A Deep Dive Into XCOM and
XCOM 2
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On my new computer, I finally had a chance to sit down and play
XCOM 2 War of the Chosen by Firaxis, without the technical issues
plaguing my old PC and see the game in its full light. I’ve said many
times over that Firaxis’s take on the venerable franchise comes close to
being my perfect game, but the issues I have with it keep it from that
lofty position.
This year, I’ve been able to play a variety of tactical strategy games, and
I can finally put into words why I feel XCOM and XCOM 2 just don’t
work for me from a design perspective.
Units on the Board:
To understand the difference between Firaxis’s take on XCOM and
other tactical strategy games, you need to grasp one important concept.
In videos and interviews, Jake Solomon (Creative Lead on XCOM)
spoke about how they originally approached making XCOM. Early
versions of the game mirrored the original’s focus on RPG stats and
values for how troops operated.
The famous “time units” which dictated all the actions a squaddie could
do in a turn were on display. Upon playtesting, Jake and the team came
to the realization that the time unit system — and by extension
the variety of attributes for units — was just too cumbersome to
bring back as they were. To be fair, he’s not wrong; the original X-Com
can become a mess of stats and units very quickly.
So it was decided to go in a different direction, and that was to embrace
tabletop design as the basis for XCOM. What that meant was relying on
a far more abstracted system for how units behaved, combat worked,
and the introduction of “skills” characters could learn. While both
enemies and allies had attributes, they were far simpler and used
smaller numbers. The basic actions for a squaddie never changed, but
their class would determine skills and weapons that they would be able
to use if they survived. Every character had two actions per turn and
attacking always ends a character’s turn.
But perhaps the greatest and most polarizing feature in Firaxis’ take
was a change in defensive design. In the original game, characters had
a possibility of dodging attacks, but the main way to keep them alive
was to acquire higher-quality versions of armor to block damage. In
Fraxis’s system, defense in the form of taking damage was replaced as
avoiding it; and armor simply added more health points onto a
character. This was done part in parcel with the cover mechanic.
cover became the defacto option for keeping squaddies alive
On every map, there is partial and full cover that characters can hide
behind. Partial cover reduces the chance of someone hitting that
character by 25%, and full cover reduces it by 50%. Many advanced
enemies get a bonus to their cover rating by the ambiguous “defense”
stat.
This also had an impact on how maps were designed around partial
and full cover as a way of focusing fights to those areas.
In turn, XCOM and XCOM 2 became heavily tuned tactical strategy
titles with some of the best secondary systems I’ve seen from the genre.
However, that highly tuned design is where my problems with the
game begin.
Fighting the Game
There’s a difference in my opinion between fighting the enemies in a
videogame and fighting the design of the game itself. The former is
always better than the latter and lead to more interesting decisions and
actions. This is very important for XCOM, as the entire game is built on
asymmetrical balance and options between the aliens and the player.
With both titles no matter what I did, I always felt like the mechanics
were hamstringing me from enjoying the game. From a basic
standpoint, you simply don’t have a lot of options or viable tactics to
play around with. If enemies are behind full cover, there is very little
you can do to get them out of it.
All your true options and toys to play with are locked to the skills of the
respective classes. Let’s say you want to suppress an enemy and move
your units around to flank, well, you better have a grenadier with you
for that. Then there are some options the enemy has that there is no
viable action on your part to avoid.
the update to the geoscape layer creates a more linear experience
I’ve had cases that with all my troops behind full cover, a sectoid could
mind control them from across the screen while in full cover itself, and
there was no way I could attack him safely to free the unit.
The game’s action system is also limiting and equally punishing given
the cover system. Because attacking always ends your turn, you can’t
fire and then retreat; with exception to the skirmisher class. This
decision greatly limits what you’re able to do on any given turn.
The only special option that is universal is the ability to “hunker down”
 — lowering the chance of an enemy hitting them by 50%. That’s
all well and good, but it clashes with the design of XCOM 2 and the
focus on being aggressive.
With many missions having objective timers (another controversial
point), actions that aren’t moving the battle forward aren’t good. A long
time ago, I wrote a similar piece about the first XCOM, and one of the
things I said was that I wanted Firaxis to give the player more
generalized abilities to make the combat more interesting.
Ultimately, I always feel like I’m fighting the game systems of XCOM 2,
and by extension, being punished for making the right moves. A major
point about the tactical layer is getting setup for flanking shots. Given
the game’s cover system, this is harder than it sounds on most maps.
There are cases where I can set up a brilliant plan, get a character into
the perfect position, do everything right, and still lose.
