The Director of Development at 2K Marin warns us to watch the skies and preps us for the alien invasion.

Electric Playground: It’s been a long time since we’ve seen a game in the XCOM series. What’s the deal with this new one?

Morgan Gray

Morgan Gray: At its heart, our XCOM is a re-imagining of the franchise. Sort of a Battlestar Galactica/Batman Begins reinterpretation of the XCOM mythos, going back to the origin story. We’ve looked at the original game—which is obviously a classic, one of the finest games ever made—as a lighthouse, our inspiration.

We’re taking what we call the “central pillars” of the XCOM experience. Managing a team of the best and the brightest. Combining a strategic gameplay layer along with a tactical squad-based, smart guys combat mode. And finally, battling an unknown alien enemy and using your brain to figure out what it’s all about. Takeing that knowledge and use it to ultimately defeat it. We’ve taken all that and mixed it together in a gumbo pot, into one cohesive whole. That’s where we’re springing forward with our version of XCOM.

EP: Does this mean that a more direct player could focus on combat, whereas a more thoughtful player could focus on research?

"Any one-man army in XCOM is one dead army."

MG: An XCOM player has to focus on both. XCOM demands you have the combatty, easy-twitch brain, along with that long-term strategy and tactical mind. We don’t so much cater to those play styles as we do cater to the player’s ability to customize out weapons, the agents you select for your party and the way you utilize those tools on the battlefield.

That’s not to say that we don’t support the “I’m going to run in and try to shoot everyone in the face” method versus “I’m going to try to be flanky” [method]. However what’s necessary is being smart with your research and utilizing your agents, because any one-man army in XCOM is one dead army.

EP: What kind of things can you research?

MG: You can research enemy combatants. Enemy technology pieces. There’s a resource you’re probably familiar with called Elerium-115, which is the alien power source, it’s an exotic mineral. That’s a central feat in our XCOM: you find this stuff, research it and power up your exotic weapons. In addition to researching alien technology, you can take the fruit of that investigation and bring it into the construction of whole new tools. Human ingenuity meets alien tech.

There’s a host of items for you to explore, and that’s even before going into agent powers and abilities, which are outside of tools you use on the battlefield. Your ability to customize a new squad of agents is a whole other line players can explore in the strategic game.

EP: What kinds of character classes are there?

Agents lock and load.

MG: We are still adding them and deleting them as we come up with cooler ideas and start to hate some of our lamer ideas. Currently we have five classes. Each class has a unique power line and ability line. Your ability to upgrade that through experience points gained through the missions is how you grow them and bring them to life.

EP: What sort of alien weirdness can we expect to see?

MG: All the aliens in our world are part of a greater organization called The Outsiders. Whether it’s a race, an organization, a fan club, we’ll leave that to the story.

The aliens have two central themes. [There are the] Abstracts, things like the blob you’ve seen, the rectangular Titans… Strong visual shapes that are atypical to the gaming space we occupy. Then there are the more bipedal enemies:  Infiltrators that look like human beings. Weapon-using soldier classes.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it...

The reason we like the juxtaposition is that with the focus on tactical gameplay—the solving the tactical problems with the tools that give you, the player—we found that bipedal enemies showed a lot of intent. They’re easy to relate to. You’ll be able to say, “Hey, this is an alien invasion. They’re going to have guns, turrets, machinery. They’re going to be relatable so that [you] can deduce what their tactics are and devise a counter.

We use Abstracts as an extra bit of spice to change things up so that’s it not just a pure militaristic slugfest. Sometimes you get the walls caving in, these bombs come out of nowhere… We’re quite happy with our cast of madness.

EP: I noticed the Titan caused a lot of environmental damage. Are we going to see a lot of s*** get f***ed up?

The Titan f***s s*** up.

MG: There’s going to be a lot of s*** that gets f***ed up in XCOM! We have this concept of The Outsiders terraforming our world. It’s part of their greater master plan. We call it “corruption.” It’s gameplay significant in that creates new cover bits and new alcoves in combat space as it erupts out of the ground. It’s also narratively significant. Our storyline can be basically summoned up as “fear of the unknown.” Something coming and changing us and the world around us is the key to that fear. Combine all that together and it’s a long-winded way of saying a lot of s*** is going to get f***ed up before the aliens are off of our world.

EP: With the game set in 1962, are we going to see any historical figures making cameos?

MG: We are definitely going to be touching on everything that we can legally do [laughs]. It’s such a specific year, it’s not arbitrary. There will be historical cameos, a lot of historical reference… We’ll be touching on real things that occurred, we’ll touch on unreal things that have been altered in our alternate timeline. We picked 1962 for a very specific reason, so we’re really going to try to own that period.

EP: PC purists might object to seeing the game in this fashion—XCOM on a console. What would you say to them?

MG: A lot of XCOM purists may actually forget the fact that XCOM came out on the PlayStation 1, and there was a whole generation of console gamers that only got their taste of XCOM because of the PS1. Not everyone had a 486-66 back then.

Corruption

Everyone’s got their platform of choice. I’m not going to tell anyone what they should think. I just think that in the greater scheme of gamedom, we should all look for more avenues to get games to people. The more people that play them, the better games we can make. Certainly though, [PC purists] are going to have the prettiest version of XCOM, because PC hardware is amazing!

EP: Tell us in your own words why XCOM is going to kick our asses.

MG: Because like the hallowed, hallowed original, it provides a unique mixing of gameplay types that even in today’s games are not seen out in the market. That combination of grand level, Theatre of War strategic thinking on mission selection, agent recruitment, research, manufacturing… mixed with intense, very focused, very smart man shooter tactical combat out in the battlefield. That’s what made XCOM 1 amazing, and since we’re taking that heritage forward to the modern gamer, that’s is why it’s going to kick some ass.

My God... it's full of stars...

-Interview by Jason MacIsaac