X-COM creator Julian Gollop discusses his most important games (2019)

I hope the future direction of this game goes back to its roots. The X-COM2 DLC which introduces alien combatants to your team as players always seemed deeply misguided to me. To me the point of XCOM is about humanity confronting those aspects it finds unacceptable to its condition, I’ve never taken it literally about aliens vs. humans, so the othering of a race of aliens is not a concern for me. What I care about are non-fictional people, their nations and their cultures. So the DLC where aliens were part of your team seemed like such a misguided venture to me. It seemed like something someone might come up with in a thoughtless effort to be inclusive of diversity. But what does that even mean in this case? So, yeah I hope XCOM reexamines it point, or someone else should create a better IP.

I feel completely the opposite. What would it look like in an alien war? Would we have defectors like we do in actual war? Could some of those fighting for the aliens actually be enslaved and riot?

All of this adds depth and texture to a game instead of "humans good, aliens bad". The world isn't simplistic and I really don't want a game with a theme to either.

Original XCOM and XCOM2 was ok, PP was rubbish.

I really liked X-COM Chimera Squad. Different capabilities were really cool and interspecies banter made the whole thing feel alive. Don't get me wrong, I still like shadowy claustrophobic climate of the original just as much, but for example X-COM reboot was almost spoiled for me because of one character, Bradford. I never hated any alien as much as his nagging, orders and tone.

Also the mechanic in the reboot was a bit misguided. They eliminated sneaking up and ambushing the enemy and replaced it by little animated introduction of the enemy as soon as they land into a very large circle around your soldiers, almost regardless of terrain. X-COM 2 brought it back a little bit with you soldiers starting in stealth mode and some of them potentially re-entering stealth again using a skill.

Why was it rubbish?

Did the developers say it was driven by inclusivity?

Wait isn't the puppet human government a huge part of the story?

I wouldn't say it was rubbish, but I will say I was disappointed with it (as a life long XCOM fan). Primarily because the microgame (tactical squad based combat) was good but the macro game (the strategical game in the world overview) was weak. Base building was basically non-existent compared to the original XCOM games. Instead you stumbled across existing bases and "build" on of 3 facilities in them. The research tree was weak. A DLC introduced the "shooting down UFO's"-mechanic but overall all of the DLC was just focused on more different enemies and story lines and did very little to improve the worldview game.

I get that, but as I see it, this way of thinking about it just makes a mediocre IP that’s coloring by numbers. It’s exactly how you say it is, and it’s what’s expected. A typical war story. But let’s look at it from a Tolkien perspective, to me that lens of looking at things gives you a sense of what’s important to keep, and what values to adhere to. It’s not orcs vs. humans, it’s evil vs. mankind. It’s not aliens vs. people, it’s non-human vs. mankind. That’s just my way of looking at it, and I expect others to enjoy the game differently, and that’s fair.

So to make it less mediocre you’d make it more predictable?

To me there’s so little in the way of things which unite us on the concept of humanity. Our conceptualization of evil and what it means is somewhat aligned, but more than that what I think unites us is our way of thinking about things which give us hope. The takeaway from a lot of Tolkien’s work, and that of others like him, has always been about the nature of fairy stories and what they entail.

It’s the same with games about uniting as humanity to kill aliens, you exist in some liminal space between reality and fantasy to come to terms with what it means to be who you are, etc. That said, someone is free to make their game how they like, just as I am free to dislike its direction and make a comment on it. And so on, and so forth.

Not only the puppet government, but also the puppet resistance. You can't tell which side the Council is on.

No, they never did. It seems obvious to me that the thought process was

  1. Humans are being enslaved by psychic powers
  2. There's multiple different alien races in the war with very different environmental requirements
  3. What if some of those alien races were also enslaved by psychic powers
  4. Humans figured out how to break psychic enslavement
  5. Therefore, it makes sense that the humans could free some aliens
  6. Grateful aliens would fight with the humans to not be enslaved again

IMO, it made the one of the biggest mistakes that games can make: It just wasn't fun.

