In the monthly 'now playing' section of PC Gamer magazine we spend a few pages discussing the games we've been playing recently—good or bad. Sometimes they are old-ish games we've been meaning to reinstall for ages, like XCOM. Sometimes they're strange meditative woodworking sims because, sometimes in life, you've just gotta build a nice birdhouse. This is also the last thing former UK editor-in-chief Samuel Roberts wrote before departing to some strange otherworldly plane called 'Brighton'.

Let us know what you're playing at the moment in the comments.

The social politics of naming your XCOM: Enemy Unknown squad—Samuel Roberts

This is my last Now Playing for PC Gamer. In fact, it’s the last thing I’m writing for PCG full-stop, at least for now. You never know, I might write a Now Playing for issue 400, before complaining about the cover price on Instagram (this is an inside joke). 

An office PA annoyingly threw all my old PC Gamer issues out, so I’ve been perusing the few I’ve got at home. I’m reading them while I’m supposed to be packing to move to Brighton. We did slightly too many lists when I was editor, but damn, each issue was packed with features. I think I gave editing this magazine a solid shot, for a 25 year-old with no qualifications who didn’t know what he was doing. I give my editorship 81 per cent. It was no Dragon Age 2. 

Anyway, here’s a filthy secret—I’ve been denying myself a proper XCOM 2 campaign since the game released, because I’ve never finished an Enemy Unknown campaign with the Enemy Within stuff installed. That is, with the mechs, deadly new aliens, that sort of thing. I thought I should do that before throwing myself at XCOM 2, with its nine million things to micromanage. I’m enjoying it, but because I’ve loaded an old save file, it’s presenting a few dilemmas. 

Naturally, when I play XCOM, I rename all my soldiers to people I know. But there are a few problems with this. For example, my ex-girlfriend is my best sniper. I could just rename her, but I feel it breaks the theatre of the game to do that. So what do I do? Get her killed on purpose? She’s a good sniper, so it’s a tough call. And Enemy Within is actually a touch harder than Enemy Unknown was. Now, her and my current girlfriend, a new recruit, are on the same squad. It seems wrong. 

The other problem is I don’t really know some of the other people who are in my 2014-era XCOM squad any more. And yet, I’m sending a bunch of them into battle. When should or shouldn’t you name a game character after someone from your real life? To me, there’s a kind of invisible line you cross in your head when it’s someone you barely know, which is why I only pick people I regularly interact with. 

And, annoyingly, I’m running out of those. My good friend Dave was just killed in service by one of the deadly guardian aliens. Now I need to cycle in someone new from the barracks. I ask, do I know anyone else? I mean, if we’re getting down to acquaintances or people I sometimes chat to in corridors, it feels like I’m missing the point. Soon I’ll have to add people who want me to join their network on LinkedIn. 

XCOM underlines the fact that I only know about 20 real people, and that’s it, which is actually probably true for most people over 30 when they really think about it. Anyway, that’s my last, frivolous Now Playing, making an arbitrary point about something I could avoid entirely by renaming everyone and starting again. It’s been a pleasure writing and editing for you.

Finding beauty in One Finger Death Punch 2—Phil Savage

Lots of people will tell you that how a game plays is all that matters, and that’s an admirable attitude that I’d love to say I agree with. In practice, though, I’m a snob. You may have crafted the stickiest, most entertaining core loop of all time, but if it’s attached to an ugly game, I’m probably not going to play it. 

There is one exception, and it’s One Finger Death Punch. It’s a brilliant two-button action game in which you, a kung-fu stickman, beat down hundreds of attackers. If they attack from the right, you press the right-mouse button. If they attack from the left, you press the left- mouse button. Sometimes attackers will swap sides, or require more than one button press to take down, but that’s really about it. It’s compulsive—an elegant dance of precision button clicks that feels great to successfully pull off. 

My one wish for the sequel was that it wouldn’t look like absolute ass. Unfortunately, One Finger Death Punch 2 is just as repulsive as its predecessor. Maybe even more so. I buy it anyway. 

It’s not that the art is ugly—although it is—as much as there’s no coherent aesthetic. It’s a grab-bag of styles, reminiscent of ’70s kung-fu movies, early-’00s Newgrounds games and pretty much any era of DeviantArt. The UI icons are uninformative. The fonts are atrocious. The faux- Chinese accent of the narrator is questionable at best. It’s an unpleasant space to explore. 

And yet, it’s loads of fun. Ostensibly each level is the same—you fending off 100+ enemies without dying. Yet through the mix of different enemy types—bosses, brawlers, enemies that attack from range—each level feels like it has a specific combat flavour that makes it just different enough from the rest.  

I think the frantic pace helps distract from how unpleasant I find its art. I’m not really looking at the level, just the incoming attack prompts shown at the bottom of the screen. Button mashing is certain death in One Finger Death Punch 2, and so—much like in a good rhythm action game—you tend to focus down on just the essential information. And in this limited view, the animations of the fighters even look quite graceful. 

Then I win, and the ugly score screen comes into full view. 

The spell is broken. I click on the next level regardless.

Going mad with (divine) power in Hades—Malindy Hetfield

I’ve recently started playing Hades again after having stayed away from it since launch. Supergiant Games is one of those precious few game developers whose games I will buy sight unseen, but initially I thought that not even they could make me enjoy roguelikes more than I do. Which isn’t all that much. 

