XCOM: Enemy Unknown Post-mortem Interview, Part Two

While I noticed it only now, the second part of Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s Alec Meer interview with Firaxis’ Jake Solomon on XCOM: Enemy Unknown is now online, including some rather interesting musings from Jake that sparked quite the debate in RPS’ comments section and might do the same here.

Here’s that particular snip:

RPS: Do you have any theories for what this means for the future of real time strategy or just strategy in the mainstream? Do you feel you’ve disproven speculation that mainstream turn-based strategy is dead?

Jake Solomon: I’ve thought about this a lot actually, but that doesn’t mean any of what I say has any authority whatsoever. I don’t know that XCOM means anything for strategy as a whole. I really don’t. I think that that’s like pointing to Civ, which is a multi-platinum game every time we put one out, but that doesn’t really mean anything for turn-based games really.

It’s almost like you can’t point to Starcraft, not that I’m making a comparison to Starcraft; nobody wants to do that, but you can’t point to Starcraft and say ‘˜oh RTSs are fine’, because they’re not, but it’s almost like there are some outliers and Civ is one of them. It’s incredibly successful every time we make one but that doesn’t mean that there’s a lot of room for other products like that.

RPS: Yeah, it’s kind of in its own bubble.

Jake Solomon: Right, and if I were to hazard a guess, these are the kinds of games I’d like to play to some extent, but XCOM is a game that one, was made by Firaxis and we have a lot of institutional knowledge of these types of games, and two, these are the kind of games we’re interested in making.

I don’t know how many designers and teams out there are like ‘˜oh right, let’s make a turn-based strategy game’, but for us we’re like ‘˜Fuck, yeah, let’s make a turn-based strategy game.’ And then on top of that, XCOM is basically the game of the entire career before my career, this is the game I’ve wanted to make. I love Jagged Alliance, and we have Sid [Meier] in-house, and I think that’s helped us, it seems like it’s a unique mix but maybe that’s just because I’m internal here, maybe it’s not that unique. I don’t know that because people play XCOM that means that they’re interested in playing other turn based games. I dunno, I hope people want to play more turn based games, that’s my personal favourite mechanic for strategy.

There’s also this effect that design-wise, I’m not like a hardcore strategy fan. I know that this sounds weird, I’m not sure how this is going to come off, but I’m not the most hardcore strategy fan there is. I certainly like Civ, and I actually worked on Civ Revolution with Sid. But I think that there’s a danger in genres sometimes, and I think you see this with strategy games as a whole actually, where the people who love strategy, a lot of times the design defaults to ‘˜well if you like this, we can give you more of that.’ What you need is more in-depth and what you need is more ‘˜we can simulate more of this’ instead of trying to pull back and say, try to make a game that I think operates on simpler principles.

It’s not because I have some deeper understanding of design or anything, I think I honestly benefit from the fact that I’m typically not the smartest guy in the room, I’m pretty much a lowest common denominator-type guy. And so for me I love Sid Meier type games. Sid’s brilliant, but his brilliance is that he tends to focus on simpler systems that then hopefully create complex behaviour.

It’s trite to point out things like flight simulators, but I think RTSs are the exact same way, they become so distilled because the people making them are so fucking hardcore that they become distilled, and distilled again/ Like I used to love Age of Kings, it’s one of my favourite games of all time, but RTSs for me became harder and harder to play.

There’s a lot more on the subject and on XCOM in general in the interview, so remember to check out RPS’ full feature!