I have a long relationship with the Firaxis XCOM reboots. One of my very early efforts with Unity involved cloning a simplified set of XCOM’s core game mechanics. To my surprise, my copy of the strategy layer felt incredibly poor. This was one of my first, very harsh, lessons in ‘narrative’. XCOM’s strategy layer is intimately tied to the games loose narrative.
The choices you make as you assume the role of ‘Commander’ are deeply soaked narrative, even if there’s very little traditional ‘plot’ - the game mechanics and the ‘role’ you assume work together in tandem to create a rich experience. The whole of the result is greater than the sum of its parts: the mark of a superb game.
That said, let’s break down some of XCOM’s core game play.
TACTICAL COMBAT
More than any other game I’ve ever played, XCOM taught me that there’s simply a massive gap between good strategy for a game, and the player’s fantasy of what the strategy is.
- On it’s surface, XCOM is a game about tactics, daring flanking maneuvers and tense firefights.
- In truth, XCOM’s actual strategy has very little to do with this. The most important element in XCOM is not moving, and the core to a winning strategy revolves around uncovering the fewest possible squares.
XCOM’s tactical maps: Enemy ‘Pods’
A map in XCOM has a bunch of walls, objects and assorted stuff for your guys to take cover behind. The enemy deployment is built around ‘pods’ - these are usually groupings of 3 alien bad guys. These pods are scattered randomly around the map.
This image is a breakdown of one of the XCOM:EU maps, and where some of the enemy pods might be deployed. Your men need to move through the area, and clean out each of the bad guy pods.
The Core Strategic Element: Pods won’t actively engage you
There are corner cases and rare exceptions, but in the vast majority of cases enemy pods are immobile and will not actively engage the player.
Instead, once the player moves into line of sight, the pod becomes ‘active’, the aliens in the pod take cover, and at the end of the player’s turn they start shooting.
As a player, activating an enemy pod at the end of your turn is the absolute, hands down, worst thing you can do. The result will often be that the game will kill one or more of your little men for making this mistake.
The Core Strategic Tool: Flanking
The game presents the player with one major combat bonus: when you ‘flank’ an enemy (move a guy perpendicular to, or behind an enemy’s cover), you get large bonuses. Flanking is presented to the player as their main goal in any combat situation.
This is emphasized by giving ‘flanking’ its own color in the largely 3 color HUD.
The color ‘yellow’ is largely reserved for to either indicate flanking or just a couple special moves. This would not be so meaningful, except the color scheme is largely limited to teal (general info on friendlies), red (bad guys) and yellow (flanked guys).
A huge part of the combat system revolves around flanking the enemy.
Where things get interesting: Punishing the player for flanking
So we have the two core elements to XCOM’s tactical design:
- The worst thing the player can do is move into a new square (you might activate a new enemy pod)
- The near term goal for the player seemingly involves moving behind the enemy, this almost always involves moving into new squares.
I do not believe that any other game will punish the player with anything like the severity that XCOM does (potentially one shot perma death) for trying to achieve game’s major micro goals.
It’s a fascinating design. XCOM’s design, literally goads you into flanking the enemy, then kills you for it.
Almost every recent turn based game have copied the shallow elements of XCOM’s tactical design. Everything from cover icons, to the movement system, but none have really taken this conflicting player incentive.
There are more really interesting parts to XCOM, and it’s design in the large and small - but this core element is so philosophically different from most games, in an era where so much game design revolves around gratifying the player, rewarding him for tiny step forward, XCOM stands in harsh contrast by doing the exact opposite.
