![]() ![]() “The first tester to beat Legend sent us some great feedback in a long note that also included how triumphant they felt after getting through all of the hardships,” says DeAngelis. Overall the testers were invaluable in providing vital feedback on when things felt too unfair or too easy. DeAngelis says the team conducted playthroughs of the hardest difficulty settings on a regular basis for both games. It also helps that the QA testers at Firaxis are some of the best XCOM players out there. Playing well in both the Tactical and Strategy layers of the game will get you through just fine.” Legend is more about punishing the mistakes the player makes. We wanted it more “fair” than the hardest difficulty in XCOM: Enemy Unknown. “Getting Legend, XCOM 2’s hardest difficulty, just right was a big challenge, but design did a phenomenal job. ![]() “Ironman is a modifier on how the campaign functions, so our designers were focusing more on balancing the different difficulty settings,” says DeAngelis. How the studio made sure Ironman was tough, but fairĭeAngelis says the developers over at Firaxis had a pretty big task ahead of them to make sure that Ironman mode wasn’t just hard, it was fair too. Those who have belong in an elite subsection of players that prove that, even though Ironman mode is tougher than a bag full of nails, it is actually possible to complete the game on this difficulty. In fact, it’s so hard that, according to DeAngelis, less than 5 per cent of the game’s player base has managed to do it. To say that completing XCOM on Ironman is far from a cakewalk would be an understatement. Ironman mode is our love letter to the original game.” We included a variety of difficulties and options to make the experience more accommodating to a wider audience, but Ironman mode is there for fans of the original XCOM. “When we made XCOM: Enemy Unknown, we wanted to establish that we weren’t watering the series’ challenge down. ![]() While the modern XCOM games let you save before and after every decision, the real way to play is to make a decision and commit to the reaction of your choices,” says Garth DeAngelis, the Senior Producer on XCOM 2. ![]() XCOM is a game about making tough decisions and extreme consequence. “The basic ideas behind Ironman are a core part of the XCOM series history. They can spend hours levelling up and kitting out their XCOM soldiers, only to see them wiped out in minutes due to lousy tactical planning on the player’s part – and there’s nothing they can do to save them.įiraxis on its love letter to the original game This means if they put a foot wrong – by, say, moving through the fog of war too quickly and finding their squad surrounded – there’s no earlier save file they can go back to. This file, incidentally, will be overwritten with every action the player takes in a mission. Not only are enemies faster, nastier and far more vicious, but players only have access to one save file. The hardest of the hardcore believe this is the way XCOM is meant to be played and the mode requires total commitment before one starts it. Even the greenest XCOM player knows they have to take their time, exercise caution and above all else, save their game as often as possible.īut even the most battle-hardened XCOM players think twice before they tackle any of these games on Ironman mode. On lower difficulty levels, the game’s challenging enough players who rush into battle without guarding every corner and planning out their attack soon find their soldiers turned into paint. In the pantheon of difficult games, 2K’s XCOM series is something of a rite of passage for players. Continuing our new PS Blog series looking at the best examples of harder difficulties in PlayStation games – and to mark the recent release of XCOM 2: War of the Chosen – we talk to Firaxis about its franchise’s toughest difficulty. ![]()
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