XCOM: Enemy Unknown | Code Like It's 198x

XCOM: Enemy Unknown is Firaxis Games’ 2012 remake of X-COM: UFO Defense, the 1994 game that Julian and Nick Gollop designed and MicroProse published. Like the original, it hands the player a secret organisation, an underground base and a squad of soldiers to stop an alien invasion, and it splits the game in two: running the base, the research and the budget, and fighting turn-based battles in which a dead soldier stays dead. Almost everything beneath that was rebuilt.

The dropped hyphen is how the two eras are told apart: X-COM for the 1990s games, XCOM for the Firaxis series. The Gollops had no part in the remake.

Fast facts

Developer: Firaxis Games, the Maryland studio Sid Meier co-founded in 1996.
Publisher: 2K Games.
Lead designer: Jake Solomon.
Released: 9 October 2012 in North America and 12 October internationally, for Windows, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
Engine: Unreal Engine 3.
Expansion: XCOM: Enemy Within (November 2013).
Remake of: X-COM: UFO Defense, known in Britain as UFO: Enemy Unknown (1994).

The remake that failed first

Solomon had played the original at 18, sneaking downstairs at night with his brothers to take turns. “It just totally blew my mind,” he told Edge, and it was why he studied computer science. At Firaxis he worked under Sid Meier on Civilization Revolution and Pirates!, and he kept asking to remake X-COM. Meier told Retro Gamer that Solomon had “been bugging us, for probably ten years now”, and that the game was “really his design and his vision”.

He tried early. A prototype in 2003 “was awful,” Solomon said. “It’s a good thing it never went ahead, because I was way too young.” Firaxis started the project properly in the spring of 2007, and it began as an upgrade rather than a reboot: “We were going to remake the original game, with the original game mechanics, and we were going to add a couple of things to it.” After a year the team had a finished slice of the game that impressed fans of the original but, Edge reported, “ended up alienating everyone else”. Solomon put it down to the original itself: “The original had incredibly high highs – maybe even higher highs than our game today has. But the cost of those incredibly high highs was that it also had some serious lows to it, like the pacing and combat.”

So Firaxis started again from what it judged essential. Edge listed turn-based combat with permanent death, destructible levels and “a deep strategic layer baked into the action”. The rest was open to change.

What changed

The biggest change was the turn. In 1994 each soldier had a stock of time units, and walking, kneeling, turning and shooting all spent some. In the remake each soldier gets two actions a turn. As Edge’s preview put it, a soldier “can move and perform a single action each turn, where an action is anything from shooting their weapon to tossing a grenade to any one of dozens of special abilities”. One of those actions is Overwatch: the soldier waits, and fires at the first alien that moves into view. “The right move triggers a spike of euphoria,” Edge wrote, and its example was as simple as a Heavy on high ground set to Overwatch.

Soldiers gained classes. Edge’s preview described the new system: “each recruit has a class (heavy, sniper, assault and support), a small number of statistics that increase automatically, and a selection of special abilities, which the player chooses each time the soldier levels up”. The aim, it said, was not to make the game less complicated, but to add more abilities than before while making sure players understood the consequences of their decisions.

Cover became a system of its own. Soldiers duck automatically behind the nearest piece of scenery, and an enemy caught from the side loses its cover bonus. Most of the scenery can be blown apart, cover included, by a laser blast or a rocket. The base changed from a top-down plan to what Edge called “a bustling side-on ant farm”, “a few thousand square feet of hollowed-out rock” in which scientists work in the labs and wounded soldiers recover in the infirmary. The Geoscape survived, a spinning Earth on which the player launches satellites, scrambles interceptors and sends a Skyranger transport with a squad of soldiers.

Players found one more change by trying to cheat. The game kept the same random-number seed through each turn, so a player who saved before a risky shot and reloaded after a miss would miss again, “even if you reload 50 times”, as Edge put it. “The sequence of die-rolls is fixed,” said Ananda Gupta, a senior designer at Firaxis. Solomon, he said, had been “adamant” that rerolling on a reload should not be part of the standard game, and it was left to an optional setting.

