XCOM 2 is coming, and with it the series takes an unexpected turn. For the first time, the venerable franchise sees an Earth not just under assault by aliens, but totally subjugated to them. No longer an international defense force, now the XCOM organization is an underground resistance organization, complete with its own cool Latin motto.

At E3 2015 I spoke to Garth DeAngelis, lead producer on XCOM 2, about the new direction for the franchise and the new features we can expect to see when it launches this November.

GameCrate: What was the decision like to make the XCOM organization lose? We tried so hard, why did we lose?

Garth DeAngelis: We did try very hard. Well...did you lose, when you played?

GC: Oh yeah, I lost a lot.

GD: Honestly, that was a really neat twist to us. When we heard a lot of testimonials from our community and people that played the game, we heard over and over "I lost." At least the first time. I lost. And this is not a game where you can just continue and pick up where you left off, when you lose you lose.

And that led to a lot of conversations that at first were in jest and a little more fun -- "Hey, what if XCOM actually lost?" And then it led to this situation that we thought was really cool and unique. Since XCOM is all about having the odds stacked against you, and overcoming those challenges, and a sense of triumph, we said, "What if there was a universe where XCOM did lose, and the aliens occupied Earth?" And we thought that was a much more compelling setting for the sequel, to have to rebuild XCOM as a resistance force and take back the planet. And since that happened to most of our player-base we thought, this is a really really cool situation. It's almost like we collaborated with our community on this world.

GC: So this is a world where XCOM loses. Do you give thought to the canon of the series and if this "counts" or if it's "real"?

GD: Yeah, it counts. This is is our Firaxis canon with the franchise. This is where we want to go narratively with it. It's interesting because we made that decision canonically to go with it because of the play experiences. This isn't a movie, we don't want to pick it up where the final cinematic left off.

It was fun, if you still won the game that's great, and this doesn't undermine people's experiences from winning the game, but that's not a universe where XCOM is needed, because they repelled the alien invasion. What we want to tell is the universe where they lost, and people can say "What can we do to take the world back?"

GC: What's the deal with the snake aliens?

GD: Yeah! The snake aliens are really cool. That's one of the few from the original UFO Defense that we didn't update for Enemy Unknown. So we thought it would be neat to dip back in that well for the sequel and find an alien that pays homage to our source material and say, "How could the snake man be updated for XCOM 2?"

Furthermore, we thought it was an awesome opportunity to say now that the aliens can shed their skin, literally, the Thin Man was sort of an incognito unit in XCOM, he was sort of amongst the crowd and eerily looks like a human. The snake woman, the Viper, is the Thin Man shedding their skin. That's their real form. So it was a cool opportunity for us both to pay homage to the original and narratively progress an enemy from Enemy Unknown.

GC: So there's just the one snake unit? The Viper is the one?

GD: The Viper is the one. There can be lots of them, depending on where you're at in the game, but the Viper is the one.

GC: In seeing the demo, it seemed like there were a lot more triggered story elements, not cutscenes exactly but that sort of thing mid-battle. What was the thinking there?

GD: We wanted to set the stage narratively. We wanted people to understand what this world was about, Unification Day was an inciting moment where XCOM is now taking the gloves off and striking back. No one knows XCOM exists and then in that moment they are revealing themselves. And we'll have a small set of missions like that that are story based, but the vast majority of missions in XCOM 2, since they're procedurally created, we're not going to have those fixed story points in the missions. What's more important there is that the player's there, and they're achieving their objective. Because those can play out procedurally we're not going have as many of those matinees.

With that said though, we do want those cinematic moments when they are tied to gameplay. So you remember in EU there were the glam-cam shots with firing your gun, we want to push that further. When aliens use their abilities you're going to get a cutscene down there, with a Viper bind, you might see the camera go down, she actually shoots our her tongue in a certain playthrough, you're going to see that with all the alien abilities and the soldier abilities as well.



GC: So now that XCOM is underground, is there an equivalent to the national support element from Enemy Unknown that you have to manage?

