Some quotes: > most players have one in common: your soldier is standing two feet away from an alien foe, shotgun trained on their glistening ooze sacs. The chance to hit is through the roof--eighty, even ninety percent. Your soldier empties a clip, and hits nothing but air. > This can be immensely frustrating, and even feel unfair because of the way that humans process statistics. “Players may view that number not from a mathematical sense, but from an emotional sense,” says Solomon. “If you see an 85 percent chance to hit, you’re not looking at that as a 15 percent chance of missing. If you thought about it that way, it’s not an inconceivable chance you’re going to miss the shot. Instead, you see an 85 percent chance, and you think, 'That’s close to a hundred; that basically should not miss.'” > [...] > So how did Firaxis make sure XCOM 2 wouldn’t unduly batter the psychologies of their player base? Well, the calculations that go into each shot aren’t as heartless as you might think. “There’s actually a number of things that tweak that number in the player’s favor at the lower difficulty settings,” said Solomon. “That 85 percent isn’t actually 85 percent. Behind the scenes, we wanted to match the player’s psychological feeling about that number.” That 85 percent, according to Solomon, is often closer to 95 percent. > [...] > “Random is never the way people expect it to be,” said Solomon. “Whether it’s a sequence of shots that you think is impossible, or a sequence of misses you think is impossible, or seeing patterns in the nicknames your soldiers get. We’re human beings--we see patterns.”