XCOM 2 - Interview & Trailer Rewind

“Yeah, we figured that would surprise some people,” said Lead Producer Garth DeAngelis.

A focus on PC was the only way to make the XCOM 2 that Creative Director Jake Solomon and his team envisioned when they sat down to talk after completing Enemy Unknown. “When we looked at what we wanted to do with the sequel, we had all these very, very ambitious goals,” said Solomon. On his must-have list were high-fidelity characters and environments, better-looking destruction, physically based rendering, and the crown jewel he’d wanted to get into Enemy Unknown but couldn’t: procedurally generated maps. “To do that, we had to use all of our studio expertise … and our expertise here is PC. That's our home, and that's where we're really comfortable.”

Focusing all of Firaxis’ efforts on the PC made logistical sense to DeAngelis, too. “Internally, with a relatively small team for the size of the game that we are, to be able to say we can focus on our platform that the studio has a pedigree for, and that X-COM: UFO Defense has a pedigree for, as PC-only… it just made a lot of sense, and that's how we wanted to dedicate our time.” XCOM 2 runs on a heavily modified version of Unreal Engine 3.5 (Firaxis’ customizations are too extensive to easily move to Unreal 4), which in some ways has been rewritten to the point of being “unrecognizable,” and it’s much simpler to make that work on one platform than three or more at once.

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This week we got our first look at XCOM 2 and the war to free Earth from alien occupation by way of an action-filled cinematic trailer depicting an XCOM attack on an Advent and alien patrol. You can probably pick up on many of its hints on your own (watch the original trailer below if you missed it), but to dig deeper and unearth some juicier secrets, I sat down with the brains behind the game: Creative Director Jake Solomon and Lead Producer Garth DeAngelis. Watch the video above to hear them elaborate on how the classes and abilities shown will affect gameplay in XCOM 2.

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JDR13 said:

I'm surprised that trailer hasn't been featured in the news feed, or did I miss something?

Anyways, I'm really not sure what to think so far. I don't care for the 20 year jump into the future, and I definitely don't like the 'Earth has been subjugated' scenario.

And the guy with the big sword? Sorry, but that's just not XCOM.

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JDR13 said:

And the guy with the big sword? Sorry, but that's just not XCOM.

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