It's even more interesting, since classes are random with same chances, except your first four rookies will always all get different classes (if it was left completely up to chance, you'd most likely get some duplicates only 9.375% would be all-different). Squaddie - character gets their randomly assigned class, one class-defining skillĮven before seeing individual class trees, there's a lot of very interesting design going on here.įirst - you can't choose class your rookies are going to get, so pushes the player towards a balanced team.Then as they get XP they get levels, and on each level they get HP, Aim, and Will bonuses, plus one skill, either mandatory or one of two to choose from. You get a bunch of 0xp soldiers, who don't even have character classes. It's just much easier to discuss this with a concrete example than on purely theoretical terms.įirst, the basics in case you never played it. I'll be explaining what they did right and what they did wrong in designing skill trees, and then I'll summarize design points at the end of the point. XCOM: Enemy Unknown is an amazing game, and this post is about how to choose optimal skill tree for various character classes in XCOM, but really it's just using that as a game design exercise.
