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 withXCOM: 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.

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.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/02/01/xcom-enemy-unknown-preview/

Death & Chrysalids: Firaxis On XCOM, Part 2

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 withXCOM: 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.

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.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/02/01/xcom-enemy-unknown-preview/

Time For A Change: Firaxis On XCOM, Part 3

In the third and final (for now) part of my enormo-chat with Firaxis’ Jake Solomon, head brain onXCOM: Enemy Unknown, the official remake of the legendary X-COM, we get into the nitty-gritty. To whit: why throw out time units, how the replacement system works, modding support, difficulty, soldier classes, country funding, Julian Gollop, ‘ZCOM’ and why he feels this new game has to bear the X-COM name.

RPS: OK, well let’s do time units. Go on, explain yourself about why time units have been removed…

Jake Solomon: (laughs) Ok, so I guess what I’d say is that we had time units, our prototype had time units and time units are a great mechanic – sorry, I even hear it in my own voice, I’m switching into defensive mode here – time units are a great mechanic, there are still plenty of games that use time units. The reason was, and this was one that actually quite surprised me, we had time units, and when we studied players, everybody was getting really frustrated because what people wanted to do in the game was they wanted to make a plan, right, that’s a lot of the joy of a tactical game like this – you look at the battlefield, you see the aliens, you see your XCOM squad and you’re going to start saying, in your head ‘Ok, right, I’m going to sneak around for the flank here, I’m going to pin this guy down there, I’m going to flush this guy out of cover, and the same time my other guy’s going to be an overwatch so I get a reaction fire shot on him’ right? So that’s how you think, looking at the battlefield.

But making and executing that plan, that’s one of the joys of a tactical game, of a strategic game, of games that reward thinking. So the problem was that people were getting frustrated, they were never planning past their first unit because time units don’t really map towhat you see, they’re not a direct map to what you see and how you think about your soldiers, and so people would basically break down and they would basically only plan for their one active unit, because they actually were never quite sure what they were going to be able to do. I think any player of the original would acknowledge that it had the sort of great experience of like, ok, snapshot, snapshot, back behind cover, oh look at that, kneel, snapshot.

That’s not a bad thing, but what that prevented was for people planning their squad as a squad and instead they planned individual units basically as it happened. Because you could have a rough idea, but the problem was that people couldn’t map time units to the way that they thought about the battlefield, and so it became a real frustration for people – because on top of that, we’ve added so much stuff, I mean we really have added so, so much stuff, in terms of abilities that your soldiers can do, weapons, classes, the cover system, the abilities that the aliens can do, new item, new armours… All these things, and we’ve designed these abilities to be combo-d together from different soldiers, and then they can interact in interesting ways.

We thought about a lot of these mechanics as like you have to use multiple soldiers to be successful at them, and time units just basically broke that system, because people just weren’t able to think like that with time units. They would say like ‘I have no idea what I can do’, they thought they knew what they could do but they weren’t sure, and so because of that, time units just didn’t work, I guess. I know some people are not going to believe me and I think that’s fine, but I would say that I’m speaking completely honestly. This was not some sort of thing where we said ‘Oh, time units are too tough, this’ll make it easier to play’ because everybody intellectually understands time units once you explain it to them, it’s easy to intellectually understand. The problem was that it just didn’t map to the experience well. With all these new abilities and things, it just created this barrier between ‘I know what I want to do and I know how I’m going to do it’ and instead it became this sort of thing where you were like ‘I’m not quite sure what I can do, and so I’m just going to let it sort of play out’. So in this case when we had time units, they ended up making the game more shallow, because all these different abilities and combos, all these interesting things, were never getting used because people couldn’t think about them that way.

Once we put in a system where the player could think about their abilities as discrete events, then it became much much easier for people to say ‘ok, I’m going to play in my turn, then the aliens are going to do something and they’re going to mess with my plan, but ultimately I’m going to execute my plan’. And that’s what’s most satisfying, is understanding that you have a superior plan, and then forcing the execution of that plan on to your enemy – that is what’s so thrilling.

