X-Com Enemy Unknown's release is special in a number of ways. This
is the first official game featuring the brand to be released since
X-Com: Enforcer in 2001. But that doesn't mean that there have not been other games
that were made. Over the last decade, there have been several attempts at
continuing the X-Com brand, and the one that I find the most fascinating
was the last one: XCOM, a first person shooter.
From
the initial announcement in 2010 the game was met with criticism from
fans of X-Com. Not helping matters was when 2K president Christopher Hartmann
said that strategy games were not contemporary as the reason for the genre shift. XCOM is a classic example of
how a brand can backfire, which is a shame as I'm probably one of the
few people who thought that the idea was interesting.
Brand Backfire:
Brand awareness is a double edged sword when promoting products. When done right, it can get a product more acclaim then without it, but when done wrong it can doom a product in the eyes of the consumer before it's even released.
XCOM was an example
of the latter and how the designers and publishers attempted to use the X-Com
brand. The first major problem was calling the game XCOM in the first
place. You have to be very careful when designating titles in a brand as the
next main game in the brand. If it's too far removed from the core elements of
the brand, it's going to alienate the fan-base.
When footage of
XCOM was released as a FPS, fans of the brand were in an up roar as expected.
What was shown had little in common with what the brand represented. The aliens
were not recognizable from the game and neither was the setting or design.
It was obvious to
everyone that the game was called XCOM just to attract fans of the brand and
this backfired. As the developers were then forced over the course of the next
two years to convince people why the game should be called XCOM, which is never
a good position to be in when developing a product.
I think that if
the game was called anything else, even if it was a generic sci-fi title, it
would have gone over better. When you start using brand names, you need to
understand what made the brand popular. If Nintendo announced that the next
major Mario game was an M rated first person shooter, they would need to call
in the army to defend their headquarters from angry fans.
A XCOM by Name
Alone:
XCOM faced an
uphill battle with fans trying to convince them that the game was worthy of the
brand. Not helping things was the gameplay, which while original, never really
measured up to X-Com. As we learned from previews, players would go out into
the world in first person with other agents as backup.
Each agent had
special abilities that they could use to aid the player and could be killed if
the player wasn't careful. The player had to try to kill aliens while
collecting items that they could research back at the base. As with X-Com the
player could upgrade their agents and choose what missions to go on as the
alien threat escalated.
The problem is
that all of that was here-say, previews of the game only focused on the
first person combat. Even leaked game footage only showed a bare bones base
system with very little of the progression of research and troops that made
X-Com so compelling.
The nail in the
coffin came with one of the final pieces of game-play footage to be
released. This one was the most developed in terms of showing game content, but
once again nothing that was shown had that X-Com feeling.
The footage had
the player using a pause-able squad control interface to move and use
the other agent’s abilities. The demo focused on cover based mechanics with the
player having to move to engage enemies at flanking positions.
The problem is
that not only does none of that measure up to X-Com's design, but the gameplay
itself wasn't all that engaging. The game had a very basic cover system, in which
is being in cover meant that enemies were invulnerable from forward
attacks. The aliens shown looked generic along with the geometry shape looking
alien ships.
Once again during
the demo the designer assured everyone that capturing aliens alive and their
tech would have a huge effect on researching new equipment. But as always, none
of that was actually shown to calm the angry fans down. I think the fans felt
that the designers were backpedaling and that the game was never made to have
that design, but after all the complaints the designers were forced to come up
with that system. I think this was a shame as I felt that the original design
did have merit.
Moved by the Fans,
in the Wrong Direction:
In my retrospective piece on X-Com, I talked about one of the main elements to its
longevity: the multi system progression. Having control over the base building,
world view and squad battles gave X-Com a unique touch. But developing a game
to have multi-system progression isn't something that happens over night. You
have to effectively design game systems that are strong enough to stand on
their own as separate games for it to work right.
Because of the
challenges of multi-system progression, it's very rare to see games attempt it.
The thought of someone trying it in a FPS had me intrigue as to my memory;
I haven't seen any other game attempt that. So for the last two years I always
kept quiet as I read people hoping that the game would crash and burn and so
on.
But the negative
reaction from fans put the developers into panic mode, as they attempted to
inject more of X-Com's design into the game and not continuing to develop what
they had. As mentioned, something as complex as multi-system design isn't
something that you can just turn on and off, but has to be designed from the
start around.
What
is unintentionally funny about this situation was how many people
believed that if XCOM failed, it would be the death of the brand which as we
all can see in less than a week didn't happened. XCOM is one of those games that
could have turned out in any number of ways, which there is now a rumor of it
being released as a $30 downloadable title. At this point it's anyone's guess
as to what affect XCOM's failure had on the development of Enemy Unknown, but
here's hoping that it will make the fans happy.
Josh Bycer
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