Browsing the reviews now, it's full of people saying how hard they tried to like the game. Good games make themselves effortless to enjoy. Even quite flawed games cause people to look past any awkwardness or glitchiness if they're fun at their core.

It's hard to express what makes unfun games not fun. But it was grindy in the wrong places, and just felt awkward to play. The balancing and pacing was terrible, and it just lacked charm.

It felt like it took itself really seriously, and it projected an air of superiority by deliberately not choosing to do some things that made the 2012/2016 XCOM games fun out of a sense that they were too "dumbed down".

If you go into developing a game being "Not X", then you better bring along a game-changing mechanic, graphics, or something else that separates and elevates you above that game. And PP didn't have that.

I’m a big fan of XCOM, but I bought Phoenix Point and it just kept crashing mid-mission. Sucked all the fun out of it and I gave up.

Wow, I didn’t know Laser Squad was done by the same guy (and his brother, full indie-style, it turns out) — I remember playing that game on Spectrum in 1992 or so, and it was absolutely next level, no other game came close at that time.

People frequently do not understand the statistics underlying real world dynamics, embrace oversimplified world models, and going against that has them discouraged? That is one strong re-expression of the satanic attitude.

From cinematography, two big examples "that may have people leave the theater, then":

-- in Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, the Sheriff (Gene Hackman) re-telling the story of English Bob:

> You see, the night that Corky walked into the Blue Bottle, and before he knows what's happening, Bob here takes a shot at him! And he misses, 'cause he's so damn drunk. Now that bullet whizzing by panicked old Corky, and he did the wrong thing. He went for his gun in such a hurry that he shot his own damn toe off. Meantime Bob here, he's aiming real good, and he squeezes off another, but he misses, because he's still so damn drunk, and he hits this thousand-dollar mirror up over the bar. And now, the Duck of Death is as good as dead. Because Corky does it right. He aims real careful, no hurry... [...] BAM! That Walker Colt blew up in his hand, which was a failing common to that model. You see, if Corky had had two guns instead of just a big dick, he would have been there right to the end to defend himself. [...] Well, old Bob wasn't gonna wait for Corky to grow a new hand. No, he just walked over there real slow - 'cause he was drunk - and shot him right through the liver

-- the scene in Vince Gilligan's El Camino, in which a bunch of gunners is so hijacked by the unpreparedness to the havoc that most bullets end on the scenery.

Not documentaries, but statistically relevant like the ten "black" in sequence at the roulette, frequent as the wheel is having well over a thousand spins.

X-Com was amazing, and Xcom2 also pretty good. I just checked, and there is an amazing mod and very active community around LwotC (Long war of the Chosen), with tons of fixed bugs and improvements, a decade or so after the game was released. [0]

I am surprised Firaxis didn't work on an X-Com 3. I would guess the fan base is still huge.

I'm getting old and I don't play videogames anymore, but if I have a month of free time imprisoned in a cell with nothing else to do, I'd give xcom2 with LwotC a go. (and Master of Magic, and Master of Orion 2, etc).

[0]: https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/Long_War_of_the_Chosen

> It seemed like something someone might come up with in a thoughtless effort to be inclusive of diversity.

The more obvious explanation is that having alien members in your squad opens up new gameplay opportunities.

Your comment seems like a caricature of a right wing person who thinks everything they don’t like is “DEI/woke”. It’s like you need the world to be black and white and when it isn’t it upsets your world view?

There's also an open source reimplementation of the original Gollop designed game which has extensive modding support. There's quite a few total conversion mods for it

https://openxcom.org/

https://mod.io/g/openxcom

It is quite interesting to see this development on forums like this one.

I guess the Thiel influence is strong here too but it seems like "The Last Scream of the Old World", which is a right wing, populist and anti-intellectual tone, will seep deep even into areas we wouldn't have expected or didn't even think it would happen because it wouldn't be necessary.

