Tag Archives: Templar Battleforce

XCom Enemy Unknown: When Developers Don’t Understand Desire Paths

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. In XCom UFO Defense, the player sends *14* humans into each battle, and humans usually outnumbered 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 should 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.

Templar Battleforce: X-Com meets Dawn of War in a very disappointing way

I don’t have time to edit again today, but I wanted to post that Templar Battleforce is a game that’s really less than the sum of its parts. It’s currently available for 10$ and that’s probably an appropriate price point, because it’s not a hidden gem or an indie classic but rather a muddled homage to X-Com and Dawn of War.

But some of you might not know what I’m comparing it to, so let me explain.

X-Com was one of the earliest and most highly regarded squad-based tactics games on the PC. I’ve seen both the original game (made in 1993) and the modern remake (made in 2012) top lists of the 100 best games of all time. X-Com puts you in command of a squad of soldiers trying to defeat and alien invasion, and despite your rookies have the life expectancy of a WW1 soldier at higher difficulties, players became instantly attached to their digital avatars thanks to the fun mechanics, varied enemies, and interesting scenarios they could be thrown into. Naming all your soldiers after pop stars, then telling your friends how Taylor Swift hit an amazing shot to blow up a cyberdisk and save Freddie Mercury was exactly the kind of fun that X-Com was made of.

Dawn of War meanwhile was a series of tactical RTS games based on the Warhammer 40k franchise. The Dawn of War series put you in the shoes of a bunch of Space Marines fighting enemies from without and within, with a lot of the enjoyment coming from the over-the-top, dare I say “cool” scenarios you could be faced with.

See, Warhammer 40k (and the Space Marines in particular) are extremely over-the-top in every way. So having your guys drop from orbit onto a burning planet to fight an awakening God with their chainsaw-swords is exactly the kind of “cool” you want to lean in on, and the Dawn of War games delivered. Whether it was endless legions of Tyranids, nigh-unkillable Necrons, or Orks who just love to fight and talk like football hooligans, Dawn of War tried to make each battle feel like an extravagant power fantasy against impossible odds.

So Templar Battleforce is an indie game that tries to make exactly the game I wanted as a kid: an X-Com style game with Warhammer 40k lore. And it just doesn’t work.

The first problem is that the lore is kinda boring. I find myself skipping most of the dialogue and story because it just isn’t interesting. This game gets around the Warhammer 40k trademark by having these “Templars” be slightly different than the Space Marines of Dawn of War, but the game is definitely leaning towards these guys being zany impossible badasses in their own right. And it just doesn’t land, in part I think because the game doesn’t have enough fidelity to *show* cool stuff and relies on *telling* us instead.

We very rarely get a nice comparison point between our Templars and the normal humans who they’re so superior to. And we don’t really get any instances of crazy scenarios that make our Templars seem cool, like the God-chainsaw fight above. You can tell me all you want about how these enemies are so strong they’d tear through any normal human, but with no comparative or stand-out moments of their own, the Templars *feel* like normal humans. They aren’t cool, and to be honest I don’t know how to fix it.

The second problem is that the gameplay isn’t as fun as X-Com, or even as some of the Dawn of Wars like Dawn of War 2. These other squad-based games were fun because of the cool tactics you could do, the cool abilities that you could use, and how the fights encouraged experimentation and rewarded you for your ingenuity. I had moments in the original X-Com of blowing up the side of a building to flank aliens who were covering the doors, and I loved it. And later games gave your soldiers special powers that were integral to victory but also really cool to use, like snipers parkouring up an impossible ledge to get a better vantage point, or heavies using a special shredding rocket that made enemies take double damage from everyone else once they were hit by it.

Templar Battleforce doesn’t really have that. I shoot and I stab my enemies, but I don’t feel like many of my tactics are cool or interesting. I feel like I’m learning the loadouts and correctly reading the maps to find the optimal way to victory.

