Screenshote by Author from “XCOM: Enemy Unknown”
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve racked up a truly ridiculous number of hours in Firaxis’ recent relaunch of the much-loved XCOM/UFO franchise, XCOM: Enemy Unknown. In XCOM, you take the role of the supreme commander in charge of co-ordinating Earth’s defenses against a hostile alien invasion. You manage your base, choosing research and engineering projects, and you control a squad of soldiers in turn-based battles against the aliens. A few grizzled veterans of the classic games were disappointed in the simplification of many aspects of Enemy Unknown compared to those older games, but, much like Firaxis’ Civilization V, most gamers seem to feel that the game has been streamlined while still maintaining a good level of strategic complexity.
XCOM: Enemy Unknown is, in fact, so compelling of an experience both emotionally and mentally that it’s an easy contender for my game of the year. This is unusual for me. I enjoy turn-based strategy games more than many gamers, but it’s still not exactly my favourite genre. It’s normally that emotional aspect that’s lacking. It can be hard to form a strong connection with a game’s world and characters from a bird’s-eye view, and hard to feel much of a kinetic response to the action on screen when it takes the methodical pace of a turn-based game. And yet, in spite of this, XCOM does a fantastic job with reaching the player on an emotional level.
The game has some pretty serious bugs and technical failings, too. There are things missing that were in the original games
Dying to these guys counts as a bug, right?
that I’m not convinced needed to be removed. The audio and visual design are both serviceable but largely uninspired. These are problems that specifically take us out of the game, make it harder to feel a strong connection with what’s happening on screen, and are frankly, at times, completely infuriating. How then does the game manage to have such a strong impact?
The answer is, rather pointedly, not simple. XCOM presents us with a complex set of systems and an equally complicated set of decisions to make. Whether you want to priortise researching new armor or weapons first, whether you want to spend your limited supply of money and alloy on building better equipment for your soldiers, or if you’d prefer to use those resources to buy more satellites (used to detect incoming alien ships, and a source of monthly income) or interceptors. Whether you want to make a risky play during combat that might have a larger payoff, or go with a safer move to ensure your troops come home alive. These are challenging decisions mentally, where you have to balance many options with merit and try and make the best choices overall, but more importantly, this spread of choices is a big part of what enables the game to hit so hard emotionally.
Each playthrough of the game is a unique narrative, each mission their own small stories, and because you’re the one making all the decisions, you develop a very strong investment in your own personal storyline. It isn’t the explicit narrative put into the game by the developers – it’s the story created by the specifics of your actions and their consequences. The game allows you a modest amount of customisation of each of your soldiers, and there’s also a simple leveling system where they become more powerful with each successful mission. You quickly become attached to these virtual people as they perform acts of heroism or survive harrowing escapes from missions gone bad. And let me tell you, when a soldier you’ve seen survive dozens of missions dies, it’s absolutely devestating, and it’s then that the weight of those choices you’ve made come crashing down on you. It goes beyond the mechanical inconvience of needing to recruit and train up a replacement. These are characters whom you’ve formed strong connections with through the drama of the game, and who’ve perished because of your mistakes, or sometimes just plain old bad luck.
I customised hom, Horatio.
This idea is a big part of many of my most loved games. Good games, to me, constitute a series of interesting choices. They let us practice our reasoning and play with different kinds of decisions and different ways of making them in an environment where it’s safe to take extreme risks or explore the kinds of options we’d never make in our real lives for one reason or another, if we’re so inclined. But it’s when the consequences of those decisions have weight, when we don’t feel too safe, that we move beyond a simple sandbox and into a fiction that can be as potent as any other artistic medium.
If you want to know more about XCOM: Enemy Unknown, go check out my impressions of the game here.
Editors note: The author forwarded this article to me a week and a half ago, but owing to illness and schedule, I’ve been unable to post it. Apologies to Dylan for the delay, and to the readers for witholding this.
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