XCOM: Enemy Unknown Interview
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1UP: You said you'd tried to take a lot of the abstraction out of the game. Was there a point at which you thought you were maybe getting too granular with the details? I know there have been some elements that were actually taken out since the original XCOM. Can you speak to that? Finding that balance between immersiveness and, perhaps, too much immersion.
JS: Yeah. The way we started was... My first prototype used the same mechanics. It had the same gameplay mechanics as the original game. And so we went all the way through our first vertical slice probably about a year or so on the project, and we got a lot of pieces working. We still used a lot of the mechanics from the original game. The problem was that those are very, very gritty. Something like, say, the time units from the original game. It was something where, after we went through vertical slice, a lot of the guys who really liked the original game, myself included, we felt like... Okay, this is perfect. This is the original game and it's modernized. It was modernized in the sense of graphics only, though.
The problem is that a lot of people who had no experience with the original were a little bit lost. They felt like they weren't able to use all this extra stuff that we'd piled into the game, all these abilities. We'd overloaded on the old design mechanics with all this new stuff we added. Classes, abilities, all these new weapons and items. At that point there was, I suppose, a realization, a moment where we realized that maybe we weren't doing the game a service by being so faithful to the original. If we were going to have these elements, then maybe we had overburdened the original system.
That was when we went back and we came up with a completely different combat prototype. That one made moving and performing actions easier, and that allowed the player to use their squads together a little better... It's easy to look back now and say that that was the right decision. But in the moment, you're tinkering with a classic. Certainly you know that you want to get rid of some of the more frustrating, time-consuming details, but I think that it was something that we worked on quite a bit. That was one of the major elements that we changed.
1UP: XCOM is considered such a classic, timeless, almost perfect work by so many people. It seems like, historically, there's been a lot of difficulty following it up. You look at the sequels, those are well-regarded, but they're all considered a step down from the original UFO Defense. That seems like a bold claim, that you're stepping in and saying, we're going to update this game and bring everything to the table that makes it a classic and yet modernize it....
JS: Right. That's it in a nutshell. Take something, but alter it, and then say, "We're not going to lose any of the magic." As you say, the danger there is that the magic of the original is so ephemeral. You can see that it doesn't even hold up sequels. Obviously we've had a lot of time to think about that. Certainly we have the design pillars of the original game. Things like perma-death. In a word, we're talking about consequences. We're taking a game that has strict consequences, and that creates a level of investment. It creates a feeling of success in the player, because they know they're succeeding against real odds. Destructible environments, which allows for interesting immersive gameplay in the tactical layer.
So certainly you have those pillars of design that you have to stick to, but that's not really where the heart of a game lies, so then you get into more subtle details. I think part of it, as well, is that... If we just talked about the sequels, I think the setting is also very important. The fact that the original game, Enemy Unknown, is set on Earth in a recognizable setting, so that people feel an emotional connection to the maps they play on. They can look out their window and see the same maps that they're fighting these aliens on. I think that's a really important part of it too. Even more subtle things like music and tone: It's all part of a very distinct magic that XCOM has. Certainly it was the sort of thing that, as a designer, kept me up nights, worrying that what we're doing is still true to the original game and worthy of that game. That game is my favorite game, has been my favorite game since I played it in 1994. So I certainly understand how important it is.
