XCom 2 War of The Chosen - Chosen Stronghold

Chosen strongholds were spawned by the idea of creating a procedural dungeon crawl in XCom. Again, with the idea of creating as few maps as possible to support this, how many unique rooms do we need to support three dungeon runs of seven-room dungeons? We ended up creating 15 rooms. Because the majority of the combat occurred between two rooms, randomizing the order that the rooms appeared in had a profound effect on the gameplay.

This spawned an interesting conversation with the environment artist I was paired with on this plot type. He was upset that the layout of the base made no logical sense. He was expecting the player to start at the entrance to the base and fight through rooms in the order that a guy building a functioning base would place them in. We could have built that dungeon procedurally, but I expect we would have had to make three times the number of rooms in order to have them in a sensical order and still get the gameplay variation we were looking for.

It raises an interesting question. How much do these spaces need to make sense? I pointed out all of the shortcuts and liberties we took in other plot types for the sake of gameplay. Has anyone noticed that there isn’t a single bathroom in all of Xcom?

Personally, I think there is a lot of leeway available in the in-game representation of reality that you have before you actually break immersion for the player, and no one playing the game will pay as much attention to it as the people who are working on it