X-COM creator Julian Gollop discusses his most important games (2019)
57 comments
·September 4, 2025simonebrunozzi
Podrod
There's also an open source reimplementation of the original Gollop designed game which has extensive modding support. There's quite a few total conversion mods for it
yyyk
I do not think you're talking even about the same games? This is about the _original_ X-Com.
YeGoblynQueenne
Yep. It's this game:
https://www.gog.com/en/game/xcom_ufo_defense
Not this one:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/200510/XCOM_Enemy_Unknown...
There's a bit of confusion because the first game was called "UFO: Enemy Unknown" in the UK and "X-COM: UFO Defense" in the US [1] but the one discussed in the article is the 1994 game:
X-COM: Enemy Unknown
Developer: Mythos Games
Publisher: MicroProse
Format: Amiga, PC
Release: 1994
_____________
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO:_Enemy_Unknown
[2] https://dcnxazdl1qzggl.archive.ph/2Ue9d/b72fb5aeb68b363eebfc...
YeGoblynQueenne
>> I am surprised Firaxis didn't work on an X-Com 3.
Firaxis didn't but Julian Golop's company, Snapshot Games (discussed in the article) published Phoenix Point which is kind of like X-Com 2.0.1:
acdha
That one unfortunately got caught up in publisher politics as they had a very successful kickstarter but then broke promises to backers because Epic offered them a lot of money for an exclusive. I think the game would’ve been more popular if it hadn’t had the distraction of many of their biggest fans feeling used.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/phoenix-point-becomes-epic-...
carefulfungi
The long war mods are X-Com 3-ish - they are extensive!
nness
I recently played through 'Aliens: Dark Descent' which manages to feel like a X-COM game, but real time. It felt like the natural next step for tactic strategy games and was instantly hoked -- I can't imagine returning to the turn-based roll-of-a-dice luck systems after that.
"random-number stuff was really too brutal for a lot of players to handle" -- I never finished XCOM 2 specifically for that reason. I think, having not come from a background of table top RPG's, it just didn't click.
carefulfungi
Turn based and random are orthogonal (of course). Coming from table top gaming first, I rarely enjoy real time games. But also find the x-com RNG too much after awhile.
reqres
Thanks for the recommendation. Seems like a natural X-COM follow on. Appears to be 60% off on Steam atm as well!
YeGoblynQueenne
I've never played the original X-COM, though I played the two Firaxis games to death. I have 132.2 hours on X-COM: Enemy Unkown (the Firaxis game) and 327.5 hours on XCOM2, both of which seem like an undercount (especially the first one).
I thought I had the original game in my GOG account but it turns out I only have a clone (Xenonauts). I haven't played it at all and I bet I wouldn't have played the original XCOM either if it was in my GOG account.
The reason? I'm sad to admit that but it's the graphics. I can sometimes play older games, e.g. arcade games from the '80s or '90s, but I really struggle with most older graphics games. That makes me sad because there are some real gems that are now older than 20-30 years and I'd really like to be able to enjoy them, but I can't.
There's a time to play, and a time to admire graphics, I guess. Oh Ecclesiastes, you were so right.
ileonichwiesz
It’s important to separate graphics and UX here - I don’t mind if the soldiers and the aliens are blobs of pixels, or even just coloured squares, but the UI of the original UFO/XCOM games is pretty much incomprehensible to a modern player.
ido
The contemporary Jagged Alliance, while it has a handful of baffling UI (that was already the case when it was new), is still imo much easier to get into than the original X-com while having nicer looking graphics.
gilleain
Probably becuase i did play it when I was younger, i still love the classic xcom graphics. they are clunky for sure, but have a pleasant style.
It is the little things, like the 'ping' of bullets hitting enemies or terrain, or seeing an alien scurry past between hedges.
mdp2021
> graphics
Have you tried interpolation, such as HQ4X, SuperEagle etc.?
If that is not enough, add textures, colour-dependent.
moomin
As an old Spectrum head I was obsessed with JG’s output back in the day. Chaos may have looked awful but it was so much fun. I still have core memories from that, Rebelstar Raiders and Laser Squad. (Beating people online is one thing, beating your friends when you’re hot-seating in the same house is something else.) Ironically never played XCom, but I have a lot of hours on Magic and Mayhem (which had the executable… Chaos.exe)
raffraffraff
This was the only game that my whole family played.
araes
Enjoy their quote midway through about how pointlessly miserly the Spectrum Holobyte people were about development. Made me bleak laugh a little.
