Dolazi nam novi XCOM!



Last week, 2K teased us with a cryptic website: AdventFuture.org. On it, a supposedly utopian near-future government called the Advent Administration offered a better life for citizens through genetic enhancement, while hackers subversively replaced text and images revealing that Advent isn’t as benevolent as it seems.

Today, IGN First officially announces that the game 2K hinted at is in fact Firaxis Games’ XCOM 2, a full sequel to 2012’s critically acclaimed XCOM: Enemy Unknown and a continuation of the now 20-year-old legendary turn-based tactical squad combat series, which will be available exclusively on PC this November. Watch the debut trailer above for a glimpse into a future where the aliens are in control of the Earth, and XCOM has gone underground to fight to overthrow their Advent government. This new guerrilla force will face more powerful enemies in unpredictable combat scenarios as they fight to turn the tables on a technologically superior enemy.

Over the next month IGN will reveal huge details about XCOM 2, uncovered during our visit to Firaxis’ Maryland studio. Tomorrow you’ll get an in-depth overview and interview with Creative Director Jake Solomon that’ll highlight the major new features, including:

• Four of the five new soldier classes
• New enemies: Evolved Sectoids, snake-lady Vipers, and Advent soldiers
• Stealth-infused tactics, including using cover for concealment and looting fallen enemies and allies
• A mobile base: a flying aircraft carrier called the Avenger
• Procedurally generated maps and the technology that powers them
• Mod support, including official mod tools and Steam Workshop integration
• One-on-one multiplayer

Following that, we’ll have a Rewind Theater examination of all the details in today’s trailer reveal with Solomon and Lead Producer Garth DeAngelis.

And, later this week we’ll go in-depth with Solomon and DeAngelis on the reasons behind the bold move to take XCOM from a multiplatform series to a PC exclusive, and how XCOM 2 will be tailored to take advantage of that single platform’s strengths – followed by Firaxis’ exciting plans to support modders and their work.

You might notice a lack of gameplay video, but fear not: in two weeks, we’ll debut the first in-game footage of XCOM 2 on our IGN E3 Live Show.

All of that and much, much more XCOM 2 is coming your way. As a huge XCOM fan, I couldn’t be more excited to tell you all about it.

Izvor: IGN

Izlazi u novembru ove godine.

XCOM 2 devs explain why it's exclusive to PC and won't support gamepads at launch



The announcement of XCOM 2 this week as a PC exclusive surprised people, but the PC focus is allowing developer Firaxis Games to optimize the game for computers, the studio said in an interview with IGN.

Jake Solomon, creative director on XCOM 2 and lead designer on its predecessor, 2012's XCOM: Enemy Unknown, told IGN that Firaxis had many "very, very ambitious goals" for the game. In particular, the developers wanted to implement physically based rendering, better environmental destruction, and "high-fidelity characters and environments," according to IGN. At the top of the list was procedurally generated maps, a feature Solomon wanted to get into Enemy Unknown but couldn't. In addition, XCOM 2 will support mods, which wouldn't be possible on consoles.

"To do that, we had to use all of our studio expertise ... and our expertise here is PC," said Solomon. "That's our home, and that's where we're really comfortable."

Lead producer Garth DeAngelis told IGN that the XCOM 2 development team is a "relatively small team for the size of the game that we are" making. And with just one platform to focus on, Firaxis can design XCOM 2 for computers through and through, said Solomon.

XCOM 2 will be fully optimized for mouse-and-keyboard controls, and Firaxis is also providing tactical information with text — after all, players will be sitting close to a screen, so they'll be able to read it. In fact, IGN reports that Firaxis is currently planning to launch XCOM 2 without gamepad support, although the studio aims to add it in eventually.

Solomon didn't rule out the chances of XCOM 2 being ported to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One someday, but told IGN that "that's something we're not even discussing yet." For more on the game, which will be released this November on Linux, Mac and Windows, check out the debut trailer above.

Correction: This article previously mentioned "physics-based rendering" as a feature Firaxis wanted to implement in XCOM 2. The feature is "physically based rendering." We've edited the article to reflect this.

Izvor: Polygon

Gameplay prikazan na E3:


Angry Joe intervju:

The best thing about XCOM 2 may be how moddable it will be.

Firaxis says that modders had to work “dark magic” to make one of XCOM: Enemy Unknown’s most popular mods function. XCOM: Enemy Unknown, wonderful as it is, was not moddable out of the box. A decent amount of mods have sprung out of the community, but for the most part they fall into these categories: tweaks to existing math, visual or soldier customization mods, or UI tweaks.

The Long War is a massive, fully-fleshed-out exception to XCOM’s mostly bite-sized family of mods, and Firaxis senior producer told me at E3 that modders’ efforts to crowbar open as much of the XCOM code as possible encouraged Firaxis to make it a whole lot easier in XCOM 2.

“What The Long War taught us—and kudos to those guys, because they worked some dark magic to pull that off—we didn’t give good support to modding with Enemy Unknown, and we want to change that with XCOM 2. It’s a key pillar to the game, and that’s why we’re releasing our modding SDK through Steam Workshop,” says DeAngelis. “You can use the Unreal Editor and make your own content if you have the skills to do that. We’ll have gameplay source code, so you can modify files for abilities or text, or whatever you want to change with our existing units. And we really want The Long War to just be the tip of the iceberg and see what else the community can come up with.”

When I asked what types and extent of mods will be feasible through those tools, DeAngelis gave a reassuring answer. “Total conversions will absolutely be possible. With things like the Unreal Editor, if you’re a madman yourself and you can do the modeling and the changes, or if you have a small team… you know, you have to have the skillset to do that kind of stuff, but the tools will now be there. If you want more tilesets for maps, you can model that stuff, you can put new materials on our stuff. That’s why we’re super excited, because that’s the ultimate relationship to have with your community, where we make something that they love so much that they want to do more with it, so let’s give them the tools to enable that and see what magic comes from there.”

