The game is built around a ”central narrative thread” with side missions, and other distractions. This year they’re showing how ”big” its story is.
”We came to realise that our studio has a strength in its storytelling and narrative abilities. He is a relatively recent addition to the project and he’s been an absolute treasure as far as the narrative is concerned in the game,” said creative director Jonathan Pelling.
He’s referring to narrative director Jordan Thomas joining the XCOM project.
”What we really want to do with XCOM is tell the origin story… y’know, even last year when we showed the game we were planning to structure the game around a central narrative thread with side missions and other opportunities that you can pursue in order to grow resources and technology and so on,” continued Pelling.
”That structure is still in place, but this year we’re talking more about how big our story is, how compelling it is.” XCOM will feature big set piece environments when it comes to pushing the story forward, as well as side mission locales too.
”There’s a primary storytelling environment, and there’s other side-missions are not going to be as highly scripted in a narrative sense as the main missions themselves.” It’s all about utilising your agents in the field with ‘run and gun’ approaches likely to fail.
”…so what we want from the combat is to make it very, y’know, tactical but also not overwhelming in terms of its complexity. We don’t want players to micromanage the combat, so we want the agents individually to be really strong tools,” he added.
”You’re not going to just be able to run out there, because the odds are stacked against you. If you try and run and gun through the game, you’ll just get cut down. Using your agents, but having these agents be individual but also class-based; how you upgrade them and what alien tech you give them, but we do keep a tight squad.”
XCOM releases on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC in March 2012. Are you looking forward to this interpretation of the long-time PC series? Gone are the turn-based tactics.
