Experiencing an Epic-Win

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I think about the epic-win I felt as I managed to complete a very challenging and dramatic operation in XCOM 2.

XCOM 2, a turn bases strategy game, puts the players into the role of the commander of the XCOM which is a special force fighting against an alien invasion. The gameplay itself is segmented into two main phases. On the one hand, the players have to manage the own base, conduct research and prepare their soldiers for operations against the alien invaders. On the other hand, the players also tactically command up to six soldiers during an operation with the goal to eliminate all hostiles or to complete a certain task, such as extracting a VIP or destroying an alien facility. The latter phase takes place in a turn based format. All units can use two actions per turn and once all actions are used the player’s turn is over and the computer starts to control the enemy units. In general, the goal is to take out enemies by tactically moving the own soldiers so that they get into superior positions, thus allowing them to eliminate the alien’s forces. Also, the player has access to special abilities, needs to make sure all soldiers have reloaded their weapons or get healed once they got injured by an enemy.

XCOM 2

As I progressed through the campaign of XCOM 2, I suddenly reached a certain point in the story at which the player’s base, which is a huge spacecraft, gets attacked by an UFO and has to crash-land. The spacecraft itself gets not severely damaged, but it can not start its engines again as the aliens have activated a special disruptor beacon which override the ship’s system. Thus, the player suddenly faces the challenge of defending the own base and destroying the disruptor in order to escape the approaching alien forces.

This special operation begins like any other operation by sending the player’s soldiers to the target area which is, in this case, just outside of the player’s base. Once the soldiers are deployed, the player immediately gets attacked by some enemies and has to establish a secure position. However, the player can not only defend the own position against the constant stream of incoming reinforcements as the second main goal is to destroy the disruptor beacon. Moreover, the constant stream of new enemies increase the chances that the player gets overrung an some poin as the player’s soldiers only have a limited amount of ammunition and special attacks. In addition, certain abilities of the player’s soldiers do have a cooldown and need to recharge after being used. Therefore, the player has to start proceeding towards the disruptor while dealing with new aliens joining the battle.

As I played this mission, I constantly felt the pressure to move forward as aggressiv as possible in order to destroy the alien’s disrupter beacon as soon as possible. Thus, I decided to move only a two of my soldiers forward to destroy the beacon while keeping the others a bit behind in order to deal with incoming reinforcements. As I finally destroyed the beacon, a truel fight for survival began as the alien’s started to bring more and more reinforcements to the battle field which landed between my two soldiers who destroyed the disruptor and the extraction zone. Hence, I could not just fall back as this would have exposed my soldiers to the reinforcements. This left me with only one way to get my soldiers out alive: I had to support them with my other soldiers who were still in a defense position and slowly move them back to the extraction zone.

As I finally managed to get all my soldiers to the extraction zone without anyone being wounded, I was completely overwhelmed. In contrast to a regular mission, I was constantly in a fight and I never had the chance to recover between incoming reinforcements. Usually, I would make sure that all the soldiers have reloaded their weapons and are in a good position to engage the next group. During this mission, however, this was not possible. In addition, a player normally encounters about 10 enemies during a mission on average. After this mission, I dealt with more than 30 enemy units. Hence, as I finally managed to get all my soldiers back to the extraction point alive, I experienced the overwhelming feeling of an epic-win.

An epic-win is a special overwhelming feeling that occurs when a player manages to perfectly solve a challenge that seemed impossible, the player recovers from a bad situation or achieves a goal with a team of other players in an unexpected way. In my case, I managed to perfectly overcome a challenge that seemed impossible throughout the whole mission. Especially towards the end of this operation, as several of my soldiers were out of ammunition already, I reached a point at which a small mistake would have led to a potential loss of one of my soldiers. Therefore, completing this mission in a perfect way was a fantastic feeling and I felt as if I could exhaust any other challenge XCOM 2 will throw at me.