JAGGED ALLIANCE 3
Escaping the spectre of XCOM by never telling you the odds
IN THE JUNGLE, DURING HEAVY RAIN, VISIBILITY IS LOWERED, BUT SO TOO IS SOUND
It’s hard to overstate just how important Firaxis’ XCOM reboot was. In the years since its release, the turn-based strategy genre has experienced a renaissance that owe a huge debt to Firaxis’ clever mix of old and new. But what if you’re trying to make the successor to a different turn-based classic? Then, it seems, XCOM’s legacy can be a hindrance.
“We found that, no matter what we did, everyone played just like they played all the other games like XCOM,” says Brad Logston, senior producer for Jagged Alliance 3. “They weren’t playing it like Jagged Alliance. We didn’t even know how to fix it. We were doing things like tweaking AI, tweaking weapon damage ranges, all these different things. Nothing was really working.”
The solution may seem small, but it’s had an oversized effect on how the game plays. “One of our combat systems designers proposed, ‘You know, this may be crazy – and people are gonna kill us – but what if we just remove chance-to-hit and see how that works.’ Once we did, everything shifted. Before, if someone had a 75% chance shot, they wouldn’t take it. They’d hold back. Once we removed chance-to-hit, they start experimenting. It also meant we could make the AI more fluid. They could try things, they could be a little sloppy during play.”
Some of my favourite turn-based games of this new era are ones that give the player an overabundance of information – like Into the Breach or
Invisible, Inc. But here, Haemimont Games has discovered something that gets to the essence of what made the early Jagged Alliance’s mix of turn-based combat and RPG-lite management so good. These are not games about responding perfectly to the situation – they’re about adapting to the unexpected.
“It’s not just chance-to-hit,” says Logston. “Even things like weapon jam chance, or grenade fumble chance are hidden. I’ve had situations where I’ve been on the second story of a building, fumbled a grenade, and blown up the floor beneath me. All the mercs fell down one floor, took fall damage and were stunned for a turn.”
HEAVY RAIN
The Jagged Alliance series has reemerged a few times in the last couple of decades, but never in a way that did justice to the spirit and depth of the first two games. But here, it feels like Haemimont wants to get it right. Its African setting features extreme weather effects that will change the combat simulation – in the jungle, during heavy rain, visibility is lowered, but so too is sound, giving your mercs an opportunity to exploit.
Its roster of 40 mercs are all fully voiced, with personalities that may clash against each other. The strategy layer is classic Jagged Alliance: a dynamic map that tracks and simulates both the missions you deploy your mercs on, and the enemy force’s attempts to retake what was once theirs.
But the real sign of Haemimont’s commitment is that one seemingly small decision to upend the conventions that XCOM laid down. It would have been easy to make another XCOM-like, but it wouldn’t have been Jagged Alliance.
“Where we had it before, it was just XCOM,” says Logston. “And we were like, ‘Well, are we just cloning what someone else has already done?’ That doesn’t make us special. We had to find how to bring that Jagged Alliance experience back.”
Perhaps the bigger question then, is whether people want a departure from the systems that have come to define the genre. Is there a place for Jagged Alliance in this turn-based renaissance? As someone who loved the borderline chaos of those early games, I really hope there is.