Then something magical happened—I got better. I know, I know, that’s the point of this type of game. And yet I often feel like roguelikes come with a skill floor that’s just too high for me to not be frustrated, and frustration gives me no reason to continue playing. But the updates kept rolling in, and with them a variety of skills and ways to meaningfully combine them that made me feel like I could perhaps actually do this. My entire journey with Supergiant titles has been like this, anxiously saying, “I’m probably not the core audience for this,” before completing the purchase anyway and subsequently falling in love. 

Hades feels like a culmination of everything that the studio has done before. Combat in Bastion now feels like a slower version of Hades—a speed that takes a further dip in Transistor in exchange for the meaningful skill combinations that I now appreciate so much. Additionally, Hades has the physicality and immediacy of Pyre, conveyed through stunning animation. I loved running in Pyre, and it’s the same here, paired with an incredible dodge that somehow manages to make me feel powerful while I’m running away. 

More importantly, Hades is slowly eroding my idea of this mythical core audience, and reminded me that a genre actually doesn’t have to define a game’s difficulty. Revelations! I know I’m doing myself a disservice by limiting myself in my gaming tastes, but I know I wouldn’t have played this if my taste weren’t already “anything by Supergiant”. 

Some aspects tickle my lizard hind brain in a way that feels like a dirty trick. During one run, for example, I bought a water basin on a whim, only to find it showed me my number of runs and total of slain foes. I swear I’ve never cared about high scores of any kind, and yet there it was—pride, unmistakably. The same is true for when I check the number of the furthest room reached, or when Zagreus mumbles to himself about never having made it this far before, a declaration which causes me to realise the same—almost inevitably stressing me out so much I die. 

Since Hades is still in Early Access, these triumphs are oddly terrifying. What if a weapon in need of a nerf or a weakness in a boss enabled my success? What if all of this is a warm-up for some really difficult battles while I’m already dreaming of becoming the Hades esports champion 2020? Well, if I’m honest, it doesn’t matter. I haven’t squealed like this at the speed and excitement of a game in a long time.

Failing to build a birdhouse in Woodwork Simulator—Andy Kelly

The developer behind PC Building Simulator has released a playable prototype of its next project, Woodwork Simulator, which is exactly what you think it is. I’ve had my fill of novelty simulator games on PC, but this isn’t something that’s played for laughs—it actually lets you make things out of wood, and it’s way more compelling than I thought it would be. 

I was absolutely hopeless at woodwork in school. Once I tried to make a CD rack and ended up with a shapeless wedge of pine with globs of hardened glue leaking out of the cracks. Several people laughed at it, including the teacher. I was alright at sanding, though. That thing might have been a mess and too narrow to hold a CD, but boy was it smooth. 

So I went into Woodwork Simulator thinking I’d be able to make something decent, because videogames let you excel at things you’re otherwise shit at, right? But I was wrong. So, so wrong. Because this is a simulator in the truest sense, requiring a delicate hand and some actual manual dexterity.

You have a bunch of different tools to work with, and they all feel fantastic to use. You can saw, drill, plane, sand, varnish, paint, and even use a lathe. Sawing by pulling the mouse back and forth feels really tactile, and I love the attention to detail, like the little curls of wood that peel off the wood when you plane it. They’ve really nailed the finer details, which any great simulator should. 

The wood is enjoyably malleable, letting you cut out any shape you like and glue the bits together to create, well, whatever you like. There’s a free mode for people who prefer to dream their own creations up, but I thought I’d ease myself in with one of the tutorials, a birdhouse, which the game declares to be easy. When I begin I see a large piece of wood marked with a template telling me which bits to cut out.  

I find cutting out the various shapes that make up the birdhouse quite soothing. I stick a long, square piece of wood in the lathe to turn it into a smooth post, then I start gluing the pieces I cut out together. But I underestimate how gently and precisely you have to do this, and the end result is something that makes my CD rack look like a work of art. 

But it’s really fun. The simple act of cutting wood and sticking it together to make things, without worrying about getting sawdust on the floor or wood glue on my fingers, is enough of a novelty to keep me playing—even if I’m making a mockery of the art of woodcraft. And it’s remarkable to think that this is an early prototype given away for free, because there’s a lot going on in here. 

I still suck at woodworking, but at least here I won’t be mocked by my teacher and classmates.

Believe it or not, it's been six years, almost to the day, since Firaxis very successfully brought back the X-Com sci-fi strategy series with XCOM: Enemy Unknown. In fact, on October 9 it will be six years to the day, and it's possible that the developers might be doing something to celebrate the birthday. 

Solomon was the designer on XCOM and XCOM 2, while Garth DeAngelis was the producer on both projects and Greg Foertsch was the art director. In other words, it's the top trio of XCOM execs just shooting the breeze, speculating idly about "doing something special" for the fans.

Could there be more to it than casual chit chat? Six years is an odd sort of anniversary to make a big fuss over, and there's no obvious reason for it that leaps out at me. But it's interesting that games from the original X-Com series were released in 1994, '95, '97, '98, and '99, but not 1996. Coincidence? Hey man, I just work here.   

Qualcomm is a San Diego-based company specializing in telecommunications equipment. As The LA Times reports, three of Qualcomm's top executives recently left to start their own tech company, also based in San Diego, and they're calling it… XCOM. Not Excom. Not even EXCOM. Just XCOM. As in, you know, XCOM. 

