After the critical and commercial success that was XCOM: Enemy Unknown, a sequel seemed inevitable. It wasn't always. The team at Firaxis had worked hard to reexamine the parts of the classic strategy franchise and modernize them, and at the time it was never a sure bet.

"We were very taken aback, surprised and humbled by how the community seemed to take to Enemy Unknown," Senior Producer Garth DeAngelis told Shacknews. "The publisher said, we think something is here. There's an audience for it, so what can you do with this franchise? Where do we go from here? It's a very different challenge than Enemy Unknown, which was to bring back this old franchise and make it palpable to a modern audience." 

With Enemy Unknown wrapped, most of the team went on to work on Enemy Within, the expansion. Simultaneously, a small leadership team headed by DeAngelis began quietly working on what would become XCOM 2. The first step was to decide on its goals, to make something of a mission statement for the follow-up.

"There are a lot of vectors going at once," DeAngelis said. "You have design looking at what it’s trying to accomplish, where they want to innovate, but then we also take a hard look at the community and the fans. They play more of it than us, so what did they think? There were a few pillars that we knew we wanted to do after that analysis."

Infinite Maps

The first pillar, he said, was to make the new procedurally generated maps. That was in direct response to the community, who gave positive feedback on the handcrafted maps, but saw too much repetition after dozens or even hundreds of hours. 

"So the team said, this is the first challenge we’re going to tackle," he said. "It’s going to be a new pipeline, a new process, but we need to make procedural maps. The team broke down how to make this new procedural map system, and it led to this beautiful system that has all the value of hand-placed beautiful art, but you don’t know what the layout is going to be. It really makes the whole game imbued with this new soul." 

The procedural maps generated their own challenges for the design team. For one, he said, they had to be sure enemies could work in various scenarios when the map components linked up in unexpected ways. For example, he said, you could make a stealth alien that can travel through a part of the map in a very specific way, which is tempting as a designer, but ultimately wouldn't work.

"We shy away from that as a design team because XCOM has to be very open-ended and work in any situation. You can’t have this huge God of War alien that only works on this map, because XCOM is systemic. You need the big baddies to work in almost any situation."

It also raised the question of game balance. Enemy Within had random encounters with different mixtures of enemies based on your current team's level, but with the addition of procedural maps, those enemies had to work in multiple environments.

"It’s not a science," DeAngelis said. "Design has these beautiful spreadsheets with all these things accounted for. You know, what the enemy schedule should be relative to where you may be on the tech tree. All that stuff is laid out and it looks great, but the reality is when you play you get this information to tweak it to the point that it feels like a magical experience."

I also wondered if he foresaw that being underwhelming to some extent. Procedural maps are a nice under-the-hood feature, but they're the sort that is intended to go largely unnoticed. After all the work that went into polishing the system, was he concerned that the audience might not appreciate it as a marquee feature? 

"That means the team did their job really really well. I think the team that worked on it is totally okay with that," he said. "Procedural maps are a little different because it’s such a big new component. In some ways it is a soft system. There’s a lot of work upfront but you’re not going to be hitting the player over the head with it. It’s this long-term sustained feeling. You’ll want to go back even if you don’t know why you want to go back. All of these things together in the back of the player’s mind lead to this high-value experience that there’s always something new, so you don’t get out of the flow."

Loss Leader

On the whole, DeAngelis says XCOM 2 is a game about loss, and that's illustrated in its central premise. XCOM 2 assumes you lost Enemy Unknown. The unit tasked with handling alien threats was forced underground, and has coalesced into a de facto resistance to the alien occupation. The aliens portray themselves as saviors and have built pristine cities to keep humanity mollified, and carefully hides its more sinister intentions.

In the lore, XCOM lost about one-third of the way through Enemy Unknown. DeAngelis says that means it was before they developed any meaningful technology, which sets the stage for XCOM 2's mechanics and challenge. On top of that, the aliens are now pursuing their own agenda as well. 

"Design knew that they wanted to make the world feel a little more unwieldy, unpredictable, and dynamic," DeAngelis said. "We want the A.I. to feel more alive. So they came up with this 'Dark Events' system, which is really clever. It came up a little later relative to the other systems, which I think was a good thing. It sort of set constraints to fit within the existing systems."

The Dark Events center on the "Avatar Project," a player loss condition represented by a progress bar. Players will need to balance their own goals with stymying the alien plans. "The cadence of that changes based on the difficulty, and there’s also variation so you don’t always know: should I be taking out this alien facility to stop the Avatar Project, or should I do this guerrilla op to get supplies I need to build these magnetic weapons? There’s always that classic choice of XCOM, it’s just in a more dynamic way."

Finally, the theme of loss is carried most directly in one of XCOM's classic mechanics: permanent death. Players responded well to the first game's punishing difficulty and the ability to lose characters, so Firaxis has doubled down on it. Now not only can you create characters to resemble your family members, spouse, or college roommate, you can also create a massive pool of characters that the game will pull from randomly.

DeAngelis says members of the team spent hours making their character pool before even starting the game, and the result was familiar faces that would pop up in unexpected places like Advent jail cells. If you happen to have a frenemy or want to abuse your jerk of an upstairs neighbor, you can set your character pool with "dark VIPs" so they'll pop up on the aliens' side.