The co-creator of turn based strategy classic X-COM has praised the Firaxis reboot, describing it as “great”.

His high opinion of the 2012 release notwithstanding, Julian Gollop was also willing to share some of his issues with the game in a GDC interview with PC Gamer. “If there’s anything that’s a problem with the game, it’s that you can be playing it for quite a while without knowing that you are actually completely screwed and you should have stopped and started again.”

Gollop also felt that too much of the action was predetermined. “I would not have accepted anything less than pseudo-randomly generated maps, he said. “I guess my original game was a bit more simulation-ny and the new game is a bit more board game-y.”

Conceding that his own approach may not have been as successful this time around, Gollop again emphasised that he felt that Firaxis had done a “really good job”.

Source: PC Gamer

Jake Solomon, designer of XCOM: Enemy Unknown and original X-COM co-creator Julian Gollop have finally met, in an interesting and thought-provoking video organised by Rev3Games at this year’s GDC. The video, which runs for 17 minutes, features a discussion of all things alien and strategical, and makes for an interesting counterpoint to those who believe the recent successor didn’t live up to the quality of the original from the two men closest to each game. Take a look.

Source: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Coming out of PAX East over the weekend is the news that the recent-revealed Brave New World expansion for Civilization V (read all the details here) has been given a release date of July 12 (or July 9, if you’re in the US).

Meanwhile, Firaxis also took the opportunity at PAX to tease a new project with a very brief trailer, showing a shadowy figure who claims “The war continues at great cost. We now believe another force is at work against us. If not dealt with swiftly, it could destroy us,” before being cut off and replaced with the words ‘SIGNAL LOST’ in a very XCOM-like font.

So! XCOM expansion, or something more? Stay tuned.

Source: PC Gamer and Kotaku

Things haven’t been the same for Jake Solomon since XCOM: Enemy Unknown was released last year, to generally positive feedback and some great critical acclaim. In this candid interview with Patrick Stafford, Jake discusses how it feels to spearhead a remake of a game so dear to your own heart, how working long hours affected him personally, and what to do once it’s all finished.

GON: Since the release, I noticed you took a few weeks off. What’s it been like for you? Having gone through the rollercoaster of seeing how it would sell, and the response, I’d imagine it’d be an emotional ride.

Jake: Yeah, it’s a unique experience. I’m sure there are other mediums where it’s similar. It’s a strange thing, you work on this thing, and no one knows it exists. You’re working on it, and you’re very excited about it, and you work for years and years. And then, just about the same time as you announce the game, the project kicks into overdrive. You work incredibly long hours, you’re stressed out, and it just doesn’t feel like there’s enough time.

You’re dealing with elation, and then some criticism, and the hardest part is the long hours. You start to doubt the things you thought were good ideas.

You work, work, work, and then you get to this point, and with us, reviews came out, and I remember that morning very clearly. I knew they came out at 8AM, but I woke up at 5AM. I looked at the clock, I was like, “well, sh*t”. I told my wife, “I’m leaving”. I went into work. But when the reviews came out, man, it was the first time I’ve been through the experience where I was that emotionally tied to it. We had a difficult year, it was a hard crunch. And the guys on the team worked so, so hard. So you have all these emotions. I can’t imagine being in a position where it doesn’t turn out to be successful. It all happened so fast.

It’s just this weird moment where it could have gone either way. The launch was just afterwards, and then right after that I took about a month off. So yeah, it’s a very strange thing.

GON: Is there a type of depression — maybe that’s too strong a word — but is there a low that comes with finding you have time to breathe?

Jake: Yeah. I think so. This was a passion project for me for sure, being a fan of the original and being blessed to be the lead designer and this was the game that, it’s something I said in pre-release marketing, but it’s true – the original was my favorite game. It’s the reason I went to college and did computer science, it’s the reason I started at Firaxis. And you can ask anyone, any time a new project came up, I kept saying we should make XCOM. Then I was blessed to get the opportunity – to go ahead and make this dream game.

I worked very long hours. I’m not a particularly — as a designer — I’m not particularly talented in that I’m not like Sid who’s brilliant and sees things quickly. I’m not the smartest guy in the room, but I’m like a dumb workhorse. Nobody will outwork me, and I put in long hours for a long time, and it just became the thing that defined me, obviously for the large part of my life. Besides my family, my f***ing hobbies and my job are the same thing – which is making XCOM.

Then when we got to the end, my team and I worked hard that it really became defining for a lot of us. This is what we do — we spend all our time working on this game. But now, it becomes the fans’ game — as it should be.

My wife was very worried after we stopped, actually. I’d have a beer, and she came home when I was on my break after I drunk a few, and she looked at me sideways like, “this isn’t going to be a problem, right?” and I had to say no, no, no. I just had nothing to do! My mind very quickly was grasping and saying, what’s the next thing? Because if I didn’t have something to do, I’d go crazy.

So it’s hard to adjust to going back to just being quiet for a while.

GON: I’ve seen people refer to this game as “Jake Solomon’s XCOM”. They’d focus attention on you, and that leads me to believe you recognised that. That video where you’re trying to sell the game, not very many studios would do something like that. Did you guys recognise it and play with it?

Jake: I don’t know that we recognise it, I think if you ask the guys that I work with, in some sense that’s kind of my personality, It wasn’t like I had a different personality. I tend to just crack jokes, I’m sort of loud and obnoxious and it’s very funny because if you were to see – people always talk about the relationship between Sid and I, because he’s my mentor and I’ve been working with him for a long time. He’s quiet, and reserved, and I can be loud and silly.

I think it was the sort of thing where… one thing we talk about is the importance of being honest and I think that’s something people respond to. Our panel at PAX this year, it was titled 1,000 Stupid Decisions, and it was the idea of just being honest. Really, we’re happy to be honest and let people in and say, look at how we f***ed up the first prototype of the game. I’ve never had a problem getting out there and saying this was a huge mistake. I can say, I messed up, or I’m not good at this. I guess I’m naturally in a position of being out there and talking about the game all the time. You feel a little guilty because it’s not representative of what we… I mean, geez, the hours these guys and girls put in on this game.

It’s nice though, because it’s great when people like what you do. I’m always honest with them, I’m upfront, I’m speaking from the heart. But it’s sometimes not representative of how important the rest of the team is.

GON: Is it necessary to do that when you’re dealing with a game that’s so beloved?

Jake: There is that, too. I can certainly speak to it as being one of the strongest fans of the original game and again, that’s part of speaking honestly. There isn’t a guy out there who knows the original XCOM more than I do. I know every little in and out of that original game.

You need to be able to address the original’s references and say, “it worked there, but it doesn’t work here”. It makes people much more comfortable with the changes you’ve made. They need to know that design wise, it’s with someone who reveres the original game.

GON: How has that vibrant personality worked in your career? I mean, obviously you’ve just been the lead designer on a game, so it’s been good, but not many lead designers have loud personalities.

Jake: I think that’s true, I think that every profession has people of different personalities, but in a more technical profession, design is a discipline where you will see a lot of more reserved people. I think that’s a fair judgment. Maybe more introverts than other disciplines, and it’s been in some senses easy for me to interact. A big part of being a lead is press where you’re interacting with a wide audience or interacting with an executive level, and maybe those people have business backgrounds and there can be a clash of personalities. But in that sense, it can be a positive.

But you know what’s funny, Garth my lead producer, he’s a very personable guy, it’s funny because when I’m in the office, in this last project, I do a lot of programming, and so much of the time Garth is the face of the project internally because he’s the lead producer and works with a lot of guys on the team. I sit in my office with the door closed and am writing code!

