BY BRANDIN TYRRELThe words procedurally generated spark the idea of endlessly interchangeable combinations of parts linked together in hundreds of different ways, creating something unique that may never be seen again. At its heart, that’s not terribly far off the mark, but as Firaxis Games discovered during the production of its 2012 reboot, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, there’s a gulf between random and procedural. And traveling from Enemy Unknown to XCOM 2 has meant discovering how to bridge that long divide.

XCOM 2 Reveal Trailer - IGN First
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Random's not fun. That is the lesson we learned.

Much of that learning process took shape during the development of Enemy Unknown – so much that it simply couldn’t be shaped and applied alongside the project’s already hefty development. Fortunately for us, those lessons are finally ready to be applied to XCOM 2’s shining white alien-built megacities, rugged forests, deserts, and snow-capped wildernesses (among other settings) that will serve as the battlefields in humanity’s war against the aliens’ occupying force.

The first rule, according to XCOM 2 Art Director Greg Foertsch, is striking a balance. “Random’s not fun,” Foertsch declared. “That’s the lesson we learned. The procedurally generated levels in Enemy Unknown, they were more random.”

It’s the kind of randomness where each slab of cover could be a bench, or a trashcan, or dumpster, or some clumsily lain obstacle course of the aforementioned parts that don’t give you good opportunities to advance your soldiers under fire. “Maybe that was a bridge too far.... And, visually, it also looks terrible.”




And so Firaxis turned to hand-crafted maps for Enemy Unknown that both looked good and played well. But the other side of that coin is that because each piece was meticulously constructed, Firaxis could make only so many – the finite number of maps just wasn’t enough to sustain the series’ dedicated and diehard fanbase, who very quickly learned to anticipate enemy placement.

“Overwhelmingly, players of [Enemy Unknown] said, ‘We like the maps, but man...we're exhausting them pretty quick,’ even though the team put in 80-plus maps,” said Garth DeAngelis, lead producer on both Enemy Unknown and XCOM 2. “And they were all handcrafted, which was a ton of work.

‘So,’ we said, ‘How do we resolve this problem?’” The answer is what the team literally calls “the plot and parcel system,” and what DeAngelis refers to as “a big quilt.”

Building A Better Tomorrow
Here’s how the metaphor works: imagine a map in XCOM 2 as a quilt, with holes where a pre-constructed modular building will be placed – those are the parcels. The holes are big, small, and medium-sized, with a range of unique buildings that could fit into each size. These buildings, and the holes in which they’re socketed, are the parcels of the system.




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Buildings aren’t procedurally generated, but crafted set pieces, and almost entirely destructible.

Though modular in nature, buildings in XCOM 2 aren’t procedurally generated, but crafted set pieces, and almost entirely destructible – including their ceilings and floors. “They're actually high-cost to make,” said Foertsch. “There are a lot of steps that go with them. Then there's the visibility stuff. And there’s a lot of things to iron out when you destruct these things.”

However, with the addition of mod support in XCOM 2 -- which we’ll be diving into next week -- and the modular nature of building design and creation, there’s no telling how many different variations and original buildings you’ll soon be blowing holes through. But in the meantime, Firaxis is planning plenty of variety in each map layout.

“You might get a gas station next to a park, next to a parking lot in one playthrough, and that's your experience,” DeAngelis said. “Even though the ‘quilt’ is the same, all of these elements are procedural, mini set piece bases.”

The plot portion of that system comes into play in the space between our buildings. At the risk of mixing our metaphors, think of the plots as the connective tissue that links one parcel to the next. The plots could be a street, or a park area, or train tracks, or a river bed, or an empty tract of land, et cetera. When you begin a mission, the map reaches into a bank of options and fills it up.




“All the stuff you see that comes up on the road, like where the cars are, the lights – that's all random rule,” Foertsch said. “It has a pool of things it can put there. But we think more about it as like a little bit of a diorama set than, ‘I'm going to put an individual trash can here.’”

“In addition, the connective tissue does have random cover that propagates on top of it,” DeAngelis continued. “So, cars in the streets, where telephone booths are, where the security checkpoints you saw in the announce trailer are, those come in as well.”

Each chunk of each plot will be procedurally generated from an appropriately themed bank of around 20-ish possible dioramas, and so on so forth. This is how XCOM 2 will generate a near-endless supply of maps, and how you’ll likely never play the same one twice.

