X-COM "It's back. In first-person!" 360/PC

[Zombie Fred]

K Games Announces XCOM® - Suspense and Mystery-Filled First-Person Shooter from Creators of BioShock® 2

Award-winning developers set their sights on re-imagining the suspense, tension and fear of one of gaming’s most beloved franchises only on Xbox 360 and Windows PC

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--2K Games announced today that XCOM®, the re-imagining of one of gaming’s most storied and beloved franchises, is currently in development at 2K Marin, the studio behind the multi-million unit selling BioShock® 2. Currently in development exclusively for the Xbox 360® video game and entertainment system from Microsoft and Windows PC, XCOM combines the strategic core of the groundbreaking franchise with a suspense-filled narrative and distills it into a tense and unique first-person shooter experience.

“With BioShock 2, the team at 2K Marin proved themselves as masters of first-person, suspenseful storytelling, and with XCOM they will re-imagine and expand the rich lore of this revered franchise,” said Christoph Hartmann, president of 2K. “Players will explore the world of XCOM from an immersive new perspective and experience firsthand the fear and tension of this gripping narrative ride.”

XCOM is the re-imagining of the classic tale of humanity’s struggle against an unknown enemy that puts players directly into the shoes of an FBI agent tasked with identifying and eliminating the growing threat. True to the roots of the franchise, players will be placed in charge of overcoming high-stake odds through risky strategic gambits coupled with heart-stopping combat experiences that pit human ingenuity – and frailty – against a foe beyond comprehension. By setting the game in a first-person perspective, players will be able to feel the tension and fear that comes with combating a faceless enemy that is violently probing and plotting its way into our world.

XCOM is not yet rated by the ESRB. For more information on XCOM please visit www.XCOM.com.

It's great to see X-COM back. I am sure some of you have had many fond memories (XCOM Defence, terror from the deep) with this series on the past, but now it seems it has taken a turn to become a first-person "shooter" with the elements of the previous series blended in this form. Not sure if I want though, X-COM was amazing as it was.

[Member_of_STARS]

I actually played "Enemy Unknown" a few months back. That game is insane. I played it in 2002 or close to that the first time and it was one of the scariest experiences in videogames.

And now they want to make an FPS out of it, with an FBI agent in the lead tasked to "destroy the unknown threat"?

What a colossal pile of steaming shit...

[Carnivol]

Yeah. It's nice to hear the name still exists, but seeing who's making it and what direction they're taking things doesn't exactly fill me with any confidence at all :/
The fact that it's 2k Marin and not Irrational, combined with the general description in that little blurb, doesn't make it sound like it'll be like a SWAT4-ish game either (which is probably the direction I'd try to push things if FPS was a forced decision. Like some sort of weird mix of SWAT4 + F.E.A.R., but with aliens, bases and terror missions.)

Besides... going by how X-Com works (tactical gameplay, playing the odds, resource management, random elements, unpredictable and cruel AI behavior, etc.), I'm honestly not sure if I wanna see the franchise jump into the hands of either BioShock developers if BioShock's any indication as for what we're to expect from the gameplay.

Been a while since I last played through Enemy Unknown, but did try to play a Super Human run last time I did... got raped... badly (Just the way we like it!). Also, if people haven't grabbed the X-Com pack on Steam; Do it. Just do it. (And, yes, it's friggin' fantastically scary. Atmosphere and cruelty are two things the first one has. Terror From the Deep's a bit of a mixed deal. It's kinda where you go when you want a change of scenery + want to hit yourself hard in the face for bringing water weapons to a fight on land.)


Come to think of it, I wish more platforms would get ports of Pocket UFO. I used to run it on my PDA 6-or-so years ago. Nice little remake/port of the original.