RPS: Some of the thrill for me, though, is like that thing we were talking about earlier – the difference between almost min/maxing it and making it up as you go along. The horrifying moment where you realize you’ve overspent by one point so you can’t actually kneel behind that wall, so you’re thinking ‘oh god, what am I going to do, I’ve got to try and work out a plan B…’

Jake Solomon: That’s certainly true, there’s that risk/reward mechanic of ‘ok, I thought I could do this and then I find out that I’ve basically overspent or something like that’, and so I agree with that, and we’ve tried to do things where risk/reward is still a part of it. It’s not just ‘move and take an action’, there’s certainly other things you can do in terms of sprinting, and then when the class system unfolds, then you can do all kinds of things, plenty of your soldiers have abilities to do multiple things beyond just ‘move and take an action’ or ‘move’ and anything like that. It becomes deeper and we are very conscious of that whole basically risk/reward mechanic where you walk into a bad situation – that’s a classic XCOM moment, when you sort of like turn the corner and you’re like ‘Uuuuh, I’m fucked’.

RPS: Bing, bing, bing, and there’s three of them just watching you.

Jake Solomon: Right, exactly! (laughs)

RPS: So can you try and describe your system as best you can, because I think most of our readers won’t have read the American magazine with the big preview in, and I only partly understand it at this point to be honest?

Jake Solomon: Right. Well, I think that the starting point is familiar to people who are familiar with either tabletop or something like this. The idea is that each rookie soldier at the very beginning is capable of doing two things; the idea is that your soldier can move and then perform an ability, whether that’s going to overwatch, which allows reaction fire, whether that’s to use a special ability like obviously to fire a weapon, to throw a grenade, to hunker down. Hunker down is, any unit once they’re in cover can basically give up the rest of their turn and double their defence, so they can get behind cover and hunker down, and they’ll get a big defensive boost but they also, their site radius drops drastically. They almost can’t see anything, and so that of course has all kinds of interesting ramifications, because your scout out in front is going to walk in, maybe he blunders in to a bunch of aliens and you’re like ‘oh shit’, he goes to hunker down but now he can’t see what the aliens are doing..

So the system is move, and you can either move again, or you can take an action, and of course you can bypass your action entirely by dashing, what we call taking a dash, and that is moving extremely far in one turn, but there are all these little system ramifications. If you’re dashing, you’ll actually do much better against reaction fire. If you’re sprinting, if you’ve given up your entire turn to move far then you’re actually harder to hit if somebody’s in overwatch, but of course you’ve given up your turn, you’re not going to return any fire that turn, so there’s all these little elements that play off of each other. And of course as abilities are added, and abilities can be added through the inventory, so what items you’re carrying, what armour you’re wearing… Armour is completely unclassed, so anybody can wear any armour, and different suits of armour give you different, interesting battlefield abilities, but you can get abilities from your class obviously, from your weapons, from your inventory and from your armour, and so you’ve got all these different abilities. Some of them work really well together, some of them are solo moves, different things like that.

RPS: So I guess you can’t do something like walk a bit, shoot then crouch? You need to make your decision upfront about how you’re going to do your play, basically.

Jake Solomon: Yeah, it’s hard to classify because there’re so many different ways you can customize your soldiers as they level. There are cases when you can fire and then walk, and so it’s the sort of thing where it’s hard to classify but certainly for rookies, when the rookies start they can do very basic things. Walk, and then shoot, or they could dash, or they could hunker down, or they could go into overwatch to do reaction fire, but then yeah, it becomes a game more about planning your squad’s turn as a whole as opposed to sort of running an individual unit and then letting it play out.

RPS: Ok, I’ve got a better sense of it. The purist in me is still going ‘hmmm’ but until I’ve played it I just can’t sensibly comment.

Jake Solomon: (laughs) I understand.

RPS: I notice, by the way, that you keep calling Mr Gollop Julian, which suggests you’ve had some contact with him, is that true?

Jake Solomon: I have had some contact with him, I’m afraid that’s all I can say at this point.

RPS: Bah! Are you considering any form of mod support, even just indirect stuff like not locking away the textures? I don’t know if you guys have much choice in that.

Jake Solomon: Yeah, and I can’t commit to anything specific obviously because my lead engineer would tear my head off, but that’s something that we benefit from. I mean there’s two sides to that. We’re Firaxis obviously, so we obviously believe in that, we’ve done that for our Civ games extensively, and the benefit of using the Unreal engine is that’s a pretty well-defined modding system. So we’re not committing to exactly what it is we’re doing, but I’m very interested in making sure that’s something that we’re definitely looking very closely at, it’s something that we’d want to do for players.

RPS: You just know the second that’s announced the first thing that will happen is someone will declare they’re making a Terror From the Deep total conversion.

