XCOM 2 Difficulty Was Increased Late in Development

Firaxis’ Jake Solomon discussed the company’s decisions regarding difficulty in XCOM 2 with the folks at Rock, Paper, Shotgun and reveals how and why the team ended up significantly ramping up the challenge for the game very late in development. According to Solomon:

(I had been pushing the mantra for a long time that we need to make Normal or Veteran difficulty basically an ‘˜I want to see the cinematics’ mode, an ‘˜I want to see the story’ mode, and the player can get through it and it shouldn’t be that difficult. But very, very late in development all the team was playing the game and they were coming back saying (yeah. it’s fun. But it’s pretty easy.) And I started to get kinda worried.

(On the one hand you’ve got all these developers who are super-hardcore XCOM players, but then on the other hand I was ‘˜if we don’t make the game hard, a lot of the design systems don’t engage.’ If the player isn’t put under pressure, then on the strategy layer a lot of things don’t kick in. The player just doesn’t have to engage with the systems.

(Let’s say the cost of recruits that’s a very small example, but there are a lot of things where the player was just breezing through the game. So I remember thinking ‘˜wow, actually this game would be improved if everybody had a much more challenging time of things.’)

However, Solomon also notes that the heightened difficulty probably turned some people off the game. Looking back at the game’s development, the Firaxis developer argues that calling the easiest difficulty “Rookie” was a mistake because of the psychological effect it has on players.

The player’s psychological mindset is also important for another reason. Solomon acknowledges that some players approach every mission as a puzzle, while in his mind the random elements in the design should encourage players to not worry too much about reaching an optimal outcome.

It’s a very interesting discussions, and we’re also promised a longer interview with the man, which should come out soon. I’m personally looking forward to reading that.