I think it’s interesting, personality is one of the major things, when we hire, personality is very important to us.

GON: How so?

Jake: When we hire people, if somebody is particularly introverted, that’s something that we really discuss. It’s something we really discuss as a team whether or not that’s going to be the best environment for that person, which is funny because we make turn-based strategy games. You think you might come here and we’d be introverted, but we’re fairly gregarious people and personality is important to us, even to when we hire people, we’ll say, I don’t know if this particular person can fit because they may have a hard time. We expect people to be personable, they have to deal with people like me!

One of our mottos is to reject cynicism and be positive, and we have to be careful about that. At Firaxis, one of the best things about this studio is that the guys and girls I work with here are generally nice, personable people. I don’t even know what the outside perception is, but we’re a funny group of people.

GON: Do you think you’ll be the lead designer on whatever it is you do next?

Jake: If you had asked me that, halfway through the project I would have said, no f***king way! That’s just how you feel. It’s funny, I talk to other guys and it’s a real common feeling in this position, you get towards the end and you get burned out. It’s not just being the lead of a project, I think anyone on a project, you feel like you don’t want to do it again. But you have that downtime, and the personality says, you’re itching. I don’t see myself doing anything else. I love design, I love creative direction I love that sort of stuff, I think it’s something that I’m not – I don’t necessarily think I’m a natural at it, but I get a lot out of it and really enjoy it. I’m always thinking of game designs, and any designer has four or five ideas on the fire.

GON: Given your huge amount of personal involvement in this game, might we see your name on your next title ala Sid Meier?

Jake: No, no. no! That would never, ever happen. You know, someone pointed out to me, why isn’t there a Jake Solomon soldier in the game. I think it’s interesting though, if you look at guys like Ken Levine, or Cliffy B, guys who have done more than I’ve done and have established track records…you know there’s something interesting in this industry, it’s hard not to attach someone’s face to a product. You need someone’s face there, and I think being the face of something is really important. But Ken, who is a good friend, and Sid, they’re both really good at recognizing that doesn’t actually mean anything. It shouldn’t translate into visions of grandeur. The only thing I’ve done is work for one of the greatest designers in the world for a long time, and then I made XCOM. I didn’t make it out of thin air, the original XCOM is a masterpiece. I’m not saying it’s easy, but you have to keep it in perspective. So much of it is team work.

GON: You’ve said you work extremely hard – do you find it hard to turn off?

Jake: Yes, and no. I think at this stage where I’m not as involved, some of the other guys have stepped up post-launch to take more leadership roles on the team. I’m trying to be hands off and just say, if you need something, use me as just another designer and give feedback. Post-launch, this is other people’s show at this point, and that doesn’t bother me one bit.

I know things will ramp up soon – it won’t last long! Plus I’m having a daughter in a couple of days, (this interview was conducted in early December, so congratulations to Jake and his wife!), it’s easy for me to be detached from work because nothing is more important than that right now. I’m thinking about my wife and my current daughter and new daughter. But in a month or two things will ramp right back up again.

The ‘Second Wave’ DLC for XCOM: Enemy Unknown is set to launch today, bringing with it a bunch of new options to allow you to customise your game.

Many of the options have already been discovered by anxious modders poking around in the innards of the game, but activating them always caused something to break. Well, break no more! Lead Designer Jake Solomon said in an interview with Polygon that the idea of the changes was to allow players to play the game closer to the original vision, with many of the options simply not being balance-able in the time before ship.

The full list of options can be found below.

• Damage Roulette: Weapons have a wider range of damage.
• New Economy: Randomized council member funding.
• Not Created Equally: Rookies will have random starting stats.
• Hidden Potential: As a soldier is promoted, stats increase randomly.
• Red Fog: Combat wounds will degrade the soldier’s mission stats.
• Absolutely Critical: A flanking shot guarantees a critical hit.
• The Greater Good: Psionics can only be learned from interrogating a psionic alien.
• Marathon: The game takes considerably longer to complete.
• Results Driven: A country offers less funding as its panic level increases.
• High Stakes: Random rewards for stopping alien abductions.
• Diminishing Returns: Increased cost of satellite construction.
• More Than Human: The psionic gift is extremely rare.

The following four options are only available once the game is completed on Impossible difficulty:

• War Weariness: Funding goes down over time.
• E-115: Elerium degrades over time.
• Total Loss: Lose all soldier gear upon death.
• Alternate Sources: The power source cost to build facilities increases dramatically.

If that’s still not enough for you, why not check out this roundup of the top XCOM mods?

Source: Polygon

The first of two DLC packs for XCOM: Enemy Unknown is due to come out tomorrow. The first, ‘Slingshot’, will consist of a two-hour mini-story arc that provides three missions that weave into the core campaign. The story sees you teaming up with the Triad, and features a Triad member called Zhang who comes to you for protection in exchange for some alien tech.

Due to launch on December 4, Slingshot will be released on the PC, XBox360 and the PS3 and will set you back about $7, which will equate to about 560 Microsoft Points.

Source: Polygon

XCOM: Enemy Unknown is generally hailed as a great game, both in its own right and as a successor to the original XCOM. Enemy Unknown’s producer, Jake Soloman regards original XCOM‘s creator, Julian Gollop as a personal hero, which was part of why Enemy Unknown is such a faithful and reverent remake.

So we know what fans think, and we know what the creator of Enemy Unknown thinks. But how does Julian Gollop feel about this recreation of one of his old classics? “The game is addictive and absorbing, not to mention quite challenging on the Classic difficulty setting,” Gollop told Eurogamer. “Most of Firaxis’ decisions have been pretty sensible. Overall, I think they have preserved the essence of the original XCOM. Firaxis has done a great job.”

There was some small criticisms about some of the more ‘contrived’ departures from the original, though. “One small disappointment is that the positions of events and bases in the world view have no relevance at all,” he explained. “I often get the feeling that some things are just too deliberately contrived, the three simultaneous abduction sites [of which the player can only respond to one] being the worst offender.”

Source: Eurogamer

There is a new patch on the way for XCOM: Enemy Unknown, to be released on all platforms. The release date for the patch is yet to be announced, so watch this space for more details. The update will, among other things, make easy mode even easier, as well as fixing game-breaking glitches and crashes. Check out the full patch notes after the jump.

Major Fixes

• Abductor roof visibility problems resolved
• Interception game hang issues resolved
• If two interceptors are sent after UFO
• If Skyranger is returning from combat after an Interceptor was already deployed
• SHIV inaccessible issues resolved
• AI Alien Activity Hang resolution
• Multiplayer connectivity optimization

Other Fixes

• TempleShip optimization: All Soldiers properly spawn when restarting the mission after clearing the second room of TempleShip
• Snapshot penalty should no longer apply when Overwatching without first moving.
• Easy Difficulty is now easier.

Updated:
“Adding my reply to the defeat screen issue here so its more visible. This is NOT confirmed to be fixed on the upcoming patch.

Defeat screen after beating game
Firaxis is currently aware and researching this issue. We got a couple save files (thanks to you guys) on Oct 22nd that they’re looking at. I’ll let you guys know as soon as I hear anything about it.” (From drcane at 2K Games)

Source: 2K Forums

Many speculated that XCOM: Enemy Unknown’s DLC couldn’t be far off, and indeed 2K and Firaxis have put paid to all those rumours by today announcing the existence of not one but two DLC packs.

The first pack, the ‘Elite Soldier Pack’, is free for anybody who pre-ordered the game or purchased it at launch, and runs at $7.75 for PS3 and PC players or 400 MS points if you didn’t. Players with this pack will instantly receive a new recruit “inspired by the original X-COM: UFO Defence“, an “iconic soldier with the blonde, flattop hairstyle”. Deco packs for aesthetic upgrades and colour customisation including tinting are also included in the pack. The Elite Soldier Pack is available right now.