Jake Solomon: Right with time units and ammunition management, I understand, I know (laughs) and I’m ok with that. And I think in some ways that’s good too, I can say like ‘well y’know, I’m perfectly happy to let people see all the code I’ve written and do what they want to do with it, so…’

RPS: There needs to be a site somewhere just documenting time from start of game announcement x to announcement of mod y that will be the ‘complete’ mod, the ‘true’ mod with all these things fixed, all these very specific little features.

Jake Solomon: And you know what, I’ll probably play it. (laughs)

RPS: How randomly generated is the campaign going to be? You’ve said about it a bit, but in terms of mission to mission, is it going to be a complete random blank slate each time?

Jake Solomon: Yeah, the idea is that there are some, very few missions, well actually the levels don’t repeat, so it’s not the sort of thing where you have to play the same map or anything like that. I mean certainly the game structure is just like the original, you’re going to be shooting down UFOs, you’re going to be going on abductions – which I guess is a new thing – and terror missions, but the idea of like what map that is and when they come up, and what day they come up; that stuff’s all procedural. That stuff is driven by procedural so there’s no laid out path for the player in terms of what map they’re going to get and where they’re going to go. I mean, you can choose your starting continent and of course different continents have different bonuses.

That’s actually something new, we have all kinds of new bonuses based on what continents you’re protecting, so based on where you start you’re going to get a different bonus based on if you’re completely protecting a continent with satellites. Internally, and this is not a good name for it, but we’re calling that ‘the collection bonus’ where if you’re protecting an entire continent with satellites then you get another bonus from that continent, which has an impact of course on how the game plays out and in addition to that they all have different funding levels and different levels of specialists, and things like that.

RPS: So there’ll be bonuses, they’re not simply more cash, there’s going to be almost a buff to your abilities?

Jake Solomon: Yeah they have that, they do have the cash bonus, they have the more scientists per month or more engineers, but there’s more than that – there’s also then gameplay bonuses where it says like ‘you will get x’. You sort of think of them as like the Civ bonuses.

RPS: Any average planned length for missions, if it’s even possible to have a consistent figure for that.?

Jake Solomon: Oh boy that’s tough, it depends on what map or what UFO you’ve shot.. I think that they can go anywhere I suppose from fifteen minutes up to, we’ve got some long ones. I’ll just say we’ve got some long ones. And it depends on what you do – some maps are going to take a much, much longer period of time.

RPS: How are you dealing with saving for that? Do you have to complete or clear your mission or do you allow a mid-mission save, cheeky save?

Jake Solomon: No, you can save however you want, but I will say that there are, we’ve got a lot of saves to help you, but I will say that I just put in this last weekend an Iron Man mode. It’s important; a lot of players, we like to play Iron Man and so it’s something we want to actually systemically enable where if you say I want to play this game in Iron Man then you’ve only got one save slot and all auto saves and all your saves go to that slot – and the only thing you can do is save and exit. Of course you get to some point where if you lose too much, I’ll give you the option, I’ll say ‘do you want to turn off Iron Man’, you know, ‘Are you done? Do you want to turn off Iron Man and continue to play normally?’ But I think it’s important that there is an Iron Man mode, I mean I saw this morning the 1999 from BioShock: Infinite, that’s awesome, I mean that’s very exciting, I think, so it’s along those lines.

RPS: Outside of Iron Man, can you still get into a real losing situation where it’s going to be difficult, maybe even impossible, to claw your way back to victory?

Jake Solomon: Yep. I think that the player can recover at any point, but it would require significant amounts of skill. It’s definitely a game you can lose, I mean that’s certainly important. X-COM is a game that you can lose on the strategic level – I mean, when you lose on the tactical level you’re not going to lose the game just because you lost a combat mission but that’s going to have repercussions of course, countries around the world are not going to be thrilled and the player has to deal with that. And certainly on the strategic level, the player is always teetering on the edge of that global war and there is absolutely ways the player can lose the global war. We don’t want a long death cycle but it is the sort of thing where a player can make choices and it can be challenging to the point where, yes, you can absolutely lose the game on the strategic level.

RPS: Good to hear, in a scary sort of way. Why, by the way, use the XCOM title? Why not take what was best from XCOM and make it into a whole new IP that you can say is entirely your own game?

