from The ASHES
How Julian is returning to the X-COM formula with Phoenix Point
Julian Gollop has been beavering away on
Phoenix Point for the past few years, which is billed as a spiritual successor to the
X-COM games of old. And it’s been a chance for Gollop to revive an array of dormant concepts. “It involves quite a lot of ideas and influences from X-COM: Apocalypse, the original X-COM and also Dreamland
Chronicles, which was a cancelled project I was working on,” he says. “I view it very much as a continuation of what I was doing back in the Nineties.”
Similar to Dreamland, humanity is on the back foot as Lovecraftian horrors have taken over the planet, and it’s up to the player to stage a resistance. Superficially it bears a resemblance to 2K’s XCOM reboots, but there are some significant differences, such as the first-person aiming that allows body parts to be targeted. And rather than shots being calculated with a percentage – which can sometimes result in misses from point blank range – you instead have a disc in your sights that you aim over the enemy. All shots will land within that disc, so if it’s completely covering an enemy, you’re guaranteed a hit.
But the real innovation comes with the enemies themselves, which evolve in response to your actions. They feature modular body parts with different mutations – so, for example, a crab-like creature might have a claw that’s mutated into a shield. And if that mutation proves effective for the enemy, they will send more enemies with the same mutation into battle.
Balancing all of these mutations has been a headache for the team at Snapshot Games, says Julian. “I think for the most complex creature, we’ve got something like 600 possible unique combinations.” But after a couple of delays, the game is almost ready for release – it’s currently slated for September 2019. than the whole Earth, but it was far more complicated because of the various organisations within the city you had to keep on side. “It was the idea that these mega cities were a horrendous parody of existing big cities,” says Julian, “where you’ve got multiple factions, gangs, corporations, all vying for influence and control, and stuff is fairly corrupt.”
This time around, the aliens are interdimensional beings that warp directly into your city. “But at the same time,” says Julian, “you’ve got to be aware that there are all these other organisations in the city that you need to keep happy.” The corporations will react to things like collateral damage to the city, and they might even be infiltrated by the aliens themselves.
If that wasn’t complicated enough, the game was now all played in real time (although there was still an option to switch to turn-based fights). Julian recalls that developing such a sophisticated realtime game was a headache: “We had to do a real-time-based AI, and we had to deal with all the animation and timing issues that real-time games have to deal with. It was very tricky.”
Development ended up taking around two and a half years, and it was marked by disagreements with Microprose about the look of the game. “Microprose didn’t quite get the hang of the graphics,” says Julian. “They took all the graphics in-house: they had a much bigger art team, and they did some really good designs with these sorts of retrofuturistic vehicles and stuff.” But the team wanted to use 3D graphics tools to create the assets, and Julian was less than impressed with the results. “They had
this overambitious idea. This famous sci-fi artist who did lots of book covers was going to build these really sophisticated aliens in plasticine and they were going to 3D scan them and then render them. And they ended up looking like these blobby characters. I looked at the plasticine models they used, and they’ve got some amazing detail on them, which they just couldn’t replicate in the game.” And although Julian was unhappy with the graphics, there was nothing he could do. “I had absolutely no control over their art department. They had this amazing ambition to do some amazingly brilliant stuff, which ended up looking like Mr Blobby.” X-COM: Apocalypse marked the end of Julian’s involvement in the X-COM franchise, although Mythos Games would go on to start development of a spiritual successor to the series in the form of The Dreamland
Chronicles: Freedom Ridge. This game saw Earth being conquered by dinosaur-like aliens, but Mythos struggled to find a publisher, and development was wound up, along with Mythos Games itself, in 2001.
However, Dreamland lives on in a fashion in Phoenix Point, the latest game from Gollop’s new studio, Snapshot Games. “Some ideas from that are actually in Phoenix Point,” he says, “including body part targeting and the first-person aiming system. That was actually in Dreamland back in 2000. And also the Geoscape side of the original Dreamland is somewhat similar in some ways to
Phoenix Point: the idea that the aliens are already building these big structures, and that you have to scavenge for really basic stuff.”
While Mythos Games worked on the ill-fated
Dreamland Chronicles, Microprose carried on making games in the X-COM series, although they began to stray farther and farther from the turn-based original. X-COM: Interceptor from 1998, which is actually set before Apocalypse in the timeline, saw the fight being taken into space, as Earth’s corporations seek to find new resources in distant star systems to rebuild the shattered Earth. It was a mix of base management and real-time
"They had this ambition to do some brilliant stuff, which ended up looking like Mr Blobby" Julian Gollop
flight simulation – the player would repel alien attacks by hopping into a spaceship and shooting down the marauding forces.
Although it was mostly well received, scoring an 8/10 in Edge, the game sold poorly and shared little DNA with the previous X-COM games.
“X-COM Interceptor was a tangent really, rather than the continuation of the series,” notes Julian.
At about the same time, the struggling Microprose was bought out by Hasbro Interactive, and two of its development studios were closed shortly afterwards. Microprose itself would cease to exist as a company in 2001, when Hasbro sold its remaining intellectual property to Infogrames.
Hasbro released two further titles in the X-COM series. X-COM: First Alien Invasion from 1999 was a budget title that formed part of Hasbro’s ‘Email Games’ range – this simplified version of X-COM could only be played over email, and ceased to be playable once Hasbro shut down the servers.
X-COM: Enforcer from 2001, meanwhile, dropped the strategy element of X-COM, instead offering up a third-person shooter where the player controls a robot ‘enforcer’ taking out invading aliens. It was critically mauled by PC Gamer on release, whose review called it “one of the worst spin-offs ever squirted out on the PC”.
Enforcer was built from the ashes of two cancelled games, X-COM: Genesis and X-COM:
Alliance. Genesis was an attempt to do a “back to the roots style X-COM game” but with a 3D engine, notes Julian. It was helmed by Dave Ellis’ team at Microprose Chapel Hill, which had worked on Interceptor, and was scheduled for launch in 2001. But Hasbro cancelled the game at the end of 1999 and closed the studio shortly afterwards.
X-COM: Alliance, on the other hand, started development at Microprose UK’S studio all the way back in 1996 and used gameplay similar to Hired Guns on the Amiga, with play split between four windows reflecting the viewpoints of each of your troops. But Hasbro closed the British office in 1999 and switched development to the US. Shortly afterwards, the project was put on hold and the assets were used to make X-COM: Enforcer, a much simpler game. X-COM: Alliance flickered back into life briefly at Infogrames in 2001, but ultimately was permanently cancelled in 2002.
Julian remembers seeing Alliance on display at a huge booth during E3 1999. “I went up to try it, and there was a Microprose guy there who jumped on me because there wasn’t anybody else playing. And he said, ‘Are you familiar with
X-COM?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, just a little bit.’
“It was interesting, in the sense that it was a squad-based first-person shooter type thing where you control four soldiers, and each of the soldiers had their own view in a separate camera. But it wasn’t working well – I remember I played it for two minutes and my guy started standing at a really weird angle of about 60 degrees from vertical. You couldn’t really play it.”
Julian laments the sad fate of the original
X-COM series: “It went out with a whimper, basically.” But now, with 2K’s XCOM reboots and a spiritual successor in the form of Phoenix Point, finally the series has a legacy to be proud of.