They had a 95 percent chance to hit, and somehow they still missed. 

What will XCOM specialize in, you ask? "Inventing and investing in wireless technologies to propel the next mobile revolution," according to its newly minted site. Before they can get to that though, as XCOM designer Jake Solomon pointed out on Twitter, they've got another problem to figure out first:  

Whether it’s an Easter egg, a joke character, or just a little nudge at a competitor, developers love slipping the odd reference to other games into their own. Sometimes though, they go beyond just slapping a Dopefish on a wall or quipping about a ‘doomed space marine’, and we get to see our heroes stride into entirely new, often completely inappropriate new worlds.

Here are a few of our favourites, along the ones that caused the most ‘wait, what?’ blinking on discovery. 

Guybrush Threepwood, Mighty Jedi

Yes, he can hold his breath underwater for ten minutes and quip his way through any sword-fight… but only The Force Unleashed II let him try his luck with a lightsaber. Turns out that you don’t need a sharp wit if you’re waving around two of the universe’s deadliest glowsticks and aren’t afraid to use them. Guybrush Threepkiller is so famous in-universe, he even has his own statues. We’re almost positive that’ll be brought up at some point in the next movie. After all, Rey does need a new teacher. Just as long as Elaine never finds out about it. 

Final Fantasy makes history in Assasin's Creed

Obviously, everything in the Assassin’s Creed series is meticulously researched and true to life, especially the alien gods and the time Ezio punched the Pope. Write it all down in your history homework! Which means that, while aliens might not have built the pyramids, they definitely got up to a bit of chocobo racing on the side. That’s according to this crossover, where Assassins ended up in Final Fantasy XV, while its villain ended up pounding sand for a bit before being dragged back to his own game by a hastily summoned Bahamut. There’s even a stuffed Moogle lying around in case you feel lonely after they’ve gone, and some fancy weapons to keep and confuse archaeologists for a few thousand years. Along with that Stargate, obviously. 

Commander Keen hangs about in Doom II

There’s a few odd appearances in Doom 2, including the severed head of John Romero as the end-boss, and a trip back to Wolfenstein 3D in the secret levels. By far the strangest thing though is what lies behind those: former id star Commander Keen… murdered and hanging from meathooks. The story goes that Adrian Carmack was the childkiller in question, having chafed at making cutesy games instead of enjoying himself with blood and guts. However, that was not enough to get rid of the boy-genius forever, for both John Romero and Tom Hall have confirmed that Commander Keen, real name Billy Blaze, is in fact Wolfenstein hero BJ Blazkowicz’s grandson… and father to the Doomguy. What a strange family tree. 

Earthworm Jim digs into Battle Arena Toshinden

He’s the world’s mightiest worm! He fights aliens! He travels galaxies! He gets flattened by a lot of cows! And he’s one of the few 90s mascots to actually be awesome, starring in two excellent platformers, one surprisingly good cartoon series, and… well, let’s not mention the sequels. Like Bubsy, 3D was not kind to Earthworm Jim, though unlike Bubsy, people actually cared. His most successful jump into the third dimension turned out to be this Easter Egg in the PC version of Toshinden, where with the help of his super-suit and a really big club, he was finally able to make the future of gaming eat dirt. Pound them into the ground. Bury himself in glory. Be cut in half and yet… no, wait. Not that one. But it was still as good as fans were going to get.

Everyone plays Poker Night at the Inventory 

Easily the most ambitious gaming crossover in recent memory… and it’s all about hanging out between games. Telltale’s Poker Night series combined, amongst a few others (deep breath) The Heavy from Team Fortress 2, Max from Sam and Max, Strong Bad from Homestar Runner, Tycho Brahe of Penny Arcade Adventures and also some webcomic whose name we forget off-hand, GLaDOS from Portal, Brock Samson from the Venture Bros (not a game, but never mind), Claptrap from Borderlands, Sam from Sam and Max replacing Max from Sam and Max, and Ash from The Evil Dead. Phew.

They weren’t great poker games, but that wasn’t really the point. It was about the banter between the different competitors as they sat back and shot the shit without the customary heavy artillery. We could also have had members of the cast from The Walking Dead and Back to the Future, but they were deemed unsuitable for the atmosphere. They didn’t want anyone crying, or any kids seeing Doc and Marty in a sweary environment. A pity. When the game revved up, they could have seen some serious shit.

Portal 2’s Space Core invades Skyrim 

When Bethesda showed off DLC for Oblivion, it was horse armour. And everybody laughed. Come Skyrim, the laugh was far more positive. One of the earliest additions saw the exiled Space Core (spoilers for a decade old game there) crash-land in Tamriel, still just as eager to explore SPAAAAAAAACE. Going bizarrely unnoticed by the locals, all probably fretting about that whole dragon invasion thing, it came crashing down in a plume of smoke. Pick it up and it still kept blinking and talking in your inventory, delivering… well, not very varied dialogue. In summary:  “Space. Space. Space!” And yet, still it was less annoying than all those guards and their epic tales of glory curtailed by the sudden impact of a ballistic stick to the lower-leg.

XCOM defends Civ V: Brave New World

What does XCOM do when there are no aliens to fight? Apparently, they learn to ****ing shoot straight. The XCOM Squad in Civ V is an elite tactical unit that gets the job done, air-dropping into friendly territory and laying down the law. Specifically, Thou Shalt Not Screw With XCOM. In the absence of aliens, they have their eyes set on "Giant Death Robots," and are happy to act as shock troopers or defensive units while they watch the skies and await their destiny. But since there are apparently no aliens interested in Earth during the Civ games, they’re probably going to be waiting a while. Should have taken the flight to Alpha Centauri.