Jake Solomon: I guess because… I’d never even thought of that….we’re starting from the original game and we’re certainly using the aliens. We love the aliens from the original game, so we wouldn’t want to, at least for the first one, we wouldn’t want to start without recreating that experience with all those original aliens and if we’re going to expand them, for us it’s fun to say like ok, if a Sectoid could do more, what do we think they can do? So we use the original alien as a template and say like ‘well if he had extra combat abilities they’d be x, y, z,’ so…I think it’s because we certainly feel that we’re in the XCOM family, so it’d be hard to imagine this game being something else. I mean you certainly could call it something else, but because we’re tied so heavily to the original game, it made sense.

RPS: I think if you call it YCOM that would shut everybody up.

Jake Solomon: (laughs) I like ZCOM, if I ever make a zombie survival game, it will definitely be ZCOM.

RPS: Someone’s going to make that as a mod now, you shouldn’t have said it, I’ll have to take that bit out.

Jake Solomon: That’s fine by me. (laughs).

RPS: I’ll do one more question on a completely different tack. How would you sell this game to someone just entering the XCOM world – as opposed to all the nerdy diehards like myself, to someone who had no prior notions of the series. How would you make it appeal to them?

Jake Solomon: Well, I think that the fun thing about XCOM is that you think back to your original experience with it, XCOM is that it’s not like any other game, you can’t make an easy comparison. That’s the sort of thing that I know people like to do to classify games, but I think as a player you can make the case of like ‘you don’t know anything like this’, so if you’re playing Terraria or Minecraft, the experience is sort of like ‘What’s it like?’ and people go ‘er, that’s tough’. I don’t know how to explain it’.

So as a player, I want to play that game – and so we have elements that I think every gamer’s going to like. We have the combat, and the light RPG elements an dstrategic elements, but I don’t know if there are any games that sort of wrap them all up like XCOM does. My favourite thing about XCOM is it’s this huge vertical integration, it’s this huge vertical scope where you’re making the top, top decisions about what battles you’re going to fight, and where, and what you’re going to research, and how you’re going to equip your soldiers, and then, you’re actually going into combat with those items you’ve built, or like you’ve shot down that UFO, you’re actually going to see that actual UFO on the ground.

So as a player you don’t feel like the game’s stringing you along and saying ‘ok, well now you’re in this location and now you’re going to do this, you’ve got to do these objectives because that’s what you need to do.’ As a player you’re sort of like ‘yeah, I chose to do this, I know why I have to raid that UFO to get those resources because I need to go back and build x,y,z.’ And on the global level you’re saying ‘look, I know why those guys in combat have to succeed because I really, really need France’s support.’ I think that there’s no game that is that intimate and epic all at the same time, and I think that that’s what makes it unique – and as a player, you have elements you recognize but never stacked on top of each other like that, it makes for something really deep, and you get invested because you’re the guy making all the decisions.

RPS: I can remember when I first heard about it at school, it wasn’t ‘this is a strategy game and you have to beat the aliens’ – it was more like ‘you can do this, and this, and you can kidnap the aliens and interrogate them and you can build this, and go to Mars, and there are fast spaceships and flying suits and hoveranks. ’ The sheer ‘oh my god it has so much excitement’ of it seems like a better way of selling it than ‘It is like game x plus game y’.

Jake Solomon: Right, and those analogies always fall short anyway because you could say like ‘well, it’s kind of like this mixed with that’, but it’s not really because it’s in the mixing of those elements that you create something entirely new. I mean, it’s greater than the sum of its parts, it’s not just a tactical, turn based tactical game, it’s not just a strategic management game because each of those games individually is not nearly as rewarding as what happens when you make the bridge between them. The decisions on each are magnified by the existence of the other – so you’re always in this constant cycle of like ‘oh, now I’ve got this I want to get back to strategy and research this, and now that I’ve researched this I want to get back into combat and use this item’, so, that is what makes it unique, it’s because you can do so many of the different things.

RPS: Yeah, you’re juggling so much at once thinking ‘this is going to happen next, I just need to get through this’. Right, well I had better wrap it up there, I’ve already got basically the rest of my life to spend transcribing this now.

Jake Solomon: (laughs) That’s great, any other questions you have, please feel free. I knew it would be you talking to me – I read that manifesto on the twenty-four things that we have to do, don’t think that that didn’t make the rounds at the office…

RPS: Uh-oh. But how many did I get right?

Jake Solomon: (laughs) quite a few, that’s all I’ll say, quite a few.

RPS: Thanks for your time.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown is scheduled for release in the third quarter of this year.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/02/03/time-for-a-change-firaxis-on-xcom-part-3/#more-92049