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Firaxis has “doubled down” on XCOM 2’s character customisation

XCOM 2 customisation

XCOM: Enemy Unknown and Enemy Within let you change your soldiers’ appearance, voice and customise their armour, making it pretty easy to create a squad of individuals. Their gender and nationalities were fixed, however, and there was only a small list of voice packs and, for English speakers, only an American accent. That’s why your British sniper sounded like he was from across the Atlantic. 

For XCOM 2, however, Firaxis is promising a lot more fiddling, including more accents, gender changes and the ability to change your soldiers’ names, not just their nicknames. 

“We’ve actually pushed character customisation further,” senior producer Garth DeAngelis told PC Gamer. “You have to be able to name your characters, that’s personally one of my favourite parts. You’ve got to create your own stories, and character customisation has been pushed. We’ve doubled down on character customisation. There’s so much more you can do with it, there’s so many more knobs you can turn now that feed into the resistance theme.”

DeAngelis confirmed an English accent for those resistance members fighting on the behalf of Queenie, but there won’t be unique voices for every nationality. I’m holding out hope for a Scottish accent, of course, because let’s face it, only the Russians sound tougher. Really, that’s my dream for my version of the resistance: just a bunch of hulking Russian and Scottish men and women, constantly shouting and aliens and collaborators.

What sort of customisation options are you hoping to see in the sequel?