Your Mission, Should You Choose To Accept It
But the procedurally generated approach of XCOM 2 doesn’t stop with the patchwork environments and battlefield locales. For the first time, your squad will not only be tasked with exterminating the aliens in the area, but secondary mission objectives which will cater to the procedurally generated settings. “It might be blowing up one of these buildings to spark the resistance,” Foertsch said. “It might be hacking a workstation, or protecting a device. All these different things you can do that can show up and in dozens of different buildings and areas. And you don't know what you're going to get.




“We're really excited about the baseline gameplay. Because it just ramps up that whole procedural factor beyond just geometries in a different place – which is what we wanted to set out to do.”

“I'm super excited about this,” said DeAngelis. “There was an interesting long-term learning lesson. Because again, with the pie-in-the-sky approach, you're like, ‘Let's make it as random as possible so you truly get play forever and totally randomized.’ But there's so much value in what the artists and designers do with crafting, so it's really that nice hybridization of techniques we learned in Enemy Unknown, but then try and give back some of that UFO Defense.” IGN Logo

It’s difficult to please both new and old fans alike when rebooting a beloved franchise, but in 2012, Firaxis pulled off a game-development miracle when it successfully revived the legendary but long-mistreated X-COM franchise with XCOM: Enemy Unknown. The modernized version recaptured the key elements that made the 1994 original memorable: an against-the-odds struggle against a technologically superior foe; the emotional sting that comes from the permanent loss of personalized soldiers heroically killed in battle; and a deep tactical system with an element of randomness that forces you to prepare contingencies in case your plans don’t survive contact with the enemy.

XCOM 2 Reveal Trailer - IGN First
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Surprise: You didn’t beat the aliens – they steamrolled you.

Enemy Unknown was a success that demanded a follow up, and it’s our great pleasure to announce that it’s getting one in XCOM 2, due out this November. But that posed a difficult question: Where do you go from the end of Enemy Unknown (and its expansion, Enemy Within), where, spoiler alert, XCOM has unlocked the secrets of the aliens’ advanced technologies and used them to destroy the invaders’ mothership, ending the threat? When faced with this problem in 1995, Microprose took the fight underwater with X-COM: Terror From the Deep, which simply reskinned X-COM with a less relatable deep-sea theme, and added a scant few new features. For Firaxis’ second XCOM, Creative Director Jake Solomon and his team are going in an entirely different direction: instead of changing the setting, they’re changing history to make XCOM the underdog again. How? Surprise: You didn’t beat the aliens – they steamrolled you.

Solomon painted an alternate version of how the war unfolded: “When the aliens showed up, XCOM suffered massive casualties, and governments around the world crumbled in face of popular support to surrender. Then, the Earth was quickly overrun. And so, 20 years into the future, the world is a very different place. The aliens rule Earth from giant shining megacities where all the people of Earth are flocking; that’s where they’re promised an easy life, a secure life free of disease.“

We’ll have much more on the new setting next week, in Impossible Ironman is Canon: Why Earth Had to Lose the War for XCOM 2 to Happen.

And here’s another shocker: though XCOM: Enemy Unknown and XCOM: Enemy Within came out on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC, XCOM 2 is a PC-exclusive game. More on that on Friday in Why XCOM 2 Had to be a PC-Only Game.

Down, But Not Out
The year is 2035, and XCOM now operates as a resistance movement against the alien occupation. That represents a huge shift in context for both the strategic and tactical battles we’ll fight in XCOM 2. “XCOM never lost the war; they just never stopped fighting and went underground,” explained Solomon. “Players are no longer the commander of this elite military force. They are commanding a very hardened group of freedom fighters and guerrilla fighters, and they’re leading them to ignite a global resistance and wake everyone up, and then try to rescue Earth from the government that now controls it."

Is the alien statue helping him up, or leaving him behind?

The aliens have a weird idea of tourist attractions.

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XCOM never acquired advanced weapons and armor technology.

