On XCOM 2: War of the Chosen, and the Stories We Build for Ourselves

I’m not usually a fan of tactics games; I bounced off of Civ a long time ago, couldn’t make it past the tutorial of Frozen Synapse, and have largely avoided the genre as a unit since. I’ll occasionally play an hour of Fire Emblem: Awakening and mildly enjoy myself, but not enough to dust off my 3DS with any regularity, and nowhere near enough to persuade myself that I’ve come around on the genre. Even Into the Breach, which I sunk fifty hours into this spring and love dearly as an engine of beautifully choreographed battles, couldn’t persuade me to give strategy games another try.

But now I’m in the position of having lost weeks of my life to the modern XCOM series: first to XCOM: Enemy Unknown in May, and now to XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. And to explain why, first, I need to tell you about Brigitte “The Truth” Martine.

Brigitte Martine is a member of my now-massive roster of soldiers in War of the Chosen: a deadeye sharpshooter who joined my resistance about halfway through my current campaign. I recruited her as a rookie, the lowest rank of XCOM soldier, with no abilities and just a basic rifle, and, before adding her to her first mission, saw that her loadout included one of the masks worn by an in-game faction known as the Reapers. But she wasn’t one, so I spent a couple of minutes deciding on alternate headgear—giving her a hood and a bandanna that showed only her eyes—and, in doing so, I got a bit attached. I’d engaged with the one system that still keeps me so preternaturally invested in War of the Chosen: its massive array of character-customization options, and the way it uses those to bring sets of proc-gen, randomly-generated characters to life.

After giving Brigitte her bandana, which meshed with the mostly-black color scheme she’d come in with, we set out on the mission. As the only rookie on a squad of, at that point, relative aces, I expected her to be the weak link. But she hit her first shot—a thing rookies, pre-leveling up, pre-weapon mods, pre-upgrades—never seem to do. So I tried again, and again, and again, taking progressively riskier shots instead of putting her into Overwatch. And she just kept hitting them. In a series notorious for disastrous misses on 99% chances, she barely missed a shot.

This wasn’t a run-of-the-mill mission either—the Chosen Hunter, one of the expansion’s three special boss aliens, modeled after the game’s sharpshooter class—showed up a few turns after my squad broke concealment. He set up shop in the back of a long tunnel map, forcing me to reposition every turn with tracking shots, and while this particular Chosen is probably the least challenging of the three to handle, he still added to the mission’s overriding theme. After that mission, when Brigitte Martine ranked up from rookie to squaddie and became a sharpshooter, it felt fitting. She’d faced the Hunter and come out on top; this was her destiny.

Now, in XCOM, when soldiers rank up to Sergeant, they get nicknamed. These nicknames are sometimes decent, sometimes mediocre, and sometimes just nonsensical. So when she leveled up again, I expected to have to spend a few minutes thinking of a good one—the one this clutch sniper deserved.

But then War of the Chosen decided on Brigitte “The Truth” Martine, and I was forced to consider the fact that we may be closer to sentient AI than we think.

The rest of Brigitte’s story is probably fairly predictable, but that’s what made it so enjoyable for me to play through. I sent her out on covert actions with a rookie medic, slowly leveling them up together until they bonded (another personalizing mechanic added in War of the Chosen), and occasionally sending her out on missions. On one, an op that forced me to take a severely underleveled squad out into the field, she watched two rookies bite the dust in the face of a particularly brutal robot, and saved three others that have become a kind of “Next Generation” to my set of overleveled original characters. On another, she met the Chosen Hunter again and dueled him eye-to-eye, sharpshooter against sharpshooter, coming out on top. As a Colonel—the highest rank of XCOM 2 fighter—she killed the Hunter for good, with an Overwatch shot as he tried to run away from a fight. In another context, that might sound dishonorable. But here, against that aggravating (but well-written) edgelord of a character, it felt so good.

Then, in the final mission, after decimating three pods of aliens with the Hunter’s rifle and a devastating ability that gives another shot with each successful kill, she secured the campaign’s final, winning shot—a cross-map demolition of the last key enemy as an insurmountable force was bearing down on her squad. That shot, like all the others that mission, came in at 100%. She’d become so good that no matter how bad a shot might be, she never missed.

In the end, the story of Brigitte “The Truth” Martine is the story of how I’ve fallen hard for War of the Chosen. I enjoy the combat, and the tactics, and the abilities and weapons to an extent I hadn’t fully expected coming in, but what I enjoy most, and what’s kept me glued to my monitor for the past nine days, it how every single moment is filled with personality. There are the Chosen themselves, written to a perfect balance between sci-fi campiness and horror movie strength. There are the main characters—Central, Shen, Dr. Tygan, all well-animated and well-acted and written in ways that make them likable and endearing. But then there’s also the scrappy legion of resistance fighters that the game pulls from the depths of its RNG, that theoretically begin as blank slates and then, as they do certain things, perform certain feats, achieve certain successes or failures in combat, develop into fully-fledged characters. Alongside Brigitte, I have Kenji Hashimoto, a medic who marched into his first battle with nothing but shorts and chiseled abs, and single-handedly dueled my first Codex to defeat. I have Ivan “White Hat” Ignyatev, a hacking specialist who lost his bondmate in a particularly brutal mission and still carried another dying soldier out of the fight to safety. I have Susan “Paladin” Morgan and Tao “Doc” Pan—the other two rookies to survive Bridgitte’s mission-gone-bad, that after months of fighting on my B-team developed into a formidable duo. I have Midori “Viper” Kojima, who lost her bondmade in an early fight but later bonded again with an up-and-coming medic named William “Coral” Williams, who, in my headcanon, helped her move on from the loss of her friend.

So yes, I’m writing these stories as I go, separate from the game’s internal systems. These characters are just sets of ones and zeroes, pulled from a character generator with all the precision of one of the game’s grenadiers firing at a distant target. But they don’t feel like fanfiction; they feel encouraged by the way the game makes its characters so distinctive, both in appearance and in the feedback loops that allow a player to give them clear personalities. If a sharpshooter hits a clutch shot, you might lead them up the Sniper skill tree… which will undoubtedly make them better at hitting clutch shots. You might give them some weapon mods that improve their rifle’s accuracy, and give them a PCS that raises their overall aim. XCOM 2 thrives on those hidden feedback loops—on leaving a starting point up to randomness, and then on nudging that randomness into a fleshed-out, three-dimensional, and wholly singular character. And in doing so, by making the player’s imagination and headcanon an integral part of the game’s core story, it provides a uniquely powerful realization of one of gaming’s most gripping illusions: that of being both player and co-writer, of uncovering a world that seems to evolve organically, and of building its storylines into conclusions so fitting, their inherent randomness starts to itself seem like the illusion.