The Bureau: Xcom declassified

[Justin Leego]

Oh! Then I just want to apologize in advance if that turns out not to be the case (though I will be disappointed if it isn't).

[Bjorn]

No worries, the thought had already occurred to me!  I'll be disappointed if that's not the case as well.  And I doubt this thread needs spoilers.  Is anyone playing the Bureau for its gripping world class story?

[sclpls]

The Soviet spy bit is so weird, just kind of drops in and right back out.

[Bjorn]

Old, oddly relevant video popped up on my Facebook feed this afternoon:

[Bjorn]

I got to the tweeest last night!

 

So it turns out that you are in fact controlling an alien the whole time! SHOCKING REVELATION! 

[Justin Leego]

Yes. YES.

[Bjorn]

Finished this last night, turns out I wasn't really all that far from the end once I hit the tweest. 

 

Part of me wants to bash the game, and it would be really easy.  The story trips all over itself.  The gameplay is okay, but starts wearing thin about half way through.  But I actually had fun playing through it.  It's the rare game for me that hits that B-Movie sweet spot of being bad enough to have fun laughing at it, but competent enough to not be annoying. 

 

It's a shame really, there are some bloody good ideas in there.  You can see how the game is rather bolted together, with ideas from multiple teams/leads sticking around after the direction has changed.  It was obviously at one point built around the idea of a secret black ops organization.  But for some reason they blew it up to a several month long global war rampaging across multiple continents, with unknown thousands dead, aliens running around, ships flying all over the place, pure madness.  And yet the fiction inside the game never stops pretending that they've got everything under control, no one knows outside XCOM, and they can brush this all under the rug once the war is over. 

 

For anyone curious about the ending and the tweest:

 

The whole game you're actually a "good" Ethereal controlling Agent DAWG. But he goes nuts once he figures out he's possessed, and so you have a choice of switching to 3 other characters. I took the rather nice, older gay scientist. It didn't change the gameplay, but it changed the tone. It was quite refreshing to have a patient, well spoken and generally curious protagonist for a little bit, rather than your typical angry male grunt.

Also, in the ending wrapup, they never tell you what happened to Carter, even though they cover the state of the world. It's kind of weird that the guy whose body you spend most of the game in doesn't get an update at all.

[Murdoc]

Hey Bjorn, I'd be curious to here what some of the good ideas were that you spotted; or were the good ideas just the cool secret black ops stuff?

[Bjorn]

First, I know that for some of these, the reason they aren't more fleshed out in the game is purely a case of money and time. Some of these would take significant resources, but I think at some point they must have been considered, or they are a natural extension of one of the ideas present in the game.

The original black ops parts are the biggest thing, particularly imagining a game where your missions vary between recon, action and coverup.

Mechanically, I like the Mass Effect style third person squad commander, and this is the only non-ME game I can think of that uses it. But instead of focusing on giving you abilities and weapons that would have made sense for 1960s era technology, they just jump straight into rayguns and magic space powers after the tutorial. The preponderance of regular ammo throughout the game and a few of the powers indicate that there was an interest in trying to thematically match weapons/powers to the era, but they just gave up and went the easier route. I think maintaining the original design goal of having a major technology imbalance would have resulted in a more interesting game.

I enjoy the idea of being able to deploy baby agents on their own missions, like Assassin's Creed has done. But in The Bureau, there is no risk vs. reward element. It's functionally just a checkbox asking if you would like a reward. Even if it was just a simple logic puzzle of figuring out the right class combination based on the mission description to ensure success would be more interesting. Or if you had to make choices about what missions to pursue, like deciding between acquiring a new technology or bailing out agents who had got themselves in a bad place.

Agent permadeath is completely wasted, losing an agent in the middle of a battle is just too crippling, retreat isn't an option, so you always reload. But I like the idea of having fragile humans who are losable due to your decisions, it's not a feature that shows up in action games much. Instead of combat permadeath though, I think they could have accomplished something similar by letting your agents contract the alien disease, or suffer injuries that they would need to recuperate from. So they might be less valuable (longer power cooldowns, less accurate, something) in a mission once they are injured or sick, but they wouldn't be gone, allowing you to finish the mission, but with a disadvantage. It achieves the mechanic/narrative goal of having repurcussions for your battlefield decisions without usually creating an unwinnable state as soon as an agent dies.

Story wise, it does that thing where it is so dedicated to its twist ending, that all the interesting stuff the story could have done is withheld until the final mission. I tend to think that dramatic twists are far more satisfying to creators than they are audiences except in a few rare cases. I think it is always interesting to ask the question, "What would our story be if we revealed the twist at the start of the game?" Spoilering the rest of this thought.

