Building a new game on top of a well-loved, long-dormant franchise that's nearly 20 years old is a bit of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you've got a built-in fan base with fond, nostalgic memories of the series. On the other hand, you want to attract a new generation of players that probably have little to no idea what your franchise is or what made it special. Change too much of that successful original formula, and you run the risk of upsetting those original fans. Don't change enough, and you run the risk of coming across as an outdated relic to the newer audience.

This is the dilemma faced by the developers at Firaxis, who are finally showing off a playable version of Xcom: Enemy Unknown, the first new title in the series since 2001. Their chosen method for walking that tightrope, it seems, is to keep the gameplay relatively familiar while adding a layer of presentational gloss designed to attract a generation raised on first-person shooters.

The turn-based tactical gameplay in the newest Xcom will be extremely familiar to anyone who played the original games. You're still leading a small squad of alien hunters through urban environments shown from an isometric, overhead perspective, taking turns with the invading forces as you try to outflank them while keeping behind cover. But fans of the original game will immediately notice that the new version is a bit more accommodating to new players, with a tightly scripted 45-minute tutorial (which was all that was playable at E3) that explains the game's flow and major actions.

"Fans of the original [Xcom] found a way to climb one of the steepest learning curves in video game history," producer Garth Deangelis told Ars Technica. "It took me a while just to learn how to launch a mission. Once you get over that hump and peel back the many layers of the game, it's an amazing game experience, but you really do have to figure it out on your own and be pretty committed to that. Our team said, let's still keep the magic that's burrowed in Xcom, but the clunky user interface isn't part of the fun, and that steep learning curve is not part of the fun. We want as many people to sit down and experience the game and enjoy it as quickly as possible."

This kind of tutorial could easily drag, but the developers at Firaxis add a bit of excitement to the proceedings with a new feature they're calling the "action cam." While the viewpoint in the original Xcom was practically welded to a familiar angled, isometric overhead view used by many strategy titles, in the new Xcom the camera frequently makes dramatic pans and zooms to accentuate important moments in the turn-based fight. This means you get a cinematic feeling from events like jumping through windows or busting down doors, but even something as simple as leaning around a corner and popping off a few rounds takes on added significance when it's shot from these dramatic, swooping angles.

"It adds so much excitement and this level of dynamism to the game," Denagelis said. "When you think of a strategy title, you don't necessarily think of really cool action movie shots, or something that's much more visceral where you see an alien blown away by a shotgun. My background is in tactical strategy, but also in console games, so to me it's really exciting that we have the elements of games that make console games exciting as well as the rich depth of strategy games on PC, and we're really trying to merge the two."

Deangelis recalled one time when a late-night janitor ended up watching an early version of the game being played by a member of the tech team. Apparently the dynamic camera angle made the janitor wonder aloud whether Firaxis was still making pure strategy games or had made the transition to pure third-person action titles.

"There's a lot of elements that will appeal to someone who plays Halo or Gears of War or Call of Duty," Deangelis said. "You're fighting off aliens, you have guns, you have big explosions. The gameplay is different, you're not real-time, spamming the shoot button. You're playing sort of a similar scenario, but... in a different way that I think is more fun, a little bit more thought-provoking. But all of the sheen and gloss and sexiness of the console shooters—we have that in our strategy game, and that's how I think we pull in some of those guys that haven't heard of Xcom."

Those newcomers to the series might be a little shocked, though, when they realize that every character in the new Xcom is constantly at risk of permanent death if you're not careful. To a generation raised on more forgiving games with frequent checkpoints and low penalties for failure, the prospect of losing advanced, heavily upgraded characters for good might be a bit jarring. But Deangelis said that he never really considered removing this key element of the Xcom series.

"That really is part of the fun, in a weird way," he said. "On the surface, it seems like I've invested all this time into this lieutenant, so it wouldn't be fun to lose him. But knowing the fact that he can go away, those consequences really add a lot of interest to the game. Every action the aliens take can make it feel that much more exciting, knowing they can actually go away. ... You're trying to hold up an alien invasion, and part of that is major consequences in losing these guys."