XCOM 2 creative director explains why it's PC exclusive

One of the biggest surprises to come out of the XCOM 2 announcement earlier this week is that, unlike its predecessor—the game that so successfully resurrected the moribund series—it will be exclusive to the PC. Creative Director Jake Solomon told IGN that the studio has "very, very ambitious goals" for the sequel, and the only way to realize them was to focus on the platform for which it had the greatest depth of expertise.

"When we have our meetings, when we talk about stuff, we only talk about PC," Solomon said. "We talk about, ‘What is the experience like on PC? What does the mouse feel like in this experience?'" The UI is being optimized to more efficiently support mouse-and-keyboard controls, and in fact the current plan is to launch without support for controllers. More on-screen tactical information will also be provided, since the assumption is that players will be sitting closer to their monitors than they would to a television, and will thus be able to read smaller text.

XCOM 2 will offer other improvements as well, including physics-based rendering, more visually impressive destruction, and procedurally-generated maps. "To do that, we had to use all of our studio expertise... and our expertise here is PC," Solomon said. "That's our home, and that's where we're really comfortable."

The Xbox One and PlayStation 4 should have the power to run the game, but developing for multiple platforms simultaneously just isn't something Firaxis can do. And even if it did come to those platforms, it would almost certainly be without support for mods, one of the games biggest selling points. "We're certainly not opposed to [a console release]," Solomon said, "but I can assure [you] that's something we're not even discussing yet."

XCOM 2 is currently expected to be ready for release in November.

http://www.pcgamer.com/xcom-2-creative-director-explains-why-its-pc-exclusive/

Honestly I don't really expect this to be fully PC exclusive but I feel it's nice that they do care about the platform enough that they want to make the game properly optomised rather than buggy with the controls being a last thought.

Can't wait to see some gameplay though on those improvements like the destruction but the procedurally-generated maps. is more my interest.

Also just in case in the off chance someone wants to spark ye old war of the platforms over this title, there's a list of all the games Firaxis  has made and what platforms they were released on:

I like the "procedurally-generated maps" bit. It will make it more interesting and will increase the already high replayability of the game a lot.

Yeah that's the part that got the most of me from the article, I love procedurally-generated maps in general, loved that about Starbound, Minecraft and most other games, I'd imagine it paing off quite well for them in XCOM 2 when it comes to replayability/challenges.

well I understand the thing about not having enough resources (money and/or man power) to develop the other versions simultaneously. That was already speculated by a few people.
But mod support? C'mon this really isn't the game that has a big mod community and I've checked.

Definitely strange, considering XCOM: Enemy Unknown did quite well on PS360.

As per the chart they released the last XCOM on consoles and they didn't botch it up, they've just been PC centric and as the chart shows they've released on PC and the other OS's more than consoles, i honestly don't see the problem.

Because PC games are worse than console games?

I'm not on the complete inside know how of XCOM's community but who's to say there isn't going to be or is a mod community?, now that there's mod support fully from the start I'd expect mods to come in abundance, same with most games that offer/restrict modding anyway.

I have no problem with that. There are console games that never come to PC, or come to PC further down the line as a port made by someone else. Console-only gamers seldom get in a huff over that.

On a personal level, I'm kind of pleased. I think this means they can make the game they want to make, which means it will probably be better than if they had to round everything down for consoles. Strategy games are simply better with a mouse.

The presence of procedurally generated maps could be awesome.

Because console sales of the last game weren't enough to justify a port for this one. Some games just belong on PCs only.