And all these different abilities you could do in any order, all they did was cost time units. And so it is theoretically an interesting system. Right. As a designer, it's a very interesting system. And as a player, all it is is just, it's nonsense, right? Hi, everybody. This is Soren Johnson, and you are listening to Designer Notes, a podcast about why we make games. Today, we are talking to veteran game developer Jake Solomon, best known for his work on the XCOM reboots and Midnight Suns.
This episode was recorded on September 25th, 2023, and was engineered by Michael Hermes. We left off... We were kind of talking about Civil Revolution. But I think there's a part of the timeline we skipped over. We did skip. Which was maybe a dark face. But your first attempt at XCOM prototype. Right. And I remember that because I saw that. I remember you working on it. When was that exactly?
So that was in between pirates and the start of civilization revolution. So. 2006 maybe right it was 2006 or so 2005 2006 um and we as a studio we were kind of figuring out what we were going to do next and i think um i was I was really, really passionate about XCOM, and I knew we had the license, and so whenever given the opportunity, I said, you know, I really, really want to make this game. Right. I remember when, like, Take-Two, like, there was a bunch of IP...
like consolidation like take two bought fraxxas and they got a bunch of other stuff and like that was like stuff from atari maybe is it yeah right i think all the micro pro stuff yep exactly so they kind of like tried to get basically everything they could all in one place and i was like okay we've got all these all these IPs including XCOM very exciting times and I think that Sid has always been
Clear about his role with XCOM, which is that he had nothing to do with it, right? So it was actually the first When we did ship XCOM, it was actually the first four axis game that his name wasn't on a very clear thing where he was like No, there's no reason to put my name on this So even from the beginning, when I was really excited about it, I think it was something that he was like, okay, that's fine. But it wasn't something that particularly interested him, the idea of XCOM. And so...
I'd been there for a while. I'd worked with Sid on a couple projects, not really in a design role, but he was the one who really pushed for me to have that opportunity. The opportunity, though, consisting of me... And maybe another programmer and a half. So three programmers. Very little art. And just go off and make a prototype of XCOM.
And did you, had you been pushing, like, did you basically pitch this first to Sid of like, you want to do that and then he helped you find space for it? Yeah, I think it was Sid. Um, I'm sure I went to Sid first. Um, and then.
you know we were talking about what we might do next and i'm sure i went to sid first um and and sid was the one who championed me getting this opportunity like okay you know you and a couple we just finished um uh pirates and there was time in the schedule so it was like okay what's the big deal take a programmer and go off and make a prototype um Right. As if I was Sid Meier, right? As if with one other programmer, I could make a prototype. Now...
I did make a prototype. You did make a prototype. I think it took six months or something like that. Right. And I went off. What was your concept of what you wanted to do at the time? Did you want to just remake XCOM? Or did you have an idea of what you wanted to do? to do to it? Just wanted to remake it. Just wanted to remake it. Just wanted to straight up remake it. Time units and everything. I didn't really have a concept of pushing it past what XCOM was. I was thinking in my head like...
You know, at that point, the game was 11, 12 years old. And so I thought, well... Better graphics. Like, boom. Done. You guys had just remade Pirates also. Right, right. We just remade Pirates. Yeah, right. So there you go. Look, it works. I was like, I'm going to do the same thing for XCOM. And so it was just going to be a prototype of tactical combat.
right we used the unreal engine assets and you were using unreal for wait was no just the no just the characters and their guns and we we put it all in our our like Like whatever we were using. What was the name of our... Embryo? Gamebryo. Yeah, Gamebryo. You could take Unreal assets and stick them in Gamebryo? Yeah, we found a way to...
Using the Unreal Engine, you could export them, and then we could re-import them into Gambrio. Huh. Okay. It worked. But all those things... And I've talked about this before, right? This was... as big a moment in my career maybe as any right this is what shaped me was this this abomination of a prototype i'm in because I was able to focus on, well, I need to import all these assets, right? You know, get the animations working and better get, don't need more. You know, I need like.
