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

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77 points Michelangelo11 | 2 comments | 04 Sep 25 19:08 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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nis0s ◴[04 Sep 25 19:34 UTC] No.45131343[source]▶
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.
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cosmicgadget ◴[04 Sep 25 20:30 UTC] No.45131895[source]▶
Did the developers say it was driven by inclusivity?
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1. unsnap_biceps ◴[07 Sep 25 07:01 UTC] No.45156018[source]▶
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
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2. acdha ◴[07 Sep 25 13:01 UTC] No.45157807[source]▶
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.