XCOM At Me Bro

It doesn't seem like XCOM should have been so positively received as it was on release. What kind of gamer epileptic fitting over the latest First Person Pew Pew would ever buy a half turn based strategy – half management sim? I'm going to guess nostalgia was a major factor in it’s popularity. The thirst of all us early 80s/90s gamers drooling over the good old days: when games were deeper and rather more intricate affairs when it came to the mechanical complexities on offer. I suppose we only have to look at the massive success of Obsidian’s Project Eternity Kick Starter in order to observe the power of nostalgia, but I digress.

There's a 51% chance that I can hit this Muton at point blank range. There's a 100% chance that 'Kingpin' Kaans from South Africa here is a completely useless git.

Anyway, on the topic of mechanical complexity: Enemy Unknown is definitely a thinking man’s game. Firaxis flex their design acumen by slightly re-imagining the classical systems of Time Units and base building while still retaining the original’s essence: a nail bitingly intense tactical think’em up. Though as much as I praise them for simplifying the mechanics in circumstances that make absolute sense, XCOM can feel like a slightly empty shell from time to time. I understand the core mechanics went through several major changes and iterations over the course of development, as Lead Jake Solomon has mentioned in several interviews and panels. It’s my belief that this lengthy process entirely paid off. But in terms of content there is something missing.

The start of the campaign is a rather hectic experience. As XCOM commander you constantly have the pressure of juggling an influx of engineering schematics, base building and excavating, ground breaking research projects, satellite coverage and squad equips all while being constantly terrorized by an increasingly powerful pool of enemies, while a council of shadowy figures are breathing down your neck. All while being incredibly short on lunch money. It is likely that you’ll lose multiple veterans and important council nations early on (I've lost the mighty profitable U.S.A every game) and you’ll generally hate life and curse the multiverse for a time. This is what I’d expect XCOM to feel like for the vast majority of playtime, however there comes a point in time where organizing my cute cross-sectioned lair and the people inside it becomes a bland affair, a time where I find myself constantly scanning the geoscape; BEGGING aliens to eviscerate me. There’s a point where the tough decisions of where to direct my time and resources evaporate and I find myself simply cruising through the invasion while every now and again a deadly new enemy type will bump the plateauing difficulty curve ever so slightly. I suppose it has to come eventually, but it seems to arrive too soon. Before you know it you’re swimming in scientists, engineers and money and you don’t know what to do with it all besides…say, excavate all the way down to the base of the earth’s mantle.

More, more, MORE is not necessarily the answer, but it’s a good start. Let me research more obscure alien technology. Take the alien surgical equipment you often come back with from UFO missions for example. Currently all you can do with it is sell it. Why not have some research benefit to it that further upgrades your medkits, adds a minor healing ability to advanced armors or decreases time spent in the infirmary? Add more to the currently short list of benefits you can research at the officer training school. For example, allow high ranking soldiers to be assigned to training duty to bring less inexperienced squaddies more up to speed. Balance it by having the trainer and the trainees unavailable for missions for a week or so and by limiting what rank they can be promoted to. Maybe even just lengthening research and build times would ruffle players some more through added tension and serious consideration before committing to a project. Autopsies are carried out way too fast as it is, making South America’s ‘We Have Ways’ bonus a fairly undesirable nab which subsequently means I leave Brazil and Argentina to rely on their amazing Salsa/Samba dancing to hypnotize the X-Rays into submission. (Hint: It doesn't end well for that continent. Ever.)

Certain fan made offerings of the familiar XCOM formula have shown just how in depth the strategy layer of the game could be. Multiple XCOM bases, micromanaging squad equipment down to the number of magazines and grenades they can hold, not to mention how many individual rifle mags, napalm tanks, rockets or what have you you’d like to manufacture. Without the finer details for the player to tweak, I feel Firaxis needed to add a few more layers to the strategic depth of the management layer to keep things interesting.

The Open Source, fan-made XCOM equivalent UFO:AI allows for comprehensive squad customisation, down to what items are attached to their belt or crammed in their backpack.

There’s also an apparently large amount of level variations on offer, which I don’t deny, but I have come across the same spaces quite a few times. Unfortunately many of the UFO crash/landing missions are just not as fun to play in as the urban spaces. Larger UFOs in particular are quite daunting to approach. Not because they look particularly menacing but because they often involve many levels, large ramps where it’s impossible to take cover and all sorts of oddly angled walls and items that make line of sight very hard to judge. A lot of time is spent in these levels trying to frustratingly track down the last few enemies, leading you to divide your squad up out of desperation only for your lone sniper to bump noses with a berserker and two elite mutons literally spooning in an extreme corner of the map. It also seems like a bit of a missed opportunity that there aren't at least some culturally themed levels. No oriental looking temples in Asia or shanty towns in Brazil/Africa. I hope that doesn't come off too culturally presumptuous. I just feel like I'm in topsy turvy world when I'm assaulting a Ponderosa steakhouse equivalent in Nigeria. Then again aliens that impregnate you with their offspring through your mouth before eviscerating you from the inside have invaded, so who am I to say what’s weird.