Princess Rosella favours Leisure Suit Larry 3

Sierra On-Line loved its in-jokes. Not one but two sequels (this one and Space Quest III) ended with the characters somehow finding their way to the developers’ own offices for a chat with studio leads Ken and Roberta Williams, with Larry also taking trips to a Westworld style factory where adventure heroes are rebuilt after every stupid death, complete with King’s Quest’s King Graham being readied for duty, and finally showing up in the Old West for a cameo in Freddy Pharkas Frontier Pharmacist. By far the strangest cameos came at the end of Leisure Suit Larry 3, where the trip to Sierraland involved trekking through scenes from games like Police Quest and Space Quest 2, before meeting Roberta Williams directing a particularly annoying scene from King’s Quest IV, in which Princess Rosella is trapped in the slobbery mouth of a giant whale. Strange.

Frank West covers Lost Planet: Extreme Condition

He’s covered wars, you know. But oddly, Dead Rising’s original and best hero doesn’t seem to know how to cover himself in this odd outing. Despite Lost Planet being set on a frozen world, everyone’s favourite photographer show up not only without his camera, but also without his trousers. Somehow avoiding hypothermia, he runs around in nothing but underpants, while still managing to rain destruction on the armies of insects happy to not have to peel their food for once. What a trooper. 

Scorpion goes mental in Psi-Ops

Fighting game characters are probably the most cameo-friendly of all, whether it’s a full game like Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe, or bonus combatants-without-a-k-because-that’s-how-it’s-spelled in the likes of Injustice. But they show up in other games with curious regularity too. Lightning god Raiden for instance showed up in Unreal Championship, while invisible fighter Reptile could have popped into basically any game. Ever seen a flicker on your screen playing, say, Fortnite? As far as you know, it might be him.

But still, this was an odd one. Even though Midway was the publisher of both MK and Psi-Ops, it’s a bit of a leap from fighting game to third-person action game. Sadly, just wearing his palette-swapped ninja outfit didn’t actually make you the world’s clingiest fighter. He still had to swap out his “get over here!” attack for regular guns. On the plus side, having to beat every character in the game two out of three times would have gotten pretty darn tiring.

Never has there been a more controversial topic in the history of strategy gaming than the use and abuse of RNG, otherwise known as Random Number Generators. I know this from experience, since my last game, Chaos Reborn, reveled and delighted in the liberal use of RNGs (it wasn’t called 'Chaos' for nothing). 

It was based on a ZX Spectrum game I made in 1985 called Chaos and published by Games Workshop (a company not shy of randomness itself—usually in the form of buckets of dice rolled in their army games). In Chaos Reborn you play a wizard, and the casting of spells and combat were subject to binary outcome randomness. The combat is especially brutal, with a success killing a target outright and a failure doing nothing at all. Even a lowly giant rat had a 10% chance to kill a dragon. 

Many players loved it, and to them the extreme use of RNG is what made the game different and unique. The tension of each battle was enhanced by the rapid turnarounds, plans thwarted, and opportunities grasped. However, the game is certainly not without a high skill factor, since the best players frequently topped our monthly leagues. The fact that games were short, and very many games could be played in a month, either asynchronously or in live matches, meant that any element of luck would even out. 

Unfortunately, a significant group of players loathed the RNG aspect of Chaos Reborn with a vengeance, and they wrote about it copiously. Our Steam reviews were suffering, mainly from this single issue. We did our best to warn potential players that the game used a lot of RNG and required a lot of risk mitigation, but to no avail. So eventually I decided to make a reduced RNG mode for the game which did not use any randomness in the spell casting or the combat. It created quite a different experience which played quite well. 

The negative Steam reviews faded away, but it is debatable whether it made a more interesting game. Long-term Chaos Reborn players still preferred the more random ‘Chaos’ mode. On reflection I think there was probably a better way to manage the randomness in the game, and other games have dealt with the RNG problem in different ways. 

Firaxis’ XCOM: Enemy Unknown also suffered from an anti-RNG backlash, due to its explicit hit percentage mechanics. "That’s XCOM, baby," was the answer creative director Jake Solomon is reputed to have given. But in XCOM 2 the RNG is subtly manipulated to make it feel less random, at least at lower difficulty levels. 

I now understand that human beings are not very good at evaluating probabilities. In particular when an RNG generates repeated sequences a human will cry foul. For a human, randomness usually means ‘evenly distributed without any detectable pattern or repetition’. This is basically how random numbers are manipulated in many games to meet player’s expectations. One poor result immediately results in a bias towards a better result.

Now some of you might want to point out that computer random number generators are actually only pseudo-random. They generate a repeatable sequence of numbers with an even distribution, but they are very, very long sequences. In practice a human would not be able to tell the difference between a decent computer generated pseudo-random number and a more genuinely random number. This doesn’t reduce the suspicion of computer RNGs though, which is another problem that game developers have to deal with.

Those of you have been board gaming or roleplaying since the '70s or '80s, like me, would be completely used to randomness in games. I love dice—particularly special dice with strange symbols on them. My current obsession is the awesome new Warhammer Underworlds: Shadespire board game from my erstwhile Chaos publisher, Games Workshop. There doesn’t seem to be a real equivalent of these lovely, tactile dice for videogame players. 

