As a product intended for purchase it’s an interesting artifact – you’re essentially paying for the privilege of being tortured in new and interesting ways. It takes an already difficult game and adds entirely new mechanics that almost universally revolve around making the player’s life harder and defeat more likely. But it’s expansion, War of the Chosen, dives headfirst into that nihilism and splashes around in it. XCOM 2 was already a game that wasn’t shy when it came to screwing over its players – the map screen has a literal doomsday clock on the top of it that is constantly counting down. Few mainstream games really present it as a possibility and even fewer bother to make it exciting. Victory might be hard won, but it is never out of reach.ĭefeat on the other hand is something else entirely. No matter how many times you bite the dust, or how spectacularly you’re pulverized by a gigantic dragon, you always have another shot. No matter how much fuss is made over how brutal and unforgiving a game is, death is never the end. We’re a long ways from the arcade days and early NES titles when Game Over screens were common and gamers could stroke their egos based on how many titles they’d “cleared.” We expect to beat games now, not for them to beat us.Įven “masochistic” games like Dark Souls are designed to be beaten. It wasn’t always this way and there are plenty of examples of merciless games you can point to, but I’m talking about modern, mainstream games. The vast majority of games are very good at conditioning players to expect victory. It’s almost unheard of for one to luxuriate in it.
The game always lets you know exactly how close you are to extinction, how much work you have left to do, and graciously allows you to do the math and know there is no hope left.ĭefeat is a rare thing in games in general. Not only because it is possible, even probable, to lose the game (so long as you’re playing honest), but because it takes its damn time.
The best and brightest of our generation are either dead or driven mad from trauma, and while I don’t know exactly how, I am certain that it is all my fault.ĭefeat in XCOM 2: War of the Chosen is a strange and bizarrely beautiful thing. The hammer hasn’t fallen quite yet, but from where we’re standing, you can see its rapidly expanding shadow as it comes crashing down.
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