The second pack, the ‘Slingshot Content Pack’, provides a new series of linked Council missions in which gamers will meet “an enigmatic Triad operative”, as well as divert the course of an alien ship and slug it out in the skies of China. Three new maps, a new squad character and new customisation options are included — but the price, and release date for the Slingshot pack are yet to be revealed.

PC players naturally have the best version of XCOM available, because it’s moddable to make it just the way you like it. Check out the top five mods here.

Even though XCOM: Enemy Unknown has only been out for a week, the first wave of mods are already starting to hit. Anxious PC players, filled to the brim with ideas about how to change, improve, rejig or otherwise go-to-town-on the game, have started hacking around in the executable to either unlock features the developers left out, or bring the game that little bit close to the remake they always wanted.

We’ve taken a look at the five most awesome mods to come out already, each of them reeling under hundreds or even thousands of downloads so far. All these mods come to us courtesy of the XCOM Nexus, naturally.

Getting your mod on

Most of the mods here involve changing the base XCOM executable file, which is problematic because it means it’s difficult — if not impossible — to run two mods at once. This is a problem that has been handily solved by a forum user named dreadylein, whose ModPatcher solution allows you to quickly and easily set up mods. As with all modding, make an extra backup somewhere just in case!

Balance Mod

Last Updated: 14 October // Download here

The Balance Mod is the most popular XCOM mod on the Nexus by a long shot, perhaps primarily because it changes the setting that hides UFOs currently conducting terror or abduction missions. As a result, you can now see UFOs peforming all sorts of villainy all across the map and, in Arietatray’s own words, “you have a lot more work to do and a higher chance of losing soldiers”, but more of a chance to get in there, punch aliens, and stop panic from spreading.

Included in the mod is a small tweak to the reward you get from abduction missions (five scientists or engineers), as well as lowering the build time for satellites from 20 to 15 days, as well as normalised soldier health.

Second Wave Mod

Last Updated: 18 October // Download here

As if Arietatray wasn’t doing enough, their Second Wave mod is the (fittingly) second most popular game mod. The option for a second playthrough is turned off by default in the game’s native executable, which is perhaps for the best as re-enabling it tends to break a few things — but nothing the dedicated modder can’t fix.

Once you’ve beaten the game for the first time, this mod will enable the ‘Second Wave’ option when you start a new game. The following variables can then be enabled (although not all of them are confirmed to be working yet).

• Damage Roulette: Weapons have a much wider range of damage
• New Economy: The funding offered by individual council members is randomized
• Not Created Equally: Rookies will have random starting stats
• Hidden Potential: As a soldier is promoted, their stats will increase randomly
• Red Fog: Any wounds taken in combat will degrade a soldier’s stats for that mission (bugged, does not work)
• Absolutely Critical: A flanking shot will guarantee a critical hit
• The Greater Good: The secret of psionics can only be learned by interrogating a psionic alien
• Marathon: The game takes considerably longer to complete (broken, makes game unwinnable, do not activate)
• Results Driven: A country will offer less funding as it’s panic level increases
• High Stakes: The rewards granted for stopping alien abductions are randomized
• Diminishing Returns: The cost of satellites increases with every one that is built
• The Blitz: The aliens will target a larger number of cities every time they launch an abduction attack
• More Than Human: The psionic gift is extremely rare

If you want to install both this mod and the Balance Mod above, be sure to follow the instructions on the download page very carefully.

Anti-Cheat Mod for Proper Classic Difficulty

Last Updated: 14 October // Download here

“I love playing on Ironman + Classic,” writes Darkreaver1980, “but I really hated the cheating AI. It gets +critical chance and +aim% on classic, which leads to unfair gameplay.” This mod fixes that particular problem, giving full alien AI without any buffs or bonuses.

But that’s not all! Construction time on satellites is halved, and UFOs now have to prepare for terror and abduction missions, which gives you a chance to shoot them down with interceptors and thus prevent the missions from happening at all. On abduction missions, you’ll still have three UFO’s to shoot down, but if you can manage to do it — no abduction mission for you. Sounds easier, right?  Unfortunately, Darkreaver1980 has also removed the ability of the starting interceptor to shoot down UFO’s, and told them to destroy your satellite network as a priority.

The Anti-Cheat Mod also enables the Second Wave options listed above.

Warspace Extension Mod

Last Updated: 18 October // Download here

Already being described as the first “must-have” XCOM mod, the Warspace Extension introduces a slew of tweaks and rebalances aross the board, from weapon damage, to map enhancements, to character and item changes. “I wanted the player’s decisions to become more meaningful, rather than being punished randomly by the game all the time,” writes modder Black Alpha.” Check out this list of changes:

Weapons rebalanced:

• Conventional guns are average.
• Lasers do less damage but are more accurate. Higher chance to damage the environment and do criticals.
• Plasma weapons do more damage but are less accurate. Highest chance to damage the environment and do criticals.
• Plasma weapons take a few more shots to damage the environment compared to vanilla settings (in which they destroyed almost everything with a single hit).
• Arc Thrower now goes in the pistol slot (it has full animation and graphics, so I guess this is how it was originally made).
• Pistols have slightly less accuracy compared to rifles.
• Pistols need to be reloaded, just like every other weapon.
• Shotguns do more damage but have a bit less accuracy compared to rifles. Shotguns should be more useful now.
• Sniper rifles have slightly more accuracy compared to the other weapons.
• The sniper rifle’s close range accuracy penalty has been removed (it still needs two moves to be able to fire, I think that’s harsh enough).

Strategical map rebalanced:

• The missions the player ignores won’t decrease the panic level of entire continents anymore, but only of specific countries.
• Panic penalties will mostly apply to single countries, but the panic penalties are bigger.
• When it’s time to decide whether to leave the council, continents with a satellite have a small chance to stay, countries with a sat have a bigger chance.
• Satellites are more likely to decrease panic levels inside the country once a month.
• Countries with no satellite in their continent will leave at the end of the month when their panic level reaches level 4.
• Normal satellites have a very tiny chance not to be destroyed by UFOs when undefended.
• Stealth satellites have a much bigger chance not to be destroyed by UFOs when undefended.
• European countries give slightly more money to give the player an incentive to put your satellites there.
• Increased chance for UFOs showing up.
• UFOs doing missions can be intercepted sometimes.

Characters rebalanced:

• Human rookies start off with a bit less accuracy.
• Human soldiers gain more Will with each level to decrease the chances of panic.
• Human soldiers who panic won’t try to kill your own soldiers anymore (the guy who thought this was a great idea deserves to be shot).
• Soldiers who take damage during missions will be recovering for a MUCH longer time, especially if they are “gravely injured”, so don’t get hit!
• Tanks take a few more days to be repaired when heavily damaged.
• Carapace, Titan and Archangel armors provide two item slots instead of just one.

General Tweaks:

• Civilians killed during Terror Missions will turn into zombies on Normal and Classic (it already was so on Impossible).
• On Normal and Classic difficulty levels, the AI should now use more than 5 NPCs (it already was so on Impossible)
• Normal, Classic and Impossible difficulty levels should be the same now, apart from hard-coded differences, like more enemies and unlocking the full AI.
• Basically, if you want full AI, play on Classic or Impossible.
• Keep in mind, this mod was made for the Classic difficulty level, but I guess Impossible should work too. AI is shackled on Normal, so don’t play that!
• Second Wave is enabled.