> suddenly we really had to finish it by end of March, and they required us to work in-house in Chipping Sodbury seven days a week, 10 hours a day for several months. They didn’t give us any extra resources. In fact, we had to beg them to give us a more powerful computer to use, because my brother’s computer couldn’t handle it! My computer was having serious overheating problems. I had to remove the case and it crashed occasionally. They begrudged us one new computer for Nick and they stuck us in this tiny little room.
> They said RPGs don’t sell, which was, of course, complete rubbish. They wanted to make it much more RTS-focused, partly because of Command & Conquer, which was very popular at the time. (...) We started to make it before Diablo came out, and it was also before Baldur’s Gate, which was the real milestone in RPGs.
> my boss was opposed to doing a sequel. He said the 3DS was dead and that we had to go with the PS Vita
[1] https://www.vgchartz.com/game/47651/tom-clancys-ghost-recon-...
It was an enjoyable read at least. Lots of standard horrible practices in the game development community, and some actually surprising ones. Such as, "they didn't even hire the X-COM people to work on any of the X-COM sequels?"
smikhanov
Wow, I didn’t know Laser Squad was done by the same guy (and his brother, full indie-style, it turns out) — I remember playing that game on Spectrum in 1992 or so, and it was absolutely next level, no other game came close at that time.
stevekemp
I maintain that his best game was absolutely Chaos: The Battle of Wizards.
Although later creations were more popular it's that first one that really stands in my memory 40+ years later.
I guess it might be time to fire up an emulator and play again, as I do every couple of years:
raffraffraff
Chaos Funk was a pretty good reworking of it.
That one you posted is pretty good until you get to casting a spell, and then they little keyboard sans-cursors and the lack of apparent touch control all goes wonky.
pjmlp
I was a big fan of the predecessors like Raiders and Laser Squad.
The first X-COM felt like those, afterwards not so much.
rendx
"Obviously X-COM also faced this problem. One of the biggest complaints is when an enemy is right next to a player and they’ve got an 85 per cent chance to hit and they miss. ‘That’s absolutely ridiculous!’ People ragequit and never play again. It’s an issue they partly solved in XCOM 2, and we had another mode in Chaos Reborn. It’s a rather sobering lesson in game design and how people manage random factors."
mdp2021
People frequently do not understand the statistics underlying real world dynamics, embrace oversimplified world models, and going against that has them discouraged? That is one strong re-expression of the satanic attitude.
From cinematography, two big examples "that may have people leave the theater, then":
-- in Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, the Sheriff (Gene Hackman) re-telling the story of English Bob:
> You see, the night that Corky walked into the Blue Bottle, and before he knows what's happening, Bob here takes a shot at him! And he misses, 'cause he's so damn drunk. Now that bullet whizzing by panicked old Corky, and he did the wrong thing. He went for his gun in such a hurry that he shot his own damn toe off. Meantime Bob here, he's aiming real good, and he squeezes off another, but he misses, because he's still so damn drunk, and he hits this thousand-dollar mirror up over the bar. And now, the Duck of Death is as good as dead. Because Corky does it right. He aims real careful, no hurry... [...] BAM! That Walker Colt blew up in his hand, which was a failing common to that model. You see, if Corky had had two guns instead of just a big dick, he would have been there right to the end to defend himself. [...] Well, old Bob wasn't gonna wait for Corky to grow a new hand. No, he just walked over there real slow - 'cause he was drunk - and shot him right through the liver
-- the scene in Vince Gilligan's El Camino, in which a bunch of gunners is so hijacked by the unpreparedness to the havoc that most bullets end on the scenery.
Not documentaries, but statistically relevant like the ten "black" in sequence at the roulette, frequent as the wheel is having well over a thousand spins.
izacus
People don't need to understand statistics for games, people understand what's fun. And that mechanic wasn't fun no matter how much you "well akshually" it.
There's a reason why pretty much ever single new tactics game got rid of the probability based hit chance. It's a dead end in game design.
2muchcoffeeman
Doesn’t the new xcom still have percentage to hit based on distance to the target?
Having an RNG hit chance is fine as long as the probability “feels right”. “Point blank” should have a 100% chance.
mdp2021
I was referring to the interpretation of «ridiculous» as "it is preposterous", not at that which means "it is frustrating".
