XCOM 2 Creative Director: ‘Modding Was One of the Pillars of the Design’

Modding was very important to XCOM 2 developer Firaxis when deciding to make their sequel to 2012’s XCOM: Enemy Unknown a PC exclusive, creative director Jake Solomon said in an interview with GameSpot.

“Improved support for modding was one of the pillars of the design of XCOM 2,” Solomon said. “And a lot of the changes we’ve made to the game are designed to open up more systems to modders. We also plan to offer modding tools and Steam workshop support.”

Solomon went on to reference the success of the modding community surrounding another Firaxis game, Civilization, and a popular mod for XCOM: Enemy Unknown known as Long War.

“Civilization has benefited immensely from a talented and long-standing mod community, and the Long War mod team has done incredible things with our game despite it not being super mod-friendly,” Solomon said. “I’m confident giving the community proper modding tools is going to result in some fantastic mods.”

However, it wasn’t just the idea of making XCOM 2 more user friendly for the modding community that made Firaxis choose to make XCOM 2 a PC exclusive.

“Our first goal is to make a great XCOM game. A game about loss and overcoming obstacles, with intense combat and a strategic component that feeds cleanly into that. We looked at what people were asking for in terms of making XCOM: Enemy Unknown more replayable along with the new elements we wanted, including procedural levels, new skills, new enemies, more customization and modding. When we saw what it meant to implement all of these elements into the game, we knew we had our work cut out for us. Our studio has its most experience building strategy games on PC, and we needed to take advantage of that core expertise and focus on making the very best XCOM we could on the platform we knew the best.”

When asked if monetized mods through Steam will be a feature of XCOM 2, given its support of Steam Workshop, Solomon said, “We can’t confirm any plans for paid mods at this time.”

XCOM 2 launches this November exclusively on PC.