The Warspace Extension mod is designed to be played on Classic Difficulty, with full AI — but the creator gives a warning against save scumming. “This mod is more ‘fair’ than vanilla,” writes Black Alpha, “and is best played by letting the bad decisions simply happen, don’t reload. You can recover from bad decisions.”

Remove Opening Movies and Logos

Last Updated: 11 October // Download here

Why do games companies think we want to see their movies and logos, and hear their sound effects? Quite frankly, we don’t, and this mod gets rid of them. The mod is a batch file, which will create a copy of your XComEngine.ini, (named XComEnginecopy.ini) and place it in the same directory. The batch file will then remove the run lines for the introductory movies and logos from the ini. Excellent stuff.

Have you found your own favourite mod? Let us know in the comments!

Firaxis have been keeping mum about the possibility of any DLC for XCOM: Enemy Unknown, but some canny users on the 2K forums believe that they’ve found some hints hidden in the text for the Steam Achievements of the game.

Although the text for many of the achievements is hidden until they are unlocked, TheSpaceMushroom uncovered the descriptions. There’s requirements such as ‘Complete Deluge’, ‘Complete Furies’, ‘Complete Portent’, and even specific ones such as ‘Complete Deluge without activating more than 2 valves’ and ‘Complete Confounding Light with more than 3 turns left on the timer’.

So what are Deluge, Furies, Portent and all the others? Well they sure aren’t in the game right now, and they sure seem oddly specific for hidden descriptors. The current theory is that we’ll see maps and missions by these names in some upcoming story-based DLC, and — even though we’re year to hear anything from 2K or Firaxis — it would seem a pretty safe bet. In the meantime, if you’re still on the fence about XCOM, why not read our fully sick in-depth review?

Source: PC Gamer

The original XCOM was — and actually still probably is — the most difficult game I have ever played. At the time of its release in 1994, there was literally nothing else on the market that compared, particularly in regards to the immense difficulty and the sheer depth of scope. I spent days attempting to create the perfect set of soldiers, trying to cover every possible scenario, whether crashed UFO or abduction, ensuring I would have troops specialized to get the job done. But the nature of XCOM, in which you are forced to allocate limited resources to take on a significantly overwhelming threat, means that regardless of how much you plan, you’re always going to feel two steps behind your enemy.

Its based on this particular element that I’m happy to say that Firaxis’ XCOM: Enemy Unknown stands up proudly against its predecessor, instilling the same sense of dread, urgency and horrific loss on top of a truckload of tough decision making. This modern remake draws heavily from other Firaxis games, with a great combination of a slick UI, strong core strategy mechanics and stellar AI… along with a few surprises along the way. The dedication to the original is plastered all over this remake, from the customisation of your soldiers to the research you undertake based on what you’ve scavenged in the field.

It was always going to be an enormous challenge for any developer to revamp a series that was so universally lauded both in its day and over the past few decades, and one that still shifts units almost 20 years after it initially hit shelves. XCOM has endured thanks to its recurring and randomised system of play, where each game will be different to the last both in the various choices you make and the panic levels of each region. Enemy Unknown takes this same system and keeps it largely intact, although adds a much needed tutorial at the beginning that highlights the basics of movement, cover, attacking, research, fabrication and base management. But as soon as you’ve gotten to grips with the interface and stumbled your way through some handheld missions, the game drops you straight into the thick of it, just to check if you’ve paid attention.

Difficulty is very subjective — especially within squad based strategy — and some of Firaxis’s design choices to balance out the various modes are largely welcome. But thankfully even the easiest difficulty mode is hardly a cakewalk, so expect to lose some soldiers early on. Your enemy is almost completely unknown in the beginning, as are their tactics, weaponry and scope. You will never know how many you will be up against, where they are or what type of unit they are likely to be. Getting them in your sights, as before, is the only way to engage them — and its within the changes made here that I’ve found things become a little irritating.

Since your alien foes no longer roam around the map before they are detected, the developers have instituted a system where they are instead handed a free turn to move and attack. This can fundamentally change the entire course of the battle, since regardless of your unit placement, you can instantly be flanked and attacked without notice. On the flipside, you’re now forced to be much more conservative about how heavily you push and how much emphasis you place on using single units to cover parts of the map. But in practice, it seems like the advantage is much too often provided to an enemy that, by design, will usually be stronger and more agile, as they will always be defending an area. I’d much rather that the original system of a roaming enemy be put in place, rather than a static placement and an unfair advantage.

That said, there are methods at your disposal to combat this. The “Overwatch” function allows a unit to automatically attack any unit that enters its field of vision, preventing sneak attacks and a minor counterbalance to the free move. But this also removes your units ability to free move and attack, meaning that you are still generally at a disadvantage within this situation. Obviously, working around changes on the battlefield is part of the game, but when you are disadvantaged from the word go it can mean the difference between dead or alive squadmates.

Permanent death of your squaddies is still a big part of XCOM, to the point where your barracks even includes a testament to their sacrifice. Keeping them alive will make your alien-busting job a lot easier, as new skills are introduced based on their promotions and assigned class. Injuries take time to heal as well, so keeping a well rounded roster of soldiers is important, especially if a special mission pops up and half of your best guys are nursing broken ribs. Much of Enemy Unknown involves working with what you have, which most of the time never seems like enough, especially on top of the sheer demand for your help.

Taking a mission in China may increase panic in Australia or Canada. Egypt might beg you for a satellite but it’s going to cost 1/3 of your budget and you might not build it in time. You had a particularly bloody mission that put all of your best guys in the hospital or the morgue, and all you’re left with are a bunch of privates. Much of what you’re handed is based on pure luck, and many of the choices you make are based entirely on uneducated risk. But this is what makes XCOM so powerful: the sheer intensity of being broke, under resourced and overworked makes every single victory supremely sweet. Every item scavenged is that much more valuable. Like a real violent invasion, you are unprepared and forced to think rapidly on your feet.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown is unforgiving in a manner that very few modern games have the balls to be, and it actually allows you to make poor or just plain wrong decisions. The only difference is that here, it’s no longer difficult to make clear choices, especially regarding research, as opposed to simply “allocating points”. If you want X project, it will take Y days and cost Z credits. You can easily see the status of the world’s anxiety and its contributions to your war effort, and all the information is at your fingertips at all times.

It’s a shame, then, that the PC has suffered slightly thanks to some obscure control mechanics. Firstly, the new grid system feels clunky when moving with the mouse, occasionally pushing you to select the wrong square or move the wrong soldier. Some commands, for some reason, require a keyboard response when it would have been easier to confirm with the mouse.

It’s not awful, but it’s obviously carrying a bit of consolitis on its shoulders, as the grid system alone feels like it has been designed for optimal use with a controller. But it’s hardly broken, or unusable — it just doesn’t feel as smooth as it should. It also tends to put an enormous emphasis on cover mechanics, rather than proper use of elevation, terrain and materials (although almost everything can be blown up). One intelligent part of the grid system, however, is the way it highlights the areas of cover offered, since it can be hard to tell just looking at the scenery alone. But then sometimes it’s a little arbitrary; a brick wall can be less flexible then, say, the hull of a UFO.

You’ve really got to look very hard to find something to dislike about XCOM: Enemy Unknown, mostly because it generally doesn’t stray too far from the tree. It’s a genuinely great strategy title, where everything looks and performs as it should, and it’s crazy hard enough to get the blood of even the most masochistic gamer boiling in some situations — especially after permanently losing your entire squad of veterans in a single mission.

