What PC Gamer Wants from the Next XCOM
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Interesting air combat
Shooting down alien ships was more of an extension of the research and development metagame than a contest in its own right. Success and failure depended entirely on the quality of your vessel, and whether or not you chose to boost a ship during combat a resource spend action that never felt worthwhile. If air combat is going to have its own interface system and require the attendance of the player during conflict then there should be some interesting decision-making going on.
It could become a game about organising good planetary coverage, placing launch sites and refeulling depots around the world map. If you wanted something more involved, this excellent little flash game, SteamBirds, shows how accessible turn based air combat could be presented. If you wanted to go even further, the pilots themselves could become characters and hang around your base getting into fights with the infantry, Starship Troopers style.
More mission types
More of everything would be nice, of course. More aliens, more weapons, more armour types, more weird alien tech to assimilate. That's a given, but I'd especially like to see more varied missions. Terror missions, crash/landing sites, Bomb defusal and escort targets provided a good range of objectives initially, but lost their novelty value before the campaign was through. More high-stakes events like terror missions could offer commanders a way to rescue a despondent country on the verge of quitting the XCOM project. Rescuing the Queen from an alien attack on Buckingham Palace would do wonders for XCOM's reputation in the UK, for example. Battlegrounds could also do more to differentiate between the continents they're set in.
