Firaxis' Jake Solomon says even he gets frustrated when he misses a shot in XCOM

rockpapershotgun.com:

Anyone who's played one of Firaxis' XCOM games in the last ten years will have a story about missed shots. Shots that, even with a 90% chance of hitting their target, still end up going wide and punching a hole in your carefully laid plans. In the moment, they induce feelings of white hot injustice, but for many, they're an integral part of what makes XCOM, well, XCOM. Looking back on his time making XCOM 2, however, Firaxis' creative director Jake Solomon tells me that he, too, now feels the pain players have felt for close to a decade.

"It was really interesting for me to return back and play XCOM a couple of years ago, and man, when I missed shots, I was unbelievably frustrated. I felt the ghosts of everybody everywhere looking over my shoulder," he says.

I was speaking to Solomon as part of my Marvel's Midnight Suns preview, Firaxis' next turn-based tactics game that's releasing on October 7th. Solomon is heading up that project as well, but the key difference between XCOM and Marvel's Midnight Suns is that the latter won't have any kind of hit percentages. Instead, all attacks are guaranteed, and after playing the game for four hours during my preview session, I'm happy to report that this style of combat not only gives you greater command of the battlefield, but it also lets you pull off some properly rad combo attacks with your trio of superheroes.

This isn't a reaction to XCOM, mind. You're playing as a group of superheroes after all, and superheroes don't miss. But having now made both XCOM and what Solomon refers to as an "opposite XCOM" with Marvel's Midnight Suns, he offered some surprisingly candid insights into the merits and flaws of both types of game when I asked him which one was more fun to make.

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