XCOM: Enemy Unknown Interview

The folks at Gematsu had the chance to chat with lead producer Garth DeAngelis at PAX East and have now published the results for us to read. Among the subjects touched on by the interview are the chance of seeing new items that weren’t present in the original game, permanent death, the squad limit, how dynamic are the game’s maps and more. Here’s a snip:

When you say (permanent death,) do you mean (permanently permantently,) or permanently for the remainder of the match?

No, permanently, permanently. So if you have this soldier you love I know it’s a new concept, right? A lot of games don’t do this. It’s scary. And it’s a catch-22, because it’s like, ‘˜that doesn’t sound fun, I don’t want to lose my guys.’ But it really does add to the magic of the game. When you know that you have these soldiers that you’ve invested in, that you’ve named, that’s part of your team, that you can lose them with one false move it really adds a sense of tension and dread that is actually fun, and is part of the magic drew of XCOM.

I want to talk an item for your fans. Our support soldier class just a good example of how they help augment and help the other teams they can throw smoke bombs, which block visiblity and increase cover for your soldiers. So if throw a smoke bomb, which behaves just like a grenade, it creates this smoke volume that other soldiers, like your assault soldiers, close weapons specialists, can run into and have some protection, even if he’s not in cover, and take out an alien in close range.

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Why are squads being limited to six people? Do tanks take up a spot in your limit?

Tanks do take up one spot on your limit. We did a lot playtesting on ‘˜what is the magic number with our game that is appropriate?’ You’d think on the surface, why not let us bring 24 soldiers soldiers? If we want to bring 24, why not. The original allows you do that, but we are re-imagining the game, not remaking it. And we’ve done some different things on the tactical layers, such as the move action system, really promoting group combinations, really promoting leveling up soldiers through our sort of RPG light system, where you can get over 50 different perks in the classes. In order to best take advantage of those, we wanted each decision and move for your soldier to be meaningful. And we though that the scope of six soldiers max was the best to do so. Anything beyond that, we would start to have moves that are not as powerful, and the matches would start to drag on. We’ve done playtesting with time limits and things like that, and we didn’t want to cross that threshold of, ‘˜these matches are taking to long, I want to hurry it up, I don’t even need this extra guy.’ Six is plenty. You’ll find when you play the game six is a very good amount.