I didn’t expect it to hook me like it has once I got into the swing of things, relaxing with fond memories pouring back in from early days in front of my Olivetti. Unfortunately, I played much of this game on pre-release code before the official launch date in Australia, so I have been unable to test multiplayer to any proper extent — I invite you to let me know your own impressions of that in the comments. Enemy Unknown is is a stellar effort on the part of Firaxis, and I can’t wait to see how they carry on the franchise into the future.

Good:

• Still very unforgiving and difficult
• Very welcome tutorial
• A great hybrid of old and new mechanics
• Clean, easy to navigate interface

Bad:

• Would have liked a minimap
• Questionable enemy discovery system

Rejoice, XCOM fans: the game is now one step closer to actually launching, as Steam preloads have now unlocked. The download size is around the 12 GB mark, so it might be a good idea to start now in preparation for launch.

Speaking of launch, XCOM: Enemy Unknown launches tomorrow for lucky residents of the Northern Americas, while the rest of us have to wait until some time on Friday. Why not drown your sorrows by watching these interactive trailers or this delightful video of the lead designer shilling his own game in a store?

Or you could just read our massive interview on how ‘accessibility’ is a dirty word at Firaxis. You know, whatever.

Haha, I like this trailer. It’s not even a trailer. Jake Solomon, lead designer on XCOM: Enemy Unknown spends his day in a video game retailer trying to sell copies of his own game. Largely unsuccessfully, I might add. Oops, should put a spoiler warning there. It’s a good watch, even if it doesn’t really make me want to buy the game. Check it out below.

CLOSES AT 5PM ADELAIDE TIME TODAY

2K have called us to let us know that this competition is open to anybody who can make it into Sydney on Wednesday October 10. They can’t cover the cost of trains, planes or buses (or even cars!) but if you can make it into Sydney proper (Surry Hills, to be exact) then you’re eligible to enter.

To apologise for the confusion, 2K have also given us five copies of XCOM: Enemy Unknown to give away to five runners up!

The competition closes soon, so get cracking!

When 2K contacted us and asked us if we’d like to send five lucky games.on.net readers to the top-secret launch party for XCOM: Enemy Unknown, we said “Yes. Yes, we would.” I gotta tell you though, this thing is pretty top-secret. They won’t even tell me where it is, and I’m the one organising to send you guys there. Wherever it is. What a mystery!

Here’s what you need to know

The event is open to people aged 18 years or older who are able to make it into Sydney’s Surry Hills. Sorry, everybody else, but that’s just the way it is! If you fit the bill, then we want to hear from you.

How do I enter?

To enter, leave a comment on this article with a link to a photo of you dressed in your best alien-exterminating outfit. Maybe you’re a private detective who knows something they shouldn’t, or maybe you’re an XCOM super-soldier from the front lines. Maybe your dad has an old Buck Rogers outfit that you can borrow — we’ll leave it up to you to determine the most stylish way to blast those alien scum.

Whatever it is, you’ll need to take a photo of yourself in it — holding a bit of paper/card with your games.on.net username on it, so we know you’re not faking — and put a link to it in the comments below.

The five best costumes will win their way to the launch party, so if you’re entering, make sure you’re free on the evening of Wednesday, October 10.

How long do I have?

The competition closes at 5:00 PM sharp (Adelaide time) on Thursday October 4. Winners will be asked to provide their details ASAP, so if you get a PM from me, please answer it as soon as you can!

Best of luck!

Trailers are so 2009. Everyone knows that the state of games marketing in 2012 is interactivity. This XCOM: Enemy Unknown effort has you guiding a squad through an encounter, to give you a taster of what’s to come when the full game launches on October 12.

Source: Blue’s News

The title says it all — XCOM: Enemy Unknown now has a demo available on Steam for you to scope out. It’s available by clicking the link on the right hand side of this page, but be warned: it weighs in at a hefty six gigabytes.

The demo contains two missions as well as some base exploration, so hopefully that’ll be enough to give you a taste of the game. For more on XCOM, why not check out our enormous interview with their lead designer about how “accessibility” is a dirty word?

Source: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

PC favourite developer Firaxis knows which side its bread is buttered on and has made significant effort to ensure our version of XCOM: Enemy Unknown wasn’t derailed by its simultaneous release on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. For on thing, the developer split off two UI teams from the get-go.

“The PC version for us is a big deal. With a shooter or an action game you may be able to fall into the dangerous trap of porting the UI, but for us that was never an option,” designer Jake Solomon told Polygon.

“We’ve had two separate teams working the whole time on the UI, one on PC and one on console. We’re pretty excited that they look very different and feel very different.”

One important practical difference is the grid view available to PC users, but not to console players; tool tips are also available more readily to mouse users, and the PC version has a higher maximum resolution and zoom level.

Plus, only Steam users can earn a unique achievement – Bubonic – spread by anybody who joins a multiplayer match with Solomon. Neat. XCOM: Enemy Unknown arrives in October.

Source: Polygon

XCOM: Enemy Unknown, a re-imagining of the 1993 PC classic XCOM: UFO Defence (or UFO: Enemy Unknown, depending on where you live), is set for release on October 12 in Australia. We sat down with Lead Designer Jake Solomon to chat about accessibility, multiculturalism, and toy boxes.

GON: Could you talk about, say, areas in the game where you’ve dealt with the balance between accessibility and the satisfying complexity of the original?

Jake: Accessibility is kind of a dirty word, and I think it’s the sort of thing where accessibility is taken as a byword for simplifying or dumbing something down, which was never anything close to our intention with this game. I always believed that the magic that existed in the original game would still work today without any kind of modification to how complex it was, or the ways that the systems interacted. But I knew that obviously, 20 years on, it had to be made more accessible in the sense that people have to be fully introduced to all these new concepts. I mean, as games go, this is right up there in terms of complexity.

In order to do that, then, you really have to look at your design and say: ‘how can we introduce this to the player in such a way that they’re not overwhelmed, so that they don’t say “I don’t know what I’m doing”… I mean, did you play the original game?

GON: Yeah, yeah. I played it quite a bit…

Jake: Right, right. So you remember, when you play the original game, it kind of just drops you into space and says “ALRIGHT! GO SAVE THE WORLD”. And that was very, very rewarding because you had to work very hard to succeed at that game. But that’s not, as a designer… that’s not really part of the enjoyment of the game.

We don’t want there to be some kind of hump that the player has to get over in terms of learning the game. So we have, like, an hour and a half tutorial mode where we’re sort of guiding the player through the experience, and then we’ve got so much more in terms of audio, and UFOpedia for the player… You just have to be vigilant, and we do a lot of focus testing, and we were committed to not making the game any simpler, or dumbing it down from the original; but of course the flipside to that is that you really have to add a lot of help for the user as well.

GON: I’m guessing that experienced players can skip straight into the sandbox without having to play the tutorial mode every time?

Jake: Well, yeah, they don’t have to. The thing is, though, that the tutorial mode is – we’ve added so many new things, even on the strategy level. If an experienced player skipped they would know what they were doing, they’d be fine. But if it was up to me I would recommend that people play what we call the controlled experience first, then it dumps you out into the XCOM sandbox and then you can do whatever you want.

GON: I sort of mean, like, players who are coming back again – who have maybe gone through one runthrough of the controlled experience…

Jake: Oh, yeah. Goodness, you – well, in fact, [the tutorial] will turn itself off. Once you make it past it once, it’ll turn itself off and you would have to actually go in and find the option to turn it back on. We would never expect people to play that more than once to get the narrative intro and the sort of gameplay intro… once you go to play the game again (which I expect people will do), it will just be sandbox from the very, very beginning.

GON: I just wanted to ask about the team’s approach to internationalism, or multiculturalism – I notice you’ve got the flags on the back of soldiers, there was a fair amount of accents, names, and even smaller stuff like German billboards or Chinese construction signs. Could you talk about the emphasis that you’ve set there?

