Fallout won't let people stand on top of defeated foes faces and hit the squat/prone key over and over again.
In all honesty, that was one aspect where Fallout disappointed me.
X-Com is a very profitable game to develop. Which is why it is being developed now. As an FPS.
X-Com as a franchise? I wouldn't put my money on it. Using the X-Com brand name made sense in the beginning - sure, people remembered X-Com was a great game. But today's new generation of gamers doesn't play or remember X-Com, which means the title means to them as much as
Yrtoggaf: The Legacy of Giblets. Besides after so many different developers, so many bad sequels and concept changes I don't think it's a positive brand name anymore.
unprofitable ? In which terms. Jagged Alliance was good enough to see a sequel. And its still one of the most known franchises ammong Tourn based fans. Right next to Fallout and X-Com. Saying JA wasnt succesfull is like saying Fallout wasnt succesfull.
Jagged Alliance was profitable. Jagged Alliance 2 was profitable as well. I love those games, in fact yesterday I was playing around with 1.13. Don't get me wrong here.
I'm talking about a potential sequel. Would it be profitable? No.
JA2 and X-com represent a unique era in PC gaming. Up to that point game mechanics evolved along with computing power. The more powerful the computers, the more features a game had. X-Com Apocalypse? Show me an AAA 2010 game that complex and I'll mail you a vodka. (
Disclamer: offer valid only in the EU, conditions may change when I sober up)
However that's when things started to change. Features began to vanish, graphics improved. Games became LESS complex. LESS features. We had fully destructible walls and terrain back in ninety fucking four and a generation later the guys at EA/dice suddenly wake up saying "GUISE GUISE YUO HAVE TO LOOK AT TIHS WE MADE DESTRACTABLE WALLS N SHIT".
What the hell were those guys doing the last decade and half?
And go look at the AI. Even though we have a hundred times the computing power we had in 1994, the AI hasn't improved much. In fact in a lot of titles it has gotten stupider. I played this game, Splinter Cell Conviction... and while I don't expect my enemies to analyze my strategy, predict my moves and adapt accordingly - hey wait, that's exactly what I expect an AI to do in 2010, not the tactical thought somewhere between a 1994 sectoid and lemming.