Firaxis Confirm ‘Iron Man’ Mode for XCOM Remake

Fireaxis’ upcoming remake of X-COM (XCOM: Enemy Unknown).  Originally released in 1993, which is often considered to be one of the best games ever made has been confirmed to include an “iron man” difficulty setting, and possibly even mod support.

Details emerge from a lengthy and detailed interview with Firaxis’ Jake Solomon posted at Rock Paper Shotgun, which reveals that XCOM will feature a challenging difficulty mode to be called “iron man”, where you are not allowed to juggle with multiple save files:

“It’s important. A lot of players, we like to play Iron Man and so it’s something we want to actually systemically enable where if you say I want to play this game in Iron Man then you’ve only got one save slot and all auto saves and all your saves go to that slot – and the only thing you can do is save and exit. Of course, you get to some point where if you lose too much, I’ll give you the option, I’ll say ‘do you want to turn off Iron Man’, you know, ‘Are you done? Do you want to turn off Iron Man and continue to play normally?'”

Solomon also gave a detailed explanation about why the studio has decided to drop “time units” from the remake:

“This was not some sort of thing where we said ‘Oh, time units are too tough, this’ll make it easier to play’ because everybody intellectually understands time units once you explain it to them, it’s easy to intellectually understand. The problem was that it just didn’t map to the experience well. With all these new abilities and things, it just created this barrier between ‘I know what I want to do and I know how I’m going to do it’ and instead it became this sort of thing where you were like ‘I’m not quite sure what I can do, and so I’m just going to let it sort of play out’. So in this case when we had time units, they ended up making the game more shallow, because all these different abilities and combos, all these interesting things, were never getting used because people couldn’t think about them that way.”

As far as mods were concerned he went on to say:

“something that we’re definitely looking very closely at, it’s something that we’d want to do for players”.

Source: GameSpy