In my first post, I briefly mentioned that the game I want to make is a cross between one of my favourite strategy/tactics games, XCOM, and my current tabletop RPG system of choice, Pathfinder 2E. I’m going to expand on what I like about these games in this post and explain my initial thoughts for what gameplay will be like.
What do I like about XCOM?
Back in 2012, Firaxis Games released XCOM: Enemy Unknown. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, the Steam version currently doesn’t launch on many systems, so it’s not worth buying at the moment, which is a shame. There’s also a DLC, XCOM: Enemy Within. Later, Firaxis Games released a sequel – XCOM 2, the Steam version of which does work at the moment. This also has one big DLC, War of the Chosen, and a couple of smaller DLCs.
The gameplay differs a bit due to story differences, but there’s a lot of similarities. In both, you build up your base and manage relationships with different regions of the world, and then send squads of soldiers on missions, which are handled as turn-based combat on a grid. In both, you research new weapons and alien abilities, letting you equip your soldiers better against the alien invaders, who also gain strength as the game progresses. Your soldiers level up as they participate in missions, allowing you to pick abilities depending on their class, making them more and more powerful.
The things I really enjoy about XCOM and XCOM 2:
- Building my base up
- Getting a new shiny toy with which to fight the aliens
- Leveling up my soldiers and choosing their equipment loadout
- The tactical combat
- Naming your soldiers lets you feel more attached
- Semi-random mission generation
There is one thing that I find a bit lacking in XCOM and XCOM2 though – it’s really easy to just have one squad of super soldiers and not bother with others unless someone dies. There is no incentive to have a larger roster of soldiers since your A-team is always available.
Long War
A team of modders created this excellent mod for XCOM. It was so popular that Firaxis Games then paid them to create Long War 2 for XCOM 2. Since then, the team opened their own studio, Pavonis Interactive, and they released their own full game, Terra Invicta, which is also very good. Development of Long War 2 was expanded on by other modders when War of the Chosen came out, and Long War of the Chosen was born.
What do these mods do differently from the base XCOM games?
One of the main features is that they make the campaign much, much longer, and give the aliens better AI, making it an epic feat to finish a full campaign and increasing the lethality. I have yet to finish a campaign, but still very much enjoy the mod! Secondly, and more interestingly for me, they add mechanics that mean you need multiple squads of soldiers. In the original Long War, soldiers would become fatigued and need rest if sent on too many missions in a row. In Long War 2 and Long War of the Chosen, your squad needs to spend time infiltrating, so is unavailable for other missions. There are also more classes of soldiers available, with more diverse abilities.
So, what I enjoyed most about Long War/Long War 2/Long War of the Chosen is:
- You need more soldiers than base XCOM/XCOM 2
- Soldiers have more options available, so each one feels a bit more unique
- Organising soldiers into squads to take on multiple missions in quick succession
Why Did I Pick Pathfinder 2E?
My second big source of inspiration is tabletop RPGs, specifically Pathfinder 2E. The ruleset for Pathfinder 2E is available for free online if you want to give it a try. Pathfinder 2E has very robust rules, loads of character options, encourages team play, is very well balanced, and it’s really easy to put together encounters. This, in my opinion, makes it an excellent candidate to use in a video game.
As an aside, I played a lot of D&D 5E, and had a lot of fun with it, but I don’t think it’s as good as PF2E for me, and Wizards of the Coast are not very welcoming towards third party products, such as video games. I love Baldur’s Gate 3, but most of the fun there came from Larian’s adaptation and not because D&D 5E is an inherently good system.
Back to PF2E. Let’s take a look at the things I like most about it, and then I’ll explain why I think these are a good fit for my game:
- Three action system
- Loads of balanced character options
- Tactical grid-based combat that encourages teamwork
- The maths around encounters works incredibly well, so it’s easy to build encounters
- The degrees of success system
Three Action System
Each character gets three actions in a turn. Every ability has an action cost – most are 1-3 actions with some exceptions. Want to move? That costs one action. Wand to move again? Sure, keep going until you run out of actions if you want. How about attacking? Each attack also costs an action, although there are penalties to attacking multiple times as PF2E wants you to use your other abilities too. This system feels like it meshes very well with an XCOM-style game.