Players without any board game or pen-and-paper roleplaying game experience tend to be a lot more hostile to the explicit use of RNG in video games. They do respond well, however, to the more subtle psychological manipulations of randomness which developers and publishers employ these days. 

As for myself, I prefer the honest and open use of random numbers where the mechanics are not hidden and fate is not predestined, but I may be in a dwindling minority.

Will there be an XCOM 3? I have no idea. All I know is: the first two games, and their expansions, were brilliant, and the XCOM formula is just too good to fade. Whether you preferred the sedate, sandbox pace of Enemy Unknown, or the tough guerrilla fightback scenario of the second game, the differences in the two show how flexible the XCOM format can be. There's surely another great game or five in the series, right? Here are a few things we'd like to see in a sequel.

A new setting

We have saved Earth a few times now. Paradoxically we have both saved Earth from being invaded and then liberated it post-invasion. We have broken the alien threat in city streets, sewers and green fields. Could you face doing that all over again, even with a different alien threat? It is time for a change.

The original X-COM games went to the ocean for variety. A modern take on Terror From the Deep could be interesting, but I need something bigger to really get excited. Could XCOM take the fight to the alien threat on their home ground? Would XCOM work on a solar system scale? It's a dangerous move. The transition from defender to unstoppable aggressor is an important part of XCOM's fantasy, and you risk losing the personal touch that you get managing a small group of elite soldiers. Maybe a move to a smaller city-scale game in the mould of X-COM: Apocalypse would work.

In this regard the series is a victim of its own success. XCOM: Enemy Unknown and XCOM 2 are so replayable XCOM 3 would need to be bold to tear me away.

Even more squad customisation

Firaxis' XCOM has loads of squad customisation, and War of the Chosen added bonds and a surprisingly great poster-making tool to better capture the successes and cruel deaths of our favourite soldiers. XCOM does plenty to let me turn my soldiers into heroes with backstories and relationships, but I cannot get enough of this sort of thing. The squad bonds system in War of the Chosen is a great example of the sort of feature allows the game to tell more complex stories. An outstanding array of hairstyle options is also a must, of course. 

Clearer campaign mechanics

Chances are you've loaded an earlier save in XCOM to undo a horrible turn, or take another shot at a mission because you got wiped by an enemy you'd never met before. 

In the first few playthroughs of a campaign trial and error is an essential part of XCOM. The game wants to tell a story, with surprised and twists, which means holding back information you need to make sensible decisions. I don't mind being surprised by enemy reveals that kill a bunch of soldiers. I enjoy the horror of first contact, and the pleasure of learning how to deal with them—besides, you're supposed to lose soldiers in XCOM. However I wish that the games were clearer about campaign-level mechanics, where ambiguity can waste a lot of time. 

Take the Avatar project. The game very strongly implies that XCOM is screwed if it maxes out, but I found myself wondering what would really happen, and I was unsure about how fast it would grow and how easily I could bring it back down. Likewise the necessity of satellites in Enemy Unknown came as a surprise to a lot of players. These uncertainties can lead to five-hour rollbacks on an opening campaign, or an outright restart.

A changing story

The worst thing about restarting an XCOM campaign is the static story. You can skip cutscenes and breeze through all of the exposition, but you are locked into a series of story missions linked by periods of compulsory research. I like XCOM's characters, world and art style, but I wish that there was a way for campaigns to branch or change to keep the surprises coming after several campaigns.

I think XCOM benefits a lot from the inclusion of a story, beyond the entertainment value of the Chosen's delightfully cheesy intro scenes. Story creates impetus, and on the strategy layer level XCOM is a game about racing the campaign's beats. I'd love an XCOM 3 campaign that allows those beats to change to keep me in a state of terror and despair for longer.

Better base building

The rooms look cool and I like being able to see XCOM members working away in the hive, but hollowing out the Avenger never really felt like I was building a base. The long excavation and build times made it feel as though the base was denying me cool stuff rather than unlocking it for me, and the layout never seemed to matter hugely, even with adjacency bonuses. The base functions felt as though they were spread out over too many rooms. Whatever shape an XCOM 3 base might take, I'd room placement to involve more interesting decisions with less waiting around.

Continued mod support

Another 'more of this please' entry. The Steam workshop has been great for XCOM 2 and The Long War campaign—a must play, comprehensive redesign of XCOM 2—adds dozens of hours of value to the game. There are loads of new enemies and weapons out there, but my favourite mods are the ones that make small UI tweaks to meet my preferences. Here's a selection of our favourite mods for War of the Chosen.

Malleable classes

Firaxis' XCOM tends to give you a choice of two upgrades when you level up. The left and right skill columns represent different builds of that class, which ultimately encourages you to come down one way or the other to hit the best synergies. 

War of the Chosen introduced training that let you unlock a few extra abilities in each class. The introduction of just these few extra options made the classes feel deeper and more flexible. I appreciate XCOM's determination to keep levelling simple, and to carefully define class roles to keep them distinct and interesting, but a degree of class cross-pollination could encourage more build-tinkering and squad experimentation. We'd want to see some new classes too, of course.

Factions, rivalries

War of the Chosen introduced several organisations that existed beyond the remit of XCOM. The resistance factions had their own tactics and fashion sense, and you had to work to earn their trust and get their cool toys. 

