XCOM’s random name generator is insensitive

Posted by on October 13, 2012 in Games

It’s important that you can choose your characters’ names in a party-based RPG like XCOM. Mainly because it creates a greater sense of investment in the characters, and therefore the game, when you use can use the names Vazquez, Hicks, and Apone in yet another videogame. But also because sometimes the random name generator can be a real dick.

  • CB

    hahaha… oh wow.

  • amanda_chen

    Assuming it’s random…

  • Joe

    Well that’s one soldier you won’t be mourning when you walk him into a hidden pack of mutons, so there’s that.

  • DWalsh

    i threw a arc thrower on a rookie and named her Killme Imfucked and put her in awful situations to get live Xrays, now shes an LT and my favorite solider. I love this game.

  • Blain

    For those too young to know or too old to remember Eric Harris was one of the young men responsible for the Columbine High School massacre of 1999.

  • wowomg

    We need a more expansive DLC skin pack for Sgt. Manson & Capt. Dahmer.

  • Inver

    On a dissimilar note, I love the random mission names. It’s a little touch that makes me laugh every time.

  • Peter Michelsen

    I thought it was one of the Harris kids from The Deadliest Catch. My mind is so innocent.

  • Mygaffer

    This is hilarious. Hey, at least he can try and make amends for his actions by saving the planet from alien invasion. I think you know who your point man should be…

  • thebigJ_A

    No assumption involved. You can see the pool of first names, last names, and nicknames it chooses from in the files.

  • Juan Pablo Bouquet

    I wonder what nickname he gets…

  • amanda_chen

    If there’s a pool of first and last names, then name generation certainly isn’t random, is it.

  • Sarkus

    Well, I get the reference but I doubt most people would really notice. Not enough that I would have expected the devs to code in exceptions to keep certain combinations happening.
    Not that it matters to me since I change the names anyway once the new troops arrive. In my current game I change their last names to current NFL quarterbacks. There are tons of other naming themes you can use as well, which is a feature more games should use.

  • tomchick

    Just for the record, I’m not actually outraged or anything. The names Eric and Harris are common enough that they’re going to happen in games and in real life. Like, say, the names Holmes and James.

  • Ray Davies

    It randomly picks a first name then a last name, what else did you expect – for the game to string randomly picked letters together?

  • thebigJ_A

    Um, yes, yes it is. What on Earth are you on about? Did you think it would just string together vowels and consonants into gibberish? You wouldn’t get many legible human-language names that way, now, would you?
    It randomly picks from a list of first names, and matches it with another random last name from a list, and it determines which of the lists to randomly pick from based on country of origin.
    Hey, presto! random name.

  • Guest

    “You wouldn’t get many legible human-language names that way, now, would you?”

    I imagine you’d eventually get ALL legible human-language names that way.

  • amanda_chen

    “You wouldn’t get many legible human-language names that way, now, would you?”

    I imagine you’d eventually generate *all* legible human-language names through that process.

  • Afiemb R. Kewpovchin

    Since a random collection of letters will generate far more gibberish than legible names, you’ll have to go through a lot of games to get a plausible one like mine.

  • PapagenoX

    I’ve gotten a Mike Wallace and a Mary Martin (old-timey song and dance star), but no murderer names so far.

  • thebigJ_A

    Let’s not be obtuse, now, hmm? Yes, given infinite time, we would get all names. Since we’re playing a video game, waiting months or decades isn’t exactly plausible. And the ratio of actual names to gibberish would be infinitesimal.

    What was your point, again? Besides being foolish for foolishness’ sake?

  • CarrotPouch

    Wait, is this like the monkeys with the typewriters that create Shakespeare? All with the help of a scoop of your everyday infinite possibilities in infinite time, and reduced (Ker-BLAMMO!) to a useful duration by my Hyper-Recontextualizing Instance MisApprehender!
    (Yeah, that’s a terrible example of anything. Once infiinity is a coefficient or variable, it doesn’t really matter what you’re doing, the answer isn’t going to be useful. )

  • CarrotPouch

    Oops. The above ^^ was directed to @Guest, and not the illustrious Afiemb R. Kewpovchin. Thank you.