Oh good heavens, it’s a good job Alec’s in his recovery tank today. He’d be running in circles until he was sick. Firaxis have just revealed they’re making a new version of XCOM: Enemy Unknown.


I presume they mean UFO: Enemy Unknown.

Some magazine or other has the news on their cover. Firaxis, they of Civilization of course, are “re-imagining” the classic game, at a time when its fans are spitting blood and teeth in fury at its FPS spin-off.

According to the magazine or whatever, this will be a proper strategy game. Steve Martin (no not that one) of Firaxis said,



Wait, no, he said,



Whether Sid Meier is on the project is not yet known. Cheers, Eurogamer.

New screens and resultant info-nuggets have arrived for Firaxis’ X-COM reimaginging, and they’ve assuaged some of my concerns. By which I mean “wahoooooooooooooooooooo! (cautiously)”

In addition to that, I’m hearing that XCOM – the shooter – has been delayed again, to 2013. Whether that means it’s gone back to the drawing board yet again, is waiting to see how the Firaxis game does or has its head on the executioners’ block I just don’t know. It does mean that Enemy Unknown is now definitely the first game in the XCOM relaunch, which pleases me greatly.

An American magazine is hosting a few new shots of the game, plus an oddly shrugging attempt to make fans of assorted console franchises believe that XCOM is for them.

First up there’s this, which demonstrates multi-tier levels and what I think are destructible environments, together with what just might be the new-look Mutons.



Also some pigeons, which might be another type of alien but honestly, I’m pretty sure they’re just pigeons.

This one has the game looking particularly spangly, and shows it off from a close-up camera.



Sectoids! To-hit stats! Dead civilians! Hard-to-pronounce Russian names! All of these things are good, X-COMy things. Obviously there’s a tell-tale console ‘RB’ icon in there, but that doesn’t worry me too much at this point. The magazine posting these shots is primarily aimed at console gamers, after all.

Then there’s the new-look geoscape, which is quite striking:



‘Hold Y to scan for UFOs’ is an odd one though – does this suggest you have to manually find them rather than are alerted by radar when one’s appeared? Good to see funding and research all present and correct though.

The shot at the top of this post, meanwhile, shows a more recognisably X-COMmy perspective than we’ve seen thus far. I.e. the one I’ll probably play from even if I have the option not to. I do generally like to be as zoomed-out as possible.

High-res versions of those shots are here. The magazine is also offering a video discussing the art of XCOM. Off you go.

I should be interviewing the devs later this week with a bit of luck, so we’ll know more very soon.

They did it. They really did it. As we unexpectedly discovered last month, Firaxis are remaking/reimagining the original X-COM, the 1993 title that is quite rightly often hailed as the greatest game ever made. Recently, I had a long, fascinating and genuinely reassuring chat with XCOM: Enemy Unknown‘s lead designer and evident fellow X-COM gonk Jake Solomon – in this first of three parts, he talks how, why, when, the response to the controversial XCOM shooter, Cyberdiscs, whether it’s being simplified for console, 2K’s infamous ‘strategy games aren’t contemporary’ comment and missing hyphens.

RPS: Hi there, I’m Alec Meer from Rock Paper Shotgun, how’re you doing?

Jake Solomon: Alec! I was hoping it would be you.

RPS: Really?

Jake Solomon: Yes Alec, I’m a long-term reader so I know who you are. I have the advantage here. I love your stuff and I know that I’m talking to a real fan here so this’ll be an easy conversation (laughter)

RPS: Is that for better or worse I wonder…for better and worse. It makes me nervous when people say they’ve read the site because I think oh no, I’ve said that thing, and they probably thought….oh no….

Jake Solomon: (laughs) That’s ok, we make sure we send all your articles around here so we’ve all read your stuff.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/images/12/jan/xnew1.jpg

RPS: That’s… good and bad. Well I am very optimistic about the game, I actually heard a rumour about it two years ago and was getting worried it had been cancelled, so I was very excited when I heard the announcement.

Jake Solomon: Yeah, we got to do that little surprise. It’s funny because a lot of people, I don’t know really how, had heard the rumours. I guess I never even knew there were rumours out there.

RPS: There’s a rumour about everything

Jake Solomon: That’s true! There is a rumour about everything, you know, whether it’s true or not, there’s a rumour about everything.

RPS: I’ve got a mixture of my own questions and also I did a kind of Twitter poll because there’s people on there who are even more ferociously nerdy about this than me so I thought it would be best to take their prompts on it.

Jake Solomon: That is perfectly fine, I feel like I can go toe to toe in the ferociously nerdy category (laughter) I’m happy to field whatever questions you’ve got.

RPS: Cool, well let’s test you on that then. The most important question of all, I think you’ll agree, is why isn’t there a hyphen in the title anymore?

Jake Solomon: (laughs) We have an implied hyphen, you’ve seen our logo, right? You can kind of see it striking through the COM part.