And that takes me to the point that I don’t think I’ve heard anyone say
they like about XCOM and XCOM 2: the pods. In the original X-COM,
each enemy had line of sight and hearing ranges to determine whether
or not they would detect the player. This meant there was a realistic
aspect to how enemies would respond and come after the player.​
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Firaxis’ take went for a far more simpler design. Enemies would spawn
in groups or “pods” that would be at set points on the map. The second
a character reveals a pod, that pod would immediately activate and
move into cover. With the game’s cover system, this gives them a
massive advantage. What’s worse is that due to how things are set up,
it’s also possible to trigger multiple pods and easily be outnumbered
two or three to one.
That also had the passive impact of greatly limiting your range of
motion on the map. Because of the fact that you don’t know what’s
around, you can’t easily move around to flank a pod lest you risk
triggering more.
In XCOM 2, the developers added in the ability to start most maps
hidden to allow players to move around and set up. However, the
tabletop design prevents characters (with two class exceptions) from
reentering stealth, even if they wipe out the pod.
Again, the player is limited by the design of the game which in turn
drastically reduces the number of options that you can play with. And
that goes double for when the chosen are introduced.
With the arrival of the Chosen: elite units who procedurally grow over
the campaign, this can also screw with the player. Case in point, doing
the mission where they are introduced, the last two times the Chosen
got the ability to be immune to overwatch — the only way to lock down
enemies and get a shot in when they move. When that happens early
on, I lose one of my main options and have nothing to replace it with.
There’s no room for trying something new or being daring in XCOM 2;
unless the game in a manner of speaking “allows it”, you must play the
game a specific way or lose every time.
And losing in Firaxis’s take is even more punishing than the original,
and it shouldn’t be the case.
The Persistence of Losing
A major part about X-Com’s design and what has preserved its legacy
was the gameplay loop around failure. When you first start playing the
game, you are guaranteed to lose characters and be behind the
eightball. Losing always hurt you in the short run, but the MO of the
game was all about winning the war, regardless of the battles.
Every battle would earn you resources that you could use back in your
base, and the squaddies that did survive would slowly become more
badass over the course of a play. So much of the progression of the
game was on the gear and research system. While higher-ranked
squaddies were valuable, the early game was all about closing the arms
race between you and the aliens.
the difficulty of a campaign always swung between too easy or too hard
This sense of designing around losing could also be seen in the Long
War mod (both in XCOM and XCOM 2), and how it was designed to
make the campaign more involved.
The mod straight up tells you that it can design missions that you are
not supposed to win, and that it’s better to retreat than try to fight it.
Both XCOM and XCOM 2 may offer some wiggle room in terms of
losing missions, but this goes away when you try to play the games on
the harder difficulties. Keeping with the tabletop design, the campaign
structure is heavily fixed.
Every month without fail will give you a terror mission, and instead of
normal missions occurring organically, they appear at set intervals
each month. The player is not given time to win and lose, and the
game’s progression can easily lead the player into a negative feedback
loop.
It’s been accepted by expert players of the game that if you lose any
squaddies on the opening mission, or outright lose your first real
mission, it’s better to restart the game than keep playing due to falling
behind.
The base building is one of the worse offenders in this regard. You need
engineers and time to mine out parts of the ship, and then supplies,
power, and more time to build the room you want. Once again, there is
the best build order for starting out that you need to get if you want to
have a chance. This is further exemplified by the fact that you need to
unlock the ability to have more squaddies in your group, and you need
to get that upgraded ASAP.
In one play, the very first mission in the game had my team of four up
against 10 enemies who all had the possibility of one-shotting any of
them.
A big part of XCOM 2’s structure is that you are battling the Advent
who have their own plans. This comes into play with the beginning of
goal of attacking “blacksites” to delay their win condition: “The avatar
project.” Again, due to the fixed nature of the campaign structure, if
you’re not making progress then you are falling behind.
In the previous section, I discussed how skills were introduced via
classes. Due to the fixed nature of weapons and abilities, losing high
ranked characters on a mission is far more punishing than it was in the
original. If you lose your best gunslinger or ranger, you also lose all the
tactics they brought to help even the odds.
As with the original game’s structure, each month of in-game time will
slowly introduce harder enemies to challenge the player, and again,
you can fall behind very easily.
Base building in both of firaxis’s takes lent themselves towards min-maxing
Firaxis did attempt to correct this issue with War of the Chosen. A new
room you could build in the avenger allowed you to send squaddies on
missions behind the scenes that could give them free experience and
level them up without needing to expose them to combat.
