XCOM 2 - gamescom Interview

At this year’s gamescom Firaxis showed a new gameplay demo for XCOM 2. After seeing this I got a chance to sit down with the developer to discuss the upcoming game.

GameGrin: Hi there, first of all could you tell us about all of the new features that were demonstrated today?

Firaxis: XCOM 2 takes place about 20 years after the events of XCOM: Enemy Unknown, so we’re saying XCOM failed. The aliens took over the world and Earth is  an alien occupied planet now, so it’s your job to rebuild the resistance. What we wanted to do was make the game a little more open-ended and a little more proactive, so we did two things on a very high level involving the strategy side and the tactical side. On the tactical side we made procedural maps which we did not have in Enemy Unknown. There are layouts that can have an infinite amount of arrangements, they’re no longer static maps, they have beautiful dynamic lighting which isn’t placed in any more and also procedural objectives so the gameplay is different. On the strategy side we’ve created an open ended world which allows for more choices on the GSV. On Enemy Unknown you’d choose your research, build an item or two maybe build a facility then you’d scan time and wait for your next mission. Now when you go to the GSV in XCOM 2 there are a multitude of decisions to make. You have to expand your resistance and grow it and you also have a mobile base. So you choose where you want to visit, when you want to move it, but there’s always a cost to it. For example do you want to grow the resistance or do you want to go search for rumours? There’s a bunch of other things to do, we just wanted it to feel different every time you play.

GameGrin: Enemy Unknown featured a great number of choices regarding countries and support, are you implementing something similar in XCOM 2?

Firaxis: Yes, so you’re talking about the meta-game involving the statuses of the countries. So at the start of XCOM 2 you obviously have no global support, because they are under alien rule and that’s a cool inverse from Enemy Unknown where you have to take back the earth. Aliens aren’t invading anymore, you sort of have to invade your own planet to take it back, so you have no support but you can build it on a region by region basis. They change every time you play the game, the layout of the world is different but as you make contact and establish radio relays, which is the mechanism to communicate with the resistance around the world, you’ll start seeing other pockets of resistance cells moving around the world. Then you have more choices such as going to Europe, or crossing the ocean, if you have to enough power, to get to western Africa and those sorts of things become the choices that you have to expand on quickly, and if you don’t the aliens have a long term goal which will be presented to you as you go through the story. That’s the mechanism which is almost like a doomsday meter which if it gets filled loses you the game.  As you open up regions you see where the aliens are making progress and what you have to stop.

GameGrin: How does the mobile base, the Avenger compare to the base from Enemy Unknown?

Firaxis: We really like the foundation of what we call the ant farm view, the side view and we wanted that foundation there. You can see your base evolve as you clear out elements of the old alien ship which is what it used to be. Now that it’s mobile and above ground you can see it move around the world. I haven’t spoken  about this to many other people but because it’s above ground you can see the environment around the Avenger change. It’s not pre-rendered; it can be in a forest or near ice-capped mountains, and it can be in a desert. It has to be mobile so you can spread the resistance which is a big change. Some of the things which are insane instead of excavating below the earth you now pull out the old alien guts of this ship, so you then reformat it to work towards XCOM’s advantage and put in facilities such as Proving Ground or Advanced Warfare Lab, stuff like that. We also have a new staffing system so we have more context and more tangible realness behind your scientists and engineers. In Enemy Unknown there’s sort of an abstract number but now you can rescue these men and women from the battlefield and put them to work. They have a name and a face and you know you can assign them to do certain things and you then see them doing the work.

GameGrin: It did look a lot more story based, do you feel there’s a big narrative in the game?

Firaxis: Yeah it’s actually one of my favourite parts about XCOM as a strategy game, a lot of strategy games are super open-ended, and they’re not known to have story objectives. But that is truly part of XCOM’s DNA, to have a strong narrative and a strong story that works with the open-ended systems of the strategy game, it’s a unique proposition that I really like about XCOM. We are going to have a very strong story with high impact cinematics that will push you along and fall in line with what you’re doing.

GameGrin: I saw a lot of expanded customisation options, do you think that’s going to make you more attached to the characters?

Firaxis: Definitely that’s the underlying psychological driver. For the development team we’re like “why are we putting in all of this extra stuff?” and it’s because we want our players to get more attached to their soldiers so you’ll be more devastated when they die. Now you can do things such as set their animations to reflect their personality, change their voices. There’s a load more visual options, hats, beards, scarves, tattoos which are all in mind with the resistance theme. These guys have been hardened over the past 20 years so we wanted to give you more tools to reflect this.

GameGrin: Speaking of the resistance, will you have a more limited number of soldiers?

Firaxis: Yes it’s more of a skeleton crew when you start the game but once members of the resistance know about XCOM they’ll want to join. There are a limited number of recruits per region though.

GameGrin: Are you including multiplayer?

Firaxis: Yeah we’re doing multiplayer. If you remember Enemy Unknown’s multiplayer mode with its 1v1, where you had your dream team and were allocated a budget, we’re doing a similar thing with all the new alien units but now they’ll be played on procedural maps. So you won’t know the exact layout which will make it pretty interesting.

GameGrin: XCOM began as a PC game, is there any particular reason XCOM 2 is exclusive to PC?

F

iraxis: Well Firaxis knows PC best, it’s in our pedigree and we believe we can make the best game possible by staying focused on that one platform. We’re also going to have some awesome modding tools so it made a lot of sense to put all of our attention on PC to make it happen.

GameGrin: Just to finish what are you most looking forward to from XCOM 2?

F

iraxis: I am most looking forward to getting a sense of the unpredictable nature of the game. I’m getting a sense of that myself and I can’t wait to keep doing multiple playthroughs to see how the procedural map system plays out and also see how strategy plays into that. You won’t be able to start a new game and say “here’s my strategy” because the aliens are now playing with their own strategies and I can’t wait to see how that feels.