They seem to have approached the game design from a "Shooting aliens is cool! Let's make a squad shooter!" angle, rather than a "X-com was an AWESOME game, what made it so?" point of view. I imagine they would argue that there is no appetite anymore for hard games where setbacks were actually damaging, but I would point them in the direction of Demon's/Dark Souls.
Did you watch the video with the dev team? The whole thing is basically rebutting exactly these points: the project lead is an X-COM fanatic, he forced the entire team to play hundreds of hours of the original in hopes of recapturing some of its magic, and he specifically cites Dark Souls as an inspiration as a game that engaged players with its challenge.
As for the four guys only at first thing, ignoring that that makes no sense from a storyline point of view, for me it pretty much confirms that your soldiers will be death machines straight from the off (at least compared to the original), if they'd kept the original balance you'd lose every mission you started.
The game isn't going to have the original balance (of tossing you completely unprepared into wildly difficult situations), it was never going to have that balance, and people shouldn't
want for it to have that balance.
The trend of educating players through gameplay about how to actually play a game is a good one. Easing the player in upfront is the best way to introduce a series of complex mechanics that become truly challenging and deep as the game progresses.
These are game systems that people have seen before. Got to be able to reach conclusions at some point.
It's reasonable to draw conclusions when there's an in-depth preview or playable build at a tradeshow and therefore there's enough information to tease out a fairly comprehensive picture of the turn-by-turn system. It's reasonable to voice concerns, but
not to draw conclusions, based on knowledge of some mechanics outside of the full context. It's
definitely reasonable to give the team some benefit of the doubt given the info they've provided so far as to their design philosophy for the game.
This is just pure speculation if we are talking about the new game but if it's true in some ways the perk system can still only limit the possibilities. If I have a "shoots more than 2 hexes away" perk on a vet sniper then a rookie can't fill his shoes if there is an alien 6 hexes away.
I think "the game must absolutely not allow individual soldiers to develop
any unique abilities" is a wildly unreasonable standard. It's one thing to say that any soldier should be able to pick up a sniper rifle and fire it (that's absolutely true) but another to suggest that someone trained as a medic or a demolitions expert should be able to do everything the sniper can do with it except at an accuracy penalty.
