The Enemy To Know

[Thorondor]

XCOM Enemy UnknownWe intercepted a new XCOM: Enemy Unknown interview at Games On Net. A variety of topics about this much anticipated title are covered and clarified, including word on Jake Solomon's conversations with Julian Gollop!

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Associate Producer Pete Murray is doing the honours this time and he answers a number of burning questions as well as some less burning but quite humorous ones:

GON: What’s the strangest complaint you’ve heard so far?

 

Pete: We have an alien called the Muton. He’s this purple faced guy, and in the original game he had this sort of green unitard that he wore. We’ve changed the look so he’s a lot more hulking, a lot more bestial, and instead of a unitard he’s got this armour suit. I remember somebody telling me a unitard was much more scarier! And I guess yeah, if a guy’s going to charge at you with a plasma gun and wearing a unitard, there’s a certain amount of terror associated with that.

Head on over to Games On Net to find out what more is revealed.

[silencer_pl]

Pete: Well, we couldn’t come up with a bonus that was awesome enough for Australia. It was basically a toss-up between making all of your soldiers poisonous, or giving your soldiers the capacity to drink incredible quantities of beer. It turned out both of those mechanics were incredibly unbalanced in gameplay. I’m sorry.

 

Come on Pete. We here will out drink any Aussie

[FullAuto]

Poor chaps having to spread the interviews around.

[Ulzgoroth]

The thing about the small squad sizes is troubling, I think.

 

I never played X-com in the mass human sacrifice style, but the fact that you could and not infrequently would lose some people on missions was important. With a tiny team, costly victory becomes much less plausible.

[Space Voyager]

I agree. But I think everything will have to be balanced to that fact anyway, so I will not start panicking just yet.

[ShadowBlade]

Yeah, that's right. Most people complaining about the new squad sizes are thinking in the original game's terms, in which entering a fight with six soldiers would be nuts. My guess is the troopers will be sturdier than the old ones and/or there will be less WTF situations. Situations like the random plasma shot lancing in from the dark and killing a guy in one shot in the first turn. But that is part of the classic X-COM experience, as I believe Jake said in one of the many interviews, so we'll just have to see how the remake's dynamics work in practice.

 

It's not wise to panic about general concepts without seeing them in action first, and in synergy with the other elements of the game.

[FullAuto]

I think although permadeath will still be there, it's going to take a little longer to come into effect. So although troopers might still get taken out suddenly, you'll have x turns to resuscitate them. Unlike the original where dead = instantly.

 

Anyway, as SV and SB said, the battles will be balanced for the new troop limit.

[owen magnetic]

In another interview recently (maybe on Rock Paper Shotgun?), Solomon said that in his most recent playthrough of the game on normal difficulty, he'd had 22 soldiers KIA.

 

So unless that gets nerfed between here and release (certainly a possibility) then the game is going to be plenty lethal, small squads and all.