What stayed

Permadeath. “It’s painful … when you lose a recruit,” Edge wrote, “especially since death is not merely penalised in Enemy Unknown, but permanent.” The barracks let players rename soldiers, and Edge’s reviewer described press-ganging “friends, co-workers and even pets” into the squad. An Ironman mode removed the option to reload a save at all.
The two layers feeding each other. Research and alien wreckage gate better weapons and armour. A country left to panic because the player could not send a squad can drop out of the project.
Escalation. The aliens grow tougher through the campaign, from the “flimsy, bulbous-headed Sectoids” of the first missions to “vast, overmuscled monster-men” who could, Edge said, “halve your poor team’s health bars in a single backhand slap”.

Reception

Edge scored it 9 out of 10 and opened its review with the stories it made: “XCOM: Enemy Unknown generates stories like few other games.” It judged the game “as unashamedly difficult as it was in 1994’s X-COM”, and devoted a sidebar to why a mode called Impossible was acceptable in 2012. Retro Gamer thought that “even the most cynical gamers can’t deny that Firaxis has handled the job with care”. By 2013, Gupta said, it had won 15 Game of the Year awards.

The series

XCOM: Enemy Within (2013) was an expansion that changed the code so deeply that on consoles it could not be sold as downloadable content. It added soldiers in mechanical suits, genetic modifications, a new resource called MELD and fixes for three separate flanking bugs. XCOM 2 (2016) moved the story on to a resistance fighting to free an Earth under alien control, and its expansion War of the Chosen followed in August 2017. Wireframe reported that Firaxis hired the small team behind the fan-made Long War modification to make content for XCOM 2. XCOM: Chimera Squad (2020) was what Wireframe called “a budget spin-off”, set in a single city.

The series became the yardstick for its genre. By the 2020s Wireframe was describing new tactical games by comparison with it, such as Space Cats Tactics with its “XCOM-style grid-based tactical combat”, and Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters as “the latest XCOM-style reboot” of a 1998 PC game. Julian Gollop returned to the genre himself with Phoenix Point (2019).

Sources

Edge issue 238, March 2012, pp. 60–63: preview (2K Games, Firaxis Games, 360, PC, PS3; work began in spring 2007; Jake Solomon; the base as an “ant farm”; the Geoscape and Skyranger; one move and one action a turn; classes; cover; permadeath; Unreal Engine 3), with a Q&A with Solomon (playing the original at 18; working with Sid Meier).
Edge issue 247, December 2012, pp. 102–104: review (two actions a turn, classes, Overwatch, renaming soldiers, funding and panic, the aliens, 9/10); sidebar on Ironman and Impossible modes.
Edge issue 249, January 2013, pp. 74–78: feature on reboots, with Jake Solomon (the 2003 prototype, the remake begun with the original mechanics, the vertical slice, his quotation on the original’s highs and lows, what Firaxis kept).
Edge issue 259, November 2013, pp. 54–55: XCOM: Enemy Within preview (2K, Firaxis, 360, PC, PS3, 15 November; MECs, genetic modifications, MELD; the flanking bugs; the fixed random-number seed; Ananda Gupta on the 15 Game of the Year awards).
Retro Gamer issue 112, March 2013, p. 51 (the reboot “done without Julian’s involvement”; “handled the job with care”) and p. 64 (Sid Meier on Solomon and XCOM).
Wireframe issue 3, November 2018, p. 18: the Long War team hired by Firaxis for XCOM 2.
Wireframe issue 31, January 2020, p. 56: Phoenix Point review.
Wireframe issue 39, May 2020, p. 94: XCOM: Chimera Squad review (“a budget spin-off”).
Wireframe issue 49, March 2021, p. 26 (Space Cats Tactics) and issue 63, May 2022, p. 84 (Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters): “XCOM-style”.
2K Games press release, 22 May 2012, as reported by Gaming Nexus (web, secondary): release dates and formats. https://www.gamingnexus.com/News/26627/XCOM-Enemy-Unknown-release-date-revealed
“XCOM 2: War of the Chosen”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): release on 29 August 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XCOM_2:_War_of_the_Chosen
For XCOM 2’s release in February 2016, see the X-COM: UFO Defense entry and its sources.