Equally important is the meta-strategic part of the game, where players build a base, train new soldiers and choose how to allocate their resources. If you shave off the lows, a lot of the time you’re shaving off the highs."īut the core of XCOM isn’t just tactical battles. It’s impossible to.” "As a developer, you have to accept the fact that when it comes to unpredictability, there’s going to be an uneven experience. “You may recognize a building or two, but you don’t recognize the overall map. “On the tactical maps, this gives each mission an element of unpredictability,” said Solomon. The result is a relatively simple system that never creates the same map twice. “If you view our maps as a giant quilt, than we simply punch out the individual tiles in the quilt and replace them with whatever we want.” The plot, or the overall map, functions as the groundwork, whereas the parcels-elements like a parking lot, or a building-are inserted piece by piece.
Their solution was the plot and parcel system. “When we started XCOM 2, that was at the very, very top of the list for us,” said Solomon. This wasn’t something the team wanted to repeat in the sequel.
Players replaying the game, though, would often run into content they had already seen. “We made enough maps that typically you wouldn’t see all of them unless you played through twice,” he says. Ultimately, they settled for hand-crafting the environments on which tactical battles would take place.
While the team was developing Enemy Unknown, they experimented with procedurally generating maps, but they couldn’t get the maps to both look convincing and remain mechanically interesting. One way that Firaxis went about creating unpredictability for their players was by making sure they never saw the same map twice. “I think what’s valuable as a player is that when you go into a game, the challenges you’re confronted with are unpredictable.” “If we were to use one word to describe our tactic, it would be the idea of unpredictability,” said Solomon. While confident in the core systems of XCOM: Enemy Unknown, tackling the sequel meant creating a more mercurial set of challenges, ones that wouldn’t be the same from player to player.
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