Part of this may be the design choice that unlike X-Com, Templar Battleforce makes it very hard to dodge shots and stabs. In X-Com a 50% chance to hit was expected, and the game was all about optimizing and improving that chance through your numerous powers and abilities. In Templar Battleforce, missing an enemy is very rare, and there isn’t much you can do to optimize and improve your damage numbers. So instead, it’s mostly a game of calculating how to use your limited movement points to fire as many shots as possible, with the assumption that each shot will do an expected range of damage.

It’s not that there’s *no* special abilities, just that they’re rare and not encouraged by the game mechanics. I like how the Hydra (flamethrower guy) can set down a wall of flame that persists for the rest of the battle. I like that the Engineer can set up turrets. But most of the abilities are just giving you small bonuses and buffs that you don’t usually need because as I said misses are rare. The game doesn’t do enough to make these bonuses and buffs feel impactful at all.

Finally the online community helpfully *discourages* you from investing into the other soldier that might be cooler like the Berzerker or the Neptune, because the game doesn’t give you enough points to spread your investments wide. Instead, the recommended playstyle is to invest heavily into the bog-standard soldier and scout classes, the least interesting classes by far.

The thing is, the soldier and scout *don’t even need to be uninteresting*. To bring it back to Dawn of War 2, that game did a lot to make every class interesting in its own unique way. Now it was real-time instead of turn based, but regardless the units in that game had heavy differentiation in their jobs and abilities. There was huge variety in the range of your weapons, the effects of your weapons, and each unit had a very unique upgrade tree that made you really think about your choices while upgrading.

My Dawn of War scout could go invisible and spam explosive mines at anyone he wanted, my Dawn of War heavy could lock down huge amounts of the map by himself, making enemies duck and move slowly, my Dawn of War soldier could ignore this ability when enemies tried to do it to us, and he could taunt enemies so they’d target him instead of my squishy scout.

These kinds of abilities made me really think about what I was doing with these units and where I was positioning them, and the maps did a lot to encourage this thinking whereas the Templar Battleforce maps just don’t do these things well.

Even better was how Dawn of War rewarded you for experimenting and playing against type. The soldier is by default a ranged-weapon guy, but you could give him his own chainsaw-sword and have him join the melee fight instead. He had a whole upgrade path that made this really effective even, taking less damage from both melee and ranged while locking down his enemies.

The Dawn of War commander could also play this game, he was by default a close-combat specialist, but you could hand him a heavy weapon if you wanted him to stay back instead. By the end of the game he could get an upgrade where he was guaranteed to 1-shot most low level enemies when he did so.

I tried playing against type in Templar Battleforce and it was severely underwelming. A melee-focused soldier is lame and ineffective, and they’ll always carry their ranged weapon just to taunt you for picking the wrong upgrades. A ranged-focused commander also feels underwelming, I can only equip pistols with paltry range and damage, no rifles or heavy weapons for the commander, not even dual-wielding pistols for rule-of-cool.

Finally, Templar Battleforce includes Relics, special items like in Dawn of War that are supposed to be of immense power and cost a lot to use. But unlike Dawn of War there’s no blurb on them to make them interesting, no tales of impossible odds or epic last stands to go along with your hand-me-down, just a name and a bonus that’s 25% bigger than the bonuses on all your other equipment.

Nor do these relic ever change your tactics like they could in Dawn of War. There’s no sword that damages you when you use it but deals massive damage to the enemies. No pistol with the range of a sniper rifle. No armor that is worse than your default armor but doubles your movement in exchange. There’s nothing here that would make you sit up and say “hey that might be cool to use.” Relics just have the same bog-standard bonuses as every other item only now the numbers are bigger.

Let me finish up with this: I don’t hate Templar Battleforce. I think 10$ is a great price and I encourage you to try it. But I’ve now tried 3 times to finish this game and I’ve always stopped short. The engaging build-a-soldier menus aren’t interesting if there’s no interesting choices like in Dawn of War, the maps aren’t fun if there’s no cool tactics and abilities like in X-Com. “X-Com meets Dawn of War” is exactly the type of game I would have made if I knew how to make games, but as Templar Battleforce proves, making great games is a lot harder than making games, and an interesting premise just isn’t enough.