[Member_of_STARS]

The game was definitely cruel. Cruel in the purest sense of the word. Unless you plan all your moves through, those soldiers you kept alive and trained through bitter tears and terror were going to get raped by a sniper shot or turned into a Crysalis (nasty, nasty creatures). And it didnt feel like you were being cheated by the game either. You literally paid for every mistake you made, dearly. Coupled with amazing ambient sound, an extensive library/UFOpedia and importance of resource management on global and "mission" scale, the game was very immersive.

Newer UFO games were just apalling and in the process of streamlining they just left out a few crucial parts here, changing around some there, and the end result was just too boring.

I doubt they could remake the original game like REmake did with RE. So why bother? This FBI nonsense shows how little they know about the franchise which in turn will speak for their commitment levels. This is exactly what happened to AVP3.

Yeah, Im frustrated. Most people know jack about XCOM anyway, so why abuse the title to gain a few bucks if the gain is going to be minimal anyway.

[EDIT] By the end of the day, if the player played for XCOM, and you were in charge of the global control of operations, but played through the terror missions in an FPS way using squad control and planning from Raven Shield (SWAT4, yeah) along with Mass Effect-like tactical-pause, they could have pulled it off. This way, you get all the goodies of an RTS game which the global view of XCOM was, along with a great FPS shooter. Unfortunately its rather difficult to make an FPS shooter which was genuinely as punishing and unforgiving as the terror missions in the original XCOM, because most modern FPS games at their highest difficulty levels are all about tricking the game and abusing the triggers, as opposed to genuinely try better and harder (exception being STALKER with AMK+PRL mod)

[Zombie Fred]

Here's a recent update on some information (rumour for now) on the upcoming X-COM game.

OK guys I have some intel to share with you.

Yesterday CanardPC (a french newspaper, http://www.canardpc.com) published a first look about this news Xcom game.

I'm reading the article right now so this will be short :

- No world map : There's a USA map (with a 50s' style) for selecting the missions.
- Research & production : yes.
- Base management : yes.
- Team management : yes.
- Choice of the next missions : yes.
- No control of your teammate during the mission (in the demo, this may change)

It seems like you can goof around in your base between the mission (in first person view).

EDIT :

- The demo was running on an XBox360.
- You play as the chief of operation of the base between the mission.
- The choice of the played mission will impact the game.
- In the demo, lots of area of the base were off limits.
- During the missions you can take photos (research ?).
- The game is due for release in a little more than a year.

Source

Sounds much better if so, but will wait and see what happens ahead.

[Member_of_STARS]

180 degree turn. Im actually looking forward to more news now.

Now, if they were to include "team can be controlled" and "enemy AI will rape your skull through your nostrils", I would be very happy.

[Carnivol]

That's indeed quite the positive turn around.

[doomed]

The fact that it's 2k Marin and not Irrational

It might not be Irrational, but it's not the 2K Marin (aka the BioShock 2 core dev team) you know either.

Let me explain:

Irrational, creators of titles such as System Shock 2 & BioShock were split into two groups: 2K Boston and 2K Australia.

2K Marin along with some help from 2K Australia (and several other dev teams) created BioShock 2. 2K Australia's involvement was likely limited.

2K Boston is renamed back to Irrational Games. Along with Kevin Levine, designer of BioShock, they work on a new IP.

Post BioShock 2, 2K Australia is joining the 2K Marin brand and XCOM is being developed by those guys (previously known as 2K Australia I mean).

Source: http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3178825

So the game is being made by a dev team that was split from the BioShock 1 team, and they have also done some limited work on BioShock 2.

[aris13]

First Screens

http://www.allgamesbeta.info/2010/05/xcom-first-screens.html

[A-J]

why is Uroboros in Xcom ?

[Zombie Fred]

New preview going into further details about this game. click here

Good read I thought. I am looking forward to this a lot more than I first did.

[doomed]

Screenshots look really ugly.

[Carnivol]

Agree. I don't really like the look of it. I don't have any other way to describe it other than it looks like BioShock tried to have a baby with Team Fortress 2 or something.

