In the new x com game, I've heard that they might not let your agents day. They get some sort of penalty box bull shit if they get killed in the missions. Can anyone confirm this. Apparently it came out over the E3 demo. I was totally behind this game (big fan of the originals and still play the first one every year or so) and this seemed interesting, but if your agents can't die permanently that is gonna wreck my head.

Well, I would assume that's the case; all of the X-com agents in the new game are scripted characters, so it wouldn't make sense for them to actually die.
 
Anyway, I agree with your sentiment; one thing about the originals is the sense of thrill you get from never knowing when one of your characters would get blasted by an alien and them permanently die.

What? Nooo...I would hate losing an agent but that's the point. I want to play like a pussy during missions for fear of losing my men, now I'm liable to just bum rush them in =(

Ahh, they're all scripted, didn't realise. I thought they would start off as basic dudes and you could specialise them over time. Oh well, still a bit of a bummer.

Doubt anyone can confirm or deny that at this stage, but yeah, if they aren't randomly generated, it's very unlikely.

The risk of actually being able to lose something, or to fail (and still continue playing) does make you play differently... though that's not a popular concept in "modern games" - just look at L.A. Noire, and the number of people who apparently replayed parts of the game to avoid failure during interrogations :)

They mentioned this on one of the E3 bombcasts. It sounds like the dev team aren't talking about specifics of squad member deaths, so it sounds like it's all up in the air at the moment, with nothing set in stone.

Whether they die or not is not the point for me. What I want is for them to "die" in fantastic deaths. That first trailer released ended with a guy dematerializing. I hope deaths like that are in the game, seeing your partners just get destroyed.

They could be going the Star Trek route, core cast can't die but extras can. It's worth bearing in mind that if they do have some sort of penalty box system then you are still losing something if they get taken out. Reduced team, missing xp for that guy, all sorts of possibilities.

The risk of actually being able to lose something, or to fail (and still continue playing) does make you play differently... 

On one hand, that is unfortunate, but on the other, it is understandable. I'd hate to play a game where my team mates could die because of the connection I could have with them, yet it does make you think in a different way aside from bum rushing the hell out of enemies if all that happens to them, is they get sent to the side lines for a little bit till you can use them again.
 
Either way though, I'll still eagerly keep my eyes open for this game.

@Grumbel: Yeah, that's kind of what I meant with the LA Noire bit. We've been so trained to always play a "perfect game", that I'd argue that it's an up-hill battle for developers to allow us to fail - people would rather replay than deal with the consequences of failure.

... But yeah, I'm going far off-topic.

Just taking dudes out of the fight for a while (say a mission or 2), could be enough to make you play carefully, if handled correctly.

That sounds kind of what happened when a team member was taken out in Rainbow Six 1.