XCOM: Enemy Unknown Interview, Part Two
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RPS: So this interview isn't a complete downer, what about the other side of the coin stuff you're proud of in the game that people might never notice. Recently I was interviewing Randy Pitchford, and he started enthusing about how he'd created the physics of the moon in Borderlands 2, but that's something most players will never be aware of. Is there anything like that in XCOM?
Jake Solomon: For me personally, there are two things that I get a major kick of, that I spent way too much time on but mattered to me. One is the random mission names. Whenever you go on a mission in XCOM, I have this mission name generator. I'm a fan of 80s metal and early Metallica, Celtic Frost, really hardcore early metal stuff, so the missions basically generate the names of early death metal albums. So there's this mish-mash of metal terms, and you get stuff like '˜Operation Crimson Sceptre' and '˜Operation Bloody Thorn'. When I'm watching people play the game, I always, always get a kick out of getting to see what the mission name is.
And along those lines, very similar, I also did the name generator for soldiers, and the country generator. So I wanted names that were not stereotypical, but people would look at it and think '˜ah, that's a Scottish soldier Aidan Southerland, that makes sense.' All these very recognisable national names. We have 20 countries or something like that, so I did all this research to look into like the most popular Korean names. Or if you're a South African soldier, most of the time you're going to be of African ethnicity and African-based names, but a very a small percentage of the time you're going to be a Caucasian soldier with a Dutch name, sometimes a Caucasian with an English name, even rarer.
It's one of those things that I put into the game and I don't think that many people except for maybe the people from that country are going to care or even notice, but I get an unending kick out of seeing the names that the game spits out.
RPS: I'll be watching the English names very carefully then.
Jake Solomon: It'll be like '˜James James.' I did have one thing where was a bug from QA, you could get a Lewis Lewis, so I had to change it up a little bit. Lewis Lewis from England.
