XCOM: Enemy Unknown Post-mortem Interview, Part One

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has been regularly chatting with XCOM: Enemy Unknown's lead designer Jake Solomon ever since the game was announced, so it's not particularly surprising that they'd catch up with him for a post-mortem interview on the turn-based reboot of the 1994 classic.

Here's a snip on base building and Solomon's thoughts about it:
RPS: How do you feel about how the base turned out> It seemed to me as though it, and Interception, was not entirely fleshed out. It seemed to be purely a way of serving the battles rather than serving its own function if you see what I mean.

Jake Solomon: Yeah, I think that's true. I think that to a certain extent, functionally, I think there's something to be desired there. There's still a lot of potential there, because personally I love the base, I love, love, love the way it looks, I love having it and seeing the little people.

I don't know, maybe it's my GI Joe nature coming out. It feels really cool and adds to that sense of '˜I am a commander'. Seeing that always reinforces that sense of '˜I'm the bossnder.' But, that being said, I think we all have had these really long lists of things that we would like to do to it, but I think that functionally there could be more that could be done. Obviously the base attacks weren't in there/ I think that that probably reduces some of the impact of it, because in the original game you had your base and you didn't really feel a strong connection to it until all of a sudden you had a base assault, and then you were down in the actual base that you constructed and fighting for it.

RPS: That's the thing, it doesn't feel like much more than a graphic or a really nice looking menu backdrop, because it doesn't come into play itself.

Jake Solomon: Right, and the fact that when you go to build we show a blueprint instead of showing the actual facility, so there're some things. I think there's still a lot of potential there. Personally though I still love going in there and zooming around, but that doesn't mean that there isn't still a lot of potential there to be fulfilled, and I think you're right.

Functionally there's still a lot of stuff that it could do, base assaults probably being the primary thing that you think of in terms of building a stronger connection between what the player does with their base and making that pretty thing into something that's a little more.like everything in XCOM seems to matter, except maybe the base doesn't matter as much. The layout does, but the actual 3D base doesn't matter as much and so that's certainly something that I agree with.