14 DAY TRIAL // A mod for the recently launched XCOM: Enemy Unknown offers players who are dissatisfied with the gameplay options provided by the game a new selection that the development team at Firaxis implemented only partially.
The new advanced gameplay options included in the mod are:
Damage Roulette – causes all weapons to have bigger damage ranges; New Economy – each member country has randomized funding; Not Created Equally – all new soldiers have randomized stats at first Hidden Potential – stats are increased randomly when a soldier gets a promotion; Absolutely Critical – all flanking shots guarantee a critical hit; The Greater Good – the player needs to interrogate a psionic alien to learn their secret; Results Driven – a country’s funding decreases as terror increases; High Stakes – rewards for abduction missions are random; Diminishing Returns – cost of satellites increases with numbers; The Blitz – more cities are targeted during abductions; More Than Human – psionics are rare in humans;
There are also two bugged options that should not be enabled:
Red Fog – wounds taken during a mission decrease stats for that missions; Marathon – game length is increased.
More mods for XCOM: Enemy Unknown, most of them linked to gameplay tweaks, can be found on the official Nexus Mod page for the game.
The advanced mods are linked to something called Second Wave, a set of features that Firaxis worked on and has since been abandoned.
Firaxis previously stated, “The ‘Second Wave’ settings that some people have found by digging in to the game files was a feature that the team was toying around with, but it was not ever finished by the time the game released. It’s something the dev team at Firaxis is still interested in going back to and working on, but at this point we don’t have any firm plans to share.”
Fans also suspect that the team is working on an official expansion for XCOM.