Ex-Irrational devs look back on the XCOM shooter that wasn't

Former developers from Irrational Games' Australia team spoke with PCGamer about the studio's attempt to revive 2K's strategy series XCOM with a first-person shooter.

This shooter predates Firaxis' 2012 reboot XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and Irrational co-founder and Australia leader Jon Chey, said was something of a tradeoff. He noted 2K "injected a lot more resources" into BioShock and acquired Irrational in 2006, which in turn freed up the studio to enable each team to have its own individual project.

While Irrational's Boston team would lead development on BioShock, its Australian side looked at making an FPS installment for XCOM, which would've been the first game in the series since 2001. Ed Orman, the project's lead designer, told PCGamer how turn-based was "a bit of a niche" back then as shooters were becoming popular, hence "having a crack at a first-person version of XCOM."

Even so, first-person shooters can struggle with squad commands and partner AI, something Irrational itself ran into with SWAT 4. For mechanical inspiration and guidance, the team studied Gearbox's Brothers in Arms games, along with the 2004 shooter Full Spectrum Warrior, which Chey described as "real-time, but it had a turn-based feel."

Prototypes for the XCOM shooter took on various forms; the Full Spectrum-inspired one was deemed "too niche," according to internal feedback. Another pitch, which featured soldiers fighting alien kaiju and climbing atop them, was influenced by Call of Duty campaigns, Shadow of the Colossus, and the movie Starship Troopers.

Both pitches, and an asymmetrical multiplayer mode where players would take on the roles of aliens they fought in the campaign, ultimately went nowhere. In trying to make the franchise into a shooter, Chey said Irrational "exposed the tension. It sounds great when you say, 'Let's do a first-person shooter XCOM.' But they're different worlds. So how do you bring them together?"

The once and future XCOM

Eventually, Irrational settled on its XCOM shooter set in the 1950s. Per Chey, this "more horror-based approach" would include jump scares and discordant music, and using conventional military equipment to fight enemies "operating on another dimension."

Chey would eventually leave Irrational in 2009 once progress on the XCOM project stalled. At the time, he felt he "had [not] made the sort of progress that I wanted to, or like I was contributing a lot and being the person who could make that project successful."

Looking back, he said the studio should have committed more to its XCOM being XCOM. "People who loved [the series] wanted to see the same creatures from the tactical game in first-person," he explained to PCGamer. "[Mutoids and Sectoids] may not be the most original monster designs ever, but they're part of what people love."

Orman, who left Irrational months after the game's E3 2010 reveal, believes Irrational Australia being integrated into 2K Marin exacerbated issues with the project. Irrational's team members were now "basically separated" from their Boston coworkers, and they "could not work together with the 2K Marin team," he said.

With both Chey and Orman gone, and the departures of other senior staff, Irrational's XCOM was dead in the spaceship. 2K Marin went on to reboot the project, which became 2013's The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, a third-person shooter and Marin's last game before its closure later that year.

Meanwhile, Firaxis' Enemy Unknown was a critical and commercial hit. The studio released XCOM 2 in 2016 and the War of the Chosen expansion a year later, followed by the standalone 2020 spinoff XCOM: Chimera Squad.

Over a decade later, Chey admitted he would like to reexamine his failed XCOM shooter and "figure out how to make it work." Since leaving Irrational, he went on to found Blue Manchu, the studio behind titles like Card Hunter and Void Bastards.

That studio's most recent game, Wild Bastards, is "pretty different" from what he wanted to do with XCOM, but Chey told PCGamer it represents "enough proof that you can mix that sort of strategic game with an FPS."

PCGamer's full look at Irrational's XCOM shooter, which includes deeper insight into those pitches and its impact on other games, can be read here.