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.

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.

Did the developers say it was driven by inclusivity?

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

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

> 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?

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.

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.

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).

>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.

For a short story which looks at this see:

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

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.

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

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

> 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.