XCOM: A Rant

So I've just watched the first 20 odd minutes of the new XCOM game over at the escapist website and it's made me sad/angry. It seems that rather than attempt anything like the original X-COM: UFO Defense (widely considered one of the best games of ALL TIME), the design team has decided to try and rip off Fallout, Bioshock, Mass Effect and any other popular game of the last 5 years with any form of shooting.

Now this bonus piece does link into the Bastion and Videogame Narrative post. It looks like XCOM is also giving the player an illusion of choice, like Bastion (as it's an unreleased game it's unclear whether these 'choices' will have any Freedom Fighters style effect on other areas or not), but unlike Bastion there is no need to strip this choice from the player. The original X-COM: UFO Defense had one of the greatest narrative devices I've ever seen in a videogame, allowing the player to re-name every character and letting them completely control the narrative in both the geoscape and the battlescape. As the player you had to protect an entire world under alien attack, you had to stretch your resources further than they could stretch, sometimes having to choose between multiple randomly generated events. For example: two terror sites (alien attack sites) appear and you only have enough personnel to save one, do you split your men trying to save both but severely limiting your chances of saving either? Save London but watch Paris burn? Do nothing and ensure the safety of your troops?

As well as the large, worldwide scale, X-COM:UFO Defense excelled on the micro level. When playing the game I was genuinely upset when Sergeant Alan Smith (named after the hilarious footballer) took a bullet to the chest and lay dying on the floor as the rest of my team were powerless to help, and I felt genuine guilt after recklessly destroying a large chunk of Wellington trying to remove an alien threat. All of these great moments were unscripted and results of my own actions and that is a real narrative choice. Now I have nothing against Bastion's 'choices' as I feel they work very well in the context and much of the early linearity is because your actions have already been happened in the narrative (i.e. the narrator is speaking in the past tense). When creating a new XCOM game, however, you have to step the fuck up and create a new XCOM game, not shoe-horn time units into a generic first person shooter...

Rant over...Sorry...