XCOM Message Board older than one year ago

New screens and resultant info-nuggets have arrived for Firaxis’ X-COM reimaginging, and they’ve assuaged some of my concerns. By which I mean “wahoooooooooooooooooooo! (cautiously)”

In addition to that, I’m hearing that XCOM – the shooter – has been delayed again, to 2013. Whether that means it’s gone back to the drawing board yet again, is waiting to see how the Firaxis game does or has its head on the executioners’ block I just don’t know. It does mean that Enemy Unknown is now definitely the first game in the XCOM relaunch, which pleases me greatly.(more…)

OK, here we go. An American magazine has just put the first screenshots of the XCOM remake ‘reimaginging’, some teasy details and the vital answers to to whether it’s linked to the XCOM shooter and if it’s been… altered for consoles.

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Firaxis making a new, true X-COM remake is the best gaming news of the year, and I fairly much expect to still be saying that on December 31 2012. Of course, it isn’t that simple. There are things this game needs to do, to get right, if it is to be both a successful homage and a successful modern strategy game in its own right. Here’s what I want from it.(more…)

There have been rumors of Firaxis working with the X-Com license for years, but the reality seemed an impossible dream when 2K Marin’s first-person reimagining was announced as XCOM.

We’re actually getting the best of both worlds, with XCOM coming in the next few months, and Firaxis working on a remake of the original X-Com for this fall--yep, 2012-- entitled XCOM: Enemy Unknown.

Yes, XCOM, not X-Com. We’re getting a Firaxis-developed X-Com, though, so let’s all get over it.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown is meant to be a completely different take than XCOM, as the linkage to the original game implies. 2K Games is promising a “equal emphasis on deep strategy and intense tactical combat” that includes “managing resources, advancing technologies, and overseeing combat strategies and individual unit tactics.”

It’s unclear how much XCOM: Enemy Unknown will borrow from Firaxis’ hugely popular Civilization Revolution, but given that XCOM: Enemy Unknown is coming to PC and Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, there’s reason to believe the approach may be similar. Thankfully, Civilization Revolution was a pretty good game.

If you’ve never played XCOM (the most I remember touching was a few missions of X-Com: Terror from the Deep), the games are available for just a few bucks on Steam.

2K Games have exclusively told me, and everyone else with an internet connection and an interest in game publisher financial details, that they’re delaying XCOM until ‘fiscal 2013′, presumably to avoid clashing with the end of days.(more…)

2K Games had announced XCOM would launch on March 6, 2012, but parent company Take-Two Interactive announced its second quarter fiscal results and revealed the game’s moving past that date.

XCOM is now scheduled for “fiscal 2013,” which is sometime between April 1, 2012 and March 31, 2013.

Borderlands 2 is in the same boat: fiscal 2013.

Spec Ops: The Line has also seen significant delays, and Take-Two has tweaked its release window to “first half fiscal 13,” which would place the game sometime before the holidays.

And what about Grand Theft Auto V? As per usual, Take-Two is quiet on the latest from Rockstar Games. The company is typically conservative about disclosing anything regarding Rockstar products, and it’s not surprising Grand Theft Auto V is no different. Both the platforms and and release date (even year!) are both listed as “TBA.” Perhaps hope for a Wii U version?

Lastly, BioShock Infinite remains a "calendar year 2012," which means it's on track for...well, next year.

OK, I admit it: I am as cynical as you when it comes to half-suspecting that enormously ambitious, fanbase-courting independent projects announced before work on them has even begun carry the dread stench of vapourware. I’ve been very interested in Xenonauts for some time, if faintly horrified that lead designer Chris England claims he made the final decision to pour his life savings into funding an X-COM remake based on an offhand oh-if-only comment I made on RPS, but I confess wasn’t entirely convinced it would see the light of day. Partly this was due to the many tales of infamy concerning amateur game devs who started working together remotely without ever actually meeting – online tensions can run so high – and partly because I’ve been waiting a long time for an X-COM remake that actually feels anything like X-COM. It is not in my nature to believe that dreams can come true.

A playable build of Xenonauts was on show in the RPS-sponsored Indie Arcade at the Eurogamer expo last week, and pretty much everyone I spoke to about it said the same thing: “well, it’s X-COM,” they offered with a wide grin. They didn’t say what worked or what didn’t or what they’d change or anything like that – they just said “it’s like X-COM.”

I can’t think of a greater compliment for any game.(more…)

Still filled up with indignant energy and ready to type “This is not my X-Com!” in response to whatever comes out of 2K? Then you are in luck, because there’s a brand new video about the development of the squad-based UFO-shooter, with a couple of guys from 2K Marin explaining what they are up to. Watch it below! Jonathan Pelling, the project lead, says: “It’s about experiencing the origins of this organization from a really zoomed in and boots-on-the-ground perspective. We really wanted you to feel like what it was like to be one of the squadies in the original game, and not the all-knowing, top-down commander.”

In case you missed it, we also got a 20-minute walkthrough a month back, which showed the game in some serious detail.(more…)

2K Games have released the full twenty minutes of the XCOM E3 2011 demo, with the developers narrating what is going on. It explains some of the background and story, shows off the underground base, the agent selection process, the mission selection, the squad combat, and elements of the problem solving involved in the “battlescape” the game sets up. This is the most detail we’ve seen of the tactical elements of the game, and it’s definitely worth watching.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in.(more…)

2K bossman Christoph Hartmann has been talking to MCV, and has been defending the decision to make XCOM into a manshoot:

“The ‘90s generation of gamers all love Xcom and we own the IP, so we thought OK, what do we do with it? Every studio we had wanted to do it and each one had its own spin on it. But the problem was that turn-based strategy games were no longer the hottest thing on planet Earth. But this is not just a commercial thing – strategy games are just not contemporary.”

So that clears that up, eh? I am sure there will be a lively discussion of this. Can a game genre really get old enough to be abandoned? Should we consigned turn-based games to the past? If the 90s generation love it and that’s a reason to remake it, why try making it “contemporary”? Surely the challenge should bring to bring the game to a new generation, not the IP? Why do publishers think game and IP are somehow unrelated?

We’ve seen XCOM. Want to know what it’s truly all about? Read on below for the best XCOM preview on this or any other internet. Really, it’s got Giant Doom Lasers Of Doom, a bit about that squad-management stuff, reports on alien super-powers, themes of 1960s political incorrectness, correct art-history references, and everything.

Go have a read.This way to the underground base»

Recently we had a chance to look at 2K’s intriguing reboot of XCOM – and a full XCOM preview is coming up soon – but first there’s an interview which explains a bit about the world, and the intention to tell a story about the origin of the XCOM alien invasion in the setting of 1960s America.

In the depths of a bunker packed with strange humanoids that communicated almost entirely using the words “like”, “totally” and “hella” we spoke to something that claimed to be Jonathan Pelling, Creative Director at 2K Marin, developers of XCOM. Here’s what he had to say…(more…)