HomeNewsThe Bureau: XCOM Declassified
Former Bioshock devs once worked on an XCOM game that played like Shadow Of The Colossus"The whole game would be about the scale disparity, that you were little human soldiers"
“The whole game would be about the scale disparity, that you were little human soldiers”
Image credit:2K
Image credit:2K
XCOM Trailer - E3 2010Watch on YouTube
XCOM Trailer - E3 2010
After releasing twoFreedom Forcegames, designer Ed Orman says that they’d “realised, with the advent of first-person, that turn-based was a bit of a niche. You’re not going to hit the big numbers. And we were working onBioShock, which is a first-person shooter. So if we’re doing that, why don’t we have a crack at a first-person version of XCOM?”
An initial concept was to translate the idea of managing a squad into an FPS, says Chey.
“First-person shooters have really struggled with the notion of managing a group of people. You have your AI companions who run around in front of you and get shot, or they run off and do something else, or they kite the enemy into attacking you when you don’t want them to. It’s very, very hard to make them behave sensibly and give you a feeling that you’re managing them and not get overwhelmed.”
Another idea was the aforementioned Kaiju, he continues, though this was eventually abandoned because “we felt it was getting too far away from what XCOM was supposed to be about”.
On the response to the creature designs shown in that E3 trailer, Chey says “People who loved XCOM wanted to see the same creatures from the tactical game in first-person, and duke it out with a Muton and a Sectoid. They may not be the most original monster designs ever, but they’re part of what people love.”
