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The Gollop Chamber - Julian Gollop's column at PC Gamer

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That's right, Gollop is a gaming journalist now. What can't he do? http://www.pcgamer.com/the-gollop-chamber-xcom-is-now-a-genre/

The Gollop Chamber: XCOM is now a genre
In his first column for PC Gamer Indie, creator of the original X-COM Julian Gollop argues his game has become a genre of its own.

Welcome to my first column for PC Gamer. What’s it all about, you may ask? You can look forward to my musings on games, the games industry, and also follow progress on my new XCOM-style game, Phoenix Point, which is underway at Snapshot Games in sunny Bulgaria.

Phoenix Point was first announced at the PC Gamer Weekender event in March last year, where I argued that XCOM is now an established genre, thanks to the tremendous success of the Firaxis games. Ever since I signed over the X-COM rights to MicroProse back in 1997 I have been trying to build a new X-COM-style game, but I never quite succeeded, despite releasing several turn-based games over the last 15 years. The XCOM genre is something special and distinct, and diverging too far from its fundamental design pillars results in something less than satisfactory.

MicroProse/Hasbro learned the hard way when they attempted to attach the X-COM name to games that weren’t really X-COMish enough, such as X-COM Interceptor (a space sim) X-COM Enforcer (an FPS) and the cancelled X-COM Alliance (a team-based FPS). Publishers, it seems, were no longer confident in the old school strategy/tactics style of X-COM. In the heyday of grand turn-based strategy games we had Civilization (1991), Master of Orion (1993), Master of Magic (1994) and the first X-COM (1994). All of them were highly successful games, and they were all published by MicroProse.

Then something dramatic happened—the RTS genre became the dominant game genre on PC, thanks largely to Warcraft (1994) and Command & Conquer (1995). Although Dune II established the genre on PC, it took a while for the seed to grow. By 1996 it seemed like every developer was working on some kind of RTS game.

At the Game Developer’s Conference in 1996 sessions on pathfinding for RTS games were packed with hundreds of developers with standing room only. The Dune II seed had become a forest. It’s fair to say that this turn of events did influence me to give X-COM Apocalypse a real time tactical mode (but with an option for turn-based battles). However, in no way could the game be called an RTS, as it was defined by Dune II.

In 1999 I began development on a new XCOM-style game called The Dreamland Chronicles: Freedom Ridge for our new publisher, Virgin Interactive. I believed at that time that the PC market was going to be increasingly difficult to make a profit from, so the game was intended for the Playstation 2 as well as the PC.

It’s true that PC gaming was having a bit of a crisis, due partly to rampant piracy, spiralling development costs and generally poor quality, buggy releases. There was also a general lack of design innovation. The flood of RTS clones had ended, but there was nothing new and exciting to replace it.

Although Dreamland was destined for the PS2, it was still fundamentally an X-COM-style game, with turn-based battles and a real-time geoscape. It did, however, involve a number of adaptations to the console game format. The soldiers were controlled by directly moving them in third person with the controller. An ‘action point’ bar diminished as the character moved. The shooting used a first-person view, allowing the player to freely aim via a controller stick, if desired. It was eerily reminiscent of a PS3 game released in 2008 called Valkyria Chronicles (since released on PC).

Sadly, Dreamland was cancelled after Virgin Interactive was sold to Interplay, and then Interplay to Titus Interactive in short succession. After my studio, Mythos Games, was liquidated, the code base for Dreamland would be given to Altar Interactive who went on to produce UFO: Aftermath, although not much remained of our original story and game mechanics.

In 2005 Take-Two purchased the rights to sci-fi strategy franchise X-COM from Atari (formerly Infogrames) after Atari had lost interest in the X-COM franchise following the cancellation of X-COM: Alliance in 2002. Reorganised under the 2K umbrella, the former Bioshock 2 studios, 2K Marin and 2K Australia, began development on a new XCOM game.

When it was finally announced to the public in April 2010 it was presented as a “Mystery-filled first-person shooter from the creators of BioShock 2.” The E3 trailer portrayed a 1950s setting with amorphous ink blob aliens and shapeshifters. A camera was used to collect evidence that then had to be ‘researched’. It looked like it could be an interesting game, but it just wasn’t X-COM, and unsurprisingly the reaction from X-COM fans wasn’t very favourable.

