In an interview conducted by Videogamer.com, Jake Solomon – Lead Designer on X-Com: Enemy Unknown – helped us to understand a bit more about his upcoming game.
Mr. Solomon began by speaking on the bases of the previous X-Com title, and how he felt that that this area of the game needed revamping; a common myth concerning the upcoming game was quick to be debunked by Mr. Solomon: “There's one base, one main base – and that's where your research and engineering takes place.”
That’s the extent of your main base’s workings, though. You can still spread your network around the globe, using satellites and much more to monitor UFOs and such.
"The player says, 'I'm going to start on Europe, or in Africa, or North America'. Then they can expand to different continents with satellite coverage, and you can send your Interceptors to hangar bases around the world as well. So you can still have UFO interception all around the world through hangar bases, but those are much reduced in functionality compared to the main base, which has all the soldiers and all that stuff."
Later in the interview, Mr. Solomon talks about map layout and generation.
"The layouts themselves are hand-crafted, but we have a huge [selection]. You could not play through a complete game twice and see the same level. They're hand-crafted, but what happens on those missions – what mission type it is, what aliens appear, where they appear – that's all procedural."
Mr. Solomon seemed very excited for this portion of the game, as he went into some more detail concerning how the “Overmind” would work.
"We've got this thing called the Overmind, and that's like the Alien player. The aliens are moving around, doing their own thing. Depending on what alien it is, depending on what type of mission it is, the aliens do different things. Some of them lurk over a body, but a lot of the time they'll be patrolling, moving all throughout the map. We don't spawn them in."
It may also interest some people to know that the score for X-Com is being composed by Micheal McCann, the artist behind the tunes used in Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
Via Videogamer