The situation is desperate: Earth is enemy territory, and in this reality XCOM never acquired the advanced weapons and armor technology that allowed us to go head-to-head with powerful aliens. We’re outmatched – even more so than before, as we’ve lost the home-field advantage, and the aliens have become even more powerful. To avoid being pinpointed and obliterated, the old subterranean headquarters has been abandoned in favor of a mobile base, built on the frame of a captured and retrofitted alien cargo ship rechristened as the Avenger. (This is a reference to the Avenger interceptor/troop carrier in 1994’s X-COM: UFO Defense, not Nick Fury’s helicarrier in Marvel’s 2012 Avengers movie.)

Firaxis isn’t going into detail about its new version of XCOM’s strategy layer just yet, other than to say that territory control will be important. From what we see in the trailer, in which the Avenger flies out of the canyon where it was concealed and off to parts unknown, we can surmise that it will move from region to region as XCOM attacks vulnerable alien targets in hit-and-run strikes. “The idea is that you’re inspiring people by actually taking the fight to the aliens and their New World Order,” Solomon hinted.

Human Revolution
What he is going into depth on is the tactical battles (which have always been the meat of XCOM games) and how this change in circumstances affects the moment-to-moment gameplay of using teamwork and complementary weapons and abilities to shoot aliens in the face. Solomon described the creative process that led to a guerilla-themed XCOM as gameplay-driven. “The idea for us is that mechanics always come first, and then we look for a setting that’s going to fit the mechanics,” he said. He and his team had some big ideas about how to change up battles and make them more tactically interesting and less repetitive, and the freedom-fighter setting rose up around them.

Your friendly neighborhood Advent checkpoint.

Sneaking into position to ambush Advent soldiers will be easier than a fair fight.

First of all, we have a new team of battle-hardened XCOM soldier classes that are similar to Enemy Unknown’s, but distinct. The Sharpshooter shares a lot of DNA with EU’s Sniper, but can also specialize in using a pistol as a primary weapon instead of a last resort. The Ranger is the evolution of the Assault class, still specializing in close combat with shotguns and the like, but now comes equipped with XCOM’s first lethal melee weapon: a machete-like blade. The Grenadier? He (or she) blows things up, much like the Heavy. The Specialist replaces Support, and uses a hovering drone called a Gremlin both in combat to stun enemies and buff allies, and out of combat to pull off tricks like long-range hacking. There’s also a fifth mystery class that Firaxis is saving for reveal closer to launch.

We’ll have more on XCOM 2’s new classes next week in Meet The Specialist and Meet The Ranger.

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This is really more of a Sons of Anarchy-type of squad.

XCOM 2 Art Director Greg Foertsch says the character models and textures shown in the cinematic trailer are the same ones we’ll see in-game (though here they have some post-processing effects on them), setting an extremely high bar for visual quality. Despite that, we’re promised much more control over our characters’ looks this time. Out of every success in Enemy Unknown, Solomon considers the soldier customization and the personal attachment that comes from that to be among the biggest, and has set out to push it further in XCOM 2. “We have some really cool-looking soldiers,” he promised. “They can have big beards, they can have really awesome haircuts, they can have some cool stuff that gives them a lot of character and fits this idea of they’re this sort of hardened group, they’re not fresh-out-of-the-barracks Johnny Soldier; this is really more of a Sons of Anarchy-type of squad.”

We'll have much more control over our soldiers' looks.

We'll have much more control over our soldiers' looks.

We can now swap genders and set nationalities to our liking – if you want an all-female, all-Portuguese team, you can do that. What’s more, we’ll be able to tweak the look of the right and left arms, torso, pants, and headgear individually, drawing from a larger selection of pieces designed to give this version of XCOM a more ragtag, scavenged look and feel. “When that stuff came online I got caught in the trap of customizing rookies, which was a huge mistake,” Solomon confessed. “We try to make it easier for the player to customize, but you can spend a lot more time customizing your soldiers, which you should not do unless you have relative certainly you’re either going to re-load when they die or that are going to survive. So, don’t do that on rookies because you’ll have wasted a lot of time.” Veteran soldiers will have unique cosmetic upgrades unlocked to visually emphasize how hardcore they are, he added.

Enemy Territory
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The structure of a typical XCOM 2 mission will be dramatically different from what we’ve seen before.

The bigger change is that the structure of a typical XCOM 2 mission will be dramatically different from what we’ve seen before. For comparison, let’s recap the typical Enemy Unknown encounter: we arrive on the scene of an alien incursion and, upon spotting something that didn’t belong, immediately engage in firefights until one side or the other is dead. It’s a guns-blazing, all-or-nothing kind of fight. If you’ve played for a few dozen hours, you’ll probably have a good idea of what the map you’re fighting on looks like and where the enemies will be, which eventually makes it routine.

