XCOM: Enemy Unknown Interview, Part Three
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RPS: So can you try and describe your system as best you can, because I think most of our readers won't have read the American magazine with the big preview in, and I only partly understand it at this point to be honest?
Jake Solomon: Right. Well, I think that the starting point is familiar to people who are familiar with either tabletop or something like this. The idea is that each rookie soldier at the very beginning is capable of doing two things; the idea is that your soldier can move and then perform an ability, whether that's going to overwatch, which allows reaction fire, whether that's to use a special ability like obviously to fire a weapon, to throw a grenade, to hunker down. Hunker down is, any unit once they're in cover can basically give up the rest of their turn and double their defence, so they can get behind cover and hunker down, and they'll get a big defensive boost but they also, their site radius drops drastically. They almost can't see anything, and so that of course has all kinds of interesting ramifications, because your scout out in front is going to walk in, maybe he blunders in to a bunch of aliens and you're like '˜oh shit', he goes to hunker down but now he can't see what the aliens are doing.
So the system is move, and you can either move again, or you can take an action, and of course you can bypass your action entirely by dashing, what we call taking a dash, and that is moving extremely far in one turn, but there are all these little system ramifications. If you're dashing, you'll actually do much better against reaction fire. If you're sprinting, if you've given up your entire turn to move far then you're actually harder to hit if somebody's in overwatch, but of course you've given up your turn, you're not going to return any fire that turn, so there's all these little elements that play off of each other. And of course as abilities are added, and abilities can be added through the inventory, so what items you're carrying, what armour you're wearing. Armour is completely unclassed, so anybody can wear any armour, and different suits of armour give you different, interesting battlefield abilities, but you can get abilities from your class obviously, from your weapons, from your inventory and from your armour, and so you've got all these different abilities. Some of them work really well together, some of them are solo moves, different things like that.