It worked great, and there are many ways to expand upon factions more broadly in a sequel. It's easy to imagine mercenary factions that could join the aliens or the humans, for a price. Firaxis experimented with EXALT in Enemy Within, so there's precedent for these shady, ambiguous factions.

I can't ignore how effective the Chosen were in War of the Chosen either. In fact, we reckon they are some of the best gaming villains out there. Having powerful villains that taunt you face-to-face creates great rivalries, and if a new XCOM didn't have a take on this, I think I would seriously miss it. Whether the game generates alien bounty hunters to hunt you down, or adopts a Shadow of Mordor style nemesis generator (a wronged Sectoid ties a bandana around its forehead comes back with a vengeance), I want strong antagonists whose defeat I can truly savour.

A new threat

XCOM's aliens are too familiar to be the sole focus of another game. The second game smartly revamped Sectoids and turned the skinny poisonous men in black into giant orange Cobras. Ultimately, though, Sectoids are going to mind control stuff and Muton's gonna Muton. For a third game I want to face enemies that feel alien again. I want the thrill of watching a unit's intro animation play in a battle and thinking 'what on planet Earth can that thing do?'

The return of shadowy "Hello, Commanderrr" guy

Other than the G-Man, is there a more ambiguous and intriguing figure in PC gaming than the mysterious silhouette guy who phones up to judge you once a month? I don't even know why he's in charge in XCOM 2, but I'll always pick up the big man's calls to hear him say "well done, commanderrrr", or "you suck, commanderrr". If there is to be an XCOM 3, he must reprise his role, and nobody tell him where the light switch is.

Welcome to my first column for PC Gamer. What’s it all about, you may ask? You can look forward to my musings on games, the games industry, and also follow progress on my new XCOM-style game, Phoenix Point, which is underway at Snapshot Games in sunny Bulgaria.Phoenix Point was first announced at the PC Gamer Weekender event in March last year, where I argued that XCOM is now an established genre, thanks to the tremendous success of the Firaxis games. Ever since I signed over the X-COM rights to MicroProse back in 1997 I have been trying to build a new X-COM-style game, but I never quite succeeded, despite releasing several turn-based games over the last 15 years. The XCOM genre is something special and distinct, and diverging too far from its fundamental design pillars results in something less than satisfactory.

MicroProse/Hasbro learned the hard way when they attempted to attach the X-COM name to games that weren’t really X-COMish enough, such as X-COM Interceptor (a space sim) X-COM Enforcer (an FPS) and the cancelled X-COM Alliance (a team-based FPS). Publishers, it seems, were no longer confident in the old school strategy/tactics style of X-COM. In the heyday of grand turn-based strategy games we had Civilization (1991), Master of Orion (1993), Master of Magic (1994) and the first X-COM (1994). All of them were highly successful games, and they were all published by MicroProse.

Then something dramatic happened—the RTS genre became the dominant game genre on PC, thanks largely to Warcraft (1994) and Command & Conquer (1995). Although Dune II established the genre on PC, it took a while for the seed to grow. By 1996 it seemed like every developer was working on some kind of RTS game. 

At the Game Developer’s Conference in 1996 sessions on pathfinding for RTS games were packed with hundreds of developers with standing room only. The Dune II seed had become a forest. It’s fair to say that this turn of events did influence me to give X-COM Apocalypse a real time tactical mode (but with an option for turn-based battles). However, in no way could the game be called an RTS, as it was defined by Dune II.In 1999 I began development on a new XCOM-style game called The Dreamland Chronicles: Freedom Ridge for our new publisher, Virgin Interactive. I believed at that time that the PC market was going to be increasingly difficult to make a profit from, so the game was intended for the Playstation 2 as well as the PC.  

It’s true that PC gaming was having a bit of a crisis, due partly to rampant piracy, spiralling development costs and generally poor quality, buggy releases. There was also a general lack of design innovation. The flood of RTS clones had ended, but there was nothing new and exciting to replace it. Although Dreamland was destined for the PS2, it was still fundamentally an X-COM-style game, with turn-based battles and a real-time geoscape. It did, however, involve a number of adaptations to the console game format. The soldiers were controlled by directly moving them in third person with the controller. An ‘action point’ bar diminished as the character moved. The shooting used a first-person view, allowing the player to freely aim via a controller stick, if desired. It was eerily reminiscent of a PS3 game released in 2008 called Valkyria Chronicles (since released on PC). Sadly, Dreamland was cancelled after Virgin Interactive was sold to Interplay, and then Interplay to Titus Interactive in short succession. After my studio, Mythos Games, was liquidated, the code base for Dreamland would be given to Altar Interactive who went on to produce UFO: Aftermath, although not much remained of our original story and game mechanics. 

In 2005 Take-Two purchased the rights to sci-fi strategy franchise X-COM from Atari (formerly Infogrames) after Atari had lost interest in the X-COM franchise following the cancellation of X-COM: Alliance in 2002. Reorganised under the 2K umbrella, the former Bioshock 2 studios, 2K Marin and 2K Australia, began development on a new XCOM game. When it was finally announced to the public in April 2010 it was presented as a “Mystery-filled first-person shooter from the creators of BioShock 2.” The E3 trailer portrayed a 1950s setting with amorphous ink blob aliens and shapeshifters. A camera was used to collect evidence that then had to be ‘researched’. It looked like it could be an interesting game, but it just wasn’t X-COM, and unsurprisingly the reaction from X-COM fans wasn’t very favourable. Christoph Harmann, president at 2K Games, explained that “the problem was that turn-based strategy games were no longer the hottest thing on planet Earth. But this is not just a commercial thing—strategy games are just not contemporary."

