Changing creative directors might’ve been a good thing for 2K Marin’s renamed XCOM shooter, The Bureau: XCOM Declassified. Morgan Gray, replacing Jordan Thomas, is bent on making the game challenging and true to the spirit of the original where you have to fight as a unit.
“XCOM’s not a game about putting on your diaper and giving you a bottle of milk. It asks you to be a hero if you want to have any chance of succeeding.
“The emphasis on tactics cannot be stressed enough. We’re trying to get a very hardcore, really small-unit tactics game. This could easily have been a game about modern day special forces, but in our version imagine modern day special forces back in 1962, using technology provided by NASA that never could have existed — but should have, because it’s cool — fighting an alien threat.
“Anybody who attempts to run and gun or Rambo this will die. It’s about a team working together,” says Gray
Gray says that the team “felt confident that the modern gamer was gravitating towards things like Demons Souls, like Firaxis’ XCOM, and that we can make games with a difficulty and a skill level more in line with what us old-school gamers were used to growing up and cutting our teeth on.”
“What is generally happening in the more modern era is that things are almost obscenely accessible. So it was nice to see this movement towards more skilful play — and I just want to call it difficulty because it’s not about hard games, it’s about challenging games — and seeing that wave come back, seeing people really wanting to have some games with some crunch to them, some meat, is one of the things that let us go ‘yeah, we can bring this aspect of XCOM into The Bureau’.”
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is currently set to release on August 20th for PC, Xbox 360 and PS3.
