14 DAY TRIAL // Garth DeAngelis, who is a producer working on XCOM: Enemy Unknown at Firaxis, has revealed that one of the biggest problem for the new turn-based strategy game has been the lack of competition in the genre.
He told Gamasutra that, “If you look at it FPSes and the action genre in the last 20 years, there's certainly a timeline where there's a good amount of releases every single year. Every month, where you can say, 'This game did something different. It pushed the genre in a new direction.' In turn-based and strategy games there's a huge gap.”
The team working at Firaxis have looked to the original XCOM: UFO Defense to inform their design decisions for the new game, but members who loved other titles like The Elder Scrolls and Fallout also brought their own ideas to the process.
This can be easily seen in how XCOM: Enemy Unknown treats the potential death spiral of losing the best squad of soldiers in a mission and then being unable to progress.
DeAngelis added, “There are some mechanics in place that will encourage you, and in some cases force you, to use other players, because your soldiers can get fatigued. They can get wounded. You can't just back to back to back level up four to six guys and only use them.”
The mechanics give players a clear reason to create two or three teams and then rotate them in and out of action in order to make sure that he balances potential rewards with potential losses.
The new XCOM: Enemy Unknown has a demo available at the moment and the first two missions point towards a very solid turn-based tactics experience.
XCOM: Enemy Unknown will be launched on the PC, the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 on October 9 in North America and three days later in Europe.