I feel there are some missed opportunities when it comes to the little details too, specifically with regards to the base commanding part of the game. Like how if I have multiple laboratories stacked next to each other (as is encouraged by the game for research benefits) they all very obviously look the same while each of them have scientists standing in the exact same spots with the exact same animations. Soldiers in the barracks are always either on a treadmill or sitting at the bar, I never get to see them bonding over that pool table in the mess room or grabbing some shut-eye. Hell why not have a shooting range where they can blow off some steam? Better yet, every once in a while have one of them visit the memorial as they sit and remember the fallen. You've made me care about my little comrades this much Firaxis, why not go that extra little step? I know what you’re thinking, small complaints and there are better things to spend time on I suppose. But a self-entitled wannabe-dev can dream.

I suppose I should go face that Ethereal now. Shit.

Death - The Architect of Passage

After power scrolling through the updates of my twitter crushes I came across an apparently aged article written by Christian McCrea, a previous games tutor of mine. As he states himself, McCrea weaves in and out of ideas a little too haphazardly for me to fully understand the broad stroke of his argument, but there were pockets of thought enclosed that triggered something within me, enough to want to form my own musings on similar subjects he mentioned. His paper can be read here.

The primary sticking point for me was McCrea’s statement on how we ‘gain pleasure from bodily exhibition, not dissimilar to a waxwork museum’. I am not entirely sure if this is something the minority experience, perhaps most viewers and players do; but there seems to be a morbid fascination and even beauty to the end-state of a life. Why else are we so bedazzled by flying limbs and corpses pushed to or from their physical extremities after an explosion or a shotgun blast? Maybe it is a fascination with dance like movements as rag dolls somersault and spin through the air, or perhaps it’s the wonder of what someone looks like when they are shot and slam against a wall, or maybe we just like to admire any kind of airborne object. Maybe it’s all three? When the main draw of this medium is its interactivity, then the process of how a user chooses to play and eventually ends a life is one of the most empowering moments within the matrix. The entire process of an in-game kill is influenced by a player, from what weapon we use, where we place the bullet/explosive and if one is perceptive enough, what kind of environmental feature the enemy will land on for maximum artistic effect. I am tempted to call the entire process itself an art, more so in a similar respect to how a traceur effortlessly glides across a cityscape. In a way, a player who has mastered the mechanics and ‘feel’ of a game reflects this artistic flow and mastery of system and self as he plays.


“The body, animated and otherwise, is the concentration point of game materiality – where the senses are interfacing most often, and where most of the production system is oriented. In cases where these bodies disappear soon after death, an evaporation of visible labour occurs.”

McCrea rightfully states the importance of the animated and ‘lifeless’ game body when we interact with it and here I’d like to briefly point out their importance. A distinct peculiarity and personal annoyance I find in some games is the abnormality of the disappearing dead body. Perfectly understandable from a technical standpoint and I know why it is sometimes necessary, but in certain games the visceral reality you've allowed your mind to immerse itself within comes crumbling down under such circumstances. As McCrea states: 

“Bodies left by the player are not murder victims, but our symbolic architecture of passage, leaving place where space once stood. In each game text, if we are to speak of specificity, a different context of memorialisation through the corpse’s lack of animation is true in each game, and in each gameplay.”

Dead bodies in a game area are an integral part of the world’s architecture as much as if the level was to stand on its own as an art piece. I'm not trying to say that the inside of a digital Vatican littered with bloody bodies is ‘art’, that is not the point I am trying to make by any means. But dead bodies left behind by a player are an important sense of passage, of how the player has chosen to touch upon the world. This is what the medium is all about. When a player blasts through a corridor leaving a trail of dead bodies only to turn back and observe that they have faded away, forgotten and abandoned by the system; that is to deny the essence of a character’s actions and of sense of place and purpose. It’s to deny Max Payne’s relentless path of vengeance, Bill and Zoe’s last desperate push for survival through a sea of zombies or the intensity of Adam Jensen’s attempt to save a crash landed friend from an onslaught. Important decisions had to be made and intense moments had by the player in all these circumstances. The game had better damn well of remembered that.

You see the bad-assery that unfolded here? Those 3 unconscious heavily armed guards?Yeah no it wasn't New Years. THAT WAS ME. These bodies, this image, tell a several hundred word story that one would scantly believe had it been a sterile corridor.

The more a game does to remember player choice, the more gratifying the player’s passage through space and narrative. For this reason I congratulate Rockstar on their ever-improving Euphoria Tech. When animation is one of the primary hurdles to immersion in an otherwise spectacularly and believably crafted vision, the reactivity of NPCs clenching their abdomens in pain or the writhing of near-corpses after being shot indiscriminately in the scrotum, is the saving grace of the virtual reality. If you must, take away my inanimate clumps of polygons off screen. But know that you lessen this player's experience when you do.