XCOM 2 - Interview @ Gaming Nexus

During E3 John Jahn of Gaming Nexus sat down with Garth DeAngelis, the lead producer on XCOM 2, and talked about XCOM 2 - some snippets:

What was the biggest thing you learned from developing the last XCOM game that you are applying to second one?
That's a great question. So we learned a lot with Enemy Unknown and there is a foundation that we got a lot of good feedback on. Certainly the game move between strategy and tactical. You can't lose the foundation of combat, the two turn system, the fog of war, the cover system. It's a tricky proposition to say what we want to change for a sequel to innovate more but those things we want to keep. We thought they worked really, really well when we looked at the core of what XCOM's about. But we said we definitely need to improve the game and how can we make it better and when you look at something like the procedural aspects like that we're adding to the game. We learned a lot on Enemy Unknown. failing that early. We tried random levels and finishing XCOM Enemy Unknown allowed us to have a lot of clarity for how to do it right. So we took a lot of those lessons with hand crafted maps and said OK, let's subdivide those, let's still design and hand place elements of maps but then we'll plug them into this procedural system that will make the game better. And so now you'll never see the same layout twice and we're super excited about that.

OK, cool. So, how are you tweaking and streamlining the core mechanics of the game?
Yeah the biggest thing that we're changing is the procedural maps but that there's a lot of tweaking happening with even just core combat. There are things like, now when you drop into a mission, since you are this resistance force that is sort of working from the shadows, the enemies don't know you're there because you're sort of invading their cities right? They've occupied Earth. So now you can sneak up on them and set traps and ambushes before they sound the alarms and know you're there. That's at its core, XCOM combat. That's a really good example of taking that foundation of combat and sort of twisting it a little bit to make it more interesting and different without losing the spirit of the original.