 I felt dismayed by these comments, and it spurred me to put a team together with the idea of raising funds on Kickstarter to make my own spiritual remake. At that time there was also another X-COM-like game in development by a small indie collective called Xenonauts, but I felt there was room for both of us.  

However, when Firaxis announced that they were going to release their own X-COM game everything I planned for seemed superfluous. If anyone could do X-COM properly, then it would be Sid Meier’s studio. But here we are five years after the success of the Firaxis remake and Phoenix Point is a thing. We raised $760k in March through fig.co, and my own take on an XCOM style game is well under way. There is such a thing as 'the XCOM genre', and I am really excited for the future. I am not alone any more.

Despite founding the series in 1994, X-Com mastermind Julian Gollop has admitted his current project Phoenix Point wouldn't exist if it weren't for Firaxis' 2012 Enemy Unknown reboot . 

In 1994, Julian Gollop, alongside his Mythos Games team, redefined the turn-based strategy genre with the creation of UFO: Enemy Unknown—otherwise known as X-COM UFO Defense. A direct sequel—X-COM: Terror from the Deep—followed, before the series changed scope and jumped genres with Gollop and his team no longer on board. 

Two cancelled games in the early '00s effectively buried the series, before it was revived and rebooted by Firaxis in 2012. XCOM has since went from strength to strength, with Gollop's original creation becoming its own sub-genre. 

"I think it's fantastic," Gollops tells PC Gamer. "When you think that for so long I was trying to make this kind of game and no publisher was even interested, what it proves that there's now an audience for this style of game. It may not be absolutely massive, but it's a pretty solid, dedicated audience. 

"People have been asking me to remake X-Com, or Laser Squad, or anything forever. They've always asked me to do it. It's just getting commercial interest from a publisher to actually do it has been very difficult."

Gollop suggests MOBAs have in many ways overshadowed RTS games in recent years, but he admires how Firaxis has "managed to resurrect" X-Com, in turn finding critical and commercial success. Despite being responsible for the foundations of the X-Com as we know it today, Gollop reckons its current guise champions a new genre—one that his latest venture Phoenix Point is happily part of.  

"It just goes to show that maybe I was right to pursue this kind of game," Gollop continues. "But what the new XCOM game has allowed me to do is make Phoenix Point, because without it, I doubt I even would've attempted it. God knows what I'd be doing. I think it's fair to say it's now a new genre of game. It's now established, and there are people who are actively looking for this style of game, and there will be more like them, which is really cool. It's brilliant. From my point of view, it's great.

"When you think about it, all the X-Com games, going back to the ones I worked on, the strategic layer is the thing that's changed the most. So the original was set on a globe, Terror From The Deep sort of copied that, but X-Com Apocalypse was radically different. XCOM: Enemy Unknown is reminiscent of the original but is actually quite different, because it's a much more scripted sequence of stuff. It's more like a min/maxing management sim. With XCOM 2, they changed it quite radically again. So this seems to be the area of the X-Com genre-style game that's changing the most."

Gollops continues, suggesting Phoenix Point—said to be a spiritual successor of the '94 X-Com—will do something different again, while retaining "this core tactical turn-based gameplay which is more familiar across all the X-Com games."

Look out for our full interview with Julian Gollop—wherein he discusses Phoenix Point, X-Com and more—later today.  

Rarely does a week go by when some publisher or retailer isn't giving away a game for free. Spending nothing in exchange for something is great, and this is an especially nice offer: the Humble Store is giving away X-COM: UFO Defense, or for those outside of North America, UFO: Enemy Unknown.

It's the first instalment in the XCOM series, of course, and be forewarned that as far as I can remember it was the first game to make me incredibly angry. The offer is valid for another day and a half, so you'd best go and grab it now before you forget. 

Last September, I went to the Firaxis offices when they were in the fairly late stages of polishing XCOM 2. I met Jake Solomon there and showed him what XCOM: Enemy Unknown modding looked like. He wondered aloud if I had closets full of chains and leather.

John Lumpkin, otherwise known as JohnnyLump, is the co-creator of XCOM: Enemy Unknown s ultra-difficult Long War a mod that adds a slew of surplus stats, extra weapons, more campaign missions, more challenges, more squad members and, inevitably, more death to the original game. To those those uninitiated, Jake Solomon Enemy Unknown s creative director once described Firaxis official top-selling reimagining of Julian Gollop s 1994 turn-based classic as a 20-hour tutorial for Long War, which gives a sense of how comprehensive Lumpkin and partner Rachel Norman s hobbyist modification is.

Lumpkin tells me that he in fact doesn t keep a cupboard-full of S&M accessories at home not that there s anything wrong with that but that Solomon s tongue-in-cheek reference points to how inaccessible Enemy Unknown is to would-be modders. First you re required to essentially hack into the game s files to make it read INI files, Lumpkin says. Then you need to review the game s code, translate it into hexadecimal, before making changes to functions and classes so as to ensure your alterations don t crash the game. Lumpkin pauses, as if suddenly aware of how confusing this might sound to those unfamiliar with programming jargon.

