters), have more RNG, and there is more freedom to build across the geoscape compared with the new ones.

Yeah, 700 hours of NU-COM and I'd agree with your rationale; though I don't seem to have the ability to play 1990's games today regardless of how fondly I remember them.