We're living in interesting times indeed...unfortunately.

I maintain that his best game was absolutely Chaos: The Battle of Wizards.

Although later creations were more popular it's that first one that really stands in my memory 40+ years later.

I guess it might be time to fire up an emulator and play again, as I do every couple of years:

https://torinak.com/qaop/play/chaos

I do not think you're talking even about the same games? This is about the _original_ X-Com.

The plots to XCOM were never very strong: it was the gameplay that set them apart. Gollup’s earlier games (the subject of the article) developed turn-based, grid-constrained tactical simulation out of board games; plot was just polish added to that. Using roughly the same mechanics, you command a death squad on search-and-destroy missions, terrorists doing direct action against the government, and, in Chimera Squad, cops. The story is just window dressing for the mechanics.

Yep. It's this game:

https://www.gog.com/en/game/xcom_ufo_defense

Not this one:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/200510/XCOM_Enemy_Unknown...

There's a bit of confusion because the first game was called "UFO: Enemy Unknown" in the UK and "X-COM: UFO Defense" in the US [1] but the one discussed in the article is the 1994 game:

  X-COM: Enemy Unknown
  Developer: Mythos Games
  Publisher: MicroProse
  Format: Amiga, PC
  Release: 1994

Also: graphics [1].

_____________

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO:_Enemy_Unknown

[2] https://dcnxazdl1qzggl.archive.ph/2Ue9d/b72fb5aeb68b363eebfc...

People don't need to understand statistics for games, people understand what's fun. And that mechanic wasn't fun no matter how much you "well akshually" it.

There's a reason why pretty much ever single new tactics game got rid of the probability based hit chance. It's a dead end in game design.

Yeah, I didn't like significantly more cartoony/comicy shift in themes in 2, especially with DLCs, either.

Fighting campy superhero bosses just kinda made everything less tense (and frankly, the random spawns got kinda annoying).

>> I am surprised Firaxis didn't work on an X-Com 3.

Firaxis didn't but Julian Golop's company, Snapshot Games (discussed in the article) published Phoenix Point which is kind of like X-Com 2.0.1:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/839770/Phoenix_Point/

As an old Spectrum head I was obsessed with JG’s output back in the day. Chaos may have looked awful but it was so much fun. I still have core memories from that, Rebelstar Raiders and Laser Squad. (Beating people online is one thing, beating your friends when you’re hot-seating in the same house is something else.) Ironically never played XCom, but I have a lot of hours on Magic and Mayhem (which had the executable… Chaos.exe)

We're talking about X-COM: Enemy Unkown, the Firaxis game, right? I had so much fun with this game that I don't even remember that RNG issue as being an issue. Most likely, if I failed a "certain to land" shot and the squad was in a really, really tough spot, I'd just shrug and re-load a save [1]. I mean, it's not Nethack, is it? [2]

In any case, I really don't get it. So you point your gun at an alien and you see a chance to hit at "85%". What do you do? Do you think to yourself "oh, cool, that's a certain hit"? It's not: there's a 15% chance to miss.

I think ragequtting over that is just the standard phenomenon, in both strategy games and real life, that people never make contingency plans, they just make one plan and assume there's no chance of failure because they're so smart to plan ahead and the competition is clearly too dumb to have any plans of their own. In my book, any plan where one imagines themselves emerging triumphant after beating all the odds like the dice are loaded in their favour by the gods is not so much a "plan" as a wish-fulfillment fantasy.

And I, for one, don't find those fun. YMMV, but let's not assume that everyone enjoys the same things, in games or in life.

P.S.:

>> There's a reason why pretty much ever single new tactics game got rid of the probability based hit chance. It's a dead end in game design.

You mean, they still have hit chances but they don't tell you what they are so they can tweak them behind your back, so you win enough to buy their next game? Oldest trick in the book [3].

