Firaxis’s Ananda Gupta had the unenviable challenge of taking what was one of the most critically acclaimed games of 2012—a game that earned seven Game of the Year awards, and even more such nominations—and finding a way to make it better.
“When you work on a game, you get really close to it,” he said at Firaxis’s booth at PAX Prime. “Even though people love it, you see its warts more clearly than others. And so there was just this tendency, this temptation to fix everything. Everything that we didn’t want. Everything that we thought could be even a little bit better we could fix. It’s like, ‘This game is almost perfect—look at the reception. It’s almost perfect! We should make it perfect!’ And that is so dangerous.”
And yet, somehow, Gupta and the team at Firaxis found a way to avoid temptation and not fix what wasn’t broken—what we’ll call the “George Lucas Syndrome.” The resulting expansion, XCOM: Enemy Within, adds new mechanics, new soldier-types, new maps, and new story elements that’ll be sure to please both new players to the series and longtime veterans alike.
One of the most apparent changes to the game is the addition of “meld,” a glowing element that can be recovered from the battlefield and used to create new types of soldiers: mech-troopers and gene-mod soldiers. The catch, of course, is that the meld canisters you encounters are on an auto-destruct timer, meaning if you can’t fight your way through enemies to recover it, it’ll explode—and you’ll have nothing.
“The self-destruct timers came from what we knew about how people had settled into playing the game, which is very conservatively,” explained Gupta. “That’s something I don’t want to punish. I’m’ not interested in saying, ‘oh, you know, you play super safe, I’m going to make that not possible.’ That’s not how we roll. I just wanted there to be another wrinkle to the gameplay, another consideration.”
But the story of how the team came up with the idea for Meld is kind of a happy accident:
“This is something I found while trolling through the old, old VO [voice over] scripts. I went over to [XCOM: Enemy Unknown lead designer Jake Solomon] and said, ‘we have VO lines for the soldiers for finding loot on the battlefield. Did XCOM have loot before I got to this company?’
“He said, ‘Yeah, you know, we kind of wanted to mess around with it, but we never had a system for it to really get it to work.’ ‘Okay then! Guess what? Now we do.’”
For Gupta, Meld “came from the need not to screw up the economy of the game.
“I do not want players having to choose between this awesome new battle-suit that they’ve paid for with the expansion, and building a satellite, because satellites are really important and they’re still important. I thought, ‘well, I need another money to denominate things in, so let’s come up with a cool science fiction resource that makes sense that you would pay for just the new stuff with.’”
Recovering Meld will enable players to create new installations in XCOM’s headquarters: the cybernetics lab and the genetics lab, which create the aforementioned mech-troopers and gene-mod soldiers. Each new type brings new gameplay powers and possibilities.
The mech-troopers, for example, will have access to pretty incredible new weapons, like a high-powered rocket punch, and that all-important staple of alien infestations, the flamethrower.
“The flamethrower is really awesome against chrysalids,” Gupta told me.
Good. Those purple zombie-factories nearly spelled my doom when I played through XCOM last year.
The gene-mod soldiers offer up interesting gameplay options as well, such as improved “muscle fiber density” that allows them to leap up to higher locations without the use of a ladder or advanced suit of armor.
During my play-through, I activated one of my gene-modded soldiers’ enhancements—Mimetic Skin—completely by accident. After moving from partial to full cover, with no enemies spotting me, my soldier started to blend into his surroundings. He was now invisible to all aliens until he opened fire.
Gupta the player makes sure to always field as balanced a complement of mech-troopers and gene-mod soldiers as possible. But for Gupta the designer, the gene-mods edge out the mech-troopers as his favorite by a hair.
“I think I like the gene-mods more because they definitely fit with the theme a little better,” he says. “The idea that it’s not enough for us to research the enemy’s armor and weapons and build that against them. We’re going to research their body organs and use that against them.
The addition of Meld and new soldier types will give players the chance to play through Enemy Within at least two or three extra times, just to see all the different options and possibilities they can find. But that isn’t all the expansion’s going to provide for gamers who want to get the most bang for their buck. That’s where a new second wave option called Training Roulette comes in.