And personally, in front of "UFO: Enemy Unknown" I lived the pleasure of the masterpiece, not the balanced game - some of us have little taste for the win-and-lose. We learnt assembly when we were kids to make those sides of the gameplay adapt to our will - and went on hacking since.
Of UFO/XCOM, one particularly stubborn subsystem to change was having the "radars" not missing any new alien ship.
YeGoblynQueenne
We're talking about X-COM: Enemy Unkown, the Firaxis game, right? I had so much fun with this game that I don't even remember that RNG issue as being an issue. Most likely, if I failed a "certain to land" shot and the squad was in a really, really tough spot, I'd just shrug and re-load a save [1]. I mean, it's not Nethack, is it? [2]
In any case, I really don't get it. So you point your gun at an alien and you see a chance to hit at "85%". What do you do? Do you think to yourself "oh, cool, that's a certain hit"? It's not: there's a 15% chance to miss.
I think ragequtting over that is just the standard phenomenon, in both strategy games and real life, that people never make contingency plans, they just make one plan and assume there's no chance of failure because they're so smart to plan ahead and the competition is clearly too dumb to have any plans of their own. In my book, any plan where one imagines themselves emerging triumphant after beating all the odds like the dice are loaded in their favour by the gods is not so much a "plan" as a wish-fulfillment fantasy.
And I, for one, don't find those fun. YMMV, but let's not assume that everyone enjoys the same things, in games or in life.
P.S.:
>> There's a reason why pretty much ever single new tactics game got rid of the probability based hit chance. It's a dead end in game design.
You mean, they still have hit chances but they don't tell you what they are so they can tweak them behind your back, so you win enough to buy their next game? Oldest trick in the book [3].
____________
[1] I hate losing men.
[2] There's an "Iron Man" mode but that turns out to only play the Black Sabbath song in a loop.
[3] https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
They wanted Mel to modify the program
so, at the setting of a sense switch on the console,
they could change the odds and let the customer win.nickdothutton
Rebelstar player here, was a great little game.
lofaszvanitt
Original XCOM and XCOM2 was ok, PP was rubbish.
YeGoblynQueenne
"Original XCOM" from 1994, or are you thinking of a later "original" game?
scotty79
Why was it rubbish?
jsiepkes
I wouldn't say it was rubbish, but I will say I was disappointed with it (as a life long XCOM fan). Primarily because the microgame (tactical squad based combat) was good but the macro game (the strategical game in the world overview) was weak. Base building was basically non-existent compared to the original XCOM games. Instead you stumbled across existing bases and "build" on of 3 facilities in them. The research tree was weak. A DLC introduced the "shooting down UFO's"-mechanic but overall all of the DLC was just focused on more different enemies and story lines and did very little to improve the worldview game.
eterm
IMO, it made the one of the biggest mistakes that games can make: It just wasn't fun.
Browsing the reviews now, it's full of people saying how hard they tried to like the game. Good games make themselves effortless to enjoy. Even quite flawed games cause people to look past any awkwardness or glitchiness if they're fun at their core.
It's hard to express what makes unfun games not fun. But it was grindy in the wrong places, and just felt awkward to play. The balancing and pacing was terrible, and it just lacked charm.
It felt like it took itself really seriously, and it projected an air of superiority by deliberately not choosing to do some things that made the 2012/2016 XCOM games fun out of a sense that they were too "dumbed down".
If you go into developing a game being "Not X", then you better bring along a game-changing mechanic, graphics, or something else that separates and elevates you above that game. And PP didn't have that.
JimDabell
I’m a big fan of XCOM, but I bought Phoenix Point and it just kept crashing mid-mission. Sucked all the fun out of it and I gave up.
Podrod
[dead]
brayann
[flagged]
X-Com was amazing, and Xcom2 also pretty good. I just checked, and there is an amazing mod and very active community around LwotC (Long war of the Chosen), with tons of fixed bugs and improvements, a decade or so after the game was released. [0]
I am surprised Firaxis didn't work on an X-Com 3. I would guess the fan base is still huge.
I'm getting old and I don't play videogames anymore, but if I have a month of free time imprisoned in a cell with nothing else to do, I'd give xcom2 with LwotC a go. (and Master of Magic, and Master of Orion 2, etc).
[0]: https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/Long_War_of_the_Chosen