RPS: Good stuff, I didn’t know if it was ‘No, we want to declare we are our own game’ even though it’s tied to the lineage.

Jake Solomon: No no, it’s funny because without the hyphen, I remember when my wife saw that she was saying it looked like ‘TROM’, she thought it was the name of an actual alien, like it was the alien overlord. I was like ‘Ok, we’ve got to fix a hyphen in there somehow.’

RPS: (laughs) How long have you been doing it for?

Jake Solomon: This project, we’ve been doing it for three and a half years at this point. I mean, some guys, some of the early art staff have been on it for four years at this point, so we’ve been in development for a really long time.

RPS: How does that compare to the Firaxis standard for stuff like this, do you normally take that long?

Jake Solomon: No, this one was a little bit longer because we knew that we were sort of starting a whole new process, right, a lot of times with Firaxis we have Sid in house, we have that sort of institutional knowledge of a lot of the games that we make – so let’s say we’re making a Civ, so many of the guys on the Civ teams have already made another Civ so it’s a lot easier to get into it. Even when we made Pirates! of course, that was something that Sid was leading up and of course Sid was in-house so that stuff’s a lot easier. So we knew that when we were making this game – first of all everybody who knows XCOM knows that the game is going to actually require you to be criminally insane to undertake the project as a developer because of all the wonderful but very difficult elements from a development standpoint. Y’know, you’ve got all the destructible terrain, and the 3D fog of war, and you’ve got the two games, it’s not just the combat game, it’s the two games and how they come on together, and so 2K was very accommodating because we said ‘Look, we’re going to need to take some time with this, this is something completely new for us, we’re not re-making one of our old earlier titles.’

To sidetrack for a second, the way we started, the art team rolled on to it first, and they were working on tone and imagery and I would give them some pointers about how the game would actually function, and we wanted to say, ok, if we take exactly what the original game is and then we want to see what we can do with that artistically. The first prototype I wrote was basically a recreation of the original game, so we started with everything: time units, which I know you’re going to ask me about [laughs], time units, ammo, everything, a recreation of the original game. So what we wanted to do was start from that point and say ‘ok, we don’t take anything out unless we can improve it.’ That was a good three and a half/almost four years ago at this point.



RPS: You know you could probably just release that prototype today and you’d make a fortune overnight.

Jake Solomon: (laughs) I don’t know, I suppose it would have interest, maybe that’s something we should put in the collector’s edition or something.

RPS: Yeah, or a least a ‘making of’ thing that showed off what it looked like and what was going on there.

Jake Solomon: Yeah, that’s something that we really really want to do. The fun thing about a development process that’s this long, the idea was when we started developing was that since we were starting from the original game we had that core there, we wanted to work fearlessly where everything had to hold its own weight, so when we made decisions we weren’t afraid, we weren’t making our decisions based on, y’know, ‘is this going to make the game harder to play or simpler to play?. And I know people aren’t going to believe me when I say that but it really is true, we’ve never lost sleep over ‘how can we simplify the game?’, it was really more a question of ‘Ok, here we have this game, what’s the more fun mechanic?’, and I’m telling you, with this game, I cannot wait some day to have a discussion, maybe we can do that with you guys after we ship.

RPS: Oh, we’d love to.

Jake Solomon: I can show you all these old screen shots, and all these old prototypes, and I’m telling you, we have taken this game left, right, up, down, whatever: we’ve done all kinds of crazy things with it. I guess that’s why we’re happy and comfortable where we are because we’ve honestly tried almost everything from a design standpoint.



RPS: Did you have a fixed point in your mind between being a recreation of the original and being something new that you could say is definitely ‘my’ game rather than someone else’s with bells on?

Jake Solomon: Right, exactly, and so that’s why it was important to start with the original as a base. Narratively we occupy the same starting point, we have a lot of the same aliens, and we use the original game as the inspiration for a lot of the things we do, and it’s never out of our minds, I don’t want to say that we design and we just say ‘oh, who cares what was in the original’. We view it more from a design perspective and say look, and the original is still absolutely my favourite game, and the favourite game of a lot of guys on this team, so we view the original not as holy and sacred and we can’t change it because that’s how Julian did it, it’s more that those things worked, they were mechanically fantastic, and they worked very very well, so as a designer, we keep that in mind when we are thinking about making changes, we say ‘look, we have thousands of hours of experience with this other design system and it works very well’, so, we took any changes we made very seriously. But because of that, because we made our changes based on play and prototypes, the only things that stuck were the things that when across the board it was like ‘this is an improvement to the game’.



RPS: Do you feel like people are, when they get this, going to feel that they’ve got it instead of X-COM, or do you think it’s going to be more of a companion almost?

