You Defeated! XCOM: Enemy Unknown
Originally published October, 2014.
It's been a while since my last post. Time to burn those pages again and get back into the habit of writing. Let's kick it off with a recent personal experience I had in the world of video games.
At long last, the elusive victory over XCOM: Enemy Unknown has been achieved. XCOM EU, for those that don't know, is a turn-based strategy game that came out in 2012. I won't go into the details about it as I outlined them in a review and if you want to know more, you can always find sites on the net about them, like this one.
I picked up XCOM around its launch and, until now, have never completed the base campaign. That's not to say that I haven't played it at all since its release. It's been an on-and-off affair mostly, but if you asked anyone in my house, they'd say that they'd seen me play it enough to have codenames for the game as well as the situation I was in; the most common term was Broadside-of-a-Barn, which meant my soldiers were missing easy shots and dying as a result. So if I played that much, why did it take so long for me to finally beat the game?
Up front, I'll be the first to admit that I love strategy games, but I'm also not very good at them. It takes some time for me to master their mechanics and understand how to properly organize my troops and execute a plan. This hasn't usually been the thing that would hold me back in the past, however. There were a few different factors at play.
Bugs - XCOM EU is a very buggy game. I'm not sure I've played many other games that could compete with it on the number of bugs I encountered consistently from playthrough to playthrough. I've experienced the minor graphical ones like projectiles stuck in mid-air on their way to their target, or a sniper using his sniper rifle as a pistol, even though it clearly has the pistol selected and is firing pistol rounds. Weird stuff like that is no biggie, but I've encountered some truly experience destroying ones as well.There were several saved games that seemed to have a real knack for crashing for one reason or another. Certain saves were far more stable, while others would consistently crash for one reason or another. Crashes are annoying in games and can ruin the experience in some situations. Thankfully XCOM had an autosave feature that would get around this and make it a trivial issue, right? Well I thought that until it saved at the end of a mission, crashed, and upon reloading the game, would not let me proceed out of the successful mission. Thus, an entire campaign halted in its tracks due to a glitch. It wasn't quite as bad as the one that happened on the final mission of the campaign where an enemy I needed to kill fell through the map and was inaccessible, forcing me to fail the mission and start over as I was using my last few high-rank guys to finish the game. Why not just load up another save of the same campaign? Well....
IronMan mode - This mode is simply an option for people who want to play with only one save file, strictly updated by autosave. Why would you do this? It forces players to accept their decisions and mistakes so that there is no turning back. If your decision that led to the permanent death of a clutch unit in your battle strategy can be circumvented by simply reloading a quicksave from a few moments prior, weight of the decision is removed. There is no tension, there is no risk. Without that, a narrative becomes boring, and I feel the same can be said for many situations in video games.In a strategy game, I'd like to make sure that I'm learning something as I play. I want to learn from my mistakes. I'm also the type that is likely to exploit a quick save feature without realizing it. Using IronMan allowed me to tie a hand around my back and really measure my moves more carefully. As a result, I feel that I got better at strategy, overall. I just had to suffer through the bad glitches and the misfortune that came with the game's difficulty.
Classic Difficulty - I didn't play the game on Normal, or Easy. This shouldn't really mean much, as game difficulty is all relative and can be fairly simplistic in how it changes from one level to the other in most games. Usually it just makes enemies tougher to kill and your characters easier to kill. XCOM was certainly no walk in the park, but there were areas where it felt like the sense of challenge was slipping. I played XCOM EU on Normal at first, found the battles to be a little too forgiving, and was already ahead of the aliens without much trouble. It wasn't super easy, but like I said, when playing a strategy game, I wanted to be challenged. I'm not very good at strategy games, but if the game is fun, I want to at least improve in my decision making skills. So I kicked up the difficulty a level.So what does the difficulty increase do for XCOM? The enemy AI is no longer "shackled" as they say; it doesn't make 'mistakes' anymore. No more random moves that make no logical sense. It's all very calculated now. The aliens are also much better shots with better chances of killing your soldiers. Not to mention, your resources are cut significantly from Normal to Classic. All of these factors, plus a few other miscellaneous ones, add to make your situation far more dire in the beginning months of the game. You are at a disadvantage, instead of a stalemate. Of course, this made it more difficult for me to survive the game to the end. In fact, I usually had to start over by the time I was finally able to assault an alien base because most of my good soldiers had been killed by then.
I restarted my game so many times, knowing that I'd already gone too far in the story with not enough upgrades for my soldiers, it wasn't until I reached game 30 that I started to really reorganize my strategies and start doing better. Strategies that worked in previous games on Normal weren't good enough, so I experimented and failed over and over until I reached lucky number 50.
Finally, I had learned how to properly retreat and when. I had learned how to properly distribute facilities in my base. I had learned what upgrades to focus on first and what situations called for particular soldiers. I had gotten better at the game and had learned what I needed to do to make sure I'd never fail a mission. This is the same reason I enjoy games like Dark Souls. Games like these give you particular tools to make it through the game, but force the player to learn from their mistakes and improve enough to dominate their opposing forces.
By the end of game 50, the campaign time was an in-game year, I had lost only 8 soldiers, only one country had left XCOM, I had $8000 in the bank, I never failed a mission, and I had over a dozen Colonels in my barracks. The first few months of that game were tough, they were the months in which I lost those 8 soldiers, but those were conscious sacrifices in tough decisions to bring about an eventual victory. Once I had finished the assault on the alien base, I was confident that I could make it to the end, but it wasn't until I had achieved victory on a particular UFO landing mission, I knew that victory was inevitable, so long as the game didn't bug out again.
This mission was a shining moment of luck and competent strategy after a monumentally unfortunate bug. The UFO had heavy resistance waiting for my squad of 6, who had the best weapons and armor I could provide at the time. After several turns with no enemies in sight, I started to advance. One of my soldiers became temporarily brainwashed by a small enemy with psychic powers. With no signs of other enemies in the area, I moved my soldier with the most health and armor forward to take out the alien that was controlling the other's mind. While I selected a particular square on the map to move my soldier into a firing position without alerting any other possible enemies, the game decided that was not the right square and moved her just another spot over, which was enough to ruin my situation.
Suddenly, my soldier was exposed and surrounded by 15 angry and aware aliens including the xenomorph crabs (Chryssalids), super-soldiers with super weapons (Muton Elites), and a Robocop inspired enemy (Sectopod) whose cannons could take away more than 80% of the soldiers health in one shot. The crabs got their hits in, the machine miraculously missed, and the super soldiers only got pot-shots. The result: one health point left. I used all of my units and their abilities available to not only clear out the room of enemies, but completely turn the tide of that battle from that point on. I did not lose a man, despite all odds. It was a momentous victory from a near defeat.
But it's a video game so who cares, right? The significance of this victory is a personal one for me. I realize that it's just a video game, my decisions here don't matter in the grand scheme of the world, but it was a moment in which I realized that I had gotten better at playing the game without resorting to strategies outlined elsewhere; I did this on my own. This was achieved through experience and learning from my mistakes. The act of playing video games may not leave a permanent mark on the world. It may be considered a waste of time by a majority of the public as a mind-numbing entertainment medium (nevermind that naysayers typically are the type to veg out in front of reality TV, but I digress).
The point is, a challenge I had set forth for myself had been beaten through perseverance and through learning from my mistakes. While I had no intention of commanding any troops in real life any time soon, I still feel like I've earned some skills and cognitive thinking through my victory. I had accomplished my goal with my own skills and will to improve.
Victory Achieved!