“That will really, really enhance replayability, and this is really something that could keep players going for a while,” said Gupta. “Training Roulette is random skills for your soldiers. So aside from skills that have a dependency on your class—like ‘fire rocket’ is still only for heavies—any skill that is sort of agnostic to a specific weapon type, you will get random skills, soldier by soldier.”
And if these gameplay additions aren’t enough to make XCOM basically a brand new game, Gupta explained that there’s going to be a new option for more story content:
“One of the new things that’s in the expansion is ‘Operation Progeny,’ another sort of side-plot, similar to [previous DLC] ‘Slingshot.’ We had intended to release it as a DLC, and then we ran into some scheduling problems, where basically they made me choose between finalizing ‘Operation Progeny and getting engineers to start working on the mechs. Well, I’d really rather get a headstart on the mechs and the gene mods, and the stuff we’re going to do in the expansion, because that’s what Firaxis is about.
“But I thought, ‘since we’re in the final stages of ‘Progeny’ already, how about we put it in the expansion? And 2K Games and Jake were fine with that. And that let us put out the second wave option in December and have a nice spacing.”
But it wasn’t as simple as all that. “Operation Progeny” was started separately from Enemy Within, so just plopping it into the expansion wouldn’t work.
“We put it in the expansion and we decided, you know what, this is cool, but it doesn’t feel right…We need to change this a little.
“So we went back, we re-recorded some of the dialogue, and we wove it into the narrative of the expansion better….I can’t talk about [the story] a huge amount, but what I can say is that we took the opportunity to take ‘Progeny,’ unraveled it a little, and then restitched it into the expansion narrative in a way that really, really works well with Enemy Within. And it’s still optional, so you can check it on and off.”
On that note, Gupta’s hoping players will give it a shot as soon as possible.
“I really hope players will play the first time with it on, just so they can get the full narrative of what’s going on. But I think it really now supports and reinforces the Enemy Within narrative, which, again, you’ll be hearing about later.”
So how does the expansion play? As I mentioned above, I got the opportunity to play through one level of Enemy Within, set on the new map known as “the Farmhouse.”
“We couldn’t make an expansion without doing a farm map,” Gupta told me as I started, “because the original 1993 game had lots of farms.”
As I made my way through the ruined crops and burnt out tractors, I reveled in the power of my mech-troopers and gene-mod soldiers, who leaped around the battlefield and delivered damage with ease. That is, of course, until I saw the mech-modified sectoid aliens, who proceeded to dismantle my team, piece by piece.
Gupta helped me through each of my soldiers’ enhancements, like the aforementioned mimetic skin. One mech-trooper had a healing mist, an area-of-effect medkit that restored health to players inside a certain radius. And of course, there was that super rocket punch, which can be directed at adjacent enemies or objects. The effects are devastating. With coaching from Gupta and members of 2K’s PAX team, I managed to win the day with only one casualty. In XCOM terms, it felt like a pretty incredible win. Clearly, my team’s powerful new abilities had a lot to do with my victory.
“I would say that on Normal difficulty, it actually is a little easier,” said Gupta, which surprised me. I asked him what he would tell a diehard XCOM fan who’d say that the legendarily difficult game shouldn’t get any easier.
“Even on normal? I’d say if you’re a diehard, you shouldn’t be playing on normal,” he laughed.
“I would say that if you play this on normal,” he continued, “the new stuff that you get is probably better than the stuff the aliens get. I think on classic difficulty it reverses and despite all this awesome new stuff you have, there is definitely an added challenge.”
Even with all this, there’s more. As my talk with Gupta wrapped up, I told him that I couldn’t wait to play the game.
“And I can’t wait to talk to you again about the new stuff we’re going to announce at the end of September.”
That’s when I scrambled to turn my recorder back on.
I asked him, “Can you say anything about the new announcement in September?”
Gupta leaned in close to my recorder, smiling.
“No.”
XCOM: Enemy Within launches for PC, Mac, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 on November 12 in North America, and hits the rest of the world a few days later on November 15.