Jake Solomon: Yeah, I think it’s very personal…if you got ten of us in a room, say it’s you, me and eight other guys just like us, right, and you said ‘ok, I want your number one feature that cannot be changed or it’s not XCOM’, somehow we would walk out of that room with twenty five features, because when you ask people, what is XCOM, they’ll say ‘it’s this’, or ‘it’s that’, and a lot of times you’ll find yourself agreeing and you’re like ‘Yes, that is core to the experience’, and so I have to interpret that and my team has to interpret that for ourselves and say ‘It’s these elements which we think make the core experience of XCOM’, but obviously things are going to change. I think it is more of a companion, it’s certainly not something that you’d play and say ‘this is completely different’. I guess it would be another game in the series, that narratively occupies the same space. They did all kinds of interesting things with, maybe not Terror From The Deep, except made it brutally harder and made the cruise ships four times longer than any human could realistically make, but they did awesome stuff with Apocalypse and that’s the funny thing, I don’t even think we’re as far away as Apocalypse is. I think we’re just taking the original, and it’s variations on a theme.



RPS: Was there anything that particularly came from that, or from Terror of the Deep, or did you pretty much put them aside for this one and concentrate on getting the spirit of the original right?

Jake Solomon: It was more the spirit of the original, I mean that’s where my heart is and that’s where we have our memories of the original. I think the reason for that is that the original resonates so much is because the setting is Earth and it’s a setting that you can recognise. I mean, Terror From the Deep was awesome but the setting was underwater and you had these cruise ship missions, and Apoc was the futuristic city… those were things that were very interesting concepts but they’re harder to relate to, but Enemy Unknown was very spooky and very affecting because you recognized the setting, you could translate what you saw into looking out your window. So I think that that’s why the original has such a strong draw on me and I think on other people as well. So when we made our XCOM we definitely started with that and took almost all of our inspiration from the original.

RPS: Yeah, it’s really got that moral imperative of the greater good, because you’ve got civilians around, and you become quite fascinatingly cavalier about their lives because you’ve got this greater goal in your head.

Jake Solomon: Exactly, and the phrase that we use is the feeling of XCOM is almost like a shark in your living room, it’s something completely out of context but in a place that you take for granted and feel comfortable in, but then you’ve got this horrifying thing sitting right in the middle of it and it’s completely jarring. That’s what was so fun, you’d be on these missions, you’d be looking around these suburban neighbourhoods, and then you’d see horrible things: Chrysalids, or Snakemen, or Sectoids just peeking out of the fog there. That was one of the neatest things that XCOM did, it just sort of takes that feeling of something you recognize and it twists it, and again, I think that’s why I think the original did so well.



RPS: It’s a really iconic image, the classic grey alien sitting in the middle of a cornfield, and you think ‘wait, something’s wrong here’…

Jake Solomon: Right, the orchard, or the cabbage, or the wheat field… You get that when they’re half in, half out of the fog, and their eyes are just glinting…and you know you’re moving your guy and he stops, and you see the little red box and you just see the glints in the Sectoids’ eyes out in the darkness, that’s the classic X-COM moment.

RPS: Yeah, waving the cursor around thinking it’s going to turn red in a moment, and you think ‘Yeah, there he is, I can get him’. So have you been able to play up that juxtaposition in yours even more between the recognisable Earthly scenes and the aliens, have you been able to flesh that side out at all?

Jake Solomon: Yes, and that’s artistically a lot of what we wanted to do, we wanted to create scenes that the player would recognize so they would have some sort of emotional resonance with the things that they see, and then you get the very bizarre, in the middle of a convenience store or something, you’ve got that great XCOM moment of like this giant Muton in there, or Sectoids, so that’s something visually we worked very hard to do, to create scenes that the player could recognise.



RPS:In the initial screenshots that came out, I was worried that you were making the aliens quite humanoid, but stuff I’ve found out since, it seems more like you’re going for the ‘this is an alien and so it’s going to look weird’ in the middle of that domestic context.

Jake Solomon: Right, it was funny because the first screenshot that came out it was a surprise because it was the Thin Man out in the woods, which is probably a very unique situation. So then I was happy when the other screenshots came out and you could see the Cyberdisc and the Mutons and the Sectoids, and of course for the majority of our first screenshots we chose the gas station because I was like ‘We have to have a Cyberdisc near the gas station’, we must because the fans of the original will recognize that as a tip of the hat.

RPS: Yeah, and you know the explosion that happens if you shoot it in just the right place.

Jake Solomon: That’s right. The chain of the Cyberdisc exploding next to the gas pump and all your guys are idiots for taking cover there.



RPS: (laughs) Something I wanted to ask about before I forget, there’s that infamous comment that 2K’s Christoph Hartmann made the other month about how strategy games are dead, and then this comes out… Was he just trolling, or was it just confusion?

