Time Extend
How the unlikely reincarnation of a strategy classic beat the odds – and relaunched a genre in the process
How XCOM: Enemy Unknown beat the odds and relaunched an entire genre in the process
Back in 2008, the prospect of a new X-COM game seemed highly unlikely. Not only because the series had been dormant for a decade, and turn-based games had fallen out of fashion – but also because, behind the scenes, the people tasked with reinventing X-COM were struggling. Lead designer Jake Solomon and his team at Firaxis were in the process of scrapping their second prototype.
The first attempt, three years earlier, had taken six months. As Solomon himself put it in a talk at PAX East 2017: “We lovingly crafted the biggest piece of shit that anyone has ever made.” The project was cancelled almost immediately. This was Solomon’s dream project, but he couldn’t figure out how to faithfully adapt his favourite game – 1994’s UFO: Enemy Unknown, known as
X-COM: UFO Defense in America – while also making something that felt contemporary.
When he was given a second chance, with a bigger team and twice the development time to produce a prototype, the result was deemed too complex and visually busy. Another year’s work was scrapped, and the team decided to start again from scratch – this time, worrying less about directly adapting the original game, and instead stripping the concept back to its absolute basics. This, finally, was the game that became 2012’s XCOM: Enemy
Unknown. And this tale of repeated failure, persistence and eventual against-all-odds victory isn’t too far from the experience of playing XCOM itself. It’s a game where everything can go wrong in a single mission, undoing hours of careful work. Of course, that’s exactly what makes it so thrilling.
The beating heart of XCOM is a tactical combat game, pitting your units against waves of alien invaders. Each mission sees you controlling a handful of soldiers, each filling a specialised role – sniper, support, shotgun-wielding assault or demolitions-expert heavy – as they push forward tile by tile and gradually uncover pockets of hidden aliens. Once they do, the shooting inevitably begins. Combat is all about the careful balance between taking cover to protect your units, and manoeuvring them around opponents’ cover to get a flanking shot. Or, alternatively, setting soldiers to overwatch mode, which automatically takes a shot at the first enemy which moves in range, and waiting for the aliens to come to you.
These are the basics that Solomon’s team established as the foundation of its third and last prototype, but in the final game, they’re pleasingly complicated by the range of equipment and abilities available to both sides. Each class of soldier can be upgraded along a tech tree, so a heavy might gain a specialised rocket that shreds armour, while a sniper can shoot a gun out of an enemy’s hand. Deep into the campaign, you unlock the ability to test troops for latent psychic abilities, potentially gaining units who can mind-control aliens or protect allies with a telekinetic shield. The aliens, meanwhile, range from those iconic big-eyed Greys – here known as Sectoids, with psionic abilities of their own – to hulking mech walkers and the dreaded Chryssalids. These skittering insectoids turn their victims into zombies, implanted with embryos which eventually hatch into yet more Chryssalids. Your first encounter with a species, then, can be terrifying: you’re never entirely sure what exactly this new and bizarre lifeform is capable of.
All these elements add up to create an exciting push and pull, as troops retreat when outgunned, or try to sneak around the fringes of the battlefield hoping to catch their foes unaware. This conflict is presented with the kind of action-movie flair that’s a rarity in strategy games. Any given mission serves up a series of hero shots, where your customised squad scramble down the ramp of the Skyranger jet as it touches down. Any especially dramatic moments see the camera zoom in from the normal isometric view to ground level, so you can watch soldiers loose a grenade, crash through a window unharmed, or make an unlikely shot across the length of the map.
And you’re given all the tools to tell your own stories in each battle. Destructible scenery means you leave a mark on environments, while enemies on Overwatch create moments of relief as a soldier dashes between cover and narrowly dodges the incoming fire. Sometimes in these stories, you’re the cool, powerful hero, and the game supports this with a few behind-the-
scenes tricks. Uncover a pack of aliens, for example, and they’ll immediately scurry for cover – but they deliberately don’t choose the optimal positions, to capture the feeling of taking them by surprise. At other times, XCOM can be brutal. Combat is dependent on dice rolls: each attack has a percentage chance to hit, and when a string of 70% shots miss in a row, it’s galling. Or perhaps you somehow trigger a handful of pods ( XCOM’s term for the squads of up to three aliens hidden beneath the fog of war) consecutively, leaving your team vulnerable.