Character Options
There are so many options available that you can create many characters of the same class who all feel very different. The options are all well-balanced against each other too, so, while there are min-max choices available, no option feels significantly stronger or worse than the others. An excellent demonstration of this, using Fighters, which are often considered the most boring/basic class, as the example, is in this YouTube series by Ronald the Rules Lawyer, one of the biggest PF2E content creators.
I probably won’t implement everything, but I feel like having a lot of choice for characters can help each one feel unique and let the player form an attachment to their favourites.
Combat Encourages Teamwork
There are lots of support options available in PF2E, so it’s great to see that they have a significant impact during combat. This encourages players to make characters who aren’t necessarily damage focused, because setting things up so that the enemy can’t act, or so that a barbarian can get in that big hit is arguably a greater contribution than just having everyone try to do the biggest damage they can. Building synergies and seeing them pay off is very rewarding in any game, so this is something that I definitely want.
Good Encounter-Building Maths
I like it when games don’t feel one-sided. PF2E’s maths for building encounters is so good that I can pull enemies out of a list pretty much at random and throw together an encounter without needing to worry about accidentally overwhelming my players. Sure, there are some exceptions – a party very focused on precision and critical damage will have a lot of trouble against slimes, for example – but these are quite rare.
Being able to throw together random encounters of varying difficulty levels and knowing that they are quite fair is very important when a large part of the game is going to be randomly generated missions and combats.
Degrees of Success System
This one is less important for a video game, but is something that I like and will be implementing anyway.
PF2E has four degrees of success, depending on how well you roll:
- Critical Success – 10+ higher than target number
- Success – 0-9 higher than target number
- Failure – 1-9 lower than target number
- Critical Failure – 10+ lower than target number
So if you’re trying to hit an enemy and need a 16 to hit…
- Getting 26+ will be a critical success (critical hit)
- Getting 16-25 will be a normal success (hit)
- Getting 7-15 will be a failure (miss)
- Getting 6 or lower will be a critical failure (critical miss)
Rolling a natural 20 on the die increases your degree of success by one place, e.g. a failure becomes a success, or a success becomes a critical success etc. Conversely, rolling a nature 1 reduces your degree of success by one place, e.g. failure becomes critical failure, critical success becomes a success, etc. Different abilities have different results depending on the degree of success.
This system means that every bonus you can get pushes you slightly closer to that critical success, while every penalty you can put on your enemy means they’re less likely to critically hit you. This plays into the teamwork emphasis of PF2E since everything you do can have a big effect on whether your barbarian get that high-damage critical hit, or letting your wizard land that debilitating spell that keeps the enemy from squishing your fragile rogue.
So… What game do I want to make?
I want to build a game similar to XCOM with a fantasy theme, and I think PF2E is a great fit for this. This is going to be a massive undertaking, which I will mitigate slightly by building it as a 2D game rather than a 3D game, but I fully expect this to take years to make, especially as I’m doing it in my free time.
Things I want in my game:
- Base building/upgrading – letting you build upgraded equipment, expanding the abilities your adventurers can take, allowing you to find more difficult quests, and progressing the story
- A large roster of adventurers you can customise – starting with their names (since I can do that easily), and ideally letting you make a custom portrait
- Diverse adventurers, even within the same class – so not every fighter should feel the same, I want the player to have meaningful choices about what abilities to take, and what gear to equip them with
- A world map, upon which random quests generate, with easier quests generating close to your home base and harder ones appearing as you progress – each quest will have a travel time associated, so when you send a party those adventurers and their gear are unavailable until the quest is completed or abandoned, so that it encourages players to recruit many adventurers
- A chain of main story quests, which spawn when you complete various objectives
- Tactical combat in the quests, using the PF2E system
- Quests provide rewards of experience (leveling up the adventurers), various resources (to build more gear, or recruit more adventurers), gear (that can be equipped immediately), and lore (which may be used to research specific enemies, or discover certain quests). Maybe some other stuff too
That’s an awful lot of features, and many of them need fleshing out from a gameplay perspective. Some immediate examples:
- What base upgrades should there be?
- How do I make the world map more interesting?
- What are the resources quests give as rewards?
- What character feats and spells do I prioritise?
And there’s also the coding. Lots of coding. A mountain of code.
What do you think of my gameplay ideas so far and do you have any thoughts about how I can flesh things out? Do you think I’m at least slightly mad choosing such a big project as my first game?