Christoph Harmann, president at 2K Games, explained that “the problem was that turn-based strategy games were no longer the hottest thing on planet Earth. But this is not just a commercial thing—strategy games are just not contemporary."

I felt dismayed by these comments, and it spurred me to put a team together with the idea of raising funds on Kickstarter to make my own spiritual remake. At that time there was also another X-COM-like game in development by a small indie collective called Xenonauts, but I felt there was room for both of us.

However, when Firaxis announced that they were going to release their own X-COM game everything I planned for seemed superfluous. If anyone could do X-COM properly, then it would be Sid Meier’s studio.

But here we are five years after the success of the Firaxis remake and Phoenix Point is a thing. We raised $760k in March through fig.co, and my own take on an XCOM style game is well under way. There is such a thing as 'the XCOM genre', and I am really excited for the future. I am not alone any more.
 
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Wow that is one unnecessary and garbage column. Hopefully if he keeps it up Gollop uses that space to actually discuss game theory and design instead of using it as a soapbox to self-promote/propagate a pretty insular and self-absorbed version of industry history.

Christ.
 

luinthoron

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Well, that was basically the speech we've already seen a couple of times in his presentations. So for now I'll take it as his introduction to PC Gamer's audience and wait for the "first actual article" to judge how he'll do there.
 

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http://www.pcgamer.com/the-gollop-chamber-where-are-all-the-lovecraftian-games/

The Gollop Chamber: Where are all the Lovecraftian games?
In his column for PC Gamer Indie, creator of the original X-COM Julian Gollop wonders why games only draw tangentially from H. P. Lovecraft.

In any game developer’s career there is always that game you wanted to make, but never got to make. And you still think is a great idea. And nobody else has done anything like it.

For me the ‘one that got away’ was a concept I prepared for MicroProse shortly after finishing work on the original UFO: Enemy Unknown / X-COM: UFO Defense in 1994. It was heavily inspired by the works of H. P. Lovecraft, set in the 1930s in an alternate version of history where renowned occultist Aleister Crowley plotted to take over the world by summoning monsters through an alternate dimension. (Crowley himself was a real, historical figure, a founder of the religion Thelema and a leading member of the Ordo Templi Orientis.)

As the player, you controlled a secret organisation funded by the League of Nations to investigate mysterious sightings of terrible creatures and reports of strange cults abducting scientists from around the world. Crowley's cult had found a way to open ‘gates’ at various points in the world which connected to gates on a planet in an alternate dimension. The alternative planet would act as a fast-travel system for travelling around the world, albeit a very dangerous one. Your immediate task was to build a brave band of occult investigators, equipped with magic, rituals and guns. Then you had to confront and destroy the horrors as they appeared. Your ultimate objective was to close down the dimension gates for good.

You're probably thinking that the structure of this game bears a passing resemblance to X-COM, and you would be right. There would have been turn-based tactical battles, and a ‘geoscape’-style strategic display. However, MicroProse didn’t like it. Their reasoning was that horror games don’t sell, and they knew this because they had made one and it didn’t sell (the game in question was The Legacy: Realm of Terror).

They instead wanted a sequel to X-COM, which should be completed in six months. I said that this was not possible, so we came to an agreement whereby MicroProse would make the sequel to X-COM, and I would make the third game in the series.

So the sequel to X-COM became X-COM: Terror From the Deep, and our game became X-COM: Apocalypse. Now the funny thing is that Terror From The Deep actually contained elements of Lovecraftian horror, with a hideous Cthulhu-like entity lying dormant in the sea. X-COM Apocalypse featured some ideas from my Lovecraftian game pitch, with its dimension gates and a bizarre alien world. However, they were nothing like the scale and depth that I imagined. Afterwards I wondered, would any other games would be inspired by Lovecraft in a similar way to my rejected concept?

In order to understand the influence of Lovecraft on games, it is useful to know something about the influence of Lovecraft on fantasy, sci-fi and horror fiction. His works consisted mainly of short stories, usually published in magazines, and they had similar themes. There were secret cults, powerful, ancient creatures and very weird aliens. Horrible things usually happen to the protagonist, often involving some kind of transformation or insanity.