10 characters right i was like i need 10 characters we need to work on all that and get those animations working and me and this other engineer we had lots of very interesting work to do right that took a lot of time And in doing so, I was subconsciously, maybe consciously ignoring what was really important, which was what you should probably make the game and start worrying about what that feels like and what it plays like.
You were doing technical work that would have had to have been done at some point. Not at the start, though. But didn't make any difference for the beginning of the game, basically. And I've seen this a lot. In myself and other designers, especially, you know, when designers are starting out, it is very, very scary to stare at, for lack of a better word, a blank page. Right. It's very scary.
To say, well, I don't know how this works. And it's also scary when you're convinced and you're probably right that what you put together is going to be embarrassingly bad. Right. So as I get. Older as a designer, you kind of grow out of that and you don't care. But as a younger designer, I think you're really worried about that and how people perceive you. And so it is a scary thing for designers to start out and think.
Okay, my best ideas I'm worried about them making me look bad. It was my first shot and so consciously subconsciously you ignore the hard work which is doing the design. And I remember, this is true, I spent months on an inventory system. Because inventory is a very important part. It's going to fall apart without the inventory. Inside this awesome inventory system. And then I was like, I got to put UI on this. I got to make sure that this works. And I was...
You could have soldiers and they were walking around and they would shoot. Um, but there was nothing in the way of. enemies that you know they had an inventory that you could load guns in and it could you know carry multiple items um none of which were properly configured and i just spent months on this and at the end they was like well okay i gotta put some music in here and i got to figure how that's going to work and i stayed in my very safe engineering lane
And at the end, I had what was essentially like a really bad tech demo, but there was no soul or there was no objectives, really. There was no gameplay at all. Yeah. And it took like six months and it was... Definitely the biggest, the starkest failure. up to that point you're never in like a solo position to do stuff like that right um and i think it was really beneficial for me to be on that project with very few people it was just me and another engineer basically and so there was no
when it was very obviously like, this is not good, right? This is not a game. There was plenty of time to have made something that resembles a game. It doesn't even really seem like XCOM. And what was helpful about that was that there's nowhere for me to... hide right for myself to be like well
It's not my fault. It was, you know, it was this, it was that, it was the other. Instead, it was like, it very clearly was my fault. I very clearly got to the end of the runway and was like, what the hell did I just, what did I just do?
And it was maybe the most important thing that has ever happened to me because after that, I looked at Sid. So going into Civ Rev, I looked at Sid in a completely different light, which was... how on earth does he do this with six months he would have made something amazing right and i was like so wait a minute like you just don't working with him for that long for years you just kind of take that for you take that for granted and you just
I think, okay, well, I could do it too. And then I learned very quickly, oh, no, no, no, I can't do this at all. So when I go back to work for him, I was more excited to work with him than I'd ever been. Because I thought. i i thought i think that i was like done with design i had the bug at that point right but i thought i don't know this is for me but boy i was like really excited now to work with him and listen to him right um the um
Maybe this is a crude question, but did you accomplish being able to shoot something in six months? Yes. Yes, you could have comp... I did a comp... I think. I think. I would have to think that you... Oh, man, I hope so. I really hope so. I mean, it was an abject, it was a very clear failure to make a prototype. I've got to think that you're able to shoot a gun, but I don't know. I don't know. I can't say that with certainty, really. Yeah.
I mean, it is hard. In a sense, it's hard because you were making a remake, so you were aware of all the stuff you needed, right? It's not like you did actually have a blueprint. And yeah, I guess you thought you were really trying to follow the blueprint. Just started from the wrong. And again, I do think it was just sort of shying away from the real problems. But I think at that point, I didn't even know what the real problems were.
you know i was an engineer i wasn't really a designer and so you're right i think there was safety in saying oh good i'm remaking something you know let me start from the toes i'm going to eat this thing but i'm just going to start way down here which you know right is foolish instead of thinking
I have six months. What do I really need to implement to make this, you know, turn into, what does it mean to be a game? And that really comes down to basic system design, but I just had never thought that way. I really had never thought about what does it take to make a game. You can think as an engineer like it's just a collection of parts, but that's not what it is. Can you define that? I do think it's systems working in concert, so both objectives.
reward right and these sort of overlapping loops right it's all I think of when I think of designs now in an abstract sense when I think of my game designs or any games designs I view it as like it's like you take the face off of a watch. And inside, there's a bunch of stuff spinning. And these are all the reward loops. So I really think of things, and I think this comes from Sid, I really think of game design in terms of...
