XCOM Enemy Within: Why do we save scum?
Why players might want to replay sections to avoid failure
An Introduction
Hey, everyone! This is Dissecting Game Design, a publication where I discuss videogames and attempt to focus on specific game design aspects I find interesting and worth discussing. I am not an expert on game design by any means, so take my opinion as just that - an opinion. This is by no means a review. Even if it were, I think reviews should be about engaging with art through different perspectives instead of attempting to assign a concrete value on it. Please approach this as a discussion in which I try to figure out why I think something works (or doesn’t work) from my subjective game design perspective.
Save Scumming
Today, I’ll be talking a bit about save scumming. Depending on the online circles you inhabit, this is either a pejorative term used for fake gamers who cheat and need to get good, or just a funny word used for people who don’t like very punishing outcomes in games. Probably, we’re all a bit guilty of this - so, is it a bad thing?
If you’re unfamiliar with the term, save scumming refers to the act of reloading a previous save file to get a more favorable outcome. To be perfectly honest, I’ve dabbled a bit in this practice, and I’d like to understand why. I feel like there’s a lot of games where I feel inclined to do it, and others where I just don’t. I find it really interesting that I have different, unspoken rules for save scumming in each game, and I think there’s value in finding out what feelings compel me to do so. This first approach to the topic will focus on one of my favorite games of all time - XCOM: Enemy Within.
Let’s get into it!
XCOM: EW is a great turn based strategy game with exciting base building and resource management elements. There is a great feedback loop between sending out your soldiers to get weird alien tech, and then using that tech to build even better stuff to send out your soldiers on missions with. The game is addictive, and has that amazing “just one more round” feeling that keeps you hooked from start to end (even more so if you’re playing the Long War mod).
Save scumming in XCOM often comes in the form of reloading a turn when the RNG rolls don’t go your way and result in a really, really bad outcome. For example, every XCOM player is familiar with the gut wrenching feeling of losing your favorite soldier to a lucky crit from an alien. This is made even worse when you feel like you played the best you could to avoid said outcome, but the dice roll just wasn’t on your side.
In this case, save scumming can just be a way of immediately saving yourself the emotional distress (whether it be sadness or irritation) of losing something you’ve worked on for a while and come to care about. XCOM is a very long game, and it doesn’t feel good to lose hours of progress because of a “tiny mistake” or just plain chance. That soldier might’ve been with you for ten, even maybe twenty hours at this point, so losing them to something you *feel* like you couldn’t have stopped feels awful.
Of course, most of the time this is just cope. Maybe I just misplayed! Maybe I could’ve hidden said soldier somewhere else, maybe I could’ve saved a crucial consumable I used too liberally in an earlier scuffle, maybe I could’ve used a cooldown I was saving too greedily. You just *feel* like there was no way out and you got permanently and heavily punished because of it, and Save Scumming can offer you a way of holding on to the feeling that you made the right choices.
Another use of Save Scumming is to prevent much larger setbacks. XCOM is a game you can definitely lose. You can be twenty hours deep into a campaign, and suffer a series of devastating defeats that leave you with a thinned out roster of inexperienced soldiers. At some points, you can just consider a campaign doomed and start over from scratch. Depending on the length of the game, this doesn’t feel great. It can feel like you’ve just lost a lot of progress for nothing, and playing through the parts you already played through can feel irritating and repetitive. By save scumming to a previous game state, you can replay those devastating defeats differently so that your progress isn’t completely lost.
So why is save scumming a thing in XCOM?
I think it comes down to three aspects: emotional attachment, game length, and power fantasy.
The first aspect comes mostly from the fact that the game wants you to get attached to your soldiers. After all, there are meta-stories that are organically born throughout gameplay. Remember that crazy mission where that sniper sat atop a van and cleared out an entire alien squad on her own? Remember that time where an assault emptied his entire shotgun into a pod of Chryssalids, saving the lives of countless civilians? Remember that time your psionic Medic mind controlled a Muton and turned a losing fight into a victory?
XCOM thrives on creating these little stories within its world, so it naturally feels really bad to have one of them end abruptly when you feel like there was nothing you could do to stop it. And, while you could argue that that’s how war works (without all the added heroism and a lot more random and meaningless deaths), it just doesn’t feel great when a character’s conclusion is so unsatisfying. You want these soldiers to succeed, to make it through to the end, and save scumming allows you to keep it that way.
For comparison’s sake, other games in which death is a lot more common but less emotionally charged (think of pretty much any platformer) offer less of an incentive for players to save scum. This doesn’t mean they’re necessarily better, but it’s just something worth thinking about. Emotional impact upon failure will make players want to fail less (and this isn’t a bad thing).
The second reason is game length. You’re investing a lot of time into this game, and starting over to repeat parts of the game you’ve already played can feel really bad. I’m no stranger to restarting campaigns I consider doomed, and I personally enjoy the early game of XCOM a lot, but after a certain unspoken time threshold I feel like replaying the entire game isn’t really an option for me.
Think of similarly difficult games, like Ninja Gaiden. This isn’t a game you could realistically save scum in, but, if given the chance, would you? Death happens really quickly, and checkpoints are generously distributed in levels. You don’t lose much by just grinding your teeth and trying again. Is this something that you want in your game, or do you think the option of permanent failure is more suitable?
The third reason is the one I find the most interesting. XCOM is at its best when you come up with a crafty solution to a problem. The game feels at its most rewarding when you can combine different abilities to make something unorthodox really work. XCOM’s power fantasy is about being the smartest strategic mind in the entire planet, and turning a bad situation around due to pure strategic superiority feels amazing -even more so if you’re outnumbered and outgunned.
When you start losing, this power fantasy can start to crack. You feel the good chemicals rush through your brain when you feel like you’ve outsmarted the game, so, naturally, you stop feeling them when your mistakes start adding up and result in terrible outcomes. There’s a lot of discussion to be had here, on whether games should always make you feel good even if you’re playing them badly, or on whether save scumming reduces the game’s intended enjoyment because it makes consequences less meaningful (including your victories), but that can be a topic for another day.
I think this is really hard to balance in a game that has so many elements of chance like XCOM does. The best of plans can fail, and the worst plan can succeed. Sometimes you’ll earn victories that you really didn’t deserve, and you’ll fail at things you executed masterfully. Of course, good players will succeed a vast majority of the time because they’ll learn how to minimize the risk of the dice roll not going their way. That’s why some people can play the game on higher difficulties and win.
So what could XCOM do differently?
If XCOM’s developers wanted to reduce save scumming (which I don’t think they do, since they already offer completely optional modes that make Save Scumming pretty much impossible by saving after every action), I think they would need to offer the player a lot more ways to get out of bad situations.
A perfect example of this is the “bleeding out” mechanic. When a soldier gets fatally shot, they have a small chance of being put into a wounded state instead of dying instantly. The game offers you a time limit to get back to the dying soldier to stabilize them by using a medkit consumable (or revive them to instantly get them back into the fight, if you have a high enough level medic). If you fail to help them within the time limit, the soldier then dies.
I think this mechanic is brilliant. It delays the horrible feeling you get when a soldier dies by a couple turns - the initial spike of shock and distress is reduced significantly because you know that you can still do something to save your soldier. Plus, if you fail to help them and they die, it feels a lot more like the product of your own mistakes than if they just die outright, which helps the player cope with failure.
However, I’d personally go a step further and argue that this mechanic should be a lot more accessible than it is right now. Here are three ways in which I think the game could improve on this mechanic:
For starters, I think it shouldn’t be tied to random chance. Every soldier that gets fatally shot should first go into a wounded state instead of dying instantly. This would help reduce the feeling of “this is bullshit!” when a soldier dies to a random critical hit, while allowing for more varied and interesting decisions to make in the battlefield. Sometimes, it’s tactically sound to let a soldier die so that you can win the mission without further losses, and doing so often doesn’t feel as bad as just losing the soldier instantly because you had a more direct sense of agency in that outcome.
The action that helps you stabilize a soldier shouldn’t be tied to a consumable - it should be a skill that every soldier has access to at all times. If you think this is a bit much, maybe you could make an alternate skill that doesn’t stabilize them right away. Maybe another soldier could choose to spend their turn keeping the wounded alive by doing CPR or another medical themed action. This would effectively make it so that there’s a more nuanced opportunity cost in mitigating your losses than just having to depend on bringing the right amount of consumables.
I don’t think bleeding out should incur any sort of long lasting penalty. Currently, if a soldier survives a bleed out state, they will suffer a permanent hit to their will stat, which governs how likely a soldier is to panic (which often gets them into terrible spots where they’re likely to be wounded again) or how susceptible they are to psionic attacks. While this makes a lot of thematic sense, as I wouldn’t be as willing to fight the things that almost killed me, I think it creates a negative feedback loop in which soldiers that get saved from a bleed out become more likely to need saving again later.
This is just one example of many. You could throw around a lot more ideas, like giving soldiers “one shot protection” much like in Risk of Rain 2, where a single instance of damage can’t reduce you from a 100% health to 0%. You could come up with a lot of mechanics that would make the game feel a bit less instantly punishing, but…
The elephant in the room: how punishing should games be?
Obviously, this is always completely up to the developer. You could make a game where you can just lose a twenty hour campaign because of a single bad button press, and I’d defend your right to do so. However, I think there’s a lot of worth in asking ourselves this question as developers, because more punishing doesn’t always mean better.
For example, it’s hard to think about more “punishing” games than old school cabinet games you could play at an arcade. You’d often get a limited number of attempts to do very difficult things. As a regular player, the most likely outcome is you’d play for a couple of minutes and then have to pay more to try again. That’s why there’s a niche competitive scene around these games - only a select few ever become so good to actually beat these games. And, of course, it makes sense that the games are designed this way, since the incentive the developers had was to create games that were just difficult and unforgiving enough that players would feel like they could beat them if they just paid another quarter. Were these games better because they were more punishing than modern games?
What about the infamous Super Mario Bros 2 (or how it was later renamed in the US, Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels)? This game was deemed so difficult that it was initially released only in Japan, as Nintendo thought players in the US weren’t skilled enough to complete it. The game has lots of very precise jumps, questionable hidden box placements, and, most interestingly, no checkpoints. Even if a player was good enough to get to the final stage, they could lose all their lives in the last level and get kicked right back down to 1-1. Did this design choice make overcoming the game’s challenges more meaningful, or did it simply make failure more frustrating and the game more repetitive?
I don’t think a lot of people would argue against the inclusion of checkpoints or the removal of lives in modern games. I think, for the most part, all of us agree that these are definitely good things. Even some of the harder games, like Dark Souls (which’s difficulty has become sort of a meme over the years), include checkpoints so that players don’t lose that much progress when they inevitably fail. It makes it so that failure is a temporary obstacle, and not a permanent consequence.
Obviously, checkpoints aren’t the solution to every game. XCOM offers tons of checkpoints, and yet, Save Scumming happens a lot. Every game would need a tailored solution if they wanted to completely prevent it. Some games might even consider the “need” for save scumming to be a good thing - sometimes they might intend to make the player feel really bad about failing, and save scumming becomes proof that they’ve succeeded.
I personally love punishing games. I like it when there’s danger to playing poorly. I like to feel powerful when I know that that power is conditional on my correct use of it. I like the accomplishment of getting through difficult parts of games. Maybe it’s just that I don’t like it when consequences are too permanent, but that is obviously very subjective, inconsistent, and pretty much dependent on how I’m feeling at that moment. As with any art, I think you could say it changes depending on how you’re engaging with it as a spectator.
At the end of the day, I don’t think save scumming is really that big of a problem (if it is a problem at all). Yes, it can interfere with the intended vision of a developer. If you want to stop it in your game, I think that’s completely justified. But maybe if your players feel the need to save scum, there could be some design choices you could question and maybe even reconsider. Maybe you don’t need permanent consequences in your game, and you don’t need to punish failure with harder playthroughs. Maybe you do to fulfill your vision - that’s completely up to you. Either way, it’s a question worth asking!