Characters gain affection with one another by doing things like carrying a wounded soldier to safety, stabilizing a fallen ally, or healing a friend’s wounds. After a while, the teammates gain benefits when they work together which allow for increases to damage, accuracy and other attributes.
However, since XCOM has never been a series to just hand you everything, there are also some risks involved with this process. There are penalties included should a friend fall – such as the surviving member gaining shaken status, which will reduce their willpower stat for a period of time.
Updates like these are what make games like XCOM 2 so great. It will be interesting to see what other ideas the community has in store for us. If we’re lucky, maybe we’ll see a sequel to the famous mod for the first game The Long War, which even the developer’s have described as, “a 20-hour tutorial for Long War.”