Art Director Greg Foertsch also shared insights regarding the design inspirations and visual storytelling of many of the game's iconic enemies:
Advent
"They go to great lengths to make sure they look human, so humanity can empathize and see them as themselves. They’ve got this black armor. I wanted them to stand out in the city centers as a cancer or something that didn’t fit. I wanted them to contrast with these stark white cities, but they’re black--their armor is black, most of their buildings are black. I wanted their presence to feel a little bit out of place."
Sectoid
"We wanted to make him more feral. He’s blended with human DNA. In the first game he had a jaw but you couldn’t really see his mouth. In this one he’s sort of half-baked. His skin doesn’t have the top layer, it hasn’t formed really, but he’s more human in form, and he’s taller and more imposing than a human.
"I always end up making the Sectoid twice. In this one very late in development I decided to make the mouth more prominent. It wasn’t scary enough, so at the very last minute, probably March [2015], I remade the Sectoid (much to production’s nightmares). I’m really super glad I did that because to me he is the face of what an XCOM game is. It’s super challenging because he has no clothes and no armor, so the simplicity makes him hard. I want to tap into the familiar with what people understand about UFO lore, since that’s their entry point, so to make a little gray that no one has seen before is very difficult."
Muton
"I wanted to blend him with human DNA, and I wanted to go back closer to the original in the green unitard. He had to have the purple face, the green armor, but that was pretty much it. He’s way more formidable, he’s much larger, you can see his physique better. I wanted him to remain inherently a Muton but ratchet him up and make him way more terrifying. Visually he’s my favorite character in the game."
Faceless
"The aliens in XCOM, no matter which game it is, have been gray. We really wanted to push them apart from each other and their abilities, so each one feels like a color key and a space for me. I tend to look at the pop culture or sci-fi lore and launch from those places when I make something new. For Faceless it’s the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Swamp Thing, and the Pale Man from Pan’s Labyrinth. He lumbers much like that. Those were really the main influences."
Chryssalid
"It was a little bit Starship Troopers. I feel like I made the face more like the original game. With that character, we didn’t want to deviate too far since it was such a fan favorite, but I wanted to make him more poisonous and threatening, so his color key changed. He feels a little more poisonous, like poisonous frogs, snakes. He’s got this soulless stare, which to me is a key feature to that creature. I added more spikes, a lot more like a crustacean. That really hot orange on the spikes makes it feel more threatening."
Berserker
"We wanted to make her really imposing, like her skin is her armor, so she’s got these calcified sections. Plus she has all these injections to really rage her up, so with that one, I removed the armor and made her skin the armor. The little portals are injection portals, and the burnished sections are the calcified skin like a rhino."
Andromedan
"It’s a giant robotic suit driven by an alien. I was looking at dive suits and NASA space suits. He’s got this blue armor with a trim, like a NASA suit. Like, who knows what happened to an astronaut? Maybe the aliens got one. He’s got these bendy coily arms like the robot in Lost in Space. I wanted to see if I could do that and make it cool. It was the 50s sci-fi stuff, it’s a familiar thing that we twist in an unusual way."
Archon
"We almost want that to feel god-like, like an ideal. He’s got this skin that physically looks real, but there’s a paneling to his skin. You can see seams. He’s got a godly appearance, and a very graceful presence. If people saw him, he looks godly. But again, it’s all about that contrast within that character. He’s got a lot of rage."
Viper
"She was a very direct nod to when I said I would never make a snake man. I came around and made a snake lady. We looked at Cleopatra and Medusa with her. She’s similar to Archon in that they both have an elegance, so they do connect visually."