____________

[1] I hate losing men.

[2] There's an "Iron Man" mode but that turns out to only play the Black Sabbath song in a loop.

[3] https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

  They wanted Mel to modify the program 
  so, at the setting of a sense switch on the console,
  they could change the odds and let the customer win.

"Original XCOM" from 1994, or are you thinking of a later "original" game?

I've never played the original X-COM, though I played the two Firaxis games to death. I have 132.2 hours on X-COM: Enemy Unkown (the Firaxis game) and 327.5 hours on XCOM2, both of which seem like an undercount (especially the first one).

I thought I had the original game in my GOG account but it turns out I only have a clone (Xenonauts). I haven't played it at all and I bet I wouldn't have played the original XCOM either if it was in my GOG account.

The reason? I'm sad to admit that but it's the graphics. I can sometimes play older games, e.g. arcade games from the '80s or '90s, but I really struggle with most older graphics games. That makes me sad because there are some real gems that are now older than 20-30 years and I'd really like to be able to enjoy them, but I can't.

There's a time to play, and a time to admire graphics, I guess. Oh Ecclesiastes, you were so right.

I was a big fan of the predecessors like Raiders and Laser Squad.

The first X-COM felt like those, afterwards not so much.

>What would it look like in an alien war?

Humanity would lose. The end. Rather boring game if I may say so.

It's an evolution of the mechanics:

Original X-Coms: very simulationist. Reboot: Adds class mechanic thus reducing simulationism.

(In both cases lategame is rather easy).

Chimera: Small set piece, probably inspired by the Mario game. Also characters like in Jagged Alliance.

It takes a lot from other games, which suits some but not others.

It’s important to separate graphics and UX here - I don’t mind if the soldiers and the aliens are blobs of pixels, or even just coloured squares, but the UI of the original UFO/XCOM games is pretty much incomprehensible to a modern player.

The contemporary Jagged Alliance, while it has a handful of baffling UI (that was already the case when it was new), is still imo much easier to get into than the original X-com while having nicer looking graphics.

I recently played through 'Aliens: Dark Descent' which manages to feel like a X-COM game, but real time. It felt like the natural next step for tactic strategy games and was instantly hoked -- I can't imagine returning to the turn-based roll-of-a-dice luck systems after that.

"random-number stuff was really too brutal for a lot of players to handle" -- I never finished XCOM 2 specifically for that reason. I think, having not come from a background of table top RPG's, it just didn't click.

Rebelstar player here, was a great little game.

Thanks for the recommendation. Seems like a natural X-COM follow on. Appears to be 60% off on Steam atm as well!

For a short story which looks at this see:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11324814-vilcabamba

Probably becuase i did play it when I was younger, i still love the classic xcom graphics. they are clunky for sure, but have a pleasant style.

It is the little things, like the 'ping' of bullets hitting enemies or terrain, or seeing an alien scurry past between hedges.

That one unfortunately got caught up in publisher politics as they had a very successful kickstarter but then broke promises to backers because Epic offered them a lot of money for an exclusive. I think the game would’ve been more popular if it hadn’t had the distraction of many of their biggest fans feeling used.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/phoenix-point-becomes-epic-...

Doesn’t the new xcom still have percentage to hit based on distance to the target?

Having an RNG hit chance is fine as long as the probability “feels right”. “Point blank” should have a 100% chance.

This works at two levels, too: it explains the presence of wildly different creatures created for gameplay reasons, and as a world-building exercise it’s more probable that when the evil empire shows up it’s not the first time they’re trying their playbook.

Turn based and random are orthogonal (of course). Coming from table top gaming first, I rarely enjoy real time games. But also find the x-com RNG too much after awhile.

The long war mods are X-Com 3-ish - they are extensive!

This was the only game that my whole family played.

Chaos Funk was a pretty good reworking of it.

That one you posted is pretty good until you get to casting a spell, and then they little keyboard sans-cursors and the lack of apparent touch control all goes wonky.

