Chris England [Goldhawk Interactive] (Xenonauts) – Interview

Merry Christmas to us all, because here is the legendary Chris England to answer a few questions for us about the development of the Xenonauts franchise. As probably most of you know, Chris England with his company Goldhawk Interactive created the great X-com inspired Xenonauts (read my review here). The sequel Xenonauts 2 is currently under full production in Early Access over at Steam & GOG, and it’s looking good too. It’s expected to be released sometime next year (read my latest impressions here).

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Let’s start from the beginning. What prompted you to make a game in the X-com genre? Tell us about the struggles of a first-time developer – what issues did you face (like the notorious game engine issue), Kickstarter tales, game journalist response, the included book, etc?

The original X-Com (from 1994) was a game I played a huge amount when I was in my early teens – I found it in a discount bin and I’d never played anything like it before, and it totally blew my mind. It was such a complex game and the way the strategy layer and tactical layer were linked together was so cool to me, especially because the game was hard as nails and the missions could be so tense. I played the various spiritual successors as I got older (the UFO: Afterlight / UFO: Extraterrestrials games) but none of them really captured the magic for me – I just wanted someone to make an updated version that didn’t change the fundamental mechanics that much.

Once the indie revolution began and I saw independent game news sites popping up, covering these self-funded games by tiny indie studios (I think Mount & Blade was the first one I encountered) I realised that perhaps it was best I just did it myself – I’d read quite a few opinion pieces from people who loved X-Com and wished someone was making a proper follow-up to it. So I took my savings, which was a few thousand pounds at that point, and decided to give it a go. Once 2K announced the official XCOM reboot as a shooter (the one that eventually became The Bureau), we suddenly started getting loads of coverage and things started to snowball.

I wrote a development postmortem that shipped with the original Xenonauts that you can read if you want more details. I go into more detail about the engine issues and various other factors that affected development in that!

Chris attached a postmortem PDF that goes into much more detail that he allowed me to upload to the site. You can find it here!

From what I understand, a sequel to Xenonaut wasn’t a sure thing. I remember reading about other ideas you had on RPG Codex, like this mysterious Pathfinder game. Tell me about it. Were there other ideas as well? Why didn’t these ideas come to pass instead of Xenonauts 2?

Yeah, I was pretty keen to move onto new things after spending five years working on Xenonauts, and we explored a number of new ideas. But eventually we realised we were trying to change an awful lot of things at once – we were moving to a new game engine, moving from 2D to 3D art (which we had no expertise in), all while trying to set up the company in a different way so we could deliver higher-quality and bigger budget projects. With so much changing I eventually decided it would be sensible to stick with what we knew design-wise rather than add even more risk.

Pathfinders was the most developed of those ideas. The basic concept was that it would be a sci-fi Jagged Alliance style game, taking place in a large city. You’d have a large pool of soldiers and equipment you could requisition from, all with their own strengths and weaknesses, and you had to disarm the orbital defences so the rest of the military force could land and capture the city. The tactical combat was going to be closer to XCOM than Xenonauts, but it used the free-aim system from Valkyria Chronicles that Phoenix Point ended up using. But it ended up being too experimental given all other things we were trying to juggle at the time.

When it was established that Xenonauts 2 was going to be the next game, what kind of iterations did it go through?

The original design for Xenonauts 2 was quite different to what we’re planning to ship. Even looking at our Kickstarter page shows that. I had quite a few ideas for how to update the strategy layer, which involved adding depth in certain areas and simplifying it in others. Unfortunately we discovered about a year after the Kickstarter that some of the new ideas worked great on paper, but just weren’t as engaging as what previously existed – a good example of this is the turn-based Geoscape, where your aircraft would attempt interceptions with % chances of success that could be modified based on all kinds of factors (e.g. aircraft equipment, UFO behaviour, etc). This gave the players a lot more options to play with, and was more interesting mechanically… but just felt less engaging than actually being able to order your aircraft around on the Geoscape.

Unfortunately the new concept for the game was quite tightly designed, and once you started scrapping the mechanics that didn’t work well it would often undermine the new mechanics that worked fine. For example, having a single base on Geoscape like you do in XCOM is fine, provided it adds enough depth elsewhere – but if some of the new mechanics it enables get scrapped, it makes sense to move back to the old X-Com model instead. That left us in a situation where we could either ship a game that was different from the first game, but worse, or just shift emphasis and deliver a sequel that was similar to the first game but better.

In retrospect it’d probably have been more sensible to just ship a crap game and keep the Kickstarter money / whatever meagre sales we could make, but we decided it was more important to deliver a good game. It’s been a very long and rather stressful journey, but I think we probably made the right decision (both financially and professionally).

Now with it coming up for release, what do you think is the biggest difference or improvement from the first game? Is it what the first game should have been, or is it another take on the franchise completely? Any features you would have wanted to include, but for some reason didn’t make it?

Xenonauts 2 is what the first game would have been had we been experienced developers when we started out. There’s loads of improvements and additions made to the game, but there’s no single feature you can point to as a game-changer. But it’s gratifying to see so many of the Early Access reviews mention that the game is already a big improvement over the first and a worthy successor, because that’s the one thing we just weren’t sure about prior to launch – how many small changes does it take to make a worthwhile improvement? It seems that we’ve already made enough for most people, and there’s a lot more planned for the rest of Early Access.

There’s a few areas of the design I’ve been frustrated I couldn’t make major improvements to. I really wanted to make major improvements to the air combat, and update the Geoscape so more was happening and you could interact directly with the funding regions. But the classic X-Com formula is also a very tight design, and it’s tricky to add too much to it without ending up diluting other parts. We tested a number of ideas for both of those areas of the game, but none of the stuff we came up with was clearly better than what existed before – and, ultimately, my frustration with the other X-Com spiritual successors in the past is that they changed key parts of the classic X-Com mechanics for no real reason, so we decided to stay faithful to the source material. Again, I think this is the right decision, but a little frustrating as a designer.

Hopefully Xenonauts 2 will be the definitive classic X-Com game, and a whole new generation of young people will be able to experience the joys I had when I played that game!

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I want to thank Chris for taking the time to answer my questions, considering he is a very busy man with finishing up Xenonauts 2. Hopefully, the game will be a big success, and we get to see more stuff coming from him in the future. I’m curious about what he and his team can come up with outside the X-com genre. The mercenary-esque “Pathfinder” game sounds intriguing to me. A Goldhawk take on Jagged Alliance, why not I say?

Thanks for reading.

/Thomas