14 DAY TRIAL // The upcoming XCOM: Enemy Unknown will not reward players too lavishly for success and will instead rely on the theme of the game to give them the motivation to push on regardless of how they perform in one tactical battle.
Jake Solomon, who is the lead designer working on XCOM: Enemy Unknown, has told Gamasutra that, “I think there are certain things that are sacred about this franchise. In terms of the game's mechanics, you need to make sure you have things like permadeath. You have to have real consequences, because that's what made games like XCOM special.”
In the rebooted XCOM, as in the original, the penalties for defeat will often feel bigger than the rewards for success.
Soldiers will remain dead for good, funding will dry up, bases will be destroyed and resources that are badly used will not be recoverable.
The developer added, “I think without those kinds of consequences, it's hard to have a real success. If you're playing a strategy game or a tactical game, they're less about getting checkpointed through a narrative driven experience, and much more about learning a set of rules and then applying those rules. If there aren't real consequences there, than you can't have real successes either.”
Solomon differentiates between games that only want gamers to experience a story and those, like XCOM, that create a system and then allow players to engage with them in any way they like.
For Enemy Unknown, Firaxis wants to create an experience that delivers strong emotions and strategy-based thrills as the players develop their Terran forces in order to defend against the alien threat and then take the fight back to them.
Firaxis is launching XCOM: Enemy Unknown on the PC, but also on the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 and the launch is set to take place on October 9 in the United States and three days later in Europe.