Every map will look and play differently each time you see it.

Every map will look and play differently each time you see it.

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We’ll be able to scout out the alien positions and move our troops around the battlefield before the fighting starts.

Solomon wants XCOM 2 to turn these concepts on their heads in several ways. “In XCOM 2, the idea is that you have the jump on the aliens. They’re already there, and they’re not hiding.” That means we’ll have the element of surprise: our small squads (still in the four to six range) will arrive unseen in enemy-controlled territory, at which point we’ll be able to scout out the alien positions and move our troops around the battlefield for as long as we’re able to stay out of hostile units’ detection radius and behind cover. Thanks to a new concealment system and waypoints that’ll allow you to precisely guide your troops’ movement within their two-move radius, setting up the battle will be a big part of what Firaxis intends XCOM 2 to be about. “You have a lot of control over when the engagement starts,” Solomon explained. “Of course, a lot of times you’ll blunder or do something wrong, like come around the corner and get revealed. We give the player the ability to jump the enemy first, and that feels very resistance-y, very guerilla tactics.”

As we see in the trailer, XCOM sometimes gets to take the first shot – and that’s a huge deal. Except in certain situations (Stealth Suits and Battle Scanners), the aliens have up until now always seen us the moment we see them – and when they do, they “scamper” to cover and deny us the chance at a clean shot. In fact, the scamper is probably the most common complaint I’ve seen from other XCOM players, some of whom see it as an unfair advantage for the aliens. Those people will be very happy to hear that they’ll have the opportunity to cancel out that advantage in XCOM 2. “The first enemy that you get to jump on, obviously they don’t get to scamper anywhere,” said Solomon. That’s not all: “Enemies will get surprised, so that prevents them – some of them, based on some factors – from fully scampering into cover.” Between that and hinting at further, yet-to-be-disclosed ways to counteract the scamper, Solomon makes it sound like if we play our cards right, setting up an ambush correctly could turn what would’ve been a losing fight into shooting fish in a barrel. Don’t expect to be backstabbing aliens or picking them off one at a time like Batman – stealth is useful for getting into position to ambush the enemy, but does not replace combat.

Nice propaganda center. It would be a shame if someone fired a grenade launcher at it.

Nice propaganda center. It would be a shame if someone fired a grenade launcher at it.

If the maps were the same set of 80 or so pre-built setups we saw in Enemy Unknown, that might give us too much of an advantage over the aliens – but that’s where XCOM 2 throws in another much-requested feature: procedurally generated maps. Solomon summed up the need for a system like this in a way that’s music to any gamer’s ears: “Obviously, replayability is a big thing at Firaxis, and it is a big thing for XCOM. We always talk about value for the player’s dollar, right? And the core of that is replayability, to make your game as replayable as possible.”

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Because maps are procedurally generated, the AI has been made more procedural to allow aliens to navigate and fight on them.

With Firaxis’ new system, we’ll see maps drastically change each time we encounter them, drawing from a large pool of components like buildings, roads, and different types of terrain to create battlefields that look good, are more destructible than ever (including by fire that spreads, acid that melts through floors, and exploding barrels), and offer well-placed cover. And, because the maps are procedurally generated, the AI has been made more procedural to allow aliens to navigate and fight on them. All of this together has the potential to extend XCOM 2’s replayability dramatically, and to make each of our experiences unique. “That’s the thing that I’m personally very excited about,” Solomon said. “When you have those moments, and you’re like, ‘This would have never, ever happened in Enemy Unknown.’ That’s what we’re going for.”

More on that later this week in XCOM 2’s Procedurally Generated Maps.

What We're Fighting For
Just as importantly, we’ll have a greater range of options for success on each mission. According to Solomon, every mission will have a dynamically generated objective – in addition to simply killing all the alien forces, of course – that will prompt us to hack a terminal, extract a VIP, or other types of not-yet-disclosed goals. If you can get in, accomplish your secondary goal, and call for extraction (which you can now do almost anywhere on the map), you can still count that mission in the win column without necessarily being able to take out the meanest hostile on the map – as long as you didn’t lose too many soldiers and pieces of equipment in the process.

