>I'm not terribly fond of the phrase itself, because it has that usual
>whiff of "only hardcore elite gamers deserve to play games" snobbery
>about it that is one of the baneful parts of gaming culture.* There
>is a lot of that in Firaxis games generally, and the XCOM
>series in particular, and as an agèd scrublord who doesn't feel a
>need to apologize to adolescents, I'm annoyed by it. Still, at least
>they offer the possibility at all.

Wait... what?

Firaxis is literally the precise opposite of this, man. So is XCOM!

Firaxis is basically a vehicle for Sid Meier games, primarily Civ, and, since they picked up the license five years ago, XCOM. And all of those games are designed explicitly around the assumption that even if you're not a hardcore elite gamer, you should be able to play the game and enjoy the experience and achieve success.

Let's look at XCOM specifically. Right out of the gate, they offer a variety a ways to make the game as accessible as you want it to be. Ever played on Rookie? Both XCOMS and their various expansions and DLCs are walkovers on Rookie. X-rays die if you look at them hard, to say nothing of if you actually try and kill them. Chrysallids deliver cute little love taps. And of course even if you do manage to get into trouble, you have convenient quicksave/quickload options. That's right in the basic options menu when you first load in.

And as time went by, they offered you all kinds of other ways in which to customize the experience to your liking. People didn't like the constant timered missions in XCOM2, so they were like "we hear what you're saying, so now you can just turn that off. And while we're at it we'll let you set and tweak and customize or just plain eliminate a lot of other parts of the game that some people seem to not like." That's the epitome of accessibility.

They don't even hide the "real ending" or the "secret ending" behind the higher difficulties. You get the same endings regardless of how you beat it, all the way from Rookie while re-loading every time you get injured to a flawless Ironman Legendary run.

And of course their other big series, Civ, has had since its inception a whole bunch of difficulty settings to ensure accessibility. Civ is famous for it's accessibility. And they made simpler versions of it for people who bounced off that, even!

I don't know where you're getting snobbery from them, I truly don't. Firaxis makes bad design decisions fairly regularly, as do most game studios, but the notion that they're focused on hardcore elite gamers and everyone else can get wrekt seems without evidence.

>>Almost as moronic as the armor you can make from
>>their skins--GOD those things look stupid, even if they're powerful.
>
>...
>
>What the fuck, Firaxis.

Eh?

We've been killing X-rays and wearing them as clothing for ages. Most of the best armor upgrades and add-ons you could get in the first game came from wearing Chryssalid carapaces.

-Merc
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