XCOM: Enemy Within Interview
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With Enemy Within specifically, were there any ideas that you tried out in Enemy Unknown and didn't make it in for gameplay or time reasons, that have now made it over to the expansion?
There were a couple. We definitely had too much stuff we wanted to put into Enemy Unknown, so having another crack at it was nice. One of those things was soldier voices. We definitely didn't want all the soldiers to sound American but they did when we shipped, so now soldier languages is a customisation option. You'll be able to hear your soldiers speaking different languages, because now it's just a slider and I can pick: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian Polish, English and that kind of adds an international feel. It was something we wanted to solve coming out of XCOM: Enemy Unknown.
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The harder difficulties became something of a phenomenon with Enemy Unknown. Were you pleased to see the Impossible difficulty become such a big part of the hardcore gaming community?
Yes, yes. So Iron Man mode. We thought it would just be this little thing the idea you can only have one save and then all your decisions are permanent. We thought nah, it's just gonna be a vanity thing. It'll have its fans. but we had no idea that people would say '˜if you're not playing on Iron Man you are not playing this game right'. We had no idea it would become this phenomenon within the community.
Same with Impossible. I mean, we thought people would be playing on Impossible, which is really hard, but the idea that somebody would be like 'I've got an Impossible Iron Man win'. I think the Steam stats indicate that 0.7% of the players have beaten the game on Impossible. I don't know how many have beaten it on Impossible Iron Man, but anybody that does has my respect.
And on Enemy Within, it was important to us that the game be beatable on Impossible Iron Man, and a couple of weeks ago somebody finally did beat Enemy Within on Impossible Iron Man. So it is possible!
