June | 2020 | adrift

Archive for June, 2020

XCOM: Bug Squad

2020/06/29 in bugs, gaming, screenshots
Tags: Chimera Squad, XCOM

Almost 6 weeks ago or so, Firaxis released a first (and so far only) patch for Chimera Squad. At the same time they patched a new launcher into all their games. What a wonderful idea from management. While the patch for Chimera Squad actually helped and removed some of its bugs, the new launcher for XCOM 2 introduced at least one new bug the game didn’t have before: mods no longer worked out of the box.

Given that mods are/were THE major selling point of XCOM 2 and few of their devs could shut up about how much they cared about mods and wanted people to make and use them, it’s especially breathtaking, that this, of all things, is the function they didn’t even test once.

Now there is a workaround, to get mods working after all, but this changes little how astonishing it is, that they apparently have no QA. Firaxis even found out about it on like the same day, which probably wasn’t very hard, with thousands of players talking about that and released their, so far, sole reaction to it.

We're aware of problems related to launching mods from the new XCOM 2 launcher. We're working on a fix with our partners.

— Firaxis Games (@FiraxisGames) May 22, 2020

A single tweet, which they only posted to their Firaxis account and not, for instance, on their offical XCOM account. Because why would you communicate something on the XCOM account, that is about XCOM. Now, this was, again, over 5 weeks ago and so far there is no official fix, nor any further reaction. This must be some bugged launcher, that they can’t fix it in all this time.

The problem isn’t even that they can’t present a patch in record time – that I’d understand, but going completely silent on it, is just poor handling of the situation. It’s not that hard to explain the situation, they could even lie their asses off, after all. Pretty much anyone should be able to handle this significantly better.

They even could have restored the old launcher and only could have rolled out the new one, once it was working properly. Should have taken zero time on steamworks. Then people wouldn’t have been stuck with a broken launcher all this time. Every other topic on the Steam forums is now about this issue.

These screenshots are of the patched CS version and no one has to look long and hard to run into some more bugs. And by now I’m not holding my breath that they will fix anything else. Great games, poor management.