Jake Solomon: I’m positive it was simply just an out of context thing because obviously I work with him a lot, and I would say that he has proven with what matters, which is, you know, money where your mouth is. He runs one of the largest studios in the world and I know that he has always been deeply supportive. and I said earlier, and this is my experience, we said at the very beginning when we wanted to do this game, the problem with a strategy XCOM, if you’re going to recreate the original, and the reason why it’s never happened before, and we’ve always seen those articles about why has nobody done this before, and I used to think that myself until it was like, ‘Ok, let’s get serious, what will it take to do this.’, and I think development-wise it’s insane. The amount of things that you have to do technically and design-wise, the amount of design systems is overwhelming and it’s not just one game, it’s two games, and so it’s a crazy, crazy game, and it’s wonderful, but it requires a huge investment of design time and technical time.

So when we went to 2K and said we really want to do this they didn’t say ‘well, what game is it like?’ or ‘well, that’s not like the other games that you’ve done’; they were intrigued by the idea of the fact that X-COM is unlike any other game and so they were very very supportive of us, our development time has been long, they’ve always given me anything that I’ve needed, the time I needed, the people I needed, so yeah, I think it was simply a miscommunication, out of context thing as I know him personally. People are going to think I’m blowing smoke here, but I’m not, they’re absolutely the forgotten side of the equation here, because a lot of times if you hear about a publisher it’s not a positive thing, but I’m telling you, with us, we absolutely love 2K because they’re so creatively brave. Ken makes the Bioshocks and things like that and that was a very big departure…



RPS: I’m speaking to him tomorrow actually. [Which we already posted here].

Jake Solomon: Say hi from me! I know that [Hartmann] appreciates that, and we make Civ and you know, Civ is a bit of an oddball, it’s nice that it sells of course but I think that the fact that they make these games, a lot of times I work with them from a creative standpoint, it’s never a question of like ‘Well, what’s the numbers, what’s this and that’. I’ve had a lot of other publishers over the years but with 2K, the conversation is almost always creative, like ‘How are you going to make this work, how is this unique to players, and how are we going to do this and that’. I guess what I’d say is I have absolutely loved working with them, so I felt bad when I saw that because that’s not representative of how they are with us as developers.

RPS: So how’s it been during the long time you’ve been doing this watching the response to the shooter which, to put it generously, was mixed? Has that coloured what you were doing at all, or scared you? Excited you?

Jake Solomon: The thing is, we were always making this game, to us we didn’t really give that a lot of thought, we always knew about the 2K Marin team, we’ve worked with those guys from the very beginning, we’ve worked back and forth and so Jordan [Thomas] and I talk regularly and we work together quite a bit and we’re both very excited about the other things that Marin are doing and how we’re connecting, which we’re not talking about yet. We’ve had great conversations, and it’s been fun because we’re doing this game and they’re doing a completely different take on things and the ideas that a fan of XCOM… and I say this as a fan myself, we’ve been wandering in the desert for quite a while. Since the original you’re looking at eighteen years now, since Apocalypse it’s probably fifteen years now or so, an incredible franchise but it just went dark for so long and so our take on it was won’t this be exciting? We’ll have everything: we’ll have the strategy version to hopefully make people happy, we’ll have the shooter which tells a story in a new way and tells a story about a different time.

So yeah, it was difficult, but it was more difficult just because I know those guys, I like those guys, and things look so differently from the other perspective. I understand that people are passionate about it, I completely do, the only thing that was difficult was that I know those guys and I know how strongly they feel and how good they are at their jobs and how strongly they feel about their title so any negative stuff I saw I felt bad for them – but I knew eventually what they’d show. I thought it did, it definitely started winning people over because what they’re doing I think is pretty cool.



RPS: So: as soon as it’s mentioned that it’s on console our threads fill with people going ‘oh god, oh no, the controls aren’t going to work and it’s going to be dumbed down, yada yada’. Do we need to worry on that front, is there going to be a bespoke PC version with different controls?

Jake Solomon: You know I’m going to say you shouldn’t worry.. But no, not at all. The way I’d say it is that input-wise, from a purely input standpoint, XCOM is not a complicated game at all, in fact it’s a very, very straightforward game from an input perspective, so whether you’re playing on a PC with mouse keyboard or whether you’re playing a gamepad, there really aren’t that many things for you to do anyway, I mean this is not at all like something like Civ, this is a much more straightforward interaction with player and experience. So we’re perfectly comfortable with putting the game to gamepad, putting the game to mouse and keyboard because we’ve do Civ in-house, which is an extremely complicated input system and so for us, XCOM is so straightforward in the inputs the player makes and how the player interacts with the game.

Being on consoles it works fantastically, being on mouse keyboard it works fantastically, there’s not even any particular tension there, I mean the tension there and what needs to be different of course is the way that the player interacts with the scene because with the mouse obviously it’s a input selection-driven input, so the player wants to click on things, he wants to click on enemies, as opposed to something like a gamepad where you want to cycle enemies, right? That’s mainly the big difference, the strategy layer is extremely straightforward, there is a lot of UI involved with it, but that’s very easy to either make those two things either work for both but we have plenty of cases where we just do whole different screens, but certainly tactical is the place where it’s the most different because of the nature of cycling into points of interest as opposed to just straight up clicking on points of interest.

