My team touches down, concealed. Two psionic soldiers, a ranger, a specialist, a sharpshooter, and a grenadier, all at Colonel or Magus rank. It’s near the end game and I’m feeling confident. I’ve got all the best armor and weapons, and have had a string of nearly flawless missions. I begin my advance on the alien facility I aim to destroy. I first move my sharpshooter to the top of a nearby building, then the rest of my squad one by one. No enemies yet. My final move of the turn, I choose to dash my grenadier out to what I believe is a safe cover point. But alas, just outside my field of vision sits a Gatekeeper and two Archons, and they’ve now spotted us. I breathe deep and end my turn. The newly revealed enemies proceed to kill off my grenadier with extreme prejudice and severely hurt my sniper. All previous built up confidence has been lost.

It’s at this point I’d love to tell you that I bucked up and salvaged an initially disastrous mission, revelling in the punishment that XCOM 2 doles out with reckless abandon. The dominant narrative, after all, are from those that choose to play the game with as much difficulty as possible, accepting the consequences as they go. But alas, the way this tale ends is with me reloading, save scumming, and getting yet another “Excellent” mission rating. Despite my thinking that this would be the time I play XCOM as I “should”, after a few early disastrous missions I quickly bumped the difficulty down to Easy and proceeded to install some mods to make the game even easier, including ones that slow down the Avatar project’s progress and make sure that my melee attacks actually hit. This left me with a conundrum; was there any value in my experience now that I chose to subvert the developer’s intent so significantly?

Let me get this out of the way, I thoroughly enjoyed my time with XCOM 2 and wholeheartedly recommend the game despite the wealth of bugs it currently has. The tactical combat and the empowering progression systems combine to make a tight gameplay loop that had me obsessing over the game these past few weeks. But at the end of it all, I lost no soldiers of significance and was given the luxury to expand and develop my resistance group with no real time pressure. This resulted in a strange bit of ludonarrative dissonance where the story was told with an urgency not reflected in the gameplay, but not to a degree that it ruined the plot. All told, it is difficult to say that the game I ended up playing was representative of the experience that Firaxis had intended, but what resulted was a fun game that pushed all the right buttons for me.

I originally planned on writing up a review of XCOM 2 once I had completed it, but now that I’ve changed the core game so significantly, it doesn’t feel right to assign it a score or definitive judgement. That’s not to say that the only “pure” experience would be to play on Normal or higher without mods, but there is a fuzzy line where authorial intent is subverted by modification. Where that line exists precisely I do not know, but I certainly believe that I crossed it by making the game significantly easier. It’s strange, but I feel nervous writing this blog post as I feel less qualified to write about the game when I “cheated” myself out of the difficulty the game is known for. But I rationalize this with the fact that I experienced the game’s thrilling highs, such as tactically outmaneuvering my enemies or using newly developed equipment in battle, both of which remained great experiences despite the changes I made to the game.

After completing the main campaign (which ends quite well narratively), I think I’ll be taking a break from XCOM 2 before returning to it in a few months. Perhaps then I’ll be more willing to engage it on its own terms and post a more level-headed review. The beauty of Firaxis games is how well they tend to age, and I fully expect that after some time with mod development, patches, and possibly game expansions, the game will shine even brighter than at launch. But for now, it’s still very good and more than worth your time, modded or not.

I'm the same after finishing my first playthrough (and I did the same thing with XCOM:EU). I'm happy to have seen a campaign through to the end, I'll focus on other games for now. In a few months once some more bugs are Ironed out and things are a bit better established, I'll be all in for a Classic Ironman run (or whatever they've called Classic in this iteration) and it will be great all over again.

I've harped on about this, but I had zero issues with bugs or performance issues. I'm not a denier of these problems, I just didn't encounter any. The RNG favoured me in that particular instance.

I understand the appeal of playing games with "permadeath" (or whatever the equivalent term is for XCOM), but at the same time there is no point in forcing your way through an en experience that is tougher than is realistically enjoyable, purely for the sake of meeting the expectations of those internet people who insist so vehemently in viewing the "correct" way as something entirely binary. It is like what Austin was talking about on last week's Beastcast... i.e. why would you force yourself through a book if you are not deriving any sense of enjoyment from it. With books you can simply put it down and pick up another one. With games you have that same option AND you have the option to change the game to fit your own style/expectations with mods (well if you have a PC). If the option is there then why not take it!

I recently, for my job, played/tested/assisted on another tactical RPG game that has recently come out on a certain popular handheld device, and that game also gives you the option to lose characters permanently. After a few playthroughs I decided to bump up the difficulty and see how my play style would change if I knew that a fatal error could leave me without a specific character for the rest of the game. And you know what? It was just too stressful to make it enjoyable and I quickly gave up. I don't feel bad about that decision at all! I mean for fuck's sake it's a videogame and I'm not going to beat myself up about how I choose to engage with it!

I think permadeath is a cool aspect of games, but it is also one which can be equally enjoyed in watching other more skilled players take on. Like, I would happily sit down and watch some high-end ironman XCOM play (well I wouldn't because I don't have the affinity or exposure to the series to make that something enjoyable, but you get my point!), rather than go through all that stress myself.

@kmfrob: It can be tough drowning out those voices telling you that there's a "correct" way to play a game, but you're absolutely right that the individual player's enjoyment should come first. I remember on the XCOM 2 quick look Brad saying something along the lines of "If I have to bump it to easy I'd rather not play it anymore", which I super disagreed with. I mean, why not make changes to derive enjoyment out of a game? It seems like a waste not to if you already own it.

Also, I had no idea you tested games for a living! That's really neat. How're you liking your career/job and would you recommend it?