One of my small concerns is the likelihood that XCOM 2’s dystopian, near-futuristic setting won’t be much of a blank canvas for modders who want to transmute XCOM 2 into a totally different genre or setting. Most of the environments we’ve seen so far wear their 2035-ness on their sleeves—if a small team wanted to mod XCOM 2 into a WWII strategy game, for instance, it’s unclear how many existing art assets they’d be able to repurpose.

Whatever the work ahead, it’s likely that XCOM 2’s community will embrace the task. And given that the E3, hands-off demo for XCOM 2 was a brief 12 minutes, Firaxis’ commitment to making its PC-exclusive follow-up as moddable as it can is the most exciting detail to come out of seeing it here in Los Angeles.

Izvor: PC Gamer

XCOM 2 Will Add Looting, Stealth, And Better Mod Support
Lead producer talks new gameplay mechanics and how going PC-exclusive allows for better mod support.

In XCOM: Enemy Unknown, your soldiers needed to recover alien technology to advance their own scientific knowledge and construct better equipment. This was done automatically at the conclusion of each mission; you would receive a certain amount of alien technology to be researched and reverse-engineered. In XCOM 2, a new looting system means you can manually recover even more valuable technology from the corpses of enemies, and place it in your soldiers' new backpacks.

"You’ll be able to take them back to base and do some very, very cool stuff--such as customising your weapons, and customising the inherent attributes of your soldiers," says Garth DeAngelis, lead producer on XCOM 2.

Players of XCOM: Enemy Unknown have found ways to customise their soldiers’ stats in the form of gameplay mods. But that customisation was limited, and now that XCOM 2 is PC-only, the modding support this time around is going to be more fully-featured. "We're going to have Steam Workshop support, and the Unreal editor so you can do total content conversions," says DeAngelis. "And we're going to release the gameplay source, so you can do partial edits to existing abilities and stats."

One new system that isn’t based on stats is the concealment phase, which DeAngelis says allows the player to "take on the role of the invader". Because XCOM is bringing down a corrupt alien-government alliance, your soldiers need to infiltrate enemy territory. They begin the mission in a state of concealment, which means enemy units aren't immediately hostile when they enter your line of sight. Instead, a smaller detection radius surrounding enemies allows you to sneak closer and assume advantageous positions without alerting them. Some enemies will follow patrol routes, and you can remain hidden if you're behind full cover when an enemy looks in your direction and walks past.



"You want to turn the tide of battle and take out that first group as efficiently as possible, and then the alarms go off, and they know you're there," DeAngelis adds. "Reinforcements may come. And then, it's a more classic XCOM. We'll be able to push on that with some later-game abilities that we're not talking about yet. You can do some unique stealth things with them."

Once combat does start, the increased destructibility of cover means that you’ll be in more danger—but some interesting tactical opportunities could also arise. "Let's look at the foundation of XCOM," DeAngelis proposed. “You have cover. What's the most terrifying thing that can happen to you? Cover is suddenly ripped out from you. There are still toughness levels on cover, so depending on the type of ammo you have, the type of weapon tiers, cover will either stick around or go away. In the demo, the Advent were using magnetic weaponry, so that takes out baseline cover much quicker. But the other cool thing about destructibility is, if you're in a building, and you have a unit on the second floor, or the roof, if someone shoots at you, that floor could go out from under you at any time and you can fall through--which is an homage to the original XCOM: UFO Defense."



The way Firaxis is encouraging more dynamic events in combat carries over into the way XCOM 2’s missions are designed. Not only will every map’s layout be procedurally generated, but so will that map’s objectives.

"In EU, you had kill missions, and scripted VIP rescue missions," DeAngelis explains. "Now, we're sort of combining the two, within a very procedural system. Not just procedural maps, but now there are gameplay mechanics layered on top, where you don't know exactly what you're doing when you go in. It could be recovering intel, hacking a workstation, destroying a building--and they're not scripted like they were in EU. They work based on a number of parts in the procedural system. So it's super replayable."

XCOM: Enemy Unknown fans will be familiar with that replayability, having most likely lost the game at least once and failed to repel the alien invasion. DeAngelis says the team actually has data that shows most players lost the campaign at least once, which is why XCOM 2 follows on from a scenario in which XCOM essentially failed.



"We're not a movie; we're not a book; we're not beholden to what story we want to tell. What's more interesting to us is what actually happened to players--their actual experience with the game. And that led to this--XCOM lost, the aliens occupied Earth, and that's a reason to bring XCOM back 20 years in the future. They didn't finish the job. For the players that did win the game, it doesn't undermine what they did. In that universe, XCOM isn't needed--you won the game. Your personal experience after you probably lost once or twice, you won and had that sense of triumph. But, there's also a universe where XCOM lost. That's what we want to tell with this story."

And what does that mean for the Council of Nations, the mysterious body of powerful people that funded the original XCOM project? "You’ll have to wait and see," DeAngelis teases. "There might be some continuity there."

XCOM 2 launches in November exclusively for the PC.

Izvor: Gamespot

Novi trejler : " Welcome to the Avenger "

     

     ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJ-rTdoiJZU )

Malo gameplay-a od strane quill18 i AngryJoe koji su bili pozvani na preview event za igru (izmedju ostalih).


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tqHWR_J7VU


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AifqaBk0T2A


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVw-QOU06WU

Igra izlazi 6-tog Februara 2016.