It s strange, he says. I had 12 hours of computer science in college, my training was primarily as a journalist, but it gets to the point where you know the scene in The Matrix where Neo is looking at the code falling? You get to that point where you can start reading the code and you can see the Unreal script that it makes. It s a weird place for your head to get to but it can get there.

Getting there saw Lumpkin sinking two to three hours a day into his pet project as a distraction from studying at grad school media studies with a side of political science and international relations back in 2012. He d often have to force himself to pursue his dissertation, and admits partner Norman, when away from her job working in the US defence industry, almost certainly spent more time on the coding side of things as the project s engineer.

Although inspired by UFO: Enemy Unknown (XCOM: UFO Defense in the US) at 43 and 42 respectively, both Lumpkin and Norman are self-proclaimed veterans of the old days the idea for Long War was born from the simple fact that Lumpkin had finished the 2012 remake, wanted more, but couldn t find anything user-made in the game s small but growing community. He took matters into his own hands and, with the help of Norman, began to push the envelope on what was possible.

It kind of grew organically but as we figured out how to do something like how to add new weapons or how to have aliens upgrade themselves, we d add these new capabilities and release a new version, says Lumpkin. The Enemy Unknown campaign was 35 or 40 missions and I had a great time playing it and then it was over. I wanted more of the feel of warfare in terms of these great victories but also reversals that you have to address.

If you think of American sports we have NFL football here, where it s a 16-game season and every game is a big deal that have huge effects on your season. I wanted to switch that to make it a bit more like baseball, which has 160-odd games in a season and is much more about performance over the long term and statistics. I always thought of what we did to XCOM a little like that Enemy Unknown was the football season and we made it more like the baseball season with ups and downs and variety of challenges.

Before long, the ever-burgeoning Enemy Unknown community began to take notice of Long War. A healthy body of brave players had started playing, offering feedback and in essence became Lumpkin and Norman s QA team. Beta versions received tens of thousands of Nexus downloads courtesy of its barrel-load of new stuff, and it was discussed favourably by the games press. One of my real pleasures from all of this was going on Reddit or the Nexus feedback and watching people debate strategy in a real productive way, adds Lumpkin. There was nothing toxic about it, these were people having these really interesting discussions and it was so fun to read.

About mid-way through development, Jake Solomon started tweeting about his enjoyment of Long War. Julian Gollop praised the unofficial expansion during presentations. Eventually, first contact was made with Firaxis by way of its community manager Kevin Schultz. One of the things players wanted was soldiers not to sound like they re from Iowa, says Lumpkin, before explaining Jonathan Emmett, the mod s sound editor, had just figured out how to implement new voice packs.

They had enlisted volunteer voice actors from the UK, Australia, and the US, and had turned character Peter Van Doorn who appears briefly in Enemy Unknown with a great gung-ho delivery of his lines into a soldier that could be added to the game. Schultz reached out and said: hey, we ve got some leftover lines from that voice actor, do you want them? We said, you bet, and were able to make a custom voice pack for this particular character.

By early 2015, the Long War team had grown to a small core group of four, as well as four senior contributors, and, behind the scenes, Firaxis had begun work on XCOM 2 a direct follow-up to 2012 s Enemy Unknown that would make modding a priority by boasting day one mods and Steam Workshop support from launch. It was looking for help in this area, therefore publisher 2K reached out to Lumpkin, put him and his team under NDA and asked that they take the helm of three day one mods.

While working towards Long War 1.0, Lumpkin had also begun flirting with the idea of creating his own game Terra Invicta: another alien invasion-inspired game on a strategic level, that he planned to crowdfund down the line. He was, however, delighted to receive official recognition. What s more, this was immediate paying work. It was a chance to see all the procedures and processes involved in how a game is made, and to learn about proper QA and all of the different roles. In short: this was the Long War team s education.

In August 2015, Long War Studios was formed, it brought on an artist adding art to Enemy Unknown was very difficult, Lumpkin recalls and set about crafting the agreed XCOM 2 day one mods, while working on Long War s final release in the background. The latter launched its version 1.0 last December, while Long War s first batch of XCOM 2 mods went live on launch day; with a second and third lot releasing in April and July too.

We had this big list of ideas and had a bit of a back and forth with them, explains Lumpkin when I ask if Long War s creative freedom was sacrificed in this new, non-hobbyist setup. We asked what they wanted and they suggested the kind of things they were after for these day one mods. We threw some specifics at them and they thought it sounded great. If there was any freedom sacrificed on the creative side it was more to do with things like deadlines than it was us being told what to do.

They wanted to show off these modding tools, and we were conscious of that therefore came up with things that showed off different kinds of things you could do within the time frame that we had. There s an approval process, of course and a bit of further back and forth.

To this day, there are still but a few hundred mods available for XCOM: Enemy Unknown, not to mention no Steam Workshop support. XCOM 2 s Steam Workshop, however, boasts 1,994 at the time of writing testament to how more accessible this game is to prospective modders of all levels. Long War Studios still plans to pursue Terra Invicta down the line, something which seems a certainty now off the back of the Long War mod s reception, and what the team has learned from its work on XCOM 2.

I therefore ask Lumpkin if we can expect a Long War 2 mod for XCOM 2 at any point in the future.

We certainly know how we d do it, he says before pausing. And that s probably the most I can say right now.