Command Lines: XCOM: Enemy Unknown and the Alleged "Dumbing Down" of Strategy Games

PC gamers have every reason to be suspicious of change. Change has killed beloved studios, franchises, and entire genres. When we get modern versions of old favorites, like when Jagged Alliance was supposed to be Back in Action, we often find mangled versions of better games. So I understand why fans of the original X-COM: UFO Defense are leery of how Firaxis' new XCOM: Enemy Unknown liberally changes and discards elements of its revered predecessor. X-COM wasn't broke, but Firaxis has done an awful lot of fixing.


Lead Designer Jake Solomon's XCOM is a much simpler, faster-paced game than the Gollop brothers' 1994 original. It is accessible, and smaller-scale. Most heretically of all, it doesn't use time units. To hear purists tell it, this means XCOM is "dumbed down," because you don't have nearly as much freedom and control as you did in the original. That reasoning is sound, but the conclusion is flawed because it misses the point of how both XCOM and its predecessor balance pacing, complexity, and possibility.

Granularity Isn't Greatness

The great thing about having granular combat mechanics like time units and action points is that they allow for more options every turn. In Jagged Alliance 2, I will rack my brain about whether I should spend three extra action points aiming, or to take a 50/50 snapshot that, if it works, will leave me with just enough action points to move into a flanking position on another target. In old-school X-COM, I rejoice in using the famous Grenade Relay Toss technique to deliver high-explosives on an unsuspecting alien from all the way across the map. A lot of possibilities open up with a granular action system, and I understand why people miss it. But I don't.


See, as much as I might enjoy a granular system, I find they hit a point of diminishing returns with regard to complexity. You get a few tricky situations that could only happen with a really granular action-management system, but most of the time what you've got is a lot more simple math to get to a straightforward answer. I just want to move my guy to cover and open fire on an enemy, and really, I don't need to count the exact number of footsteps it takes because it's not important.

Occam's Tactical Razor

XCOM:EU may be simpler, but the problems I'm using its tools to solve are as thorny as those I've encountered in more hardcore wargames. You can move and take an action, or you can move far and take no action. This is pretty much the same choice I face 95% of the time in a wargame. The difference is that XCOM:EU expresses it simply as a "run, or take a smaller move and shoot." A more "serious" game expresses the same dilemma as "use 13 points for movement and crouch for 1, or use 6 points for movement and take a shot for 8." XCOM:EU never wants you to spend your time worrying about those numbers and counting spaces; it just wants you to move from tradeoff to tradeoff. That might give you less freedom and fine control over your troops, but it also means that XCOM:EU moves along as a great pace, as opposed to the occasional tedium that could mire Jagged Alliance and old X-COM.


I said that 95% of the time you could reduce your decisions in a complex wargame to the simple ones presented in XCOM:EU. But what about that 5% that XCOM:EU rules out? Ah, there are some great stories in that sliver of the pie chart. Sending a soldier dashing across the mouth of an alley, turning to take a single snapshot at the Sectoid crouched there and blowing the little bastard away before running up the street, dropping to one knee, and pegging a Cyberdisc with a single desperate rifle shot. Or in JA2, that time Dr. Q mugged an enemy sniper carrying a Dragunov sniper rifle and had enough action points to pick it up and toss it to Buns, who caught it and used it to pick off the enemy trooper who was about to cap Buzz.

Leveling Out

When I talked to Jake Solomon on the Three Moves Ahead podcast, he was pretty frank about the tradeoffs he made with XCOM:EU. He and Firaxis chose to lop off some of the highest peaks of which those games were capable, in order to remove deeper and wider valleys. The result is a game that's designed to operate in a tactical sweet-spot, even if it is frustrating when you run into those edge-cases where the best course of action is obvious, if only had a proper inventory and a few action points.


On balance, however, I tend to favor accessibility and pacing, and enjoy some of the new challenges that pop up in XCOM:EU, like the correct "order of operations" for a particularly tricky turn. Since your troops only have a move and an action each turn, the order in which they do them can have a huge impact on the battle. I've spent as long trying to construct the "perfect turn" in XCOM:EU as I ever have in Jagged Alliance 2 counting action points.

The War on Simplicity

I'm not saying classics like X-COM or Jagged Alliance are overrated, but I think we should be honest about the strengths and weaknesses of how they modeled combat. The pure wargame analogy for me would be Gary Grigsby's War in the East vs. Unity of Command. They deal with many of the same issues, but the former requires serious study and hours to play a single turn, and the latter takes 10 minutes to learn and maybe an hour for a scenario. Both are great games, even though they take a completely different approach to their subject matter.


War in the East is incredibly complicated, it also makes use of every single one of its mechanics and puts the spotlight on those tricky maneuvers that require a detailed understanding of the systems and their granularity. I would not say it is deeper than Unity of Command as much as it is vastly more sophisticated, with the pros and cons that implies. Both are deep games, insofar as they deny you easy, reliable paths to victory and reward repeated playthroughs with even more unexpected and challenging situations. But I know maybe a dozen people that I'd push toward War in the East, while I push Unity of Command on everyone who has ever clicked "end turn."

How to Make a Bad Strategy Game

When I think of bad strategy games, it's rarely the simple ones. I hardly ever find myself wishing a game were more complicated, or had another system or two to manage. Bloat is a bigger problem than shallowness, and actually, the two often go hand in hand.


I found Empire: Total War to be a disaster because Creative Assembly added poorly integrated systems in an attempt to make Empire a bigger game than Medieval 2. Those systems never pose many challenges: if you have cash to upgrade, you upgrade, if you have resources to trade, you trade them. There are all sorts of numbers and stat breakdowns you can analyze, but you can just as easily ignore them.

Wising Up

Muzzy Lane's Making History 2, by contrast, forces players to manage every last factory and oil well in their country, putting so many variables in play that they practically crowd out the World War 2 strategy game that Making History 2 is supposed to be. It's not a deep game so much as it is a game with an annoying number of small, unimportant choices.

It's easy for a game to obfuscate simple problems with piles of math and tons of apparent possibilities, but few truly find a way to make those systems add up to a greater whole. Harder by far is what XCOM succeeds in doing: preserving the feel and depth of a complicated strategy classic while making it vastly more intuitive and fast-paced. Dumbed down? More like wised up.