XCOM: ENEMY UNKNOWN
Sid advocated for me after we did Civ Rev and the question was: what’s next? He was like, “I think Jake deserves a chance to try XCOM again”. I’m very thankful for that.
You have the setting, and you know what you want the player experience to be. But constructing all the elements of the systems to work with each other and produce the player experience you want is enormously complex. I had no experience of system design in that regard. I’d seen Sid do it but I’d never done it myself.
We spent the first year, at least, working on a prototype that looked pretty cool but was very much the original Enemy Defense. I’d taken that and then piled all these systems on top of it – classes, different weapons. For people who were familiar with the original game, it was awesome. For everybody else, it was the most complicated spreadsheet thing they’d ever played.
The reaction when everybody played it was like, “Oh no, this is not good”. The feedback was pretty unequivocal, and it was so disheartening and deflating, because I knew they were right. It’s hard to overstate how difficult that period was, because it felt like I didn’t know what I was doing.
I had to make it way more fun, and to make it more fun, it had to be a lot more straightforward. So then, in a panic, I stripped everything away. I came up with this prototype where every soldier had only one number to represent them, and the number encapsulated the tactical value of that soldier. When they were behind cover, it would go up, but that number also represented how much damage they would do. It was so simple, but it was already a little more fun. Then we went to two numbers: offence and defence. If you have a height advantage, your offensive number goes up. When you take cover, your defensive number goes up. When you’re flanked, your number goes down. There are trade-offs, interesting decisions that players are making and consequences to
those decisions. It was a long process from there, still years to go before we shipped it, but that was actually the basis of what our XCOM became.
Some people use this as a pejorative, but I’ve never taken it that way – I’m much more of a boardgame-type designer than [X-COM creator] Julian Gollop is. I don’t typically play a lot of other videogames for inspiration, but I do play boardgames, or I’ll read the rulesets. The best boardgames, like Pandemic and Forbidden Island, have an economy of information. I love that as a player and a designer. I gravitate towards showing it to the player, putting the numbers front and centre: this is the choice, this is the consequence. The only way you can inflict meaningful loss on the player is if they can look at what happened and go, “I see how I’ve done this to myself”. They knew the risk they were taking. XCOM pushed me even further into that player psychology.
“IT WAS A VERY BIG SWING, AND I FELT REALLY GOOD PERSONALLY WHEN WE FINISHED IT”