There have been grumblings from some players who would like more possibilities, sliders for facial features and so on. AdvertisementĮnlarge / One of XCOM 2's simpler thrills is in making a group of your friends and then going into detail on each one's death with the person in question. Two decades on from Jools and Jops, the systems working this magic are more sophisticated than ever, but they owe much to the work of the Sensible Software team. XCOM 2excels at creating this tiny emotional connection. The challenge for the strategy game designer is in making players care about mere pawns: they're central to the game, but ultimately expendable in the pursuit of victory. As Napoleon Bonaparte said, "Victory and disaster establish indestructible bonds between armies and their commanders"-and he knew a thing or two about wars. These are often war-focused, certainly in XCOM's case, so it makes sense to try and tap into the idea of caring for your troops. There's something particularly important about this design choice in the context of a strategy game.
Tombstones became a point of pride, one of those challenges we set ourselves that beats any pre-fabricated achievement pop-up.Ī defining part of the XCOM (née X-COM) series has been creating a similar connection between you and the virtual soldiers sent out to die. But Cannon Fodder went beyond simple XP hoarding with a delicious twist: the more decorated a character became, the bigger their tombstone on the between-mission screen. Because soldiers levelled up after each successful mission, improving their capabilities, keeping Jools and Jops alive throughout the game was a number one priority-which was easier said than done when anything from grenades to flying debris to friendly fire could kill them in an instant. Jools and Jops were the first soldiers you commanded in Cannon Fodder, the first to taste blood on the battlefield. But of those, only two really, really mattered: Jools and Jops. Among its unique features was that the several hundred interchangeable soldiers you led across the battlefield were individually named. The first time I cared about an in-game avatar was back in 1993 when famed UK developer Sensible Software-makers of Sensible Soccer-released Cannon Fodder.
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