Weekend Reading: XCOM Could Be the Contemporary Strategy Game

I was always a strategy gamer first and one of the biggest complaints I have when looking at the current gaming landscape is that there are less and less big strategy titles coming out as the years pass me by.

And, if the statements of one studio executive are to go by, the situation might become even worse in the near future and most strategy linked game titles might come to describe action-oriented video games.

Here's the full quote from Christoph Hartmann, who is the president of XCOM creators 2K Marin at the moment: “The ‘90s generation of gamers all love Xcom and we own the IP, so we thought OK, what do we do with it? Every studio we had wanted to do it and each one had its own spin on it. But the problem was that turn-based strategy games were no longer the hottest thing on planet Earth. But this is not just a commercial thing – strategy games are just not contemporary.”

I can vouch for the fact that, being born in 1983 and introduced to gaming in the first years of the last decade of the 20th century, I worshiped at the altar of UFO: Enemy Unknown, the first of the X-Com video game and the best of them all.

In a lot of ways the mix between turn-based strategy battles, resource management and light role playing has not been equaled since.

And I understand how the people at 2K Games thought that they could use some of the concepts seen in that game and the name to create a new experience, set in another time frame and using mainly the mechanics of the third-person action and shooter mix.

But I don't get why they don't use a different name for the game they are creating and reserve the use of XCOM (as they write it) or X-Com (as I remember it) for another set of games that update the mechanics of the strategy genre and try to push it forward, try to make it contemporary with the games we see today.