There are at least a few examples of games featuring symbiotic relationships, but I think there's a lot of interesting ground to explore there yet. Particularly when you have a case of an alien that humans are going to struggle to trust, but is one of their only effective tools to use against another alien enemy (a very Terminator 2 type scenario going on, but with a symbiote). But everything narratively interesting about that gets condensed down to a 5 minute cutscene that's most of the way through the game.

Directly after the reveal that you the player are actually controlling an alien symbiote bonded with angry white guy, you get to pick a new protagonist, which includes a great female character (no love interest, not sexualized, professional), an old man (the director of Xcom) or a gay scientist. For fuck's sake! Those three are all so much more narratively interesting than stock white guy. Obviously letting you make that decision much earlier in the game would result in a bunch more work. Or what if it wasn't even a decision, what if the game was simply split into 4 acts and you spent time occupying each of them. Same amount of dialogue and voice acting, it's just split between 4 characters. Then you get 4 different perspectives on Xcom.

But the idea is there, that as a symbiote, the story doesn't have to be told from the stock white guy hero perspective. They just don't let themselves indulge in it until the very end.

[Murdoc]

Thanks Bjorn, I didn't mean to draw this thread out, I was first surprised someone decided to play it after all this time and what you're feedback was since you slogged through it in the end.

 

I totally agree with your feedback on the mechanics, the inherent game system seems interesting, but the execution of the context/theme for powers really got muddled.

 

A lot of the risk and reward stuff seemed to be glazed over in favor of simplicity(so not to confuse shooter fans?) or oversight; the original idea born from Xcom was there, but again, the outcome seemed to be glossed over. This could have easily been a time/money thing in development.

 

And yeah, the story was a mess. It was a product of a long development where they had this cool idea during the Bioshock 1 days of a "gotcha" ending then 6+ years later had a billion different rewrites that couldn't divert from it's path, so it was just one horrifying mess. Despite the games problems, I think if they were bold enough to take a step back once they had the foundation of the game they released and do a mass rewrite/edit akin to what happened on Spec Ops, the game might have been received a bit better.

 

And yeah I agree, I thought the idea of you playing a stereotypical cliche game protagonist is a cute idea and how you get to throw him away in the end, only that after x amount of hours, it's no longer cute, it's just a stereotypical protagonist. For that idea to really have come through, he should have been your 20 minute tutorial character that you then throw away. 

It's funny because I think somewhere during development they lost sight that this guy was your typical meat headed yes man, it comes off in the dialog clearly, but then the marketing and much of the game is centered around how cool this "Franchise" protagonist is... yet he wasn't supposed to be. Too many crossed channels and a muddled experience through and through. 

[Bjorn]

Thanks Bjorn, I didn't mean to draw this thread out, I was first surprised someone decided to play it after all this time and what you're feedback was since you slogged through it in the end.

 

No worries about drawing it out, I would often rather talk about a flawed, but interesting, game than a great game.  There's more to say.

 

The other thought I had about this is that for Xcom as a franchise, these narrative driven side stories make sense.  The tent pole strategy game holds up the franchise, and then devs can explore some interesting stuff that just doesn't thematically fit in the strategy game.  Imagine a survival horror game where a group of civilians has to survive long enough to be extracted by Xcom soldiers during a Terror mission.  Which, I would love to see a game explore the nature of being a civilian in a war torn area.  But no major publisher is ever going to greenlight that scenario if it is too close thematically to actual modern conflicts.  But maybe you could get away with it in a sci-fi game.

 

It's a shame that this game was such a mess that we'll probably never see other ideas or stories explored. 

[chummer]

So I was eyeing this game for a long game and ended up getting it in the 2K bundle like Bjorn did. Finally got around to putting some time into it in the last couple days and I feel like the game is keeping me from enjoying it. Maybe it's just my squad in particular, but I feel like my boys are more interested in tagging along with me during combat than following orders. Maybe it's a class thing as I've noticed the sniper has done a good job of staying put. The game points out early on how valuable flanking can be, but whenever I try to set that up, my mates break cover and try to get into my area. I've not lost due to the behavior, but I definitely feel like it's made encounters longer than they should be. It's annoying to the point where I'm not sure if I'll pick it up again, which is unfortunate because when the game does work, it's kind of fun directing dudes and using abilities.

 

I've also started skipping the story stuff as well. Even if I don't think the story is great, I often find myself picking up the notes and listening to audio tapes anyway in other games. Here, I'm at the point where I'm just ending conversations as soon as the option as given to me. Mosaics. Infiltrators. W/e. Also, did they ever give a reason as to why audio diaries of day-to-day conversations are strewn about the world? Found that odd.