I picked up the original XCOM on Steam again, last having played it on an old 486 box--I remembered my lessons, and the first mission I'd intercepted a little scout craft (2 crewman, one of whom died on impact).

So, naturally, I deploy 12 squaddies, leapfrog and encircle the crashed craft on a farm in broad daylight (never, ever, at night, ever), and proceed to fill it full of detpacks. Perfect, flawless run. I'm feeling cocky.

Next mission, terror mission, and within three turns I've lost like half my team to friendly fire (unfortunate incident with an incendiary rocket), a quarter to enemy fire, and the last few guys are either panicking or getting crushed in a pincer between alien tank units (cyberdiscs) and heavy infantry.

And that's when I realized that pretty much no modern games are as hard and unforgiving as that old DOS wonder. You start the game with a bunch of folks in T-shirts and M16s, and by the end you are literally space marines whose mere presence sends elite enemy units scurrying in terror--and more importantly, the game made you earn it, every step of the way.

EDIT:

Their Github!

https://github.com/SupSuper/OpenXcom/

Actually, it's hard to deny that X-Com did have a serious gameplay fault in its difficulty curve, as much as we loved the nostalgia.

At the easy difficulty modes (most new players) the curve is completely backwards. It stars out brutally difficult and becomes easier as you gain access to heavy plasma weapons.

If a total wipe of your early team was a forgiving event compared to late-game losses, that could be excused as setting tone, but it's not like that - players just save-scummed until the mission worked. That's not good gameplay.

I mean, the game's merits easily overshadowed its flaws, but the reverse-difficulty is a serious flaw.

So, the trick with the early game was to accept losses, right?

Once you realized "Hey, we're totally outgunned...we just need to flood the aliens until we get better gear", things changed. Missions became more about resource management: what is the bare minimum I can field to wipe these guys, what can I build and manufacture that has the highest profit margin, etc.?

Terror missions, for example, early on devolved into "Set fire to everything, because we need the light, and shoot the civilians, because they could be used to feed the Chrysalids and make more Chrysalids."

The enemies in the game stayed largely the same difficulty, but your equipment got better and better and tactics switched as you were able to field more expensive units--and unless you ran a really tight resource game, you treated those expensive units much differently.

The thing that made the game feel unique was exactly that: the reverse-difficulty. If you started kicking ass, and then things got harder, it'd be annoying--instead, you had some early success, discovered just how outclassed you were, and after a few restarts learned how to fight a technologically-superior enemy until you had achieved force parity.

I remember it having a nice subtle balance - you couldn't afford to just let terror missions go unmolested because you would quickly lose funding. On the other hand, you couldn't just grind soldiers out because you needed them to progress with skills, etc. for the endgame... although there was a sort of plateu around when you got armor and psi-ops where things got boring between, say the 70% and 95% where you were just waiting to capture that one thing you missed in the earlier missions... from what I remember, that was the worst thing; There were like 2 or 3 things you needed for your tech tree that only appeared in early missions and they were really difficult to get after that.

> And that's when I realized that pretty much no modern games are as hard and unforgiving as that old DOS wonder.

I'd say FTL and Super Hexagon are good examples of punishing modern games. I think this sort of difficulty curve is coming back into fashion with gamers.

I personally don't think the punishing difficulty curve was ever not in fashion with the gamers we're talking about. What happened was it fell out of fashion with the publishers, because they realized if they made the game easier, it appealed to a larger market.

What changed all this was kickstarter. All the games that developers still wanted to make, but couldn't find funding for because they weren't "modern" suddenly had a new method for publishing. FTL is a great example of that- it was an early kickstarter success and I doubt it would have been as good if it were published by, say, Ubisoft. What will be interesting is if we see a resurgence of hard games, just like the resurgence of point-and-click adventure games after Doublefine showed that people will still pay money for them.

> if you're patient and methodical, it's not terribly hard to win most fights, scratch-free

I was pretty satisfied with how they addressed that issue in Enemy Within. There are optional objectives that give you bonus resources if you reach them before they expire after a number of turns.

But yes, in Enemy Unknown, I gave up on my Classic runthrough after I realized that I could win easily if I just advanced slowly enough.

I agree that it is slightly weird that the aliens wait for you to discover them. However, when playing on impossible difficulty (and maybe also classic?), the aliens don't "hang out" most of the time. They will actively seek you out and it can be quite a challenge when they all show up to the party at the same time.