GD: What we can say, there is going to be obviously a metagame on the strategy layer. XCOM needs a new base, and what they've found -- I don't know if you saw the announce trailer, but at the end the vessel rises out of the canyon. XCOM has repurposed an alien craft from the old war, and that is going to become their base. They have to be mobile, because they're on the run, and the aliens are trying to hunt them down and track them. They need to be mobile in order to get away from them and also to spark the resistance globally around the world. There will be a very interesting strategy layer.

GC: What can you tell us about the new classes?

GD: You saw the Ranger and the Specialist, they were the two highlighted classes in our gameplay demo. The Ranger is a great frontline unit, it's sort of an evolution of the Assault class from Enemy Unknown in this new world, what would have happened in this new world for 20 years. What the Ranger does is they say "I'm going to pick up a badass machete sword and take that to the aliens if I have to." So we wanted melee combat to be an option. It's a very interesting frontline combat option that has a high risk/reward element to it. She can also act as a scout as well, and she'll have some concealment-focused abilities on her perk tree.

The Specialist on the other hand is an evolution of the Support unit from Enemy Unknown. They can buff their units, they're more of a back line unit, but she can also use that robotic drone called the Gremlin that you saw in the gameplay demo to hack into robotic enemies, and the turret hack was sort of the tip of the iceberg. A lot of the robotic units, you'll be able to turn the table on the enemies and use that weaponry against them. Furthermore the Gremlin can do some cool things with mission objectives themselves, where you can set the Gremlin up to take care of things.

GC: Can we expect more new classes?

GD: Oh yeah, there are more new classes, we have five total. We're not talking about detail on one, the other two -- the Grenadier and the Sharpshooter -- are evolutions of the Heavy and the Sniper. The Sharpshooter is really awesome because it's not a clear choice of "This is going to become a godly, long-range sniper that can fly in the air and take out anything with Squad Sight." You still have your sniper rifle but you also have these really really cool pistol abilities tied to the Sharpshooter as well that make pistols very very tempting.

GC: Are we going to see an Iron Man mode?

GD: Oh yeah. There will be an Iron Man mode.

GC: After the announcement trailer came out, you had some people saying "We should be under water!" like in Terror from the Deep. Why didn't you go in that direction for this game?

GD: Creatively it didn't really resonate with our design, as a design priority. We don't know what's going to happen in the future, but right now we had this story to tell. We really were captivated by the premise of "What if you lost" and Earth still the main stage.



GC: There are a lot of examples in sci-fi movies and books of the human resistance against an occupying force theme. Did you draw from any of those specifically?

GD: Yeah, it's a very ripe trope that's a lot of fun, and it makes a lot of sense in the XCOM universe because of odds stacked against you. There isn't any really go-to movies that design talked about a lot, but we knew that we wanted to have the premise of: the tables have been turned on you, and now you have to take back what was previously yours.

GC: In talking with the Civilization team at Firaxis, they talk a lot about the philosophy of Thirds in designing franchise games -- a third new ideas, a third tweaked or evolved ideas, and a third classic gameplay. Is that something you applied in XCOM 2 as well?

GD: I think in broad strokes. You can look at the baseline combat that we have, we didn't want to change things that worked really well, that resonated well with the community. Things like our cover system and even Low and High and the decisions that are made there with cover. Destructibility, the fog of war, soldier class abilities, the two turn system. All of that we really like and we don't want to touch. Then we layer something on top of that like the concealment system that really changes how you make those existing decisions with the existing mechanics we had before. I think there's some fair amount of crossover there when you look at it that way.

GC: Finally, what are you most excited about with XCOM 2?

GD: I'm really excited about the procedural nature of the game, that's probably with the core game what is most different. We really wanted to accomplish that goal of, you will not see the same map twice. That was a huge goal of the design team and our engineers and artists and designers really pulled that off. You won't have this feeling of, "Oh I've played this map before." You may have that eerie sense of, "I may have seen this before, but not in this way." And that is a really cool feeling, and it actually fits the tone of the game well, this sort of futuristic alien occupied Earth where, "What have they done with our cities? I don't think I've quite seen this before." It's a pretty interesting feeling.