The great thing about XCOM isn’t blasting a bunch of aliens with futuristic plasma beams, which is great don’t get me wrong, but it’s the connections you make with the fictional people who are pulling the trigger.

Take, for example, Maj. Leif Berg. He was the only specialist to speak of in XCOM. And he purposely got himself captured during a VIP extract. That was a timed mission, but time, chances and movement were running short, and there was no way for him to escape and the mission be a success. It was one or the other.

Berg realized this and chose to become legend. He tossed a beacon that attracts nearby enemies to free up a running lane for the rest of the squad to sprint through, toward the awaiting helicopter. However, Berg couldn’t throw that and also make it himself. And the beacon wouldn’t last forever, so Berg ran back into the base where the VIP had been imprisoned to draw fire, telling the rest of the squad to make a run for it.

The mission was a success, but he wasn't heard from him again. Presumed KIA.

And the turn-based strategy game continued.

But six in-game months later, maybe 15 or 20 hours of playtime, XCOM received a signal of another VIP to extract from the enemies.

It was Berg.

In XCOM, and in this case XCOM 2, you choose which missions you take. And sometimes, you pass on certain missions because your squad is injured or you don’t have the firepower to adequately deal with the threats, but how could the commander turn this one down? A chance to save a hero? To bring him home?

But this wasn’t a story the game was telling. It was one that it was letting me tell.

In XCOM 2, and the franchise in general, you’re playing as the commander of a squad of soldiers fighting to protect the planet from invading aliens, who are doing all sorts of just plain old nasty things to humanity. That’s pretty much the whole story the game is going to tell you. And that’s great! You don’t need much more than that. There’s stories about what the aliens are doing and the lore of their technology and how things got so bad, but there’s not a ton going on.

But if there’s not a layered, deep story being told, where’s the fun narrative in XCOM that makes it so special? Easy, it’s the story that the player makes themselves during their journey to the end. And there’s load of great stories in XCOM that are worth telling. And they are all emergent in their design. XCOM isn’t telling you the story, it’s giving you the chance to tell it yourself. You’re crafting the fiction behind your squad. And even if you think you’re not creative enough to do that, you’re wrong. You’ll find yourself coming up with stories and ideas without even realizing it.

You’re the commander. We’ve established that. But you’re commanding a bevy of soldiers who have unique faces, backstories, names and all that. And while they’re randomly generated, you can also customize and make your own soldiers. And the soldiers, and who they are, is where XCOM does what it does best.  

In other games, if Soldier A dies, it’s a feeling of “eh whatever, it was just Solider A. It’s just a glob of pixels.” But when Soldier A has been customized to have the backstory of your best friend from your childhood who looks kind of similar to him and has the same name, then when Best Friend Soldier dies, the feeling is one of utter despair.

-Oh no! They killed him?! Those HEATHENS. I will blow up this ship and every exo scum aboard it!

And even if they’re just randomly generated soldiers, like Berg was, you’ve still likely spent a great deal of time watching them grow during the course of the game. Even if it is just Soldier A, it’ll hurt regardless when they go down.  When a soldier dies in XCOM, they’re dead. There is no respawning. When your soldiers die, they are gone for the entirety of that particular playthrough. There is no getting them back.

Attachment is important and is something that many games have trouble imparting onto their players. With XCOM though, attachment is the name of the game. It’s the best part.

But XCOM is a game of probability. When you command Best Friend Soldier to shoot a sectoid, his odds of landing the shot are ran through myriad variables. Is the enemy behind cover? Does BFS have a scope? Is he on higher ground? Is he flanking? Is there a positive or negative status on either BFS or the exo? All of these are taken into consideration.

So, when BFS is contemplating his shot and the commander, you, are seeing the odds coming back at a 33.3, repeating of course, percent chance of landing the shot, a few things come up. Do you need to take this shot? Does someone else die if BFS doesn’t land the shot? Can someone else neutralize this exo? Is there another way out of this situation? Maybe he can hunker down behind cover and you can cross your fingers that the aliens miss their shots and see if you can do better on the next turn?

