How X-Com's creator is reinventing his masterpiece in Phoenix Point
Julian Gollop discusses his new game, and how X-Com became its own sub-genre.
X-Com creator Julian Gollop and his studio Snapshot Games have raised over $750,000 on crowdfunding platform Fig to make Phoenix Point, a game that looks like a perfect match for anyone who's enjoyed Firaxis's recent XCOM efforts. Set on a mostly destroyed Earth in 2057, you lead part of an organisation called the Phoenix Project, and are tasked with saving the last pockets of humanity from aliens and an encroaching mist that mutates every living thing it touches.
In doing so, you'll ally with one of three different conflicting human factions (or maybe more). Plus, with a strategic layer that borrows more from 4X games, it's a very different proposition to Firaxis's recent titles—but no less exciting.
In this interview, I asked Julian to talk me through how they approached the game's tactical and strategic layers, enemy types and X-Com's growth into a sub-genre of its own.
We've seen early footage of what a battle looks like in Phoenix Point. Can you give us an overview of what you're trying to achieve with the game?
What I want to do with Phoenix Point is create a very rich and systemic game world that has a lot of dynamic interactions on a strategic level, not just on the tactical level. So one of the things I'm doing with Phoenix Point is taking something I did before, actually, with X-Com Apocalypse, where you had a city with different factions with different resources, and they had relationships with each other, and you could raid them, help them, or so on. So in the world of Phoenix Point, in its post-apocalyptic setting, humanity is basically fractured but there are three strong factions, and they're trying to expand and take control of things.
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