[vanderZwan]

> I always felt the serialising that X-COM enforced to be an artificial limitation.

I was about to argue that it might have been a technical limitation too, but Dune II, the first real-time strategy game, came out two years before X-COM so technically that can't be quite right.

On the other hand, it also requires a certain set of programmer skills and specialized knowledge of how to simulate such systems, and opens up a combinatorial explosion of scenarios that can be much harder to design around if you also want to include lots of complex possibilities. Serialized turn-based design is much easier by comparison.

[eru]

Yes, I think it's not so much a programming limitation per se, but a game design limitation. It's a much tougher nut to crack how to present the choices available to the player in a sensible and understandable way.

Notice how Frozen Synapse is otherwise a much simpler game with fewer elements than even just in the tactical mode of the original X-Com.

[ethbr0]

It's fair to say that, going further back in computer game history, something being possible didn't mean it was possible for you.

Programming expertise and information was a lot less accessible and evenly distributed.

You couldn't just "hire a graphics person", because no one knew what the hell that was. You hired a smart computer person / artist, and hoped they could learn everything. One reason the history of early games companies has so much "and then we hired this person named X, who had no training, but turned into one of the world's best Y's."

[eru]

I think we are mostly in agreement.

What I am saying is that just implementing a very crude version would have been doable in the early 90s.

What was much harder was to come up with a way to present the information and make the planning intuitive and fun. Including the programming aspects of that.