XCOM: Enemy Unknown Interview
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RPS: So if you do have that stuff on is it going to reflect what gear, what armour and weapons the aliens have got, or is it pretty much fixed per species?
Jake Solomon: No, actually some aliens at different points they will carry different weapons, so generally they stick to a particular class of weapons, but the Mutons in particular, they actually will change their weapons. That's the sort of thing that you can either get by, you can look at them, I suppose you could zoom in and look at them, see what weapon it is, but also capture is a big part of the game as well, just like in the original, making sure to capture them.
I don't know that I've ever talked about this before, but in our game the aliens don't leave their weapons behind. When they die their weapons self-destruct but if you capture those aliens, then the weapons don't self-destruct, and then you can research those. Not only is it critical to say '˜look, we want to know,' you can find out a lot of things by having a friendly chat with these guys, but part of it is crucial to player progression, because if you really want to get your hands on some of the great weapons you're going to have to send some poor bastard in at close range with what we call the Arc Thrower. I never liked the small stun launcher in the original, I always liked that real terrible moment of .et in there with the stun rod' and that's basically what we have, we call it the Arc Thrower but it's basically .et in there and pray to God when you pull this thing out that the alien falls over'.
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RPS: Has there been balancing stuff in terms of restricting or delaying access to research-critical stuff like the Arc Thrower? In the original, it takes a while before you've got all the kit and facilities you need to actually capture an alien, so you can't go and immediately capture a lot of stuff and maybe have a big advantage quite early.
Jake Solomon: Well, it's the sort of thing where I don't want to control that too much, I mean we thought about that, we thought about, balance-wise, should we hide the alien weapons in the tech tree to where it's like '˜well, you kind of need to look into how the aliens generate power first' and then we thought '˜that's not fun.' You have to gate it a little bit because you don't want the experience to be ruined, but first you have to build the Arc Thrower, you have to build the alien containment facility, so that's actually also a fun thing too.
In your base, whoever it is you brought back last, you can actually go down there and look at them and there's your scientists kind of standing around, looking at the alien containers and taking notes, and there's this big Berserker behind the glass pounding on the window.
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RPS: In terms of research, is it a fixed linear tech tree , or branching? You could have gone down human or you could have gone down alien, say.
Jake Solomon: No, it's a big, big tree and what we've tried to do is also, speaking about interrogations, in the original there wasn't as much value sometimes in autopsies and interrogations. They were awesome narratively, but there were techs that actually wouldn't grant anything, and so one thing we did was we made sure that every tech grants something. It has to grant something.
The way that actually works, there is something like that, but we have the actual alien tech, and that's what your scientists work on. In addition to that, there's a facility called the Foundry, which is almost like an engineering tech tree, and so when you build that, that's how the player builds SHIVS, which are the tanks in our game, and that's sort of like an engineering focused thing like '˜Oh, here's improved pistols' or '˜Here's the different types of SHIVS' and here's all these things, and so that is in essence a tech tree.
And then of course you have the Ops which is almost like a soldier tech tree, but it's pretty flat, I don't want to misrepresent it, it's more like upgrades for your soldiers. And so we have these different facilities, one: you have to build the facility, and then two: you're never going to be able to do everything unless you just really stretch out the game. So it's the sort of thing where on my last game, I wanted to, I set out being like '˜Oh, I'm going to do a bunch of engineering stuff, I'm going to build a bunch of tanks.' I just never got around to it, just because resource-wise I didn't spend it on all the tank upgrades.
So the science tech tree branches in all kinds of different directions, but at the end of the day you could conceivably map out the entire tech tree if you really took a long time. And based on what bonuses you got, you could conceivably do the entire tech tree. So it's not an either/or thing, but then when it comes to the Foundry and the tech tree, you have to make choices about what you want to spend your resources on.
