A desire path is a very simple idea. While the sidewalk may take a roundabout way to go from A to B, humans want to go more directly, and will happily walk across grass to get where they’re going. Walking a dirt path into a manicured lawn may seem uncouth on the face of it, but the people who walk these paths aren’t in any way stupid or evil. A desire path is in fact a sign that whoever developed the concrete path was ridiculously out of touch with getting from A and B, and didn’t care about the time of the people who would use their path. A desire path shows when a developer has failed.

There are ways to prevent desire paths. If a developer doesn’t want to admit they’ve failed, they can try to add barricades, like benches or hedges, to keep people on the path. These rarely work unless they take the form of an insurmountable fence, at which point the greenery area is no longer a nice little park space and instead becomes a fenced off fortress, basically ruining the greenery in the process.

A good developer however will reconsider how they’ve engineered the pathway, and will try to make a new path that better fits people’s desires.

XCom Enemy Unknown (EU) is a sequel to the original XCom: UFO Defense (a game from 1990). XCom EU has an expansion pack, XCom Enemy Within (EW), and a sequel, disappointingly just called XCom 2. I’ve been playing these game over the week to compare them to Templar Battleforce, which I wrote about earlier, and I still hope to make that post. But for now, playing XCom EU has made me think of desire paths.

See, XCom EU, XCom EW, and XCom 2 all have their own version of the desire paths problem. Essentially the game forces players to play one way in order to play well. The Devs don’t like that the players are playing this one way, but rather than reengineer their game, the devs instead just tried to add barricades.

To explain, let me briefly summarize the gameplay of these games. XCom (all versions) involves a secret organization (called XCom, natch) trying to defend the world from an alien invasion. Aliens will randomly attack places on earth, and XCom will send a squad of soldiers to take them out.

In the 21st century XCom games, the map your soldiers fight on is covered in fog of war, and the aliens will move around the map in little groups which the devs call “pods”. These pods are completely passive however, and won’t attack the humans or do anything of note until the humans get within range to “activate” them. The aliens might have 5 or 6 pods on the map, and the game quickly turns into a sort of peekaboo farce.

See in a normal wargame, and indeed in XCom UFO Defence from 1990, soldiers should be expected to scout as much of the map as possible to find their enemies, find good ground, and so forth. In the 21st century XCom games however, scouting the whole map is *extremely* counter productive, as it will mean activating all the alien pods and having all the aliens converge on your position. The humans can never have more than 6 soldiers in each battle. So if each alien pod has 3 aliens and there are 5 pods on the map, activating them all makes the gunfight into a 6 vs 15 affair. If however the humans only activate one pod of aliens at a time, they can turn the fight into a series of 6 vs 3 fights, which are all very easy to win.

But the only way to activate just one pod at a time is to NOT scout forward, to not even move forward a single step, until the pod you are currently fighting has been defeated.

Thus, the 21st century XCom games have a perverse incentive, they reward the player for scouting as *little of the map as possible*, keeping all their soldiers bunched up, and never moving forward to flank an enemy. Doing this keeps every fight a 6 vs 3 affair because it prevents the player from ever activating more than 1 pod at a time.

The pods can move around the map sure, but the game also prevents the player from ever being flanked by surprise. If a pod moves into the player’s flank, the aliens will be activated sure, but they won’t start firing on the player from their advantageous position, instead they’ll just run for cover and honorably wait for the humans to take the first shot.

This all comes together to make “good play” in the 21st century XCom games a dull, turtling affair. Players sit back in cover and plink away at aliens, then cautiously move forward to activate the next group. One by one by one. Good play doesn’t involve inquisitive scouting, or daring flanking attacks, or wisely using the terrain to your advantage. Good play instead involves not giving into boredom and just plinking away from cover until the aliens are dead.

In my opinion, the entire reason for this problem is the pod system itself. XCom UFO Defense from the 1990s didn’t have this problem at all, aliens moved around the map in a totally active way. If aliens were on XCom’s flank, they’d happily walk right up and start firing, they wouldn’t run to cover and wait for XCom to take its turn first. Aliens weren’t passive on the map, and so the humans weren’t incentivized to be passive turtles either. You were incentivized to *actively scout the map* because you needed to find the aliens (who could see you from further away than you could see them).

Because you had to actively scout ahead in XCom UFO Defense, you were also encouraged to use that map knowledge to flank alien positions or take good ground when you found it. You weren’t punished by activating more aliens and getting outnumbered, all the aliens were active by default. XCom enemy unknown send *14* humans into each battle, and they usually outnumbered the aliens 2 to 1 in the early game.

So we see the difference right here, in XCom UFO Defense from 1990, you are encouraged to scout ahead so you can bring your own numbers to bear in fighting the outnumbered aliens. In the 21st century XCom games, you are encouraged to sit back and turtle, because scouting ahead gets you outnumbered and defeated.

The devs of the 21st century XCom games realized this. They realized that they had accidentally encouraged their players to play in as boring a way as possible in order to win. They weren’t happy that players were sitting back instead of scouting forward. But like a bad developer, they didn’t try to reengineer the system to encourage players to play a better way, they just tried to stick up guard rails that punished players for playing the boring way.

XCom EW, the expansion pack to XCom EU, introduced meld, a resource which you can collect on the map but which self-destructs after a certain number of turns. This is supposed to encourage the player to get a move on and move forward. The game also introduced a few voice lines by the commander of XCom telling you that you really shoudl start moving forward during the base defense mission of the game. Yes, even though it’s a base *defense* mission, the devs want the players to be aggressively moving forward, and so have the commander repeatedly use the same voice lines to tell them to do so.

But this doesn’t solve the problem. Yes those resources may self-destruct, and so you’re rewarded for pushing forward. But pushing forward results in a 6 vs 15 firefight like I explained above. That leads to the death of all your soldiers, which means you can’t get those resources anyway. The best way to beat XCom on its harder settings is STILL to hang back and turtle.

XCom 2 went a step further and introduced timed missions, to FORCE the player to move. But now we just place the player on a precipice with 2 sides to fall off of. Go too fast, and the player gets killed by the 6 vs 15 firefight. Go to slow, and the player gets killed by the timer running out. We still haven’t done anything to make scouting forward rewarding or interesting, we’ve just made the player lose if they don’t get a move on.

The XCom devs don’t realize that the players were just following the most efficient path to reach their destination. Players want to win the game, and the system the devs designed made it so the best way to win was to hang back and turtle. The devs wanted players to scout forward, so they should have redesigned the game so that scouting forward was the best way to win the game. They didn’t do this, you still have a game were hanging back is best, and where scouting forward gets you killed, the devs just put barricades on the path to badly hamper the player’s ability to get to where they want to go effectively.

XCom EU, EW, and XCom 2 are all pretty good games. But they didn’t seem to do well enough financially to get an XCom 3 any time soon. They were great at cashing in on nostalgia for XCom UFO Defense from 1990, but I think if the 1990 game could be played with graphics and UI from the 21st century, it would still be considered the better game. Because gameplaywise they are night and day, XCom UFO Defense encourages the players to play in a fun way, 21st century XCom encourages players to play in a boring way, then harasses them for doing so.

It’s such a shame because in many ways the 21st century XCom games brought so much to the series that I love, and brought about ideas that Templar Battleforce could have, and should have learned from. But the game from 1990 is still has the better gameplay in my mind, I just can’t have as much fun with its godawful UI and eye-searing graphics.