Something about sea creatures really bothered Lovecraft, as revealed in some of his creepier stories such as The Shadow Over Innsmouth. Lovecraft’s personal traumas and phobias certainly affected his work. He suffered from parasomnia (night terrors), and his xenophobia infected a few of his stories.

He created the Necronomicon, a book of cultish secrets, and the fictional town of Arkham, which have been used repeatedly in novels, films and games. He directly mentored, inspired and influenced a wide circle of contemporary writers, including Robert Bloch, the author of Psycho, and Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian. He also influenced Stephen King, artist H. R. Giger and filmmaker John Carpenter, whose film The Thing was based on a 1938 book called Who Goes There? which was itself directly influenced by (in my opinion) Lovecraft’s best story At the Mountains of Madness.

Nowadays Lovecraft is not so highly regarded in literary circles, his racist views causing the World Fantasy Awards to drop the bust of Lovecraft as their award in 2015. However, it is possible to adapt aspects of Lovecraft without the unsavoury elements and redeploy it in new media, which is precisely what has happened with board games in recent years.

As far as I know, the first significant game influenced by Lovecraft was the 1981 pen-and-paper roleplaying game Call of Cthulhu, which remains popular to this day. A 2013 crowdfunding campaign for the 7th Edition with a goal of $40,000 raised $561,836 and it was published last year.

One problem for Lovecraftian games is that the essence of Lovecraft’s horror was the idea that humankind is incredibly insignificant and powerless in the face of ancient alien races. Man is lucky to be ignorant—if he knew the truth he would go crazy. It’s not that the creatures in his stories were evil, they just displayed ‘cosmic indifference’ to the fate of humanity.

There have been very few direct interpretations of Lovecraft in computer games.

The Call of Cthulhu RPG had combat, but also added a neat ‘insanity’ mechanic, which caused your character to go insane through repeated exposure to horrors and cosmic truths. This is an idea that has been copied in subsequent Lovecraftian board games and computer games.

The company which has really delved deep into the Lovecraftian Mythos is board game publisher Fantasy Flight Games, with titles such as Arkham Horror, Mansions of Madness, Eldritch Horror and the rather excellent Arkham Horror Card Game. FFG’s take on the Cthulhu Mythos involves a lot more confrontations with monsters, and a significantly more diverse and interesting set of ‘investigators’ than Lovecraft envisaged, but it retains a good deal of Lovecraftian flavour.

There have been very few direct interpretations of Lovecraft in computer games. Bethesda’s Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth published in 2006 was an FPS with a few puzzles which didn’t really capture the essence of Lovecraft. More recently, Bloodborne incorporates a very strong Lovecraft influence (but sadly is unlikely to find its way onto the PC). Cyanide Studios' upcoming Call of Cthulhu is perhaps the most promising game on the horizon, although it has now been delayed until 2018. For me, what makes this one exciting is that it is an official adaptation of the Call of Cthulhu pen-and-paper RPG. I am awaiting its release with eager anticipation.

As much as I like Lovecraftian games, I have one complaint—these games are almost all set in the 1930s. You might argue that this was when Lovecraft set his stories, but I would counter that Lovecraft’s success was partly based on using a contemporary setting and the latest scientific knowledge known to him. A better implementation of Lovecraftian horror would need to be set closer to the present day and informed by modern science.

This brings me to my latest project, Phoenix Point, which has some very strong Lovecraftian themes, but set in an alternate histor with dramatic events occurring in the near future. The main adversary in Phoenix Point appears, at first, to be a virus known as a pandoravirus, which contains a massive genome with many unique sequences not found in any earth-based life form. The pandoravirus has been lying dormant under the permafrost for millennia, but is released into the world's oceans as a consequence of global warming. It proceeds to mutate earth-based life forms progressively from the smallest to the biggest, affecting humans eventually, and combining them with other animals and a distinct alien influence.

Around this we have created sophisticated game lore, thanks to our writing team of Jonas Kyratzes, who worked on The Talos principle, and Allen Stroud, who worked with me on Chaos Reborn. We have a great collection of short stories, many Lovecraftian in inspiration, available on our website for you to dig deeper, if you are interested. I feel that with Phoenix Point I have finally been able to bring back some of my earlier influences which led to my rejected game pitch in 1994. All is not lost.
 