@darth_navster: Well I mean I guess again that is just Brad's style, and if that's how he enjoys games then more power to him, you know what I mean?

But yeah, the internet is a noisy place and it's easy to get dragged down into the mire when you have somebody telling you how wrong your opinion is, but that's just the world we live in. And you know what, I'm sure at various points in my life I've read something that some person has said that I disagreed with, or watched somebody playing something in a way that makes me hold my head in my hands (GB Quick Looks of FIFA for example...), and have left some snide remark or tactless comment in an attempt to cut them down. So I'm just as guilty as any other troll, I suppose.

Actually I'm a Japanese>English translator, but if there's no Japanese work for me then I sometimes help out with other tasks like linguistic testing etc. I've done functionality briefly in the past, but I'm first and foremost a translator. In terms of how it is as a job, then I guess it depends on your threshold for boredom. You will either work on lots of shitty games (and doing shitty tasks on those shitty games) or you will go long periods with nothing to do at all (or worse...unemployed). It means you get to watch a lot of Giant Bomb, but at the same time it can be incredibly dull... I'm actually trying to convince (and hopefully succeeding in doing so) my company to let me start writing content for our website. So basically, I can turn the blog thing into an actual job... Like I know it's already 10 years too late, but some content writing has to be better than no content at all...

There are basically two thoughts that I have on this. First, there are some things some people have enough experience to know they just don't like, like time limits in games. Second, there are some things that people don't have enough experience with to know whether they like it or not until they meet the challenge head on. So I have a lot of scorn for people who refuse to engage with a game's mechanics based on ignorance, but once you have a pretty good idea of what's going on and how you feel about it, you owe it more to yourself to get the most you can out of your purchase than you owe it to the game to play it as the designers intended.

I just can't believe they've made no headway on the performance issues yet. I was certain I'd be playing it like 2 weeks after release when I heard about the issues originally.

But that is just such a crazy attitude. Like I'm really into BBC/PBS science and history documentaries (or even better the history of science!!), whereas my partner can't stand them. She instead loves true crime documentaries which I, in-turn, do not have much time for. Now, I'm sure if she just took the time to actually sit down and listen to what is being said then she would love them, and I'm sure that if I took the time to follow the many-tangled webs of a true crime doc the I would equally get into them, but at no point would I say I feel scorn for her decision to not be interested in my stuff.

Like, what difference does it make to your life if another person decides to interact with a game in a different way to you? I mean, sure these things are fun to debate and explore, but how you could feel scorn for somebody is just crazy to me!

I'm sorry if this comes across as an attack because it's really not meant in that way, but I just find it so odd.

@kmfrob: Ya but your wife doesn't keep telling you that they're shit without ever having seen one does she?

What I think @veektarius was talking about was a lot of people started talking shit about XCOM because of the timed missions before that even played it and refused to give them a try (they actually add a lot to the game). Now, if these people engaged with the mechanics and tried them out and then decided they were not to their tastes that's fine. And by engaging with them they might even learn to appreciate the changes that you have to make in your play style and be won over by them.

He actually explains this in the second half of the sentence that you truncated in your quote. Maybe you should have read just a teeny bit more?

I'm not really seeing the ludo narrative dissonance you talk about. You are on a timer and if it runs out, which can be as soon as the 4th month, you're game over. The reason you had time, is because you were beating the aliens at their game and the game tells you clearly 'because you did this, their progress is removed and slowed'. If anything the narrative reinforces why you have more time.

@arabes: I take your point, but what I said still stands. My partner doesn't tell me my shows are shit, she just thinks they are boring because the subject does not interest her. She can decide she does not want to watch a particular documentary based purely on the fact that the subject has no relevance to her, even though she has not watched a single minute of it. And that is fine. Why should she feel bad for not enjoying the same documentary as me? She does not need to be familiar with the documentary in question to decide she does not want to watch it.

Of course, some people will express a strong negative opinion as fact despite knowing nothing about the thing they are talking about. And while this is infuriating at times, it still doesn't mean I have to feel any particular hatred towards them. Like Dan Ryckert (and I'm sure many Americans) has an active dislike of football/soccer despite not knowing anything about the sport, but why should that bother me enough to induce scorn?

@kmfrob: Maybe I didn't communicate my point clearly in that you can know that you don't like a thing in general and apply that knowledge to a specific case without the need to experience it directly. I don't think that qualifies as "ignorance". However, judging a thing you have no informed opinions about is called a preconception or a prejudice, and if prejudice isn't something it is okay scorn in this modern day, then I don't know what is.

@veektarius: But again where is the divide between saying something is boring and not wanting to watch it/play it and making a prejudicial judgement?

I understand your point, but all I'm saying is that why should it matter so much? Should I feel angry because Dan Ryckert dismisses soccer out of hand? Of course I shouldn't. There's many more more important things to get angry about in this world than whether or not some other person on the internet thinks differently about a sport/game/tv show/film than me...

@kmfrob: Don't worry, I'm not losing any sleep over it.

@zevvion: I suppose I wasn't clear in my post, but the reason I had so much time (and by extension was able to do well) was because I had installed mods to delay the Avatar project as well as add turns to the various mission timers. This obviously didn't vibe all that well with the "time is against you" theme of the story, hence the ludonarrative dissonance I felt.

@darth_navster: I see, but you inserted that yourself. It reads a little bit like criticism.

@kmfrob: Nobody said that your wife should feel bad or that you should be pissed at someone who doesn't like something you do. veektarius just said that it pisses him off when people refuse to engage with something becasue they'll assume they'll hate it. He isn't you, he's entitled to be annoyed by that and have his own opinions on it.