Jake: I’ve always said over and over: obviously we’re an American developer, but this isn’t an American game. This game is – it’s one of those funny things where, I am actually excited to see – not from a sales perspective, but I’m excited to see how many we sell in Europe as opposed to domestically, because XCOM is a global game. On top of that, certainly the narrative and the gameplay is meant to be like, ‘you are saving the world’, and we don’t want it to feel North American-centric. We really don’t want it to feel like a game made about America by American developers.

So from the very beginning, we’ve always said: this is multicultural, the characters should be multicultural, they should be from different countries. Your soldiers can come from over 20 different countries, and we have the flags for them, and they all have unique names – even very detailed, where if they came from South Africa, typically many of the soldiers would be of African ethnicity but you can get some Dutch ethnicity, you can get some English ethnicity – and that was the sort of things I had a blast doing.

Certainly you can build your base in any continent and all of them have unique and valuable benefits, and so yeah, that’s certainly part of it, making sure that the game is a global experience; and then part of it is regionalising the maps as well, as you saw. Certainly the first map is in Germany, that’s a very, very localised map. We do have a lot of regionalised maps, too. Now we can’t do that with every single map, what with variety and randomisation, but – if you go to Asia, or North America, or Europe, we have the regionalised versions of the maps that have this European flavour, or North American flavour, or Asian flavour, and – well, it’s something that is very rewarding, you know, you put in all that work and we’re glad to see that people appreciate that.

GON: You mentioned randomisation – I had heard that maps were not randomised in the style of the original XCOM, where they were tilesets sort of randomly placed against one another.

Jake: Yeah, that’s true; they’re not – the maps themselves are handcrafted. But we have over 80 base maps, just 80 handcrafted maps, and then over the top we have – with variations – like, a hundred and something. I forget. So we’ve made a massive amount of maps for the player to experience and then on top of that we randomise things like – where the player starts on a map, where the aliens spawn on a map, their behaviours – they’re not just sitting there waiting for you to walk into them, they’re running patrols, walking all over the map – so it really is a different experience every time you play it; when you encounter these maps, what aliens are on the maps, it’s all randomised. And so we’ve randomised as much as we could without randomising the actual layout of the map themselves. Those are actually handcrafted.

GON: With multiplayer, I noticed that everything is unlocked straight from the start – was that something just for the demo build? Was there a worry about multiplayer spoiling aspects of the singleplayer?

Jake: Yeah, I mean, that’s actually a very insightful point. We did think about that, we did agonise over that a little bit. In fact, the build that we showed doesn’t have all the aliens in it because there’s some aliens we haven’t really talked about – we locked them out of the build. But yeah, if somebody were to buy the game, and then immediately go into multiplayer, they will in fact see a list of all the aliens. And it is a spoiler, it’s the sort of thing where a player does that before they complete a singleplayer playthrough they will spoil some of those aliens and some of their abilities.

But it was one of those tradeoffs where I didn’t want to lock anything multiplayer-wise because I didn’t want to control how the player experiences the game. Either they wanted to player multiplayer first, or they install it on multiple machines… maybe they have two copies, or can install it on two machines, and… I just didn’t see a strong enough reason to lock them out of multiplayer play based on singleplayer. But right, it’s something that we did kind of agonize about. And we even thought about, and I suppose we might still, put in a sort of screen, sort of saying – if you haven’t beaten the singleplayer game yet, which I suppose we can detect, well – look here, you might be spoiled going into multiplayer.

GON: Multiplayer kind of demands you treat your soldiers differently in comparison to singleplayer – they’re more disposable, they don’t play into the metagame – was this intentional? Is this a kind of skirmish game setting to experiment in XCOM, where you can play around with field units that you’d have to work towards in singleplayer?

Jake: Yes, that’s very true. There are two things at work there – one is that we didn’t want to pull away from the singleplayer experience. A real focus with this game was the singleplayer experience; multiplayer was meant to be a solid mode, but we didn’t want to overshadow the singleplayer experience. So XCOM multiplayer is like – opening up the toy chest. We give the player these action figures and we want to let them make whatever crazy combinations they can.

We thought about putting in some kind of multiplayer metagame where you level up and advance squad members but we just decided against it for this mode and decided instead to let them play it like a big toy chest where they can play it however they want.

Source: YouTube

Yet another trailer out of Gamescom today, the latest on XCOM: Enemy Unknown. This one’s really more of a demonstration than a trailer, as Jake Soloman, lead designer on the game, talks the recently-revealed multiplayer – strategies, tactics, balancing the game and crafting your squad with the resources available to you. Check it out below.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown is a faithful followup to the strategy RPG action of the original games, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t got a few modern additions. 2K has revealed a head-to-head multiplayer mode, in which players craft teams from a set resource limit and then battle it out turn-by-turn, with 90 seconds to make a move. You won’t be able to bring over your squads from the single-player campaign, but you will be able to play as aliens; naturally, none of this is canonical. XCOM: Enemy Unknown is expected in October.

Source: VG247

XCOM might be a game about tactics and strategy, but the trailer is a beautifully-cut blend of cinematics and gameplay that really sets the tone for the alien invasion which you’ll be tasked with repelling. Take a gander for yourself – the game will be shipping on October 9, this year.

Last Thursday, 2K held a preview event for XCOM: Enemy Unknown at the palatial Sheraton Hotel opposite Sydney’s Hyde Park. The first part of the event took the form of a hands-off demonstration, in which the assembled games press got to see a squad of poorly-equipped troopers go toe-to-toe with some end-game baddies: a Berzerker, a Floater and a Chrysalid – a centaur-like spider creature that hatched out of a soldier’s corpse.

Then, to illustrate just how far you can upgrade your gear in the course of a campaign, three more troopers arrived to save the day: a dude with a jetpack, a lass with the power to turn invisible, and Sid Meier himself, kitted out with a sleek, Stillsuit-like set of rubberised space armour, a ray gun, and the nifty psionic ability to make aliens detonate their grenades right on top of themselves.

Next we got to sample the first 90 minutes of the game. It soon became abundantly clear that Firaxis had set out to accomplish two things with this contemporary XCOM remake: to streamline the base management and tactics to ensure that at every turn players are offered more meaningful choices, and to streamline the interface to the point where it could work on consoles.

The nitty-gritty

We went hands-on with a PC build, but we were only given Xbox 360 controllers to play with, which proved adequate. Once a Skyranger dropship has deposited your troopers at the site of an alien attack, putting them to work is simplicity itself. The left trigger zooms out, the right brings up attack options (Throw grenade, overwatch, etc.), and the bumpers cycle between your available men.

A trooper’s potential actions are presented in an immediate and intuitive manner. Little shield symbols reveal how much protective cover each obstacle offers (assuming you don’t get flanked), and a blue outline stretches over the area of ground you can advance your man before firing. Beyond lies an orange outline which you can sprint to, but only by sacrificing your chance to fire.

Veterans can be equipped with Javelin rockets and sniper rifles, but these come with trade-offs: Your man can’t move at all in the turn he fires a heavy weapon, and rockets and grenades tend to destroy the scraps of alien gear you need for your reverse-engineering research efforts.

The overall presentation was great, if a tad toyetic, and little atmospheric touches were everywhere. Approach a burning building, and crimson cinders will drift across the screen. Climb up a drainpipe to snipe from a Hong Kong roof top, and birds will scatter. A Deus Ex-esque electronic soundtrack constantly reminds you that you’re in the not-too-distant future. And it must get draughty at XCOM’s sprawling underground base, as the key personnel you meet there are all kitted out in the most luxuriant skivvies.