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He forgot to mention the excellent Shadow of the Comet and the (vastly inferior, but still kinda fun) Prisoner of Ice.
Lovecraftian influences on Pheonix Point are incline for sure.
 

Jimmious

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Gollop is really a monocled man. Someone should let him know of Stygian: Reign of the Old Ones by the way.

Also....
MIIIISTER Crowley what went down in your head
Mr. Crowley, did you talk to the dead
Your lifestyle to me seems so tragic
With the thrill of it all
You fooled all the people with magic
You waited on Satan's call
 

LESS T_T

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http://www.pcgamer.com/the-gollop-chamber-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-of-rng/

The Gollop Chamber: The good, the bad, and the ugly of RNG

HmWEoeMHy8fXzTCmn58yaN-650-80.jpg


Never has there been a more controversial topic in the history of strategy gaming than the use and abuse of RNG, otherwise known as Random Number Generators. I know this from experience, since my last game, Chaos Reborn, reveled and delighted in the liberal use of RNGs (it wasn’t called 'Chaos' for nothing).

It was based on a ZX Spectrum game I made in 1985 called Chaos and published by Games Workshop (a company not shy of randomness itself—usually in the form of buckets of dice rolled in their army games). In Chaos Reborn you play a wizard, and the casting of spells and combat were subject to binary outcome randomness. The combat is especially brutal, with a success killing a target outright and a failure doing nothing at all. Even a lowly giant rat had a 10% chance to kill a dragon.

Many players loved it, and to them the extreme use of RNG is what made the game different and unique. The tension of each battle was enhanced by the rapid turnarounds, plans thwarted, and opportunities grasped. However, the game is certainly not without a high skill factor, since the best players frequently topped our monthly leagues. The fact that games were short, and very many games could be played in a month, either asynchronously or in live matches, meant that any element of luck would even out.


intbsPPKxvm2WbNa4noJMk-650-80.jpg


The turn-based wizard combat of Chaos Reborn.


Unfortunately, a significant group of players loathed the RNG aspect of Chaos Reborn with a vengeance, and they wrote about it copiously. Our Steam reviews were suffering, mainly from this single issue. We did our best to warn potential players that the game used a lot of RNG and required a lot of risk mitigation, but to no avail. So eventually I decided to make a reduced RNG mode for the game which did not use any randomness in the spell casting or the combat. It created quite a different experience which played quite well.

The negative Steam reviews faded away, but it is debatable whether it made a more interesting game. Long-term Chaos Reborn players still preferred the more random ‘Chaos’ mode. On reflection I think there was probably a better way to manage the randomness in the game, and other games have dealt with the RNG problem in different ways.

Firaxis’ XCOM: Enemy Unknown also suffered from an anti-RNG backlash, due to its explicit hit percentage mechanics. "That’s XCOM, baby," was the answer creative director Jake Solomon is reputed to have given. But in XCOM 2 the RNG is subtly manipulated to make it feel less random, at least at lower difficulty levels.


uNbW85PHTLogrLswWnVT4f-650-80.jpg


I'm definitely not going to miss this shot, because I missed the last one.


I now understand that human beings are not very good at evaluating probabilities. In particular when an RNG generates repeated sequences a human will cry foul. For a human, randomness usually means ‘evenly distributed without any detectable pattern or repetition’. This is basically how random numbers are manipulated in many games to meet player’s expectations. One poor result immediately results in a bias towards a better result.

I love dice—particularly special dice with strange symbols on them.

Now some of you might want to point out that computer random number generators are actually only pseudo-random. They generate a repeatable sequence of numbers with an even distribution, but they are very, very long sequences. In practice a human would not be able to tell the difference between a decent computer generated pseudo-random number and a more genuinely random number. This doesn’t reduce the suspicion of computer RNGs though, which is another problem that game developers have to deal with.


XygnWKd2wxNETVeLMByEWW-650-80.jpg


The unique dice of Warhammer Underworlds: Shadespire. Bucket not pictured.


