There are adequate new recruits and soldiers in XCOMs ranks to make up for lost characters. The ship has an area where you can see records of your fallen soldiers. The designers want to encourage players to let their soldiers die, and this is reflected in the number of the gameвЂ™s mechanics that involve character death. I still save scum sometimes, as do lots of players, but being willing to let my soldiers get injured and die lets me participate in all of the gameвЂ™s systems. So why in XCOM do I not reload a mission every time I lose a soldier? Mostly because it feels like save scumming, and I acknowledge that having soldiers die occasionally is part of the game. Some modern roguelikes (XCOM included) have an Ironman mode intended to make save scumming more difficult. Because this behavior bypassed some of the intended difficulty of the game, the community came to consider this behavior dishonorable or вЂњscummyвЂќ, hence save scumming.

But players found that they could circumvent the need to start over by loading a save file from before they died. Roguelike games typically require the user to complete the entire game without being defeated, and start over if they die. A screenshot of the original Rogue, a game which spawned a genre. Since then, roguelike has come to refer to any game which has randomized level generation and permadeath, two of the most notable features of Rogue. Originally, roguelike was a label given to a niche category of turn-based dungeon crawling games based on the game Rogue. To understand the term, we need to quickly talk about roguelikes. If you spend any time at all in the XCOM community, youвЂ™ll hear the term вЂњsave scummingвЂќ used derogatorily to refer to the act of reloading a save when your soldiers die. While both games are tactical, XCOM is more like a Tactical Roguelike, where Fire Emblem is more of a Tactical Roleplaying Game. So what causes this difference? A lot of things contribute, but one of the most significant is the genres of these games. When IвЂ™m playing XCOM and one of my units dies I grimace and try to figure out whether I can finish the mission without them, and whether I can recover their body. When IвЂ™m playing Fire Emblem and one of my units dies, I let out a long sigh and restart my console so I can retry the level. LetвЂ™s contrast my two favorite example games Fire Emblem and XCOM to see how permadeath impacts them differently.

But permadeath greatly impacts the tone and style of a game, and the way players handle permadeath is impacted by the rest of the game as well. The clear advantage of this is that itвЂ™s easy to understand, because this is also how it works in real life. When a unit runs out of health theyвЂ™re dead, and they stay that way.

Permanent death, or permadeath as itвЂ™s often known, is a natural starting point as itвЂ™s immediately intuitive to just about any player. In this post IвЂ™ll analyze different methods of handling death in tactics games, and how they affect the rest of the game (and vice-versa!) Permanent Death The loss of one such character does not necessarily mean the defeat of the group. Tactics games complicate the issue however, as many tactics games ask the player to control several characters. In many genres, the answer is simple(ish), the player controls only one character and if they die the game is over or at least must be reset to a point before the character died. And with violence comes the question of what to do when a player dies. For better or worse, most tactics games (most video games in general) are about or feature violence.

Xcom 2 save scumming