Reward loops and so completing objectives which then spins these little wheels and you've got all these different sized reward loops going from the very gameplay is just a loop of like what are you doing every five seconds okay what are you doing every minute what decisions are you making every five seconds that can be rewarding In XCOM, for example, you are choosing what cover to move to. That's your five-second loop, and that's rewarding if you find a good spot.
You feel like oh I made a good decision there and I can be rewarded for that. And what are you doing every minute? What are you doing every five minutes? What are you doing every 30 minutes? What are you doing every three hours, right? There's just all these big loops spinning and you should start with the five-second loop when you're making a prototype. what is the five second loop like what is
What is innately satisfying about this experience? Well, it's probably like the five second loop. At least start there. You have to have something that as a player, you're like, okay, this is satisfying to make this decision and make this decision and make this decision. Midnight Suns, it was choosing, you know, it was like, look. at your cards and choosing one to play um so now i always sort of think about the game in terms of all these like little gameplay loops and reward loops but back then
I just saw the face of the watch. And I was like, okay, I'll build the face of the watch without any understanding of how the hands turned. It was just like, okay, I could probably build something that looks like a game. Okay, so how did the process, how did you get another shot at it? It didn't come until, so me going back to the best thing that happened to me was that prototype and it being a little publicly embarrassing and also...
You have that moment and you get past it. Like anything, this is trite, I suppose, but you get past it and you're like, okay, I'm not dead, right? Yeah, right, sure. That stinks, right? You got to work on another project that went well. Right. And I was like, well, I'm way more self-aware now. Like I now understand what I don't understand. And I do.
get to now work with maybe one of the greatest to do it. And so it made me, I looked at him in such a different light, which probably as we were talking about before, this really probably pushed me to advocate for him so strong and fall in his camp so strong. Cause I was very, now I was very sympathetic to like,
I don't know how he does any of this stuff. It was magic to me. I've had multiple times over the course of developing games where I thought, I have so much respect for people who just... get games out right i still think that as somebody who's put out games i still think it's amazing i really think it's really remarkable when people are able to like make designs and
have them be successful and making a good game design. I still feel like that. And I think it comes from that first failure is like, it takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of somebody doing, a lot of people doing a lot of really amazing work. So once I viewed him in that light. I started absorbing more from him. Right. And then I think he, he was the one again who advocated after Civ Rev. We had worked so closely. He was like, yes, Jake should definitely.
Get another shot. On XCOM. On XCOM. And it was a much bigger shot. It was right out of the gates with a big team. He was right out of the gates with a big team. So he definitely felt more confident. Yeah, that's interesting because that kind of sounds scary, right? Like you had a shot with a small team.
It didn't work out. And so the answer is like, OK, this will maybe didn't have enough people. Maybe that was a problem. Obviously, that's not what they were actually thinking. But that's what happened. It's like NFL head coaches, right? It's like, I mean, yeah, this guy wasn't any good, but he's done the job before. We should definitely give him a bigger opportunity at this point. He was standing on the sidelines. That's right. He does look like a coach. He's got that big chin. Like, oh, yeah.