Those of you have been board gaming or roleplaying since the '70s or '80s, like me, would be completely used to randomness in games. I love dice—particularly special dice with strange symbols on them. My current obsession is the awesome new Warhammer Underworlds: Shadespire board game from my erstwhile Chaos publisher, Games Workshop. There doesn’t seem to be a real equivalent of these lovely, tactile dice for videogame players.

Players without any board game or pen-and-paper roleplaying game experience tend to be a lot more hostile to the explicit use of RNG in video games. They do respond well, however, to the more subtle psychological manipulations of randomness which developers and publishers employ these days.

As for myself, I prefer the honest and open use of random numbers where the mechanics are not hidden and fate is not predestined, but I may be in a dwindling minority.
 

thesheeep

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I must say, while I found Hard West absolutely terrible in some aspects (a collection of game design sins, if you want), its combat system and the way it handles randomness is commendable.

For those who don't know:
Each character has a luck stat (imagine it like a health bar). It goes from 0 to 100%.
When a shot is fired at a character that has 100% luck left with a chance to hit of 70%, it may hit or not as usual*. If it doesn't, 70% is subtracted from the character's luck stat.
If the chance to hit is higher than the luck stat, the shot hits. Always. I assume there isn't even a RNG involved. A 20% chance shot will thus always hit a character that has <20% luck left.
And being hit increases the character's luck again (iirc by 75% or something) so a character is somewhat less likely to eat one hit after another.
Of course, you can take some other measures to regenerate your luck. But a character that is focus fired upon will end up being hit at least once, preventing those annoying miss streaks from XCOM.

And in contrast to XCOM which fucks up what should be guaranteed hits, Hard West has 100% chance shots happening somewhat regularly (and logically).

It really is a good solution.
It IS fudging rolls, but instead of fudging rolls behind the player's back in/against the player's favor, it is made a part of the game mechanics.


*Not actually sure about this, it may be that even if the shot would have hit, it results in a miss instead and -70% to the char's luck. The game doesn't really tell this well... If this is true, it sucks of course and should be as I described above, instead.
 
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LESS T_T

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https://www.pcgamer.com/the-gollop-chamber-rise-of-the-roguelike-deck-builder/

The Gollop Chamber: Rise of the roguelike deck builder
From the tabletop to videogames like Slay the Spire and Dream Quest, a new subgenre has emerged.


I am often fascinated by game design evolution and how different genres and mechanics get fused in interesting ways. Much of the innovation here has taken place in board games, but there are also interesting evolutionary influences on videogames, where a videogame takes a board game idea and makes it something only possible in this medium. So today I would like to introduce you to a new videogame sub-genre—the roguelike deck builder. Now there aren't many entries in this genre, but I am sure this will change.

First, to explain deck building games. When you hear "deck building" the first thing you might think of is Magic: The Gathering or Hearthstone, but these are games for which you build decks, not "deck building games". In deck building games the game revolves around building the deck as part of the gameplay. The first deck builder I played was Dominion, a card/board game released back in 2008. In Dominion, each player starts with a deck of 10 cards containing money cards and victory point cards. Each turn a player draws five cards from that deck and may buy a card using money cards from their hand, and play a card. Then the hand is discarded, so that a new hand of five cards may be drawn on the next turn. When a player doesn't have enough cards to draw from they shuffle all discarded cards, including any cards bought in preceding rounds, in order to create a fresh draw deck. The cards you buy include money cards and victory point cards of various values, and kingdom cards which can be played for various effects which are described on the card.


hz9umVtJoRwmmqnSt2iNy4-650-80.jpg


Popular tabletop deck builder, Dominion.


All deck building games start off simple with few choices for the player to chew on. Complexity builds up as the game progresses and the player has to devise strategies for cards to include in the deck, and cards to get rid of. Sometimes deck choices you make earlier in the game can come back to bite you. Sometimes bad cards are added to your deck, and you generally have limited ways to remove them.

There are relatively few videogame deck builders, and most of them are iOS/Android adaptations of original board games. One of the more successful is Ascension: Deckbuilding Game, which is available on Steam. It's a fairly straightforward implementation of the original card game, but didn't set the videogame world alight.

