XCOM 2 Interview

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has published the full interview with Firaxis’ Jake Solomon about XCOM 2. During the piece, Solomon discusses the game’s difficulty, bugs, its place in the X-Com/XCOM franchise, his inspirations for its design, and some of the design choices that resonated less with players, like the turn limits placed on many missions.

It’s an excellent interview and arguably an essential read for anyone interested in the game. Want proof? Look no further than this excerpt:

Adam: Did you see that tweet from Julian Gollop?

Jake Solomon: No, what’s he said, Oh God.

Finally getting somewhere on my 5th attempt at an #XCOM2 campaign awesome game but brutal, unforgiving, stressful!

Julian Gollop (@julian_gollop) February 18, 2016

Jake Solomon: [laughs] With XCOM 2 we felt a little freer. Obviously a big part of Enemy Unknown was being reverent to the source and making sure that people understood that we were reverent. That was a big part of what we talked about for that year when we released. A big part of that conversation was ‘˜what does this mean for the actual, original X-COM and what are the parallels?’ It was interesting to then make a game when that didn’t really come up any more. That stopped being a question, and people instead asked ‘˜what is the relationship of this to Enemy Unknown?’ That was strange, but at the same time I guess a lot of the things that we tried to bring into XCOM 2 still come from the very original game. Procedural maps, a greater sense of unpredictability in the strategy layer and not being quite as much of a railroad. We still go back to the source material of the original XCOM games. They are still the heart of the series.

We do all these things, and now we even change the narrative. We feel much more free to do that, we have our own audience, it’s not being held up against the original anymore. But at the same time we still look at it and think this is all based on the original series. I would never in a million years think that this game would come together on its own without the originals existing or that I as a designer could possibly have thought of this. This is still Julian’s idea that birthed all of this. It’s not an idea would I have come up with on my own having this relationship with the original is still part of it.

But I’m happy that Julian likes it. A lot of the ways we improved XCOM 2 was integrating more things from the original.

…

Adam: The biggest difference in XCOM 2 is the classes, the soldiers feel much more like a toolset in themselves. You said early that XCOM isn’t a puzzle, and I agree, it almost feels more like an RPG as well as a strategy and tactical. There are some many points where I look at the situation and I’ve got so many options, whereas in the original it was which guy isn’t going to shoot now? It’s a more intricate strategy game.

Jake Solomon: That is definitely a distinct thing. Making all of the soldier abilities do something not big, but obvious, so that the player can mentally map them out, so you can look at your soldiers and their abilities, and they always do something that is simple and the tactical benefit of it is obvious. It’s not like +15% to something, it’s you get a free move when this happens or the ability Untouchable if you kill someone, the next attack against you is guaranteed to miss. People were like (even explosives?) and I said (yes, just make it simple because that’s the only way that as a player you can manage all these different characters and their abilities.)

In that sense it is kind of like a Tetris puzzle where you can slot things together. In some senses it becomes a challenge because you only have so many knobs you can turn: you’ve got moves, you’ve got actions, you’ve got aim percentages, you’ve got cover. They all slot together in fairly interesting ways, hopefully, no matter who it is you’ve brought on your squad. In that sense it does sometimes feel puzzle-ish.

Adam: It feels like what you did design-wise was to constantly disrupt the battlefield and tactical ideas. Everything that I used to do, the gradual Overwatch creep, you meet an alien that says ‘˜no, you can’t do that anymore’ and have you to switch around your thinking.

Jake Solomon: That’s right. It comes out of the idea that when you design a game, you build these spaces and then when you go looking for room, a lot of the time the only place you can find room for new ideas is by breaking the rules you just established. Certainly you see that a lot in the expansion packs, but even with sequels you make these rules because you have to give the player the safety of these rules in which to operate, and then when you go looking for a way to make a new experience there’s all this room to manoeuvre.