Automated Cinematography and XCOM 2

There’s a lot of procedural generation going on in XCOM 2, but it’ll take me a while to see enough of it to have something interesting to say. However, there is one aspect of the game that, while not strictly procedural generation, is closely related: the automated camera.

Just like text generation has ways to vary the text, there are also ways to vary the visuals. Dynamic lighting is one way: Elite Dangerous gets a lot of mileage out of varying the lighting according to the nearby stars. But it has its drawbacks: varying color is less noticeable than varying silhouette.

A dynamic camera, on the other hand, can significantly change how a scene looks, even if the lighting and animation is identical. Different framing can dramatically change how a shot feels. They also allow storytelling to peek beyond the immediate player character. A dynamic camera showing different parts of the simulation was often included in flight simulators like F-15 II and European Air War.

There’s been a lot of research into automated shot composition and editing (some examples: cinematographic user models, tracking camera, automated editing). Designing an AI to handle virtual cinematography is tricky because it not only has to handle the usual 3D camera problems (like not going inside walls) but it also has to pick the best angles on its own.

For the previous game, the dynamic closeup cameras were a combination of procedural scripting and an artist-influenced camera-cage around the characters. XCOM 2 doubles down on this, with, from what I can tell so far, a greater variety of shots. Diving into closeup mode when a soldier smashes through a window, dashes across a room under fire, or lines up a shot on that nasty alien helps get you emotionally closer to the action. Not to mention, just like in the first game, seeing your soldiers visible emotional reactions helps humanize the game and connect you to their stories.

And then you get ambushed by aliens and half the squad dies, because XCOM is, at its heart, a horror game where you care about the characters getting stalked by the unrelenting monsters.