This guy should definitely be our next designer. So, yeah, I mean, Sid gave me the shot again. And obviously because I'd worked with him on Civ Rev so closely. And, you know, I'd said before, Sid... Sid has said this, I've said this, that we're very, very different externally, but internally Sid and I have, and even the way we potentially go about the designs we make, they may be different, but like our core.
is very very how we think about players is very similar now a lot of that's because i learned from him but like the way we kind of think about design the way we think about players is very very similar so i think that he saw that in me
And he was like, okay, sure. Get another shot. You should make XCOM with a really big team. Right. Let me stop you for a second. Can you define how you two see... players the same because i think maybe i even come from a different place like like what what's what is the two because it is a very specific type of designer yeah what is that core um
I think it's being really hyper focused on player experience. So I do really think about the player experience, like the moment to moment player experience. That's kind of like everything for me. And so that does result in me making. virtually all my decisions based on either picturing the game playing and then once it's implemented all i do is i mean i play the game so much i played
XCOM, Midnight Suns, I played that game. Now, again, I don't want to denigrate the awesome people in QA. Maybe some of them had more hours in it than me, but not like actually playing the game. Thousands and thousands of hours of those games. And I just believe that comes from... that's what you have to do and then all thought i just don't do theory stuff i never do theory it's always like let's just get it in right focus on like what's the player's experience here and i think
I just benefit from being able to put myself in the shoes of players. When I play, I just think as a player. Right. And so, yeah, player experience is just everything for me. And I'm just really focused on that. The player's values. try to keep the player in the room with me. I try to be the player when I play and not be an intellectual designer and just play the game as a player. Right. You try to empathize with where the player is. Yeah. Yep. And so, and I think that Sid and I were always...
And I think he said that too. He's like, we were always the ones fighting for the player. So when there was friction with the team, it was more like developers versus player. I don't think I typically have very high-minded design ideals about we should do this or things should work this way.
There are a lot of people, I think, who are much smarter than me and who probably sound smarter than when they talk about design. They probably are smarter than me when it comes to it. But I think there's like...
You can never go wrong if you just play the game and you just think like, well, okay. I've got to think about this from the player's perspective. What are they actually doing? What have they just spent the last half hour doing? What do they value? What are they doing? If it's not fun, like... And again, this comes from Sid. And it also comes from my early failures, like being able to be not brutally, but just be self-aware of like, yeah, this isn't good. Like, this is not fun. Like I'm happy to.
I think it's important even as a designer or a team lead to be like, I'm happy to put myself out there first and say, oof, bad. That was my call. I made this decision. Let's talk about why I made the decision or we made this decision. So we can just say it was the right decision, maybe, but like it's wrong in practice. Yeah.
Okay. Well, let's talk about the second prototype or the second version. I think this is like a fascinating case study because how often does this happen where someone can kind of like try the same thing twice? It doesn't go as well as you'd hope the first time. And the second time around, it turns into, like, a game that, you know, is beloved, right? Yeah, rocky road on the way there. Right, sure, sure. But so what happened? Like, how did this actually work?
So then it was it was really exciting at Praxis at that moment because for the artists, for engineers. Because we were finally going to make a game that did not look like a Firaxis game. Right. Had up to that point. Subject matter was very different. Right. It was. you know, XCOM is violent, it's scary, it's modern military, it's all the things that FRAC just had not done before. It was a very, you know...
This doesn't mean there's value in this, but it was just a very un-Sid game. It was very not-Sid-like. And so it was really exciting for people just to be like, oh, we're going to do something very different. And it looked more like... modern games that like when we talked about like being cool yeah actually i felt like oh this is our way to be cool we're still gonna be turn-based but it's gonna be cool it's gonna look cool so everybody while on the project
Um, artists, they, everybody was just so excited to be involved with it. Um, and we started right away with a really cool, um, Greg Fertz, who was my art director. Like he made this awesome previs video that. I think still looks cool today. And it was brutal and violent. And it was just this really cool imagining of what XCOM was going to look like.
um yeah i think i remember i remember seeing that yeah and did that get released eventually yeah we released it eventually so people should be able to find it out there somewhere but even that still had like time units and and um right so i
Because, you know, the art team was asking, well, how is this going to play? And I was like, I don't know. I was like, it's going to have time units. It's going to be exactly a recreation of the original game, basically, but cooler. Right. It's going to look cooler. And actually... and so then we put together prototypes a tactical prototype and a strategy prototype so the way x-com works is you have these tactical combat battles that are turn-based you've got the squad um and then you go back to
the strategy layer or the geoscape as it was originally called, and you go back to your base and then you make a lot of decisions about research, about building gear, about building ships, building satellite coverage all over the world. And so we prototyped both of those. And this is a story I've told before, but it still is worth telling. So we worked with this really small contracting team to make the prototypes because they knew the Unreal Engine really well.