This is how, in the space of one turn, what seemed like a sure thing can collapse in on itself. And so XCOM becomes a game about preparing for disaster, knowing how to triage when it inevitably strikes. The game again does a little work to ensure it’s never too unfair – it secretly adjusts for streaks of misfortune, tweaking the percentages so you don’t fall victim to too many bad rolls in a row – but not so much that it dissipates the constant sense of tension. This is definitely the weaker half of the game, with success dependent on a few factors – satellites being a particularly egregious example – that feel disconnected from the core experience, but its inclusion is fundamental to the loop that has always made the series work.
Tactics feeds into strategy feeds back into tactics, with the decisions you make in each half impacting the other. This can be a positive thing: set your scientists to work researching alien technology, and before long your soldiers will have shiny new plasma guns to try out in the field. But it also means that even small mistakes can have long-term consequences. Choose to deploy all your top ranked soldiers, a well-rounded A-team you’ve spent in-game years building up, on a single mission and it should make victory easier. But if everything goes south, and you lose the entire squad, it could cripple your organisation permanently. Failure is baked right into XCOM, especially on the permadeath Ironman Mode, which many – including Solomon himself – argue is the ‘correct’ way to play the game. It’s telling that Enemy Unknown’s sequel is based not on a rare triumphant playthrough, but in one of the hundreds of timelines where you fail and have to restart the game.
You’d think that any right-minded player would find this punishingly tiny margin for error more trouble than it’s worth. But Solomon and team managed to find a sweet spot so that, for the most part, it feels like you’re failing forward – and that your mistakes are something to learn from, even if it means having to scrap days of progress. The game is relatively simple to understand, and even its more complex elements are easily readable. The responsibility for most failures therefore lies firmly on you as the player. There are exceptions, of course: a misjudged click that sends a soldier one tile left of cover, or encountering a rule for the first time as it causes a building to collapse
BY TESTING ITS BOUNDARIES, THE TEAM PROVED HOW PLIABLE THE FORMULA LAID DOWN BY X-COM WAS
onto your squad. Playing on Ironman, where these fumbles can’t be undone, things occasionally tip over into frustration.
This is a problem addressed by some of the turn-based tactics games which followed in Enemy Unknown’s wake. Invisible, Inc, which applied the XCOM structure to an espionage stealth game, added a rewind button that could be used to undo the previous turn up to three times per mission – an idea picked up in turn by Into The Breach’s time-travel mechanics. The very existence of these games is testament to the unlikely feat pulled off by Solomon and the XCOM team. They resurrected not only this franchise but an entire mini-genre. By testing its boundaries, the team proved how pliable the formula laid down by X-COM was. A robust tactical combat game that overlapped with a strategy layer, with an ever-present opportunity for disaster: these were the fundamental pillars. Everything else was a matter of taste.
These boundaries have been further pushed by the ‘ XCOM- likes’ which have sprung up in the years since Enemy Unknown’s release. Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle, an improbable combination of Nintendo’s mascot with turn-based shootouts, streamlines the formula so much that the game drops the strategy layer altogether, and doesn’t leave much room for catastrophe. Nevertheless, the influence of XCOM is tangible: Solomon has even admitted that playing Kingdom Battle forced him to reconsider a few of XCOM’s most rudimentary design principles. Meanwhile, other XCOM- likes are pushing in the opposite direction. Julian Gollop, creator of the original games, is returning to the genre with Phoenix Point, which features more granular combat. The mechs of Harebrained Schemes’ recent Battletech require careful management to prevent overheating or the loss of weapon systems, creating a slower and more thoughtful experience.
Each of these games provides a different answer to the problems that faced XCOM in its early days. As unlikely as it might have seemed at the time, Solomon and his team eventually found one solution, a way of balancing old and new, simplicity and complexity. The real marvel, however, is that they created an environment where other teams could discover their own – without the fear of failure.