Decision consequences vs Narrative (Xcom chimera squad)

I recently wrote about how irreversible decisions can be a powerful tool in game design.

One of the examples was XCOM and how it deals with permanent death of in-game characters.

Today I would like to look at it from a bit more narrative driven point of view. We will encounter bit of a trouble when we try to use something like permanent death while using those characters as storytelling devices.

This is one of those fundamental problems, where you can’t quite have both.

Either you have a character driven game, where characters drive the story forward or you you have characters dying.

There are of course ways how to go about both, you could include death of the character as a part of the story, but you can’t do that too often. Purely from pragmatic point of view, if you have 5 different characters in the game and potentially any of them could die at a specific point of the game, you will need to have 5 different branches how your game continues depending on who died.

That’s 5 times amount of story that needs to be written, voice-acted etc…
The more major effect in the game, more extra work it will be.
Something like this may become possible with improved workflows and LLMs helping us write and narrative designer overseeing rather than writing, but we are not quite there yet.

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XCOM: Chimera Squad made this change to XCOM experience, where none of your soldiers can really die.

It certainly has its downsides… since important soldiers can’t really die now, XCS lost most of its suspense. You can risk anything and everything since the game will just reload if you fail.

That takes important part of why I like XCOM and throws it away. It’s more of a liner puzzle game now, where you can’t progress until you solve the current puzzle.

On the other hand, this approach offered a lot of benefits. Characters have much nicer design, they are driving the story with their own backstory, everyone is fully voiced, joking with each other and overall dynamic feels a lot more like a small team.

It’s a tradeoff that’s important to consider, like mentioned above, there are benefits and disadvantages to both. I think, most important here is to consider what the game is about, what is its essence and based on that consider this.