XCOM: Enemy Unknown Lead Designer Responds to Fans' Concerns
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No more Time Units?
We're not saying Time Units are (too hard) to understand. They aren't. But TUs are a (fuzzy) design mechanic.
With Time Units, players weren't considering the squad as a whole and how their abilities related to each other. Time Units actually made it less fun to consider how these abilities were going to combine and interact because players wanted to optimize the use of their time units, but it often wasn't clear what an optimum use of time units was. Some actions had a fixed TU cost, but others were a percentage of your TUs. No player could look at his TU numbers and make a perfect prediction of what that number means. Faced with that, players said (I'm just going to let this play out and see what happens,) which wasn't a very interesting decision to make.
We've added a lot of new elements to the combat in XCOM in terms of the abilities of your soldiers and the aliens' abilities. Those abilities come from the classes, weapons, and equipment you choose to bring with you on your mission. The joy of a tactical game is looking at the battlefield, evaluating the position of your men and the enemy, and then planning out your move. You'd say: (Okay, I'm going to have my guy with the machine gun go into overwatch so he can cover those enemies, and in the meantime I'm going to have those other guys move up so they can throw grenades into the enemy position.) Your planning at that point considers the entire squad as a squad, and how their abilities combine in awesome ways.
Once we had a system where players could think of their abilities as discrete events, then players found it easier and more engaging to make a plan, force it on the enemy, and beat the opponent through superior tactics. In the end, you get all of the excitement and joy of carrying out that well-executed plan without having to break the immersion to think in terms of these abstracted Time Units.
It's also worth mentioning that we didn't just make a decision to get rid of Time Units. We started making our prototypes with Time Units and we found the action/move-action system to be far more engaging. You still have those classic XCOM moments where you decide to go for broke and it doesn't quite work for you. Maybe you make a break for it, and you suddenly find yourself staring at a group of aliens you didn't plan (or want!) to meet. Or taking your best shot at a crowd of Thin Men, failing to take them out, and realizing that when your turn ends, they're going to be very, very angry with you.
Now, you might say that you prefer the old method of TUs and individual tactics. That's perfectly fair. But we're as hardcore as it gets here at Firaxis, and we truly prefer the move/action system. Give it a chance, and you might, too.
Scan for UFOs? What does that button do?
(Scan For UFOs) is a way to tell HQ that you're ready to continue scanning for enemy threats in the world, and it un-pauses the game and starts time moving again. An experienced X-com player knows that pausing the geoscape between missions is the best way to set up your next research and construction projects, re-equipping your soldiers, and so forth. At some point you've done everything you can to prepare, and now you need time for research and construction to finish. At that point you'd press the (Scan for UFOs) button, and watch the days and hours count down until your projects complete, or until the next threat materializes.
Squad size?
You do begin the game with a 4-man squad size, and you can expand that over the course of the game. We found that small squads with our turn-based combat actually made the game more interesting. When we had large squads, then players had a considerable ability to inflict their will on their opponent before that opponent could respond. That meant that combat became less interesting, especially as combat progressed, because you ended up with more and more soldiers with nothing to do.
We haven't backed off the lethality of the weapons involved, so it's easy to make a sloppy mistake with positioning soldiers so they get flanked and killed by aliens. The small squad also means that losses are proportionally worse. If you have one guy die, you're down 25% of your strength. If you have two die, you've lost half the soldiers you brought. It's hard, but it's fair. In the course of the game you will lose soldiers, and you will lose soldiers who were important parts of your tactics.
What really hurts is when you lose a soldier who's survived multiple missions, and is now a one-man machine of alien disintegration, and he gets pinned down by Mutons and then killed by an alien grenade. That hurts a lot. Or maybe this morning's test game is still affecting me a little bit. Rest in peace, Winston Wallace.
Visible enemy health?
The important thing to keep in mind is that our interface isn't finalized yet. We're still trying to make the game as awesome as people expect, and so we're playing with ideas still. Right now alien health is visible and that makes sense to us. That may or may not change between now and release.