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XCOM soldiers have in some cases literally duct-taped upgrades to their weapons.

Inventory is set to be much more important this time around, too. “Loot is a thing now,” said Solomon. “One thing for the soldiers is that they have to make do with the things they’re recovering from the battlefield.” This doesn’t extend to the kind of on-battlefield inventory management X-COM: UFO Defense fans remember, but rather a sort of “backpack” into which you can throw loot items recovered from fallen enemies or allies. Once you return them to base, you’ll be able to equip them for the next mission. What that loot is hasn’t been detailed yet, but we can see in the trailer that XCOM soldiers have in some cases literally duct-taped upgrades to their weapons.

Loot will serve an important function on the battlefield, too: in the same way that Enemy Within added the Meld resource to incentivize us to charge our soldiers into danger (instead of slowly advancing your troops at an ultra-conservative pace) by putting an expiration timer on valuable collectables, XCOM 2’s loot will have a countdown. If you don’t reach loot items within a few turns, they’ll explode into less-valuable weapon fragments, which is what happens to gear in Enemy Unknown if you don’t take the aliens alive. So there’ll be increased risk attached to the best rewards, because the Advent soldier or alien who just dropped something shiny might have still-living friends in the area.

If one of your troops is rendered unconscious, wounded, or killed in action, one of their teammates can sling the body over a shoulder and carry them out. When resources are scarce, it’ll be crucial to save their equipment even if you can’t save their lives.

Aliens on Steroids
Which brings us to the aliens you’ll face in XCOM 2 – and all of them are terrifyingly powerful. “When you encounter aliens out in the field, your soldiers are not going to go toe-to-toe with them. Certainly not in the beginning of the game,” promised Solomon. “In these past 20 years, they’ve grown very strong. The important thing about the aliens is that soldiers are no longer a one-to-one match; there is no way to take on aliens without teamwork.”

Here's what the Thin Men look like under their human suits.

Here's what the Thin Men look like under their human suits.

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Sectoids have not yet evolved the ability to wear pants.

Case in point: the Sectoids have taken this opportunity to incorporate human DNA into their own, rapidly changing their species from four-foot-tall imps into imposing seven-foot-tall monsters with beady eyes and a brand-new set of unsettling pearly whites. Worse, they’ve enhanced their psionic abilities to include mind control from the get-go, making them extremely dangerous for any one soldier to take on by themselves. Despite their more human-like legs, Sectoids have apparently not yet evolved the ability to wear pants, but still have greyish-pink skin and an otherworldly glow emanating from their internal organs. Though we saw an XCOM Ranger slice through a Sectoid with a melee attack in the trailer, Solomon assured me that a move like that would only be possible in-game if the Sectoid had already been softened up.

In addition, the XCOM 2 trailer showed us the snake-like female Vipers (a clear reference to the Snake Men of X-COM: UFO Defense), who have the capability to not just immobilize and slowly crush a soldier with a constriction ability similar to Enemy Within’s Seekers, but can also yank them right out of cover with a frog-like tongue. Beyond that, background images hint at the return of the psionically powerful four-armed Ethereals, and we’re told many other XCOM enemies will be back along with a complement of all-new alien invaders.

Someone's been hitting the space-gym pretty hard.

Someone's been hitting the space-gym pretty hard.

Obviously, this kind of creature would render the early game a miserable, punishing experience wherein the typical XCOM rookie would be ground to a pulp if there was more than one or two in play at once. Hence, we have a new form of fodder against whom our lowly recruits can prove themselves and level up: the Advent. So far we’ve seen two ranks of these (probably) human collaborators, whom Solomon clarified have no direct relation to the Exalt forces from Enemy Within. These rank-and-file troopers wear black armor, wield magnetic weaponry, and maintain order in the alien-controlled cities. We’ll have more on the aliens and the Advent later this month in our XCOM 2 Enemy Profiles.

In a game as massive and deep as XCOM, all of this information only scratches the surface of how it’ll play, but it’s a start. Over the next month you can expect to see lots more in-depth features on what’s in store for our troops pop up on IGN, so we’ll see you again soon.

Oh, and did I mention that Firaxis is going all-in on mods for XCOM 2? We’ll have much more on that next week in XCOM 2 and The Potential For Mods. IGN Logo