RPS: Do you have any theories for what this means for the future of real time strategy or just strategy in the mainstream? Do you feel you’ve disproven speculation that mainstream turn-based strategy is dead?
Jake Solomon: I’ve thought about this a lot actually, but that doesn’t mean any of what I say has any authority whatsoever. I don’t know that XCOM means anything for strategy as a whole. I really don’t. I think that that’s like pointing to Civ, which is a multi-platinum game every time we put one out, but that doesn’t really mean anything for turn-based games really.
It’s almost like you can’t point to Starcraft, not that I’m making a comparison to Starcraft; nobody wants to do that, but you can’t point to Starcraft and say ‘oh RTSs are fine’, because they’re not, but it’s almost like there are some outliers and Civ is one of them. It’s incredibly successful every time we make one but that doesn’t mean that there’s a lot of room for other products like that.
RPS: Yeah, it’s kind of in its own bubble.
Jake Solomon: Right, and if I were to hazard a guess, these are the kinds of games I’d like to play to some extent, but XCOM is a game that one, was made by Firaxis and we have a lot of institutional knowledge of these types of games, and two, these are the kind of games we’re interested in making.
I don’t know how many designers and teams out there are like ‘oh right, let’s make a turn-based strategy game’, but for us we’re like ‘Fuck, yeah, let’s make a turn-based strategy game.’ And then on top of that, XCOM is basically the game of the entire career before my career, this is the game I’ve wanted to make. I love Jagged Alliance, and we have Sid [Meier] in-house, and I think that’s helped us, it seems like it’s a unique mix but maybe that’s just because I’m internal here, maybe it’s not that unique. I don’t know that because people play XCOM that means that they’re interested in playing other turn based games. I dunno, I hope people want to play more turn based games, that’s my personal favourite mechanic for strategy.
There’s also this effect that design-wise, I’m not like a hardcore strategy fan. I know that this sounds weird, I’m not sure how this is going to come off, but I’m not the most hardcore strategy fan there is. I certainly like Civ, and I actually worked on Civ Revolution with Sid. But I think that there’s a danger in genres sometimes, and I think you see this with strategy games as a whole actually, where the people who love strategy, a lot of times the design defaults to ‘well if you like this, we can give you more of that.’ What you need is more in-depth and what you need is more ‘we can simulate more of this’ instead of trying to pull back and say, try to make a game that I think operates on simpler principles.
It’s not because I have some deeper understanding of design or anything, I think I honestly benefit from the fact that I’m typically not the smartest guy in the room, I’m pretty much a lowest common denominator-type guy. And so for me I love Sid Meier type games. Sid’s brilliant, but his brilliance is that he tends to focus on simpler systems that then hopefully create complex behaviour.
It’s trite to point out things like flight simulators, but I think RTSs are the exact same way, they become so distilled because the people making them are so fucking hardcore that they become distilled, and distilled again/ Like I used to love Age of Kings, it’s one of my favourite games of all time, but RTSs for me became harder and harder to play…
RPS: Same here, I guess. I need to prepare myself for vast amounts of learning rather than just sitting down to play.
Jake Solomon: Flight sims went through this period when it just became this really complicated thing, and it was just a turn off because unless they’re your number one favourite thing to do, to play RTSs towards the end, it felt like RTSs had to be your favourite type of game. To play flight sims, flight sims had to be your favourite type of game, because you had to really invest a lot of time to understand all these concepts.
I think a lot of times you get strategy games that just really become harder and harder to get into because they’re complicated. You go through these tutorials and think ‘my god, for some people this may be second nature but for me it’s very difficult.’ But you see some are great like Unity of Command, which is a brilliant game. I’m excited by games like that, but I don’t know what kind of parallels you can draw between XCOM and other games. Maybe tactics games…
I hope that doesn’t come off pompous, I’m not trying to say that we did something that other people can’t do, I just don’t know what something like XCOM means for the rest of the industry. I hope it means more turn based strategy.
It's like the act of working with consoles lobotomizes all the developers involved. For fuck's sake even Creative Assembly get this shit right.