This happens all the time. It’s the main gameplay loop of XCOM and it’s a good one. And it’s there, in the probability, that your own fictions are born. Taking a 33.3 percent chance shot is a bad move to make almost all the time. If you’ve been backed into that corner, something has gone terribly, terrifically wrong. And it’s up to you figure out whether or not that is the best move to make.

When you tell BFS that he needs to make this shot or everyone dies, you’re really just putting that pressure onto yourself. And when you finally click the confirm button and BFS takes the shot, the story unfolds.

What happens next is all because of your best friend. It’s kind of a like a choose-your-own-adventure book. But either BFS nails the alien or he doesn’t. If Best Friend Soldier succeeds, he might be a hero who lives on to die another day and continue fighting the good fight. If he doesn’t, a tale of sorrow might begin as the aliens descend on the squad.

And losing a squad of elite soldiers hurts. Not only because you spent hours and hours beefing them up and getting them the best guns and armor, but because they had the names of your friends and family. They had custom faces and personalities and voices that you deemed best fit with who they are in reality. You knew these soldiers in your real life, and now they are dead in XCOM. And it’s probably your fault.

It might be time to start over if that happens, but every single XCOM playthrough is different. The same story missions are there, yeah, but they have different scenery and they have different actors playing the roles. You might know how the plot-driven story of XCOM 2 goes, but each time you begin a new campaign, you decide how the character-driven story plays out.

XCOM is long game where your soldiers start out as rookies and eventually, if they survive long enough, get promoted up the ranks. It feels good when your soldiers get further into the game because not only are they getting better at blasting alien scum, they’re also enhancing the story that you’re telling by simply living. A rookie with a rough start in the beginning might wind up being a savior.

I once had a soldier named Sajjad Majid. Funny enough, that’s name of a Firaxis developer, the group behind the game. You can download their names to have them be randomly generated into your pool of recruits. And Majid was still a rookie when his nickname changed.

Each soldier is given a random, unless you opt to choose it yourself, nickname. Like Chad “Demolition” Abshire, for example. Majid had a nickname that was something meaningless, maybe like “Deadeye.”

But it changed because I changed it. It changed because the game made me.

The commander had told a soldier to flank an enemy with the ability to mind control, an obviously very dangerous threat and one that needed to be taken care of swiftly. One of the few named-in-game characters, Jane Kelly, received that order. She helped free the commander on the first mission. At this point, it’s very early into the campaign and it’s Majid’s first ever mission.

He’s eager to prove himself. He’s fighting to reclaim Earth. He’s under the command of a legendary strategist and things are going well.

Then he blacks out. He can’t remember anything that happens next. All he knows is that when he came to, he’s standing against a building that he doesn’t recall walking over to. And in the corner, Jane Kelly lies dead. Smoke is coming from the barrel of his rifle.

He was mind controlled by that alien and shot her to death. In his first mission, Majid not only killed a fellow soldier, but he killed one of the people instrumental in kickstarting this rebellion by freeing the commander.

It was too much for him. He sank into a deep depression. He wore a balaclava from then on, wouldn’t show his face, but he also wouldn’t shirk from his duty. He would continue the fight, but he would do so from a place of penance. From then on, he wasn’t Sajjad “Deadeye” Majid.

He was “Guilt.”

-We’re not calling you that.

-I’m not answering to anything else.

-But it wasn’t your fault. You were…

-It doesn’t matter! I pulled the trigger. I killed her! It was me!

This sucked for me as the commander. I just lost my best soldier! All because a rookie got mind-controlled and couldn’t keep his cool? It was frustrating, yeah, but it was also unique and something that other games just can’t offer because of how they’re structured. That’s fine, not every game can or has to do this, but XCOM can and does.

And XCOM thrives in its success of being able to do that.  

That dialogue didn’t happen, obviously. That’s just how I framed it. That’s how “Guilt” came to be. He wound up being the squad captain, a position that Jane Kelly held. He named every weapon he used after her in memoriam. But he never got to escape his sins. He went on the final mission and survived. “Guilt” made it to the end of the game and found redemption.  

But XCOM didn’t tell that story, it just allowed the commander to.