14 DAY TRIAL // The main creative director working at 2K Marin on the XCOM project has said that the move to first person shooter from turn based strategy game will not affect the feelings that players will get from the alien battling experience.
It was quite a surprise to hear that 2K Marin, the studio which delivered the sequel to BioShock, was also set to work on a revival of the XCOM series, taking the old series, which lacked any successful games in the last decade, and turning it into a first person shooter.
Jonathan Pelling, who is the creative director at 2K Marin working on XCOM, told Gamasutra in an interview that, “It's what makes XCOM XCOM. It's more of an emotional state, like 'when you're playing the game, this is how I'm feeling'. That's the most important thing that we're trying to capture with this game.”
He then went on to add, “It's not so much the nitty-gritty mechanics, but translating that into something that still feels the same to play, that still achieves the same feelings in players that used to, but now in a much more modern way.”
Pelling has acknowledged that players will not be getting the same game mechanics as they did in the original X-COM but he insists that the decisions and tactical choices are still present and have a clear impact on how the experience plays out.
The main elements of the experience that 2K Marin is keen on keeping and enhancing are the fear that is linked to the first alien encounters and the sense that humanity has no chance to fight back at first.
The creative director says that he has played the original game when he was younger and that he spend a lot of time with it, which should be comforting for those players who fear that the new game will be unrecognizable to fans of the series.