It’s difficult to please both new and old fans alike when rebooting a beloved franchise, but in 2012, Firaxis pulled off a game-development miracle when it successfully revived the legendary but long-mistreated X-COM franchise with XCOM: Enemy Unknown. The modernized version recaptured the key elements that made the 1994 original memorable: an against-the-odds struggle against a technologically superior foe; the emotional sting that comes from the permanent loss of personalized soldiers heroically killed in battle; and a deep tactical system with an element of randomness that forces you to prepare contingencies in case your plans don’t survive contact with the enemy.
Enemy Unknown was a success that demanded a follow-up, and it’s getting one in XCOM 2, due out this November. But that posed a difficult question: Where do you go from the end of Enemy Unknown (and its expansion, Enemy Within), where, spoiler alert, XCOM has unlocked the secrets of the aliens’ advanced technologies and used them to destroy the invaders’ mothership, ending the threat? When faced with this problem in 1995, Microprose took the fight underwater with X-COM: Terror From the Deep, which simply reskinned X-COM with a less relatable deep-sea theme, and added a scant few new features. For Firaxis’ second XCOM, Creative Director Jake Solomon and his team are going in an entirely different direction: instead of changing the setting, they’re changing history to make XCOM the underdog again. How? Surprise: You didn’t beat the aliens – they steamrolled you.
Over the next month IGN will reveal huge details about XCOM 2, uncovered during our visit to Firaxis’ Maryland studio. Creative Director Jake Solomon highlighted the major new features, including:
- Four of the five new soldier classes
- New enemies: Evolved Sectoids, snake-lady Vipers, and Advent soldiers
- Stealth-infused tactics, including using cover for concealment and looting fallen enemies and allies
- A mobile base: a flying aircraft carrier called the Avenger
- Procedurally generated maps and the technology that powers them
- Mod support, including official mod tools and Steam Workshop integration
- One-on-one multiplayer
The year is 2035, and XCOM now operates as a resistance movement against the alien occupation. That represents a huge shift in context for both the strategic and tactical battles we’ll fight in XCOM 2. “XCOM never lost the war; they just never stopped fighting and went underground,” explained Solomon. “Players are no longer the commander of this elite military force. They are commanding a very hardened group of freedom fighters and guerrilla fighters, and they’re leading them to ignite a global resistance and wake everyone up, and then try to rescue Earth from the government that now controls it.”
The situation is desperate: Earth is enemy territory, and in this reality XCOM never acquired the advanced weapons and armor technology that allowed us to go head-to-head with powerful aliens. We’re outmatched – even more so than before, as we’ve lost the home-field advantage, and the aliens have become even more powerful. To avoid being pinpointed and obliterated, the old subterranean headquarters has been abandoned in favor of a mobile base, built on the frame of a captured and retrofitted alien cargo ship rechristened as the Avenger. (This is a reference to the Avenger interceptor/troop carrier in 1994’s X-COM: UFO Defense, not Nick Fury’s helicarrier in Marvel’s 2012 Avengers movie.)
Firaxis isn’t going into detail about its new version of XCOM’s strategy layer just yet, other than to say that territory control will be important. From what we see in the trailer, in which the Avenger flies out of the canyon where it was concealed and off to parts unknown, we can surmise that it will move from region to region as XCOM attacks vulnerable alien targets in hit-and-run strikes. “The idea is that you’re inspiring people by actually taking the fight to the aliens and their New World Order,” Solomon hinted.
Watch the debut trailer above for a glimpse into a future where the aliens are in control of the Earth, and XCOM has gone underground to fight to overthrow their Advent government. This new guerrilla force will face more powerful enemies in unpredictable combat scenarios as they fight to turn the tables on a technologically superior enemy.
The news was first reported by IGN.com.