and there were these guys from um uh north carolina right down by epic they worked with epic a lot okay and they're just these country boys i say that as a country boy these like generally country boys came up to help us make the prototype
Uh, and they were awesome. They were super awesome. And, uh, we spent weeks with us and we just were all in this like little room. We were still in the old building, right? They were like teaching you how to use it and they were just flying. They were, they were super talented.
um and then they were there for maybe three or four weeks and on the last day there they were like everyone was having beers it was awesome we presented these like really small prototypes no real gameplay but they looked cool and so
um last day they were like hey do you want to play the game that we've been working on right and i was like sure and i sat down i played the game um it was really hard to understand you're like driving these cars around flying all over this arena and i was like i was like Cool. I was like cool guys. I was still young enough designer to think that I knew enough and I was like I was like I really like those guys I hope they do well. I was like but night I was like good lord
You know, not like me. Not like me in this awesome XCOM game. These guys. So that company was Psyonix. Oh, so that was Rocket League. That was Rocket League. I played Rocket League before it came out. And I played it. And like the genius I am, I clearly saw.
that there was no value in that game. Well, you probably played the first version of it. I did. Which has some other name. Super Rocket Battle cards or something like that. Which did not take off. Did not take off. No, I mean, I don't remember if it was like... a complete failure or it just did okay or whatever but like um i mean that's an interesting story in itself right because they they
iterated on it and and they had this amazing success even though the first version you know just did okay i guess so yeah i mean maybe it's not surprising that at that moment it wasn't you know it wasn't looking like it was going to take over the world because that would have been seven or eight years later, right? It took a while. Dave, who ran the team, he was saying they were going to move out to California, where they moved, San Diego or something. He was talking about that.
And I played their game. They're such brave. They're really brave. But I just remember playing it being like, I don't know. Was it still like kicking a soccer ball around? Like the first version? Wow. It was. It was kicking a soccer ball around these little rocket cars in an arena. Boy, someone had a dream.
and just did not give up that dream. Did not give up. And guess what? Good for them. I just saw an article in Forbes talking about they were like doing profiles of super yacht owners. And it was Dave. It was Dave. And he was on a... gorgeous white new super yacht. That's just funny. He was scrapping by helping our team put together our first XCOM prototype. Good for them.
so then after that we really embarked on i think we had a year to do a vertical slice so yeah so how are you approaching this differently from the design point of view right like compared to what you did before so i was now i um i felt that i at least understood
system design and oh you've you've really got to like build these systems not what does it look like but you really have to kind of build these systems starting to think about systems from the ground up not about like top down like what does it look like and then
you know just implement um engineering instead i was like okay we've got to do systems here i got to think about this from a design standpoint um my challenge though was that i was still thinking okay i'll remake the original game with all of its idiosyncrasies and complexity of time units but there wasn't any there was no cover at that point so it was like time units but i also wanted classes i want to add modern concepts like you know soldier classes and i added a few new mechanics um and
You still were like you started the mission on the dropship so you had to walk all your soldiers slowly out of the dropship. All these things that I just kind of inherited because I didn't have a better idea. Yeah. Inherited is the right word. Yeah. Like when you're doing this and it's tough, it's hard to realize the stuff that you really don't need. Yeah. Right. Because you're saying like, that was a fantastic game. Like who am I to, if I don't have a better idea, like.