So we’re totally committed to making a separate experience for PC, and in fact there are things we can do on PC obviously that we couldn’t do on something like a console, so whether you’re talking zoom level and the different ways you can view the battlefield tactically, that’s certainly much easier with PC, above and beyond the stuff that you always get on PC like better res and things like that. But really what we’re looking to do is having a more tactical view in terms of zoom level and things like that, and how the information is displayed – those are all things that we can do on PC that have to be changed for gamepad.



RPS: Yeah, that’s the main thing that occurs to me, looking at something like Skyrim when the interface just comes over wholesale from console and it’s all big giant text and missing information and categorisation.

Jake Solomon: Right, and it’s harder and we can’t do that, which is a good thing, I mean you cannot do that with a tactical game or a strategy game, you simply can’t because the interface is not the same thing, you’re not free, your inputs are not like, let’s say a real time or an action based game, where your input is continuous and you can steer the camera around. That’s not how it is in a tactics game, a strategy game, you actually have points of interest that you’re either clicking on or cycling through. Those two things are not the same and so you can’t just bring something over wholesale, which of course we’ve always known and which is actually kind of a good thing because it forces you to make a new interface.

There are two more parts of this mega-interview, to be posted over the next two days. Still to come: time units or lack thereof, Chrysalids, min-maxing, whether the response to the shooter affected decisions on this game, indivdualising your soldiers, losing men, exploring the base, psychic control, the fate of Silacoids, the Gollops, modding and much more. Stay tuned, X-men.

In this next chunk of a mammoth chat with XCOM: Enemy Unknown‘s lead designer at Firaxis Jake Solomon, we talk Chrysalids, the death and critical wounding of your soldiers, the fanbase, why min-maxing X-COM’s not all it’s cracked up to be, the base, the geoscape and which of the original game’s aliens didn’t make the cut…

If you missed part one, that’s here. Where we pick up, Jake has just been discussing the reaction to 2K Marin’s oft-delayed XCOM shooter and what that meant for Firaxis’ strategy game.

RPS: How much were you aware of the passion and ferocity in the X-COM fanbase before the shooter was revealed; did it at all colour what you thought you could or should do on Enemy Unknown?

Jake Solomon: I can’t say that I expected it, I tried not to peruse too many message boards or anything like that because I think that at some point you could go down the rabbit hole there, but I think that certainly the passion is not a surprise and I have no problem with that. I know that some people are passionate about this aspect or that aspect and that’s not a surprise, I mean that’s not a surprise for me who plays the original game still till this day,. I don’t think any of us are bothered if people say like ‘oh, I don’t agree that they did this or did that’, I mean all it tells you is that you have something that I think people feel strongly about and that’s certainly, I know it sounds silly, but it’s certainly better than the alternative, right? I mean you release something and you say like ‘these are the things we’re doing’ and there’s deafening silence, as a designer that’s never particularly good.

I mean if you can have a conversation with fans of it and people saying ‘this is why I feel this way’, it’s truly amazing. XCOM is actually unique in the sense that I think one of the great things about the original XCOM is that when it came out I played it in high school and I didn’t have the benefit of the internet and things like that, so I wasn’t using that to look at facts or anything like that, so I played it as just a game experience. I absolutely loved it as just playing it and even not understanding all the detail of it – like you can tell like there is just incredible design at work, the game is very affecting emotionally in terms of the music of course, John Broomhall’s music, and the look of it, it’s got this very lonely feeling and you have all these interesting decisions to make. But then, also the advent of the internet and then the fact that people could exchange all this information about the original game if you go to something like a UFOpedia online, or there are so many wikis about the original game, you can go there and then you start to understand the depth behind all these systems.

I remember this was towards the end of college, I went back and played and was starting to get all this information in mind, and like there’s a whole new layer to the game as your understanding of these very deep complex system mechanics, and so it’s been very interesting because people can argue, people can make some points with some very deep information to back it up based on how the original game worked and things like time units and reaction fire. They’re very deep systems so it doesn’t surprise me that people feel passionate about it and it certainly doesn’t bother me that people feel strongly about it even if they don’t agree with the choices that we’ve made. Sometimes you’re surprised at the things that people do seem to get excited about or to latch on and maybe not agree with you on, but yeah, I think the passion overall wasn’t a surprise to me. Although there were some people on my team who weren’t familiar with the original, and of course everybody on our team had to play the original. When you start on our project, you have to play for a week…



RPS: You should have just fired them, they’re clearly no good.