Innovative and intriguing use of deck building mechanics for videogames first appeared with Peter Whalen's Dream Quest (originally an iOS app, but now available on Steam). You have to disregard the very basic graphics, but otherwise it is a compelling blend of roguelike mechanics with deck building. The roguish aspects are fairly simplified, since the monsters don't move, but the exploration and random generation are there. The deck building is critical, because it gets difficult to mold your deck to deal with increasingly varied enemies.


R6DKxqbPvd6GCzmL8vwdWL-650-80.jpg


People aren't kidding about Dream Quest's graphics.


Dream Quest caught the attention of none other than Richard Garfield, designer of Magic: The Gathering. "It has been ages since I couldn't put down a game" he comments in a Facebook post. "I became completely hooked when I realized that you really had to build a well rounded deck. Most deck building games reward you for picking a strategy and following it to the absolute exclusion of anything else. This is one reason I am a second tier deck builder — I usually want to add a bit of variance to my deck. In my quest to win Dream Quest I narrowed my strategy as I typically have to do and found I always eventually ran into something that just demolished me. I didn't actually win until I started adding back in some of the cards that gave my deck a bit more dimension."

This is high praise indeed from the granddaddy of collectible card games. Despite this endorsement, Dream Quest has languished in obscurity. Now there is a new contender on the block.


BaDRGjoQEnsbZCgvtFBA39-650-80.jpg


Slay the Spire in action.


Slay the Spire is in Steam Early Access, and is doing well. It streamlines the roguelike aspects even further, with exploration being limited to a branching path containing monsters, special encounters, and rest stops. You progress steadily towards the final level boss using a combat system which is asymmetric. You will normally be able to play multiple cards in a combat round, including various attacks, blocks and special effects. However, the monsters will usually perform one action each per turn, and this action is shown to you in advance of the monster's turn. This gives you a chance to plan and react accordingly. It's a clever mechanic, because it allows you to make interesting decisions based on a known situation.

So far I have enjoyed my time with Slay the Spire and I look forward to its emergence from Early Access. I'm sure there will be more videogames that use deck building mechanics in interesting ways, but in the meanwhile, both Slay the Spire and Dream Quest will give you your money's worth.
 

thesheeep

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Wonder if Hand Of Fate would fit into the same category to him...
Despite the action combat (which is so simple, it barely counts as action IMO).
 

Galdred

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Having an actual projectile system did help X-COM, through, so this
HmWEoeMHy8fXzTCmn58yaN-650-80.jpg

is impossible and your shots WILL hit because the game is not just calculatting a chance, but actually firing a projectile. Even if you "miss", you can still hit anyway.

They just could have added an animation where the alien dodges or wrestle the gun from the operative. It is supposed to be an abstraction. People rarely stand still next to each other during firefights.

And you don't need an actual projectile system btw, tweaking the %hit chance would have worked as well in this regard.
 

KazikluBey

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Having an actual projectile system did help X-COM, through, so this
HmWEoeMHy8fXzTCmn58yaN-650-80.jpg

is impossible and your shots WILL hit because the game is not just calculatting a chance, but actually firing a projectile. Even if you "miss", you can still hit anyway.
JA2 (not 1.13 with New Chance To Hit though) works this way, IIRC. First a roll to see if you hit in which case the bullet travels straight to the body part (legs, torso, head) and connects, while if you miss the bullet is fired randomly in a cone and just hits whatever happens to be in the way, possibly the original target.
 
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Galdred

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Having an actual projectile system did help X-COM, through, so this
HmWEoeMHy8fXzTCmn58yaN-650-80.jpg

is impossible and your shots WILL hit because the game is not just calculatting a chance, but actually firing a projectile. Even if you "miss", you can still hit anyway.
JA2 (not 1.13 with New Chance To Hit though) works this way, IIRC. First a roll to see if you hit in which the bullet travels straight to the body part (legs, torso, head) and connects, while if you miss the bullet is fired randomly in a cone and just hits whatever happens to be in the way, possibly the original target.
Fallout tactics had that too, but instead of an angular spread, a miss resulted in a fixed deviation, so aiming far behind an opponent allowed you to hit much more reliably than aiming at him.
 

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