XCOM: Enemy Within Lead Designer on Hypothetical Alien-focused XCOM

Firaxis’ Ananda Gupta, who’s currently the lead designer on XCOM: Enemy Within, has talked with Rock, Paper, Shotgun about the chances of the company developing an XCOM title that has the player using the aliens instead of human characters.

While he doesn’t rule it out completely, he thinks it’d be tricky to do:

(That idea I think is very interesting from an abstract point of view, but when you think about the blanks that’d have to be filled in, [it gets a lot more complicated],) he begins, contemplative.

(Like, who’s the alien equivalent of central command? I actually think StarCraft fell victim to this a little with Heart of the Swarm. You have this English-speaking British-accented tentacle woman who talks to you about stuff. So I’m Kerrigan, I’m the Queen of Blades, which is really neat, and she definitely has a very alien feel to her and yet, she’s surrounded by all these English-speaking aliens. Admittedly, they had very cool voices. Blizzard tried very hard there. But still, the Zerg didn’t seem all that implacable anymore. They don’t seem like this giant inexorable force so much as a commander and a ship and a computer. They’re a lot like us. They just have a bunch of pets.)

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(So I think the idea of an alien campaign is a really good one, but it would have to be pretty different from the systems we have in XCOM: Enemy Unknown and Within. Like, it would definitely be a whole new game with a very different approach.)