Jake Solomon: (laughs) I just said if you can’t make it to Cydonia at the end of your week….you can just not bother coming in. So, I think for those that didn’t have that understanding of how the game continued to live on on the internet through the wikis, I think it was quite a shock to see how strongly people reacted to the idea of remaking XCOM, so that was actually kind of fun to see. But I don’t know that I was surprised by it. I mean Civ is certainly similar in the sense that you have fans that are so knowledgeable about the deep system mechanics that it’s a little bit daunting. You never question what you’ve done, the decisions, before the game comes out, because the decisions we make here are based on play, like we do not have paper discussions about Firaxis, nobody gets to write a design on paper and say ‘see why this is so great’ because those conversations can go on forever. What we do is that we put them in and we say is this better, is this not, take it out, move forward with it. So you feel confident that you’ve made your decisions the right way. Not to say that every decision we make is right, but yeah, it’s just the sort of thing where it’s fun to have people who not only feel strongly but can then pull out some pretty obscure math to back up their point, so…I don’t know, it’s nice to have that and then the opposite.

RPS: I do wonder about the change from how things were when the game first game out. It was just a complete self-discovery thing, there was no tutorial, there was no Gamefaqs – and now you’re going to emerge into a completely different era where people can just dissect you and share all the information straight away and there won’t be that same sort of mystery and very slow-burn understanding.

Jake Solomon: No, and I think that’s what’s funny is that we’re all the hard core guys right, like the original fans, and for us it was this sense of like, you get dropped on the Geoscape, right, and you’re looking at it and it’s already affecting because you have the music and you’re looking at Earth hanging there… And I love the Geoscape, I think it’s brilliant because the first screen you’re looking at, you’re just staring at the earth and it looks very vulnerable because it looks a little small and it’s surrounded by the black and purple mists of space behind it and you’ve got this music playing and it’s just very affecting, right from the get-go, but you don’t know what you’re doing. The first thing you do is, pick where you wanna put your base, and you’re like ‘umm….I guess I’ll pick Kansas city. So I always put my first base there, before I learned that I should put it in Europe, but I always had Nuramcom, which was the name of my first base, and that was always in Kansas because that was where I grew up. And so, then you have these experiences, and the game just continues to reveal itself to you and you’re like ‘what the ****?’ the first time you meet Chrysalids let’s say. And the first time you meet Snakemen you’re like ‘Those guys don’t look so tough, right’, and then a Chrysalid comes out of the dark and you’re like ‘what the hell?’ because he walks right up to you. If you can see a Chrysalid then you’re dead – they’ll walk right up to you, chomp, chomp, your guy dies, and then you’re like ‘wow, that’s amazing’. Then next turn, what the hell, all of a sudden this zombie rises up.

And without knowing that stuff beforehand and almost being dropped into that, that was a different experience and I think that that’s what a lot of us remember too, and certainly as a developer that again is daunting because we want to have all those notes, we want to have that depth. I mean trust me, we’re trying to have all that depth all and those notes, but this isn’t the same situation – we don’t want to eliminate any depth but then now what we’ve got to do is make up for all that by making it a little more clear to the player and making sure that the game blossoms appropriately to where the player starts at the right point and then learns all these mechanics and has all the same mechanics. That’s obviously been the most challenging part of development.



RPS: So how much do you spoil, almost, in the tutorial which I guess you feel you’ve got to have in this day and age, and how much can you still keep for later once they’ve got the basics?

Jake Solomon: I think the way you do that is you set up systems, you set up some pretty core systems that once you teach them how to use one element in the system, then they’re good and you sort of let them out into the wide world, and then when the later elements appear, they function somewhat the same but they’re completely different and they introduce all kinds of interesting interactions. So it’s true, the way that I played the game then and the way that I played the game after I got online and saw how your manufacturing can actually be optimised… I learned all these mathematical systems and how you’re supposed to manufacture, how to use reaction, how to level up your soldiers by, I won’t say cheating, but you load your guys down then you take all these reaction shots, and so then I played that way, and now when I play, I’ve actually gone back to how I first was, I play in the way that I think Julian would have wanted me to play. So I, use, like, the Firestorm – people don’t use the fFrestorm, right? Well I use the Firestorm, and you’re not supposed to put fusion ball launchers on your ships but you know what, I AM going to put those on my ships and I do use the heavy laser because I think the elements they put in there originally in the flow, I can play. I’m good enough now to win by not min/maxing so it’s fun now to use all these elements that for the last couple of years I’d avoided using because they weren’t optimal.

RPS: I’ve never played it in the optimum efficiency way myself, I’ve always preferred the fantasy of it being a world teetering on the brink of destruction and one false move from you can create untold disaster. The idea of knowing precisely how to react to an alien invasion sort of ruins it for me a bit. It is called Enemy Unknown…

Jake Solomon: No, absolutely, it’s absolutely true. I mean, there is satisfaction of course in playing the game the best you can, you understand the system and you’re like ‘ok, I’m going to manufacture Medkits to start off, and I’m gonna manufacture xyz, and then laser canons, because this is most profitable’, but then it does suck a little of the joy out of it. So now I’ve gone back now to playing like, you know what, I’m not going to worry about that, and when I research the Firestorm I’m going to build it, I don’t care that I should probably just go and build the Avenger and throw plasma beams on it, but that’s not the way I play any more. Now I sort of play more narratively because I just get more enjoyment out of it.



