XCOM 2 was one of E3’s big party pieces for PC players. It’s exclusive to us, after all. Whilst the reveal showed little gameplay, E3 finally showed off one of the new procedural levels being played, and you can see the whole mission in this new gameplay video.
Not only that, but a Q&A with senior producer Garth DeAngelis reveals that XCOM 2 will ship with modding tools that will allow players to do anything from small stat changes to complete total conversion mods.
XCOM 2 is set 20 years after the first game, with the story continuing as if the XCOM project had been a failure. We didn’t steal and backwards engineer all that fancy alien tech. We’re living under an alien regime, and XCOM is now a small freedom fighter cell trying to strike back.
This is reflected in the new gameplay design, where your XCOM unit is seen as a strike force that leaps from the shadows as opposed to an invading army attacking landed UFOs. Ambush, stealth, and risky runs combine to make XCOM 2s gameplay look a lot more aggressive. The Ranger class carries a sword and can melee attack, but this leaves them out of cover, and its elements like this that seem to stress XCOM 2 is more about taking risks in the hope of greater rewards. I think we’ll be seeing a game where creeping forward in half-moves with overwatch constantly on won’t provided the almost fool-proof results that it did in XCOM.
The Q&A reveals little tidbits on the wider game, such as XCOM now using a mobile base rather than an underground lair, and that you’ll be able to move the base around the globe. The support class now has a ‘Gremlin’, a drone that can be used to hack into robot enemies and take control of turrets. But most exciting is talk of modding tools, which will be available to players to easily create their own XCOM 2 mods. The tool will be flexible enough to allow small changes like adjusting stats to rebalance the game, to creating custom scenarios and adding new story through text files, and all the way up to complete art and asset replacement for total conversions.
XCOM 2 releases on PC this November.