We give the player the ability to jump the enemy first, and that feels very resistance-y, very guerilla tactics.” “Of course, a lot of times you’ll blunder or do something wrong, like come around the corner and get revealed. “You have a lot of control over when the engagement starts,” Solomon explained. Thanks to a new concealment system and waypoints that’ll allow you to precisely guide your troops’ movement within their two-move radius, setting up the battle will be a big part of what Firaxis intends XCOM 2 to be about. They’re already there, and they’re not hiding.” That means we’ll have the element of surprise: our small squads (still in the four to six range) will arrive unseen in enemy-controlled territory, at which point we’ll be able to scout out the alien positions and move our troops around the battlefield for as long as we’re able to stay out of hostile units’ detection radius and behind cover. “In XCOM 2, the idea is that you have the jump on the aliens. Solomon wants XCOM 2 to turn these concepts on their heads in several ways. If you’ve played for a few dozen hours, you’ll probably have a good idea of what the map you’re fighting on looks like and where the enemies will be, which eventually makes it routine. It’s a guns-blazing, all-or-nothing kind of fight.
For comparison, let’s recap the typical Enemy Unknown encounter: we arrive on the scene of an alien incursion and, upon spotting something that didn’t belong, immediately engage in firefights until one side or the other is dead. The bigger change is that the structure of a typical XCOM 2 mission will be dramatically different from what we’ve seen before. So, don’t do that on rookies because you’ll have wasted a lot of time.” Veteran soldiers will have unique cosmetic upgrades unlocked to visually emphasize how hardcore they are, he added “We try to make it easier for the player to customize, but you can spend a lot more time customizing your soldiers, which you should not do unless you have relative certainly you’re either going to re-load when they die or that are going to survive. “When that stuff came online I got caught in the trap of customizing rookies, which was a huge mistake,” Solomon confessed. What’s more, we’ll be able to tweak the look of the right and left arms, torso, pants, and headgear individually, drawing from a larger selection of pieces designed to give this version of XCOM a more ragtag, scavenged look and feel. We can now swap genders and set nationalities to our liking – if you want an all-female, all-Portuguese team, you can do that. “They can have big beards, they can have really awesome haircuts, they can have some cool stuff that gives them a lot of character and fits this idea of they’re this sort of hardened group, they’re not fresh-out-of-the-barracks Johnny Soldier this is really more of a Sons of Anarchy-type of squad.” “We have some really cool-looking soldiers,” he promised.
Out of every success in Enemy Unknown, Solomon considers the soldier customization and the personal attachment that comes from that to be among the biggest, and has set out to push it further in XCOM 2. Despite that, we’re promised much more control over our characters’ looks this time. XCOM 2 Art Director Greg Foertsch says the character models and textures shown in the cinematic trailer are the same ones we’ll see in-game (though here they have some post-processing effects on them), setting an extremely high bar for visual quality.