RPS: How are you approaching the narrative in yours – is it still that slow-burn of new stuff, new understanding without resorting to cut scenes and things like that?

Jake Solomon: Yes, I mean we accent moments throughout the gameplay with cinematics and more dramatic moments but it’s driven by the player in the sense that it’s obviously not a linear progression, but the player can achieve certain things and we’ll say ok, that’s a big moment, so… One of the things we always wanted to do was get across that sense of the world teetering on the edge, and there was one thing about the original game, which I think is kind of its appeal, but it feels very lonely. You’re managing XCOM, you’re the one making all the decisions and that can be a very lonely position, but you never got too much sense of what was going on in the wider world – and we’re not trying to change that and have this be some kind of linear scripted experience, because that’s not what XCOM is. But we still have the opportunity to say like ‘oh, look at that, the player did this or achieved this big thing or this dramatic thing happened, let’s enhance that with something more dramatic’ so we certainly do have cinematic, but we also understand that the player driven narrative is always going to be stronger than the overarching linear narrative in a game like XCOM. That’s something we enjoy ourselves and love and believe in.

A lot of things we do we do to try and enhance the player driven narrative, you know, your soldiers earn nicknames at the sergeant rank, so once they reach sSrgeant they actually get a nickname and of course everything’s customisable, the names, the look of your soldiers, because again, it’s that sort of thing where you feel like you’re not a movie director, you’re more of like the stagehand and you’re trying to give the players the best props that you can to tell their own story. So we do things like let them earn nicknames and let them customize their soldiers, and along those lines, every soldier, they come from all different countries. We want to make sure that this feels very international, so every soldier when they go into battle they actually have their country’s flag on the back of their armour. So you’ve got a soldier from Brazil, and they’ll have the Brazilian flag on the back of their armour. A lot of those touches that as a player from the original game I said, ‘I always wished I could….x, y, z’, and we’ve tried to bring a lot of those into this game.



RPS: That sounds like it’s handy…it could be quite hard to tell your soldiers apart later in the game when they’re all wearing the same armour and you can’t see their stupid haircuts anymore. Maybe the flags will help differentiate that.

Jake Solomon: Right, exactly, it’s one of those things where by the end, everybody’s like an orbiting death station because everybody’s in the flying armour and they’ve got the heavy plasma, and so it becomes very difficult to tell. But of course you would associate with them, and maybe rename them so that their stats would show up or something like that. We want the player to form that attachment, you’re gonna form that attachment to your soldiers anyway, and so we just want to do things that enhance that.

RPS: Are you keeping them being hospitalised and wounded so that you can have that guy not quite dead – ‘oh, he’ll be coming back, it’ll be so amazing when he’s back on the scene’ thing, and then…

Jake Solomon: Yeah, obviously your guys can die of course, the rookies also have to go through the meatgrinder, and of course even your veterans can die. There are permanent consequences to your guys getting wounded as well so if your guys get wounded in combat, when they come back of course they’re going to have to go to the infirmary, and one of the things that I’m excited about is that we actually have our HQ – you’ve seen the screenshots of the base, so that’s actually a living diorama, you’ll actually see there’s people walking around and they’re your actual soldiers, so when you come back from mission they’re shooting pool together, they’re having a beer down in the bar, so your wounded soldiers are laying up in infirmary and maybe some of their oldest friends are down there standing next to the bedside visiting with them.

There’s a memorial wall where you’ve got all your fallen soldiers, so maybe somebody’s visiting that, and there’s the officers’ quarters, there’s the rookies’ quarters, which aren’t as nice, so you’ve got your scientists walking around and your soldiers, and those are your actual soldiers. Again, it sort of plays into the player narrative is so much stronger and so it’s just fun as a player to come back and be like your two officers are there and they’re shooting pool together, and when they’re wounded they’re laying up in the infirmary and there’s doctors and nurses walking around taking care of them.

And a fun game play thing is we have critical wounding in the game, so when somebody takes a critical wound, just like in the original, they’re bleeding out and you’ve only got a couple of turns to get to them with a Medkit and stabilize them. But those soldiers who are critically wounded, if you stabilize them, well then good for you, you’ve saved one of your soldiers, but the problem of course is that they suffer a permanent Will penalty from that point on, and so now they become a little shakier. Like God forbid you suffer two critical wounds, you’re going to be jumping at every sound. I mean depending upon what their starting will was, but then you get these guys who are a little shaky and they’re going to panic at the first sign of things going south and they’re going to start chucking grenades everywhere and freaking out and firing off their gun wildly…



RPS: and presumably when the Ethereals turn up they’re the first to be mind controlled.

