But these are super subtle tweaks, and for the most part XCOM 2 doesn’t care one whit about the soldiers, the “PCs” of the game. XCOM 2 has a few tweaks to its core systems that help to favor the player-for example, if you miss too often, it starts to skew its random number generator in your favor, so you’ll have a better chance of your soldiers actually hitting enemies. The game is powerful because it isn’t a fan of the “PCs”. As a player hoping to have fun, though, you want missions to be interesting and surprising, which most often means you take some hits and suffer costs along the way. As a player hoping to win the game, you want every mission to go exactly according to plan, because your plan is to win without cost. Attached to the idea of these stories being unexpected is that they’re also often bad for you, the player looking for a win. You remember the ones where you stationed that sniper in a safe space, atop a building, only to have an alien smash through the building beneath him and collapse the whole thing, sending your sniper crashing to the ground, out of cover. There’s something incredibly satisfying in the game when you run through a mission perfectly, killing all enemy aliens without a scratch-but honestly, you don’t remember those missions. In XCOM 2, the stories you remember are the ones that happened unexpectedly. Here are some key lessons that we can take from the game, then: The best stories are the unexpected ones. You can even lose the whole game, if too many missions go south. You can lose your soldiers, even after many hours of development. And because the game is highly procedural, you’re not guaranteed anything. You come to care about your team as you watch them go into the fire on mission after mission. Each soldier is named, with a unique appearance, and even a randomized background. The real story of the game comes from your soldiers and what happens as you play the game. There’s a plot to the game, and it does guide the course of events, but it’s not too prominent. Outside of that, there’s a strategic level in which you manage the money of your insurgent anti-alien rebellion, research new weapons and tools, manufacture useful equipment, recruit new soldiers, build new facilities, and so on. There’s a tactical level of squad-based combat, in which you move your soldiers around what amounts to a grid-based map, taking turns to shoot at alien monsters with your pew-pew guns. XCOM 2: a game of soldiers, aliens, bad calls, upsetting mistakes, a really cruel RNG (random number generator), and many, many explosions. In this series of posts, Brendan will tackle games outside of the tabletop RPG realm, dissecting them for any useful tidbits to apply to tabletop RPG design.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |