XCOM2 and Long War 2: Designing Mechanics around Story
How indulging the setting and lore creates more engaging mechanics
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!
XCOM 2 and Long War 2
Today, we’ll take a closer look at one of the most popular XCOM 2 mods out there: Long War 2. Just like the first mod developed for the previous entry in the series, Long War 2 has amassed a dedicated fan base thanks to its innovative changes and the new perspective it offers to the XCOM experience. This mod is a complete overhaul of XCOM 2, so it’s very difficult to cover everything that changed - I really recommend you give it a go!
Long War 2 does a lot of things right. For instance, the game offers a lot more meaningful choices in terms of what soldiers can do, as well as offering a much more intricate strategic layer. While this might turn off some players because the skill floor becomes a lot higher and the learning curve much, MUCH steeper, this is perfect for players such as myself, who enjoy feeling like they need to learn the ins and outs of a game in order to “outsmart” it.
What I find the most interesting in this mod, and what we’ll discuss today, is how Long War 2 does a better job than the base game at designing its mechanics around story elements. In my opinion, the result is a much deeper connection between lore and gameplay, as well as more interesting and unique mechanics overall.
So, what is the story of XCOM 2?
Well, turns out you lost during XCOM: Enemy Unknown. At some point XCOM was crushed by the alien invasion, and the Commander, the player character, was kidnapped to study his latent psionic abilities. The Earth has been under alien control for around two decades or so, and a dictatorial, oppressive, and totalitarian regime named ADVENT has been insidiously instated. An ominous, suspiciously alien looking Leader speaks at massive rallies and through screens placed everywhere, adulating the alien rulers, the Elders, for their benevolence and compassion, while simultaneously slandering XCOM, the resistance guerrilla, as a bunch of bloodthirsty terrorists who refuse to embrace the gift of a better life.
In the opening mission, XCOM succeeds in retrieving the Commander from an alien prison. What follows is a long campaign where the player leads the resistance effort by sabotaging ADVENT’s plans and striking when the opportunity presents itself. They slowly contact other resistance cells, gather more soldiers, steal alien tech to incorporate into their own, all to grow strong enough to actually become a threat to the alien’s rule. Slowly, the player starts uncovering the truth about what the Elders are really doing on Earth - they’re farming humans to find a suitable body to host their minds and continue their species, since their bodies are slowly withering away.
So there you have it. In terms of the setting, XCOM 2 is a game about a resistance operation using guerrilla tactics to bring down a tyrannical oppressor. How does Long War 2 improve on the base game’s mechanics in order to better fit this setting?
Infiltration - proactively sabotaging ADVENT
In the base game, the player will be periodically offered a choice between three missions to attack ADVENT at a key strategic location. The player might be tasked with hacking a computer, stealing an item, destroying an alien device, among other things. All offered missions have separate rewards, so the player is incentivized to prioritize one or the other based on the state of the strategic layer of their campaign. They might stop a particularly bad Dark Event (passive bonuses for ADVENT), or gain a desperately needed resource. Once the player picks a mission, the other two, and their rewards, are lost.
Long War 2 offers a different mechanic - infiltration. Instead of responding to an ADVENT move and picking one of three missions, the player will discover lots of ongoing alien operations based on how many resistance members they have assigned to gathering intel. Once the player discovers a possible attack point, they’ll be informed of how much time is remaining for the alien operation to be completed, and they’ll be given the option to assign a group of soldiers to infiltrate this mission site. Based on a range of variables, such as how many soldiers the player wants to deploy, what they’re equipped with, and infiltration bonuses, the infiltration will take a certain amount of time. The difficulty of the mission will scale depending on how much time the player’s squad has had to infiltrate the site, representing how prepared the aliens are for an XCOM move.
So, for example, a resistance cell in North America will discover an alien operation in which the player can hack into an ADVENT computer. There’ll be 7 days left before the operation completes, so the player will have near that amount of time to respond. The player decides to infiltrate the site, since the reward seems to be good. They assign six soldiers of varied classes to this mission, and realize the estimated time to infiltrate will be about 8 days. The player now has an engaging choice to make - how exactly should they outfit their squad to maximize their power while minimizing their infiltration time? Heavy classes, like gunners, need more time to infiltrate, but they’re very useful in combat. Should the player swap a gunner out in favor of a lighter class? Should they send out only five soldiers instead of six? Or should they just take the increased difficulty penalty given by not infiltrating fully? And then, the player needs to consider whether they’ll be able to manage 7 days without the soldiers they send out. Maybe send out a rookie soldier so you can keep an elite one at base, just in case?
This new mechanic makes squad building have a lot more depth. Modern XCOM has always had an issue where there’s not a lot of reasons to take less experienced soldiers on missions, unless your “A team” is wounded or dead. You’ll usually end up with a roster full of rookies and a dozen or so elite soldiers, so this works wonders to incentivize the player to manage a larger and more varied roster. It also forces you to take risks sometimes, since missions can be discovered with less than sufficient time at moments where you’ll *really* want the offered reward.
The thing I found most interesting, though, is how it creates a thematic connection between setting and mechanics. XCOM is supposed to be a resistance guerrilla, right? So it makes sense that we’d be proactively looking for ADVENT operations to sabotage, instead of passively waiting for ADVENT to do something and then responding, much like we did in the first game where we were the defenders instead of the aggressors. It makes more sense that we’d conduct our war effort by infiltrating a mission with as many soldiers as we can spare, but be limited by how much time remains until the enemy’s operation is complete. It also makes more sense that ADVENT’s preparedness for our strikes would decrease the more time we spend infiltrating a site, as they divert resources to more important places where they think we might attack from. In this way, Long War 2 does a better job of fitting its setting than the original, and the game feels richer because of it.
Combat - outnumbered and outgunned
Let’s be clear - XCOM has never been a series that pulls its punches. It feels like whatever can go wrong, will always go wrong. An alien with a 1% chance of hitting you will succeed, while a soldier with a 99% chance of hitting an alien will fail. A single careless move or a lucky enemy shot can set off a cascade of events that will result in a mission failure, or, even worse, a squad wipe. XCOM 2 is no different - it wants you to feel in danger. Every move matters. You’re just a single bad roll away from losing your favorite soldier, so you better think carefully.
Long War 2 is, infamously, a lot more difficult. The game adds on to the base game’s progressively more powerful enemies by creating more variants of the alien roster. In vanilla, a Muton will stay mostly the same from whenever you first encounter them to the end of the game, and, by the end, they’re not really a threat anymore. In Long War 2, not only are there other two variations of the Muton, like the commander-like Muton Centurion, or the absolutely deadly Muton Elite, the regular Muton will gain more stats to remain relevant throughout the whole campaign. The same can be said for most enemy types, such that even the most basic ADVENT troops are always a threat to the player.
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Additionally, missions have a lot, and I mean A LOT, more enemies. This incentivizes you to both finish fights quickly, so that other aliens can’t join the current battle, as well as picking your battles more carefully. Stealth becomes a more important mechanic, because going in guns blazing will often mean you’re at too much of a disadvantage to win. This means that it’s often a good idea to have a scout that stays in stealth for the whole mission, just so that you can get information on where it’s safe to move.
While I understand that not everyone will enjoy this gigantic spike in difficulty, I think these new mechanics make a lot more sense thematically. As a resistance force, you are supposed to be massively disadvantaged. Guerrillas don’t win by going all out in massive head-on battles - they win by using their superior maneuverability, adaptability, and ability to hide. They strike at weaker targets while avoiding the main enemy forces, slowly chipping away at their strength. While ADVENT has millions, or even billions of troops, and a practically endless supply of resources, XCOM is just a bunch of people hiding in a spaceship, stealing what they can from the alien overlords and using superior tactics for leverage. I like that these new mechanics make me feel like I’m fighting for my life, like every minor victory is a tiny step towards liberation, even if it feels miniscule when compared to the odds I’m facing.
Missions - combat isn’t the main focus
In the base game, pretty much every mission forces you to completely eliminate the alien forces in order to succeed. While some missions will fail if you don’t complete the objective in a certain time limit, the objective always ends up feeling like a secondary thing to do while the real test for success is killing every alien on the map. It doesn’t matter if you successfully destroyed the alien device and escaped with no casualties - there are still aliens remaining, so the mission counts as a loss.
Long War 2, of course, changes this. The main objective isn’t combat anymore. If you complete whatever goal you were sent in there to do, you succeed, regardless of whether you even killed a single alien. This, of course, changes your tactics, as it becomes possible for a single soldier to complete the objective and escape successfully. Combat is now a thing that impedes you from achieving your goal, instead of the goal itself.
Apart from just changing the win condition of certain mission types, Long War 2 introduces new, more interesting, fail states. While some missions in the base game will just outright fail you if you missed the time limit, there are now missions that, instead of a traditional timer, will just start continually spawning alien reinforcements at shorter time intervals the longer you take to complete the objective, to the point where it’s pretty much pointless to fight. This makes it so that there is an added element of pressure but with a bit more fairness added. If you take a bit too long, things will start to get a lot more difficult for you, but you can still survive and succeed if you play your cards correctly.
I don’t think it made a lot of sense to make the player win every engagement they took in the base game. As I’ve been repeating, XCOM is supposed to be a single resistance force facing an almost impossible war against a vastly superior enemy. Why would I fail if I hacked the alien computer, but left without killing a couple of aliens? I set out to do what I was sent to do, the alien computer is useless now! This new change in priorities makes it so that I feel more like what the game tells me I am, a scrappy group of freedom fighters using guerrilla tactics to liberate a planet. As a result of mechanics fitting the story better, the tactical layer becomes deeper and more nuanced, because there are now multiple solutions to the puzzles presented - instead of just blasting your way through everything.
Equipment - power is hard to come by
In the original XCOM 2, much like its predecessor, researching new technology and then paying for it would permanently boost every single one of your soldiers. Paying for the laser weapons upgrade would give everyone a laser weapon, meaning your power floor had just increased flatly from then on until the end of the campaign.
Long War 2, also much like its predecessor, rethinks this approach. XCOM might have successfully researched how laser weapons work, but that doesn’t mean they have the resources to produce them en masse. Now every single weapon or armor piece exists as an individual instance of that item, meaning you have to think a lot more about what pieces of equipment are worth prioritizing. It also means that, very often, you just won’t have enough resources to give everyone a power boost, since equipment is now finite.
This increase in scarcity makes it so that outfitting a squad is a more nuanced process which offers more meaningful choices to the player. If you only have a set amount of resources, and you can either craft two weaker guns, like submachine guns, or one single powerful gun, like a sniper rifle, which is the better choice? This depends entirely on the roster you’ve been building throughout a campaign, how much the upgrade will increase your power by, and what strategy you intend to use on the field.
Thematically, of course, this also makes a lot more sense. XCOM is supposed to be fighting tooth and nail for every little increase in power they can come by. Whether this be manpower, technology, or resources, we’re the underdog trying to steal whatever we can get our hands on. It also makes every piece of equipment individually impactful, as well as more emotionally important. If you give a soldier a powerful gun, you better make sure they make it through till the end of the mission - and if they don’t, then you have more incentives to risk someone else just to get their corpse back to the evac point.
Conclusion
Long War 2 isn’t for everyone, that much is for sure. The increase in difficulty and game length is a turn off for many players. Some can even consider these thematic changes unfun and frustrating. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to feel more powerful than your enemies in videogames without needing to keep a separate wiki open while playing.
However, I think that these reworked mechanics add a lot of depth and skill expression to the game. There’s a lot more for the player to do, choices matter a lot more, there’s worth in weighing your options before choosing what to do next. You’re often spread thin, incentivized to take risky missions for which you might be under equipped just because opportunities are finite and hard to come by. There’s more opportunities to feel like you’ve outsmarted ADVENT, which is an important part of the power fantasy of games like XCOM.
In my opinion, Long War 2 is an excellent example of how directly tying your game mechanics to the setting and story can really elevate the experience. It feels like the team at Pavonis Interactive really made an effort to think through what a guerrilla group in XCOM’s position would have to do to be victorious, and how they would mechanically go about doing so. By indulging the circumstances of the setting, I feel like they made XCOM 2 even better than it already was. This mod is a great reference point for game designers like me. We should challenge ourselves to think in terms of the settings we’ve chosen, because we never know what crazy and fun mechanics can come to us if we just work inside the bounds of the little worlds we create.