XCOM 2 - Preview @ theEscapist

Joshua Vanderwall (theEscapist) takes a closer look at the gameplay mechanics of
XCOM 2:

XCOM 2 is What Happens When You Lose Enemy Unknown

While I've been excited for XCOM 2 since it was announced, there was one thing that's bugged me about it from the outset; the entire premise assumes you failed to fend off the invasion in Enemy Unknown. Though I didn't win every game, I beat Enemy Unknown and Enemy Within no fewer than a dozen times, so seeing the sequel predicated on failure seemed odd. It turns out, to very little surprise, that I wasn't the only one to take umbrage with this, and the team at the Firaxicon panel took a moment to address it.

The replayability of XCOM has always been important to the game, and being able to restart from scratch and have a wholly different experience lends itself to a parallel universe situation, where every playthrough is true in one of the infinite possible universes. XCOM 2 is based on those times - few though they may be - that you failed to fend off the invasion. It's a redemption of your losses, rather than a retcon of your wins. They went so far as to address folks who may never have lost, in that you're cleaning up other players' messes.

While replaying previous iterations of XCOM offered a unique experience, those of us who played through more than a couple of times are all too aware of the repetition of tactical maps. Previously, every encounter map was designed by hand, so there wasn't significant variation in combat encounters over the long-term. You might not notice the repeats in your first or second playthrough, but you'll see them after a while, and then you'll see nothing but the repetition. It's certainly effective to know the best lines of attack for any given map, but the surprise factor of a new map is more fun.

XCOM 2 fixes this issue with procedural combat maps, which, it turns out, aren't as easy to implement as they sound. The topic naturally came up while I was chatting with Creative Director Jake Solomon, who expressed the difficulty of creating a system that could intelligently piece together the pre-designed "parcels" of map into something not only cohesive, but navigable and survivable. For 20 years now, keeping your soldiers behind cover has been integral to the entire XCOM combat system. When combat maps are crafted by hand, it's simple to check cover density by eye, and adjust it later to finer specifications. Asking a computer to do so in any meaningful way, however, is a far more arduous task.

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