I enjoyed getting my hands on XCOM: Enemy Unknown last month. I even liked the multiplayer. One omission, though, kept leaping out to me: there I sat, playing a remake of one of the most widely beloved PC games I could think of, and I had only seen the Xbox 360 version.
https://lastchance.cc/playing-xcom-enemy-unknown-was-worth-the-speeding-tick-5933224%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E
The major difference in look between the PC and console versions is that the PC version has a grid overlay on the world. Lead designer Jake Solomon explained, āIt was surprising to us how much the interfaces ended up diverging. It feels different, one of the funny things is thatā¦ on the PC, we actually ended up going back and adding a grid on top of the world because in the PC version it was just so irritating not to have the grid in a tactics game.ā Solomon also reiterated how carefully Firaxis had worked on both the PC and console versions of XCOM natively from the start, rather than creating a port from one to the other at the end. Players will also be able to plug in a controller and switch easily between interface types should they wish.
PC versions of XCOM will indeed connect through Steam and support Steam Achievements, Steam Cloud support, and other Steamworks features. At the moment, players canāt mod XCOM but Solomon mentioned that the team would like to be able to make that happen in the future if possible, through they have not yet explored the options.
While discussing Steam achievements, Solomon also gleefully described himself as patient zero for the āBubonicā achievement that will be transmitted through multiplayer play, tracing the complex world of who has played with whom through a model of contagion. For XCOM, being a plague on players will apparently be a good thing.