Jake Solomon: Right exactly, those are the guys who are just a little bit shaky in the mental department, and again it’s one of those things that, it sounds like a penalty, but it’s really one of those things that carries over from the original game because you would have guys that would go all through the game and maybe they had a very low bravery or morale stat, or they get to the end of the game and you realize that your stud Colonel, who’s like your best soldier, has like the mental prowess of a goat. So, he’s immediately the one that the aliens turn on his own men and so that was always such a heartbreaking moment, so we wanted to have elements like that where as your soldiers get wounded they suffer some permanent effects of that.

RPS: Yeah, I can remember stuff, like the psychic stuff, where I was actually sacrificing lesser troops just to try and keep my main guy alive and rescue him somehow….

Jake Solomon: It’s not a bad thing when you realize that the Sectoid leaders are going to go after the mentally weakest one in your squad – you realise which one’s they’re picking on and you go ‘ok, fine. From now on, you get to come with us but you get a pistol and that’s it’ and like ‘You’re off the drop ship first’. So when they start controlling that guy, you don’t have to worry anymore because you’re like ‘oh yeah, that’s his thing… Don’t worry about him, he’s freaking out and gnashing his teeth but he only has a pistol so he’s not going to kill anybody’ and you basically bait the aliens, which is a horrible thing to do if you actually thought about that realistically, but, yeah, that was always an effective tactic.

RPS: One of the things that XCOM’s so great at is making you be horrible, as I was saying earlier – killing civilians and sacrificing your own men, but you’re goning ‘it doesn’t matter because we’re saving the world, okay, don’t ask me about it’.

Jake Solomon: That’s right, you can have a very utilitarian point of view because you can say ‘ultimately, I’m the guy saving the world’, so and of course it didn’t help that the civilians, they walk around and you are like ‘do you not see the giant snake behind you’, (laughs) ‘do you not see the eight foot snake behind you, why are you walking back into the room with him? Why do you not come this direction?’

RPS: So how much of that have you been able to recreate or expand on?

Jake Solomon: Well, we certainly still have terror missions, some of the mission types obviously we’re not talking about, but the terror missions we certainly have and so we still have that element of civilians running around. In a very fun way, it becomes this exasperating element of like, you’re saving the world and there are these horrible monsters here, they’re running around, and you feel like you’re herding cats because there are all of these civilians and they’re screaming their heads off and you actually feel like this is probably what a military commander would feel like. You’d be ‘for God’s sake, would you just stay still, I’m coming over there to rescue you, please do not….’ And then they run out and you’re like ‘ok, well that’s your own fault’. Yeah, so I think that that element is still there.



RPS: Are there any of the original aliens that you weren’t able to keep in?

Jake Solomon: Well yeah, I suppose I should never say never, but I will say that the Silacoid didn’t quite make it, what I would say is that… You know what, I’m going to get blasted for that aren’t I? you just set me up, didn’t you?

RPS: (laughs) I did not! Though now you mention it, maybe I have my headline…

Jake Solomon: ‘They eliminated the Silacoid’…. and then I’m going to get forty comments about the Silacoid and why it was crucial… No, what I would say is that we have a deep love – I don’t want this to sound marketing-ish – but we do, the original characters mean an awful, awful lot to us, so I don’t think that people should worry on that score. But yeah, if I will say there’s one that didn’t make it for sure it was the Silacoid, remember the old rock spitting blob, well he didn’t make the translation, but in general we love the original aliens. I mean the only ones we’ve talked about so far, the Muton, the Cyberdisc, the Sectoid and the new one, the Thin Man, but we do have a deep abiding love for the rest of the original aliens as well, so…

RPS: I will read between the lines and presume Chrysalids are in there then, which will make a lot of people happy.

Jake Solomon: (laughs) I did not confirm or deny anything! I didn’t say anything!



RPS: What about new guys, are the Thin Men the only ones that are in there or have you really expanded the rogues gallery?

Jake Solomon: I think that I’m under embargo to talk about any more past that, but yeah, the Thin Man is an example of where we felt it made sense to expand, because the original is rooted not in camp but in UFO mythology, so they have the greys and of course it got weirder and weirder, but you know the Sectoids coming from the greys is obvious, and I think that that’s a very fun place for the player to start. Even like when I was new to XCOM, of course that’s what you expected to see, you expected to go onto the field and see a grey, and that was always very fun, and so we felt with the Thin Man we could do that because it’s a play on the idea of an infiltrator which everybody always knows. The aliens are among us, they’re watching us, and so it’s a play on the idea of that infiltrator and also a play on the men in black mythology, so that obviously made sense and it fits within that whole idea of these aliens being rooted in some sort of UFO mythology.

In tomorrow’s third and final part, we discuss the thorny issue of why time units were removed, how the replacement system works, Julian Gollop, mod support, random mission generation and why call this game X-COM instead of a new IP.