Now with all that said, I know someone is ready to leave a comment to
the likes of “Once you get high-ranked units the game becomes a
cakewalk,” and that is very true, and also a big issue with the design of
XCOM.
An Inverse Arms Race
XCOM 1 and 2 are games that start out hard until they’re not. What
that means is that due to the fixed nature of the design, there will
either come a point where the player cannot keep up with the AI and
lose, or they will pass them and the difficulty goes away.
A full squad of upgraded characters, with all their abilities at play, is
like playing a different game than it was at the beginning. XCOM 2 also
introduced more ways of powering up characters with weapon
customization and special items that can raise squaddie stats.
You can see this happen in the legacy mode at a faster rate that was
added in the last patch. Going from having nothing to a sniper who can
hit from any visible point on the map, psionic attacks that can mind
control enemies, and moves that allow for multiple attacks, the game
becomes easier for some strange reason.
This has always been the allure of the X-Com progression model —
 reaching the point where you can fight the aliens on their own
terms and beyond. However, you still run into the case of either the
game is too easy, or one bad turn could spell disaster for your squad.
Completely lose your highest squad on a mission and you might as well
reload or restart.
Each enemy type itself is hard-coded in what it can do, and there are no
variations at the individual level. This was also a problem that the
original X-Com ran into, and how many missions just became grinds of
fully upgraded characters clearing out the weaker enemies. This was
part of the reason for having the chosen and “boss” enemies introduced
to mix things up.
once the player takes the lead in terms of skill and tech, the game becomes one-sided in
the opposite direction
What ends up happening in these games is that no matter what the
map generation is or the enemies you fight, all your tactics are locked
to the units and begins to make things repetitive.
One of the best additions with War of the Chosen was the idea of the
nemesis system from Shadow of War and keeping the chosen changing.
I would have liked to have seen something similar happen to the
normal units over the course of the campaign.
I do know of some mods that were created to add in more enemy
variants of the lower enemy classes to spice things up.
Now it’s time for something a little different, and how one of my
favorite tactical systems came from an unexpected source and where
XCOM could have taken some notes from.
Rabbid Punching
One of my favorite tactical systems as of late came from Mario +
Rabbids Kingdom Battle. Let’s get one thing straight: XCOM 2 from a
system’s standpoint is the deeper game, hands down. However, it’s
how Ubisoft designed the tactical layer of Mario + Rabbids around
generalized and specialized move-sets that’s important to examine.
Similar to XCOM, the game has partial and full cover that either gives
you a 50% chance to hit or 0% chance respectively. Unlike XCOM,
Mario + Rabbids will always let characters hit cover if they miss; giving
them a chance to weaken or destroy it.
Every playable character in the game has three actions per turn
separated into three groups:
1. Moving around the map and sliding into enemies to hurt
them, or using friendly characters to jump around and
get into a better position
2. Use either their main or secondary weapon
3. Use one of their two special abilities
Here’s the important point about these actions -- the player and the
enemies can do them in any order. If I want to attack, run away, and
then use my special to heal, I could do that; just as I could heal, slide
into an enemy, and then attack them from behind cover.
To be fair to XCOM, Mario + Rabbids does not have anywhere near the
same depth of options or situations. However, the reason why I liked
the system wasn’t about the complexity, but about the choices I had at
any given time.
As we’ve talked about, XCOM’s design greatly limits the tactical
options you have in any given turn due to the rules at play. What I
enjoyed out of Rabbids was the fact that I could come up with a variety
of solutions to my problems based on the tactics at hand and which
characters I was using.
The standard options in Mario + Rabbids afforded more depth at the start, while XCOM
backloads it with skills
In my first run of the game, I used Rabbid Mario and Rabbid Luigi as
close range status-effecting brawlers. On my second run, I used regular
Mario and Luigi as overwatch sniping wonders. If something went
wrong, it wasn’t immediately a game over; I could pivot.
What’s interesting about comparing the two games is that Rabbids
went for having the generalized moves have more utility compared to
the character-specific or specialized options. While XCOM keeps the
generalized moves very basic and backloads the utility into the
specialized options.
There is more that I liked about Mario+ Rabbids, but that would be
getting away from our discussion on XCOM and XCOM 2.
A 95% Success Rate
Ever so often people will remark about that one game they would like
to be stuck on a deserted island with, and for me, XCOM 2 comes the
closest being that game. From a systems standpoint, the game is one of
my favorites and a game well worth studying.
However, no matter how close it comes to perfection, I just can’t fall in
love with the game like others have. If/when we get an XCOM 3 from
Firaxis, I’ll be there day one for sure to see if my luck improves or I
miss three times in a row.