Bug hunting

The build we played was a tad buggy. Occasionally a character’s animations would go missing, and they’d hover above the ground, frozen, like they were in the middle of a star-jump. While there were national flags displayed prominently on the backs of every trooper, they all spoke with gung-ho American accents.

Some remarks worked at several levels. At one point, one of my men shouted in the direction of an alien: ‘You shoot like a limp-dick dog!’, thus cleverly asserting that the xeno was both bad at his job and suffering from erectile dysfunction. Upon being wounded, another trooper cried out: “Who’s got a med-kit?!” He knew jolly well that I hadn’t bothered to research med-kits yet, in what was clearly a passive-aggressive response to me allowing him to get shot in the first place.

Their quips mostly hit the mark, but a few came out wrong. Blasting at a gangly, alien-possessed human, my sniper calmly stated that he was “aiming for centre mass,” even though I specifically ordered him to go for a head-shot.

Most disconcerting of all was Patrick, the token Australian trooper on my team. Patrick Taylor was a man without a face. He wasn’t disfigured or deformed; rather the texture for his head was just missing entirely. A hairpiece hovered eerily over his gaping neck-hole. Suspecting that he may have some manner of supernatural edge over his peers, I gave him the S.C.O.P.E. Device I’d researched in lieu of those nano-tech med-kits. It boosted his chance to hit significantly, on the rare occasions that I deployed him into effective firing positions.

Wrapping up

90 minutes was enough hands-on time to get a feel for the tactical side of Firaxis’s XCOM. The good news is that it works. Levels are compact and clearly presented, and every move counts – the game gives you just enough rope to hang yourself.

But it would take a lengthy play-through to get a clear idea of how the strategic side of things plays out. If you place your HQ in the US, just how much of a boost will you get from that 50% aircraft discount? Will the quality of your gear suffer if you spend significantly more on science than on engineering? How many missions do you have to fail before your shadowy bosses relieve you of your command? Where is the game balance skewed, and where is it broken?

This first taste has left me with more questions than answers, but it has also left me hungry for more. At the very least, it appears the XCOM legacy is in safe hands at Firaxis.

Last week, we asked you for the questions that you’re dying to put to Firaxis about the upcoming XCOM: Enemy Unknown remake. We then sat down for a chat with Pete Murray, the game’s Associate Producer, and blasted him with a broadside of your questions. Here’s what he had to say.

GON: What will the fighter plane/UFO interceptions be like?

Pete: They’ll be very similar to what was in the original game. You’ll see UFO’s pass through your radar coverage, and then you’ll send a fighter out after them to try to shoot it down. That exact system is still being finalised so I can’t give you the full details, but if you’ve played the original game it will be pretty familiar to you.

GON: Can you confirm that there will be only one XCOM base?

Pete: Yes and no. There is one main XCOM base, and at the beginning of the game you choose a continent that you’ll be operating from. Each continent provides you with a different bonus. You can station interceptors on the different continents around the world and you can also launch satellites over individual member nations/countries, and they act as your radar coverage.

It’ll be very similar to what players did in the original game, where a lot of people had one major base and they created satellite stations, distant bases that were basically just a radar post and a refuelling spot for their interceptors.

GON: Is this a choice you make once, and that’s it?

Pete: That’s it for that entire play. You can choose from North America, South America, Europe, Africa and Asia.

GON: No Australia?

Pete: Well, we couldn’t come up with a bonus that was awesome enough for Australia. It was basically a toss-up between making all of your soldiers poisonous, or giving your soldiers the capacity to drink incredible quantities of beer. It turned out both of those mechanics were incredibly unbalanced in gameplay. I’m sorry.

GON: We’ll try to forgive you. Does the move/action paradigm take into account the different stats of soldiers?

Pete: More experienced soldiers are definitely more accurate than your rookies, and certain classes are more accurate than others. A veteran sniper, for example, can pretty much hit what he aims at. We don’t have – at least in this iteration – a stat that corresponds to ‘fitness’ that would affect your movement. Movement speed is to some degree tied to class, I believe.

GON: Are there cornfields and terrifying desert wastelands?

Pete: We have a bunch of outdoor settings, and some of them are deserty-looking and, yeah, they’re pretty terrifying. We debated whether or not to have every crop in the game be cabbages, much like the original, but I don’t know that cabbages made it in. We wanted to make sure our environments were very readable offhand, and basically a giant cornfield looks like danger no matter how you cut it. It’s a case of there being either very dangerous things in there that you can’t see, or you’re going to be exposed to them as you try to cross the field. We wanted to make sure our environments made a lot of sense from a gameplay perspective, too.

GON: Can you tell us what, if any, DRM the game will be using?

Pete: I don’t know. That’s something they work out on the publisher side, and we’ll try to get some more information on that as we go.

GON: Will your team still go inside UFOs on the ground?

Pete: There’s a bunch of different missions that your team will be going on. We’ve shown a bunch of missions, but we haven’t shown all the different mission kinds that there will be in the game. But we are drawing very heavy inspiration from the original.

GON: So that’s a ‘Probably yes, but don’t quote me on it’?

Pete: That’s a “we’re drawing very heavy inspiration from the original”.

GON: (laughs) Okay, I think we understand each other. Can you confirm the maximum squad size?

Pete: The maximum squad size is six. It starts at four and goes up to six. The reason we went with that is because it made the combat much more tactical. When we were adding things like the different classes and abilities to the soldiers, having a huge team of soldiers enabled you to inflict so much of your will on the enemy on your turn, that it actually made the game less tactically interesting. And you ended up with a lot of moves that either didn’t contribute to the success of your team or were just sort of filler.

Also having a smaller squad size means that casualties become correspondingly more important. If you only have a four man team and you take one casualty, that is a 25% loss rate. You take two people down out of a four man team and suddenly it’s much less about ‘How am I going to succeed in this mission’ and more about ‘How am I going to salvage what’s left of the operation?’ The game has a better tactical ebb and flow in terms of reacting to the situation on the battlefield and being aware of what’s going on, it makes each individual decision with each soldier correspondingly more important.

GON: Have you reached out to anybody on the original UFO: Enemy Unknown team for guidance, input, beers…?

Pete: I know Jake (the lead designer) has been in personal contact with Julian Gollop, one of the original designers of the game. They talk back and forth, Jake is maybe the biggest fan of that original game I’ve ever met. He can talk for hours and hours and hours about that game.

Firaxis is kind of descended from Microprose, who were the publishers of the original XCOM. Our audio lead actually worked back at Microprose back in the day, and his office was near the QA department, and he would tell us how suddenly there were all these QA guys saying “Oh, you’ve got to come in and play this amazing new game”. So we have had people in our office who were at Microprose when that game came in, and a lot of people here have worked on sequels or some of their later, less-famous XCOM games. So we have kind of a distant historical connection to it.

GON: Is there any cross-over with the FPS XCOM game from 2K Marin? Any easter eggs for players who finish both?

Pete: We’re sort of envsioning them as being in two seperate universes. But there certainly may be “mysterious links” between the two games. I don’t want to spoil too much!

GON: Can you spoil for me whether the blaster launcher will be making a come back?

Pete: I can’t spoil that but I will say, up to this point, that we have shown only very early game weapons and actually the only advanced piece of technology that we’ve shown off has been a suit of armour called the Skeleton Suit that has an integrated grappling hook. We’ve got a really good slate of weapons in the game, and we’ll be showing more of them off fairly soon.

GON: How useful has the feedback from the fanbase of the original games actually been for Firaxis?

