“Rough” would be a kind word to explain the release of XCOM 2 earlier this month. Not as disastrous as Batman: Arkham Knight, but developer Firaxis is by no means happy with the game’s current state.
Talking with Alec Meer over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, lead designer Jake Solomon says the developer was caught off-guard by the onslaught of issues affecting the game on release.
On Steam, the negative reviews are starting to take their toll, with the title just five percentage points away from a “Mixed” rating.
Solomon mentions that Firaxis is “working very furiously” on addressing the problems that plague XCOM 2, though he was unable to offer specific dates for patch releases. The developer has described some of the bugs as “myriad… sporadic” — difficult to pin down, basically.
Much like Arkham Knight on PC — though to a much lesser extent — the performance issues are not universal, as Solomon reiterates:
“Maybe this is damning on me, but I’m sitting here talking to you now on the laptop I use to play it on,” explained Solomon, “and I didn’t see these issues. We didn’t catch this stuff in compatibility testing. We’re fully, fully accountable for the product in people’s hands, so we certainly take responsibility for it.”
Firaxis will almost certainly get to the bottom of XCOM 2‘s annoyances. The real question is, will it be in time to recoup the goodwill of players?
Firaxis “Working Furiously” On XCOM 2 Fixes: “We Didn’t Know It Would Be This Way At Launch” [RPS]
Comments
26 responses to “Firaxis Frustrated By XCOM 2 Woes, Big Updates On The Way”
I think personally the ‘good will’ of players hasn’t been damaged, it’s not like they’ve really got to ‘recoup’ it? I think it’s really incomparable though to the Arkham Knight situation and any comparison reeks of hyperbole. I don’t think it’s a perfect game, it’s got its flaws and it does have bugs, but really no more than any release. The game runs well in general whereas Arkham, it was hard to find someone where it ran at all to an acceptable degree upon release, it just has some bugs which will be ironed out in time as they were with XCom were and as they generally are with most games. They created a game specifically for the PC, and it’s going to be a tough job making sure it performs optimally no doubt, but in my books, they created a damn good game that for me at least, runs exceedingly well and so far has me exceedingly entertained.
Funnily enough, ive had zero issues
Me too. Not a single issue and constant 60 fps.
Same here, the only time I loose frame rate is when its loading the mission and after the mission, both screens are not game affecting at all.
Tip you may or may not know: When the mission finishes, press Capslock, it skips the loading after the mission somehow when you’re in the skyranger. :O
Same, not a single issue for me.
thankfully those who normally play Firaxis games are normally more mature than . Anyone who has ever played one of their games know that these teething issues always happen, not because they are bad game developers but because their games are massively complex. What is important is that as a company they have always taken to task to fix them, not because they ‘have’ to but because they care about their players and the games they make.
Just don’t try playing this on AMD under Linux, doesn’t matter what tweaks you make the game has stutter pauses to down right halts going on! (they do no support AMD hardware at this time how so thats understandable)
Didn’t they make it PC only to avoid issues like this? As someone who’s desperate to play it on consoles this doesn’t make that bitter pill any easier to swallow.
(also, what exactly are the issues people are experiencing right now? The article doesn’t make it clear)
Trust the comments more than the article. That’s all I can say.
They made it a PC game because it works better as a PC game. I usually play on consoles these days but this sort of thing is just easier to control on a PC. It does however prove that consoles aren’t the cause of crap PC releases – it’s just that writing games for PCs is hard and issue tolerance for AAA games is zero.
I found xcom ew and eu much easier to control with a x360 controller on pc. That’s just my natural bias though.
Do you have a source saying that is the specific reason as to why they chose to make the game pc only this time round?
Here’s why they made it for PC only (at least thus far): http://www.pcgamer.com/xcom-2-creative-director-explains-why-its-pc-exclusive/
Part of that reason is the UI and controls just work better on the PC – as is the case with most games that involve pointing and clicking. As well as the fact that they’re predominately a PC company and they’re leveraging higher end PCs for better physics and level design. Not to say that it won’t come to consoles but they’ve tried to focus on a better design for a specific platform instead of a compromise.
Yeah, I’d heard about the other reasons like UI, which seemed weird to me, because I played on 360 and then later on PC and never felt like the UI was difficult to use or suffered on either platform. From the twitch streams and vods on youtube it doesn’t seem like the ui would be that difficult to translate to a big screen.
It just seemed from the way you worded it was the primary (even only) reason for not releasing multiplatform (I knew it wasn’t).
After 2015 I torrent any new game I’m interested in before I delete and purchase but this game runs like shit on my 980ti. I never played past the second level.
Out of interest what graphic settings… I have a 970 and have had no issues.
All max with AA off at 1440p. I’d say they didn’t optimize for the higher resolution.
I would love it if Firaxis were the ones releasing deliberately dodgy copies on the torrent sites to discourage piraters.
Not far off being a legit possibility, it’s been done in the past by studios apparently.
I get the feeling that my “issues” aren’t really the issues being talked about… Like cover being absolutely worthless when a Viper can launch it’s tongue through walls and obstacles, then drag you back through them :-/
Game runs fine for me and haven’t come across any bugs, except one weird one. Had a guy carrying one of his dead team mates running across a damaged roof. An alien was in the room below on overwatch and somehow saw my solder running across the top. The alien shot at him, missed, but blew up some of the roof. My guy kept running, teleported into the room below where the alien was, then teleported back up onto the roof. My turn ends, some more of the roof falls down and the alien somehow misses his turn. Kinda helped me, I guess, but a bit weird.
I played through it and finished it. 30 hours put in and maybe one crash if that? Yeah some annoying slow downs happened at some points but nothing game breaking.
Unfortunately I am one of the sufferers. Game crashes after you hit launch. Admittedly I would usually put it down to my dated setup, but seeing the amount of players with significantly better rigs having the same problem makes me think it’s just a boned game for some of us.
Ended up borrowing a friends Alpha to play – game is awesome.
If you want to help the developers out, check over your windows event logs in the control panel, and send them any info you find that relates to the crash the game had.
Windows app crashes usually result in something being logged, and if the developers are lucky, it’ll have information about which exe/dll the crash happened in, along with some basic info about what happened to cause it.
It is really helpful to them, but on the last game I worked on, only two people actually responded to requests for more information about the crashes they were having. It’s really really really hard to figure out reasons for crashes if all you’ve got to go on is a forum post saying “game crashes on launch, fix it”, and your own logging and crash handling systems can’t catch the reason for it =D
Man that sucks. I’m not delusional enough to think noones affected, of course people will be. I simply thing the internet is pulling an ‘internet’ (i.e. Problem is say, realistically a 4 out of 10, but comments and articles make you think the ‘volumes cranked to 11’ on the issue).
Hope the upcoming patches fix all your issues for you then!
Was playing it this weekend no issues till now, all the enemy AI just stood still and let me kill them with no issues, (was lucky cause all my shoulders were wounded badly and near death), finished the mission and started a new one and again all enemy AI just stood there doing nothing … Still enjoying the game but still odd bug is odd bug.