Other games have attempted to use the campaign coupled to squad level combat idea, such as the UFO trilogy, but in opting for a post-apocalyptic setting the point of actually defending the Earth in that series was rendered somewhat moot. Games that have remained true to the X-COM genre have been rare until recently. Make no mistake, UFO: Enemy Unknown was a masterpiece. Many franchises have done better yet few are so well-regarded by their fans. X-COM is a franchise loved by many gamers, yet possesses arguably the worst ratio of classics to turkeys. It is perhaps appropriate that the nautical-themed Terror From The Deep, only the second game, is where the series jumped the shark. You will start to receive emails from The New Statesman. SUBSCRIBED THANK YOU Thank you for subscribing. That’s what an X-COM game should be and what the best ones always have been. The games feature two main aspects: a campaign element where you build bases, research technology, manufacture equipment and marshal your forces, and a second element which is turn-based combat between squads of your troops and the aliens on the ground. The name of the agency, X-COM, is short for Extra-terrestrial Combat Unit, essentially a global group for stopping little green men from taking over the world. In the X-COM games you are the head of an agency appointed to protect the Earth from alien invaders. X-COM games are a genre unto themselves, one that is clearly defined by the original title of the franchise – UFO: Enemy Unknown, created by British developer Julian Gollop, released in 1994. Both games have appeared at roughly the same time after substantial development periods: Xenonauts has been in production since 2009, and work on the new XCOM: Enemy Unknown (now hyphen-free) began in 2008.
XCOM: Enemy Unknown, produced by Firaxis, which shares the name and the legal ownership of the IP with the original series, and Xenonauts, an indie title produced by Goldhawk Interactive which is dubbed a re-imagining. However, one instance where we can examine this subject outside of hypotheticals has come to light with the emergence of two X-COM games. We can only conjecture on what might have happened had Bethesda used the Morrowind systems in Skyrim or if Bioware opted to perfect the cumbersome inventory systems of the original Mass Effect rather than ripping them out.
There is no complicated version of Skyrim for comparison, ditto for the Mass Effect series. Players lament the over-simplification of titles like Mass Effect 3, or Skyrim, but the debate is usually hypothetical because we only know about games that exist. For years there has been debate amongst video game fans about dumbing down, about streamlining games, cutting out features, making them easier to play and less challenging.