How XCOM: Enemy Unknown Overcame the Accessibility Stigma

While I’m sure not everyone will agree that the XCOM: Enemy Unknown team managed to “overcome the accessibility stigma”, this Gamasutra excerpt of a longer post-mortem available in the April issue of Game Developer magazine offers some good insight into their philosophy and the iterative process that brought us the “re-imagined” 2012 AAA turn-based strategy title. Here’s a snip:

Even before beginning work on XCOM, we heard it all before: Games had become too easy. The development (or marketing) buzzword “accessible” translated to “dumbing down,” the idea that developers would take an otherwise deep, rich, and satisfying game and distill its intricacies to its barest form so the entirety of the world could understand, buy, and play said game.

It sounds hyperbolic, but I’ve seen games with easy modes that literally played themselves, making failure impossible, so this stigma against accessibility wasn’t without merit! Making a game “for the masses” could be the ultimate transgression, especially for a complex game with a hardcore past, and we anticipated that XCOM fans would be skeptical that our work would hold up to those who fell in love with the original.

While UFO: Enemy Unknown may have been magnificent, it was also a unique beast when it came to beginning a new game. We often joked that the diehards who mastered the game independently belonged in an elite club, because by today’s standards the learning curve was like climbing Mt. Everest.

As soon as you fire up the original, you’ll be placed in a Geoscape with the Earth silently looming, and various options to explore within your base options including reading (unexplained) financial reports, approving manufacturing requests (without any context as to what those would mean later on), and examining a blueprint (which hinted at the possibility for base expansion), for example the player is given no direction.

Even going on your first combat mission can be a bit of a mystery (and when you do first step off the Skyranger, the game will kill off a few of your soldiers before even seeing your first alien welcome to XCOM!). While many fans on the team found this learning curve to be a part of the game’s charm and wore it as a badge of honor, we ultimately knew that, in 2012, we needed to enable gamers to experience the truly fun elements without overly testing their patience. But neither could we bear to dumb XCOM down.

We were on a mission to flip the perception on streamlining, to remove the stigma that accessibility equaled a dirty word. We wanted anyone to be able to give XCOM a whirl without expecting them to become fluent in the game’s many systems on their own accord. At the same time, we needed to preserve all of the richness, depth and challenge ingrained in the core pillars. If someone wanted to walk away from the experience due to the game’s challenge, we were okay with that; but we didn’t want to alienate anyone simply due to a lack of information.