I was referring to the interpretation of «ridiculous» as "it is preposterous", not at that which means "it is frustrating".

And personally, in front of "UFO: Enemy Unknown" I lived the pleasure of the masterpiece, not the balanced game - some of us have little taste for the win-and-lose. We learnt assembly when we were kids to make those sides of the gameplay adapt to our will - and went on hacking since.

Of UFO/XCOM, one particularly stubborn subsystem to change was having the "radars" not missing any new alien ship.

> Point blank

If the target is a mime pretending to a statue, yes, probably, it will approximate that.

The turn-based animation of UFO/XCOM may have felt so static and poised - but it narrated a military action...

> graphics

Have you tried interpolation, such as HQ4X, SuperEagle etc.?

If that is not enough, add textures, colour-dependent.

There was/is? A mod called “Shut Up Bradford” to make him stop talking.

Enjoy their quote midway through about how pointlessly miserly the Spectrum Holobyte people were about development. Made me bleak laugh a little.

  > suddenly we really had to finish it by end of March, and they required us to work in-house in Chipping Sodbury seven days a week, 10 hours a day for several months. They didn’t give us any extra resources. In fact, we had to beg them to give us a more powerful computer to use, because my brother’s computer couldn’t handle it! My computer was having serious overheating problems. I had to remove the case and it crashed occasionally. They begrudged us one new computer for Nick and they stuck us in this tiny little room.

The Magic and Mayhem quote's pretty funny too about game dev, still seems to be the same.

  > They said RPGs don’t sell, which was, of course, complete rubbish. They wanted to make it much more RTS-focused, partly because of Command & Conquer, which was very popular at the time.  (...) We started to make it before Diablo came out, and it was also before Baldur’s Gate, which was the real milestone in RPGs.

And naturally the demise of Nintendo

  > my boss was opposed to doing a sequel. He said the 3DS was dead and that we had to go with the PS Vita

3DS sells 76 million, PS Vita ... 10. Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars even sold "acceptably". 340,000 according to the data available.[1] Not exactly Mario Kart 7 or Pokemon, still acceptable for a third party.

[1] https://www.vgchartz.com/game/47651/tom-clancys-ghost-recon-...

It was an enjoyable read at least. Lots of standard horrible practices in the game development community, and some actually surprising ones. Such as, "they didn't even hire the X-COM people to work on any of the X-COM sequels?"

I think this affects only nagging on missions, not the cutscenes. But it's a step forward.

Yeah I got a copy of the original XCOM as a kid and could not make heads or tails of it - after playing the modern releases, I figured hey, I’m a seasoned adult gamer™ now, maybe I should go back and check it out…

Unfortunately I’m also a software dev, and an interface snob, and the UI/UX for the old games sucks. They had access to the exact same mouse+keyboad back then as we do now, but the standards for controlling a Turn Based Tactics game just weren’t established yet, and interfaces ranged from ignorant to amateurish to experimental to actively user-hostile - and I don’t know which one to characterize old XCOM as, but I don’t have any patience for it nowadays.

It’s such a shame that old games with good gameplay are effectively hidden behind bad UX. Rereleases like the recent Tomb Raider that practically preserve the original experience, but fix the UI issues (the tank controls of the original, in this case) are a blessing.

> the DLC where aliens were part of your team seemed like such a misguided venture to me. It seemed like something someone might come up with in a thoughtless effort to be inclusive of diversity. But what does that even mean in this case?

If I live a million years I will never understand the paranoia over the ‘threat’ of inclusivity / diversity.

I agree with most of what your saying but could you clarify what you mean with:

> by deliberately not choosing to do some things that made the 2012/2016 XCOM games fun out of a sense that they were too "dumbed down".

Because the way I experienced it, is that it was quite clear Phoenix Point was also meant to be playable on a console. For example compared to the original X-com's inventory management was dumbed down.