I’m pretty amazingly not into the idea of the FPS “reboot” of X-COM. I didn’t play X-COM for its trite, skeletal story or its anonymous, disposable soldiers. I played for the nerve-wracking strategy and squad tactics. Making an FPS and calling it X-COM is like making a cel-shaded platformer and calling it NASCAR.
My best X-COM memories involve situations that I couldn’t predict, but could only learn from. The time a squaddie opened a farmhouse door and stood helpless, out of action points, while the alien on the other side shot him. The moment later in the fight when another soldier, who had saved up his action points, spotted the same alien through a window and gunned it down in return. The soldier who saw another unit member die right next to her and went berserk, firing a fusillade of Heavy cannon shots in every direction, killing almost the entire team.
In a modern FPS, all of these events would have to be scripted, coded in by programmers to be sure they happened the right way every time, just while the player happens to be looking at the affected soldiers. Every event in the game is right there in your hint book, on GameFAQS, in your memory from the last time you played. If the good folks at 2K Marin can find a way to inject the big-budget FPS genre with a healthy dose of X-COM-style unpredictability, God bless them and keep them. I haven’t seen anything like that yet from a game in the genre, though, and I’m not inclined to make pre-emptive excuses to justify this genre switch.
I mean, I understand where they’re coming from. FPS are a big genre anymore, maybe the biggest depending on how you look at things. X-COM is a storied franchise that’s been sliding down a long, slow, sad decline for over a decade now. It might make sense to say “Hey, let’s try freshening things up with a gritty re-make, get all Casino Royale up in here.” Except that’s exactly what’s been going wrong with X-COM for year now. The first game was fun in a slightly weird, opaque way. The second game was really just the first one again with a different set of graphics and a vertical difficulty curve. The third game, Apocalypse, added a trendy but really unnecessary RTS element that wasn’t enjoyable, as well as some pretty dismal 3-D rendered graphics. After that came a shitty space fighter game and a bland 3rd person shooter game. Again and again, X-COM has been shoe-horned into the genre of the week in hoped that lightning will strike again, apparently without thought as to what actually made the first game good.
I’ll tell you what. You could make an FPS that hewed true to the stuff I played X-COM for, but it would involve the player character huddled behind the landing strut of a VTOL, choking on smoke grenades, and eventually dying in a hail of plasma fire and alien grenades, Modern Warfare style. Every mission. The soldiers in X-COM are fucking cannon fodder for most of the game; you can’t develop a story about how one of them super-heroically and single-handedly drives the alien menace from the world.
Well, you could. It wouldn’t be X-COM, though.
-ssr
[h/t Destructoid]