#oneaday Day 602: The Systematic Destruction of Everything You Once Held Dear

So EA has officially confirmed the existence of Syndicate from The Darkness developer Starbreeze, and lo and behold, it’s a first person shooter. After X-COM, this makes two once-beloved PC strategy franchises pillaged in the name of popularity and commercialism.

Now, to be fair to both the new X-COM and Syndicate games, no-one’s played them in any great detail yet. (Except the developers, obviously.) So there’s every possibility that they might be very good. Syndicate in particular has a setting which lends itself to Deus Ex-style first person exploration and cyberpunk shenanigans. Perhaps it will even be able to out-Deus Ex Deus Ex: Human Revolution — given the somewhat mixed opinions I’ve heard regarding that game (mostly of the “it’s great but the boss fights suck” variety) that’s a distinct possibility.

X-COM, though, is missing the point to a spectacular degree. The whole point of the X-COM series was to repel an alien invasion through careful management of your strike teams, of your vehicles and bases. It was a complex series of games, but an immensely satisfying one as a result. Its isometric turn-based battles laid the foundations for many future games and indeed, some might say, the whole strategy RPG genre. And it’s not as if strategy RPGs have fallen out of favour, as the recent Tactics Ogre release on PSP, Disgaea 4 on PS3 and Final Fantasy Tactics on iPhone will attest. So why pillage a beloved franchise and turn it into a shooter?

Perhaps they believe that they’ll be telling an excellent story from the first person perspective. It worked for BioShock, after all (right up until that stupid ending) and it worked for the Half-Life series. But herein lies the rub — the original X-COM was an emergent experience where the story unfolded naturally as you played, and everyone’s experience was a little different. Sure, there was an end to the game (which very few people saw, I’d wager) but the route you took to get there was up to your own strategic mind and the decisions you made — and not in a BioWare RPG binary choice sort of way, all the decisions you made regarding the makeup of your team, their equipment, where they were based, how you developed them and so on. To pre-script the whole thing again seems to be missing the point somewhat.

Perhaps it’s just misplaced nostalgia that makes us ageing gamers want to remember these games as they once were, not as the populist reboots that they’re getting. After all, as gaming has become more and more mainstream and more and more people come to these big-name titles, games in once-niche franchises use the cachet of their name to attract veteran gamers while providing the quick-hit thrills of the popular FPS genre to attract younger players reared on a diet of Call of Duty.

Sadly, though, it doesn’t really work — the younger players haven’t heard of the series in question and simply come to the game because it looks interesting (and because people are talking about it) and the veteran gamers take one look at it, think it doesn’t bear even a passing resemblance to the game they once loved and thus dismiss it. They’d be much better off making proper sequels to Syndicate and X-COM in their original styles (with appropriately upgraded graphics, obviously) to appeal to those veterans — who would doubtless snap up such products in a trice — and leave the youngsters to newer IPs.

Alternatively, as someone said on Twitter earlier (I forget who, sorry if you’re reading) — if X-COM and Syndicate can become first-person shooters, why can’t Ghost Recon become an isometric turn-based strategy game? I’d play that. (And yes, I know it has already done this on the 3DS — with X-COM creator Julian Gollop behind it, no less — but I’m talking about a proper computer version, preferably PC exclusive, with renamable characters.)