Many of the roadblocks seem to be just for the sake of it, effectively purposeless other than to rank up soldiers, which there is no shortage of opportunities to do anyway. Partly it's the extra chaff introduced by the DLC, but mostly it's that I now know the game very well, and am acutely aware of what I want to achieve in it. I swore and slammed keyboards too many times, as yet another pop-up mission or far too slow Avatar counter animation took over my screen, and I realised that I truly do hate the strategy map now. My quest to upgrade Medkits seemed to take years. I counted four interruptions within a single in-game day at one point. Having a wider choice of sub-objectives is entirely welcome, as is, if this is your first time with the DLC, getting to see new places and fight new foes, but it's so hard to make progress on anything when it's popping up a prompt and trying to drag you on a mission quite this often. Those goodies require research and resources though, so you're further splitting the vote of your funds and having more things that you're keen to progress on - but can't, because the strategy map keeps bombarding you with other priorities. You can put them off indefinitely, but you probably won't want to, both from a thirst for the new and because you almost certainly know going in that they grant new and powerful goodies. I'll get onto their actual contents later, but first let's talk about how they're implemented: crammed in as new missions and objectives available from an hour or two into a new campaign. Already a beeswarm of nags and forced deviations from one's R&D plans, with the two story-led DLC packs (the third is purely aesthetic) in the mix it's off the scale in the early game. This is compounded by a sometimes unbearable-feeling regularity of interruption on the strategy map side of the game. The aggravating delays between certain actions have been toned down too, although there's still an unwelcome amount of heel-dragging as various animations or reactions play out, maddening when one is keen to know the consequence or action a riposte. Or perhaps I'm just able to appreciate it a little bit more now I'm not seething about jerkiness and worrying that my poor graphics card is running at the temperature of the sun. I can't prove this, but I swear it looks a little prettier than it did too. It's never dropping below 30, it's smoother and I can get the magic 60 if I compromise on a few things. (Full SSAO, as opposed to the lesser and not hugely different Tile SSAO still takes a big toll). The good news is the worst issues have been resolved - where once I was seeing my frame rate drop to sub-30 on a GTX 970 even with most settings at absolute minimum, now I'm seeing it range between 40 and 60 when almost everything is maxed-out, and at 1440p too. I'll start with performance, as I was one of those who was blighted by lousy and wildly-spiking framerates both at launch and after the initial patch. I've just emerged from the requisite sleepless nights to wage the main part of another campaign, and I have indeed found a significantly changed game - for reasons both good and bad. There have been three DLC packs, a bunch of patches, a mod community and most of all, plenty of time for repeat visits to see how it feels now we know how all the pieces fit together. The picture's a little different now we're here in July. XCOM 2 was a big huge hit at release, and mostly very well-received - although, variously, there were complaints about performance, difficulty, time-wasting and the opacity of its complicated systems.
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