Also, what's with the black oil focus? Is this some sort of absurd artistic and political "Terror from the Deep" message? To take the pic posted in this thread; There's a burning flying piece of oil, there's that dead piece of oil on the ground and then there's The Conduit's All-seeing Eye -kitchen sink edition- ... filled w/oil.

(Could be that it's just to keep the aliens secret, so all shots are of them... inhumanly covered in oil.)

[Gideon Quinn]

Why 1950s? I liked the not-quite-scifi-but-not-quite-present-day vibe of the original X-Com games. Just because Bioshock worked well in that setting it doesn't mean X-com will. Maybe it's because of the post-roswell paranoia that America experienced during that time period. Either way I literally have no opinion on this right now. I loved UFO Enemy Unknown but i'm not about to ravage this without a good reason.

Anyway, here's my wishlist for the game...

* No Checkpoints
* If you or any of your squad die during a mission then that's it. They die and you need to send others in their place or recruit more, like in the original Xcom. (Sadly i can't see this being implimented as most game devs nowdays would see that as bad design or consider it unmarketable, especially for an FPS.)
* Failing that, a 'superhuman' difficulty (that would probably be akin to Beginner on UFO Enemy Unknown, Har!) as a present for the hardcore x-commers.
* No 'protagonist' (the main character being the organization) and no annoying radio chatter during missions to give you objectives.

I really hope the new Xcom game will be an FPS in the loosest sense of the word with a lot of other things going for it. I'm not someone who has jumped on the "modern gamers are stupid" bandwagon but i've genuinlely started to wonder as of late --- Are they really made more accessible for the sake of making a product that anyone can pick up and play rather than because it's the kind of game they truly want to make? I'd imagine it's a compromise in most cases due to the amount of money involved nowdays (due to the demands of the consumer, graphics and hardware expectations etc)

I'm really not sure, like i said, i have no opinion -But in the case of Splinter Cell Conviction, the 'dumbing down' has genuinely been for the greater good and to break the monotomy of the series. With Xcom though, it's not for the sake of that since the last Xcom game was made 9 years ago and it was a third person shooter. The last TRUE Xcom (according to many fans) was Apocalypse back in 1997.

Either way, i'm intruiged and keeping an eye out.

tl;dr, sorry....

[Member_of_STARS]

Im usually the kind of guy who sees any deviation from established values of a franchise as proof of the developers lack of understanding of the franchise and therefore as the first and fundamental misstep which turns the end result into something awful.

Like Splinter Cell Conviction, R6 Vegas, RE4. In most cases the end result is a game/franchise which is "more generic" and "more casual" making it truly into "just another game", completely ditching its niche on the market.

Im on the fence about XCOM. They have so many things which can go wrong, but I can see some hints of it being great aswell. For example, instead of using modern/postmodern sci-fi setting, they go for an almost abandoned concept of post-Roswell setting. In the history of movies and TV shows, its largely unexplored but/and still has a kind of "mystical" aura about it. And this can be used to a great extent in creating both immersion and horror. One of my favourite "alien invasion" themed TV shows is "Dark Skies".

Then, theres this broad daylight setting. In FPS, they have to pull it off perfectly for it to work, but if anyone remembers daylight terror missions and spaceship investigation missions, daylight was no different in horror aspect compared to night ones. They were both ridiculously immersive and had plenty of horror. Mostly down to limiting what you can see, but it worked.

Then theres the immersion factor in knowing that the technology in the 50-s and 60-s was just so limited, that you know youre going to probably just have a revolver and a shotty, against an unknown threat, and that adds to the scare factor.

The list where the game can go wrong horribly is long, from pseudoscience being just one-sentenced description a´la "it works, because its science with alien tech" to the game being too easy, or the graphics being too cartoony. But they are pressing the right buttons to create the atmosphere of XCOM in an FPS setting, at least from these screens. So far.

Im hopeful. Sceptic, but hopeful. Mostly because what we see on the screens is not a game which sells itsself to the broad audience using the "man, this is cool!" factor.