Pete: We’ve had just an amazingly positive response. It was incredible to see the number of people who were fans of the original who got super excited and went out and flooded the internet with “YAAAAY” when we announced it. It was an amazingly validating moment. That was immediately followed by trepidation, “Oh no! What are you going to do? You’re not going to make it bad, are you?”

And we’re all huge fans of the game too, so one of the things the team did when development began on the game was that Jake held these Friday afternoon play sessions where he’d just bring people into a room full of PC’s with the original XCOM loaded up and get them to play it, so people could see what the magic was from that original game, all those wonderful emergent moments where you’ve got rookies panicking and taking the shot that ends up killing the last alien or something like that. And a lot of the guys on the team who had never played it just got it really quickly, what it was about the game that people love.

They take that responsibility really seriously. It’s great to see the positive reaction from people and when people express concerns, saying “I don’t know,” or “I don’t understand,” we really want to just tell them to wait until they can give the game a try. It’s going to have all of that magic.

GON: What’s the strangest complaint you’ve heard so far?

Pete: We have an alien called the Muton. He’s this purple faced guy, and in the original game he had this sort of green unitard that he wore. We’ve changed the look so he’s a lot more hulking, a lot more bestial, and instead of a unitard he’s got this armour suit. I remember somebody telling me a unitard was much more scarier! And I guess yeah, if a guy’s going to charge at you with a plasma gun and wearing a unitard, there’s a certain amount of terror associated with that.

GON: You never know how revealing that might be on alien physiology…

Pete: (laughs) I didn’t really agree with him, but the more I think about it, the more scary a unitard can be. Depending on how revealing it is. Let’s stop talking about it.

GON: Alright. The cinematic camera is a great addition – how much work has gone into it?

Pete: That was one of the things that we put in and it almost immediately carried a lot of weight. It does a lot to create tension, and in the original game you always wanted to get down, on the shoulder of your guy to see what he was doing, and now we can do that with the new camera system and it’s pretty amazing. It does a lot more to bring you down to your soldiers and personalise them than I had certainly expected. Consequently when you lose soldiers, it’s a lot more meaningful. They’re not just resources, they’re people.

GON: Especially now that there’s only four or six of them…

Pete: Exactly. You’ve got a bunch of them back at the base, but you can only send four or six of them on a mission. So consequently you have a lot of veterans who are a key part of your operation, but you always have to keep bringing rookies along just as an insurance policy. But especially later on in the game, bringing a rookie on a mission can be a bit of a liability, as their will just isn’t quite as high and they’ll panic at inopportune times. But by the same token you need to bring them with you as replacements. So it definitely humanises them more.

Some of the cinematic camera work, especially on the killshots, is just a great reinforcer, making you feel like you were really clever in taking the shot – or if things go bad, an alien takes the shot and suddenly it snaps into that cinematic camera and you’re like “oh nooooo, this is going to hurt”. It really amplifies the emotions of the game.

GON: Has there been an attempt to cater for XCOM veterans, as opposed to new players who are being introduced to the universe? How much of a balance do you strike there?

Pete: That’s kind of a delicate balance. I think if you’re a veteran player, a lot of the systems are going to be familiar to you. You’re going to have a good handle on not only what the game is, but the ways you can progress towards victory. For new players we’ve taken a lot of time to make sure that not only do people know what they’re working for in the short term, but also the medium and long term. It’s not hand-holding, and certainly the game is not ‘gated’ in the sense that you’re required to progress down a certain series of missions.

We’ve got people who are not huge strategy players who are able to pick it up, figure out what the game is about, to go into combat and achieve success, and they’re having a good time! And that’s really validating, because we’ve got these people who may never have experienced a strategy game before who are playing it, having a good time, going into the office the next day shouting ‘You won’t believe what my rookie did last night..!”.

GON: What is the most interesting/funniest bug you’ve encountered so far?

Pete: In one build there were no heads on any of the soldiers, so you had these torsos, legs and arms running around shooting things. That was amusing, but sort of creepy at the same time. Some of the ragdoll deaths have also been pretty funny! And there was one build also where, for whatever reason, soldiers simply could not hit targets. Everybody’s accuracy skill was reduced down to zero. So no matter what percentage it told you you had to hit, you would never hit. That was certainly… frustrating (laughs).

GON: As you start to put it all together, are you still looking to include modability for PC users? You’ve already mentioned a PC-specific user interface. Will mod support make it into launch?

Pete: We’d love to do mod support for the game. I do not know what the timetable is for that. The game is based in Unreal 3 and Jake’s work uses a lot of Unreal modding tech, so there’s no theoretical reason why we couldn’t do modding. That’s something we’ll have to work out with 2K down the road.

GON: Speaking of 2K, can I ask – what came first, did you approach 2K with this idea and they said “Oh, we already have an XCOM game!” or was the other XCOM game already announced internally and you guys thought “Oh well, we have a better idea actually…” What was the genesis?

Pete: I don’t know the exact conversations that went on to generate both 2K Marin’s shooter and our XCOM, but I do know we have been in production for years at this point. It was certainly not a reaction to the announcement of the shooter.

I’m really excited for the shooter guys, they have a very cool concept taking the emotional components of the original game and building a shooter around it. That studio has done fantastic work in the past with shooters and I’m sure they’re going to come out with a great game. I haven’t played a build of it lately, I’m actually gonna lean on people to let me play it… (laughs). I think XCOM as a franchise has a lot of hooks that people can latch onto, and a lot of ways you can go at that core experience.

GON: So you mustn’t have been immune to the rage that boiled up from many dark corners of the internet when the shooter was announced and decried as being unfaithful to the original – but when XCOM: Enemy Unknown was announced, everyone was throwing their hands in the air with joy and saying “Finally! Somebody treating our beloved games with respect!” How do you guys feel when you see these things – validated? Slightly bemused?

Pete: I think a lot of people didn’t give the concept of the shooter a fair shake. They’re taking the emotional resonance of it and they’re doing something different with it. The fact that it has the same name as the strategy game is just their callback to the heritage and the feeling they want to generate. I think people basically saw ‘XCOM’ and ‘shooter’ and weren’t willing to say to themselves “Okay, that’s interesting – why? What’s the rationale behind it?”

I think by the same token we’re very happy that people are excited to see an XCOM strategy game. We’re very dedicated to making a game that’s faithful to that original experience, without being a complete copy of it. I think it’s cool that this classic franchise is getting such attention, being brought forward in a major way. I think it’s very cool that there’s a lot of support for that.

I think there’s room in the universe for both. I think it’s a case of people just wanting to have a good time when they sit down and play a video game, and I think that there’s two XCOM experiences that are going to be able to provide that for them. And we want to do our job and make sure the strategy game is as good as we can make it.

GON: We hear a lot from Firaxis and from you, here, about how you’re keen to stay as faithful to the original as possible and as true to the spirit, but what would be the best, NEW thing you’ve done, the best different thing. If you had to pick one and say “this is OUR XCOM”, what would be the feature that defines it?

Pete: I’d say the whole combat system. We’ve taken a combat system and made it based around classes and roles with abilities. That system… when it went into the game, that completely changed the tenor of the game. At that point the game developed this entirely different character that was just amazing.

It was still immediately XCOM. You sat down and it was XCOM. It still gave you that emergent, seat-of-the-pants excitement that you got from combat, but the way that it was done was a lot more intuitive, a lot more direct, and a lot more clever.

At that moment, for me personally, it was a case of “Holy crap, we have a game. I can’t wait for people to sit down and play this.” That was when I got really excited for this XCOM that Jake has come up with. That’s when the game clicked for me and I felt “We are making a worthy successor, and it is going to contribute something new”.

Thanks very much to Pete for taking the time to speak with us!