Yes, you need to get off the dropship. And so that's a good example of something where... So we made this vertical slice. It looked very cool. There were legitimate design systems working here. You were facing... choices maybe not particularly interesting choices um but it did look pretty cool and you could tell all right this soldier has this weapon and operates differently from this soldier who's carrying a rocket launcher
We even had like a tank like a mini tank unit at that point But we presented the vertical slice and it was this really big day And we had this really big party at the company. And everyone was really kind of excited. I remember we had this big presentation. The company was energized. And big party. And then we went out downtown. How long had you worked on at that point? About a year. About a year. It was April 23rd. Okay. April 23rd. Jeez, you got a good...
Good mind for dates. Yeah. Well, yeah. Some positive negative. We'll see where the story goes. But anyway, go ahead. It was April 23rd and we'd probably start on it the summer before. So maybe nine, 10 months or something like that. And so the problem was that when people played it, fans of the original XCOM were like, oh, this is pretty cool. Everybody else was like, what the hell is this? They're like, this is so complicated. We just don't get it. What am I supposed to be doing?
The feedback was pretty unequivocal that it was, that people just, they didn't like it, right? It was just complicated. Nobody wanted to replay it. After you'd played the mission one time, there was no, nobody even wanted to retry it, right?
Even the people who... Even the people who were like, oh, I see what you're doing. It's XCOM. It doesn't feel as good as the original for some reason, but it's XCOM and it looks cool. Did you feel that way when you played it? I did. I think I did. I think that... Again, I was so like laser focused on we got to hit this deadline. Yeah. That I wasn't really paying attention. And then it came out and the feedback came back and it wasn't.
very positive and so i would already been primed for failure at that point so i wasn't even in that point i was kind of like yeah i have this big team i have a lot of people i could blame but i was still kind of like yeah no this one's on me i i didn't This isn't a good game. This is not a good game. And so that was even lower. Can you find why that was not a good game if it was very similar to the original XCOM?
So it was missing, it still was missing magic, I think. I think that the systems were there, but the choices being presented to the player weren't that interesting. I'd have to go back and watch it and see what magic it was missing from the original. Because I really tried to ape the original game. It was cooler too. It had all these opening movies.
You know, it's like the last hope of a designer is kind of like, oof, I hope once we get all this cool stuff and music in there, it'll help it. I remember you guys put a lot of effort into the presentation.
Aspect early on which is kind of unusual. Yeah, for access, you know, like like really a big that was that was a big part of it and Like that part did matter like to like give people the vision of like okay we see this is going to be like uh i don't know if you say triple a or whatever but this is like this that's what we're aiming for that's our bar you know we're trying to hit that get people excited about that that that was worthwhile
But like, I think that saved the project in some ways. It bought me runway through the work that Greg and the art team did and it looking cool and that cool video they made. It definitely extended the runway from our publisher because they were like, well, this looks like a cool game. We don't understand the gameplay, but...
Frax is always good at that stuff. So I think it just kind of bought us runway where they're like, can you guys figure this out? It's like, yeah, no problem. Yeah. But yeah, let's get back to what did you feel like it was missing compared to the original? Or maybe like the original was... Not something that could work with current production values? Yeah, I think it was overcomplicated for sure because I'd added stuff on top of it. And I think that...
They were really... I think you could make the original way that was... interesting but i mean there were some really important elements like the fog of war wasn't working as well because it's such a complicated thing to do right um i think that the pacing of the enemies like they're really spread out on the map so i think the Just the like map design wasn't great.
And so overall, the experience just wasn't very compelling. I mean, I feel like the original XCOM, the design, I mean, this is the thing. You design games based off of literally things like the resolution of the screen that you have and the controls you have at the time and so on and so forth. The box helps, right? Having a box helps. And the original XCOM, it feels like a game.
for something where it's a very tile-based game, where there's a lot of tiles on the screen, you can see a lot of the map, and there's a certain regularity of like, oh, I get it, there's a lot of randomness here, and creatures can kind of come from anywhere, and whatever. As opposed to what you guys are making, which is like a little much more of a constructed experience, right? Yeah.
Now that I think about it, the original, yeah, it wasn't tile-based. It felt like free movement. Oh, really? Okay. Yeah, and it was funny because... I recognize like, look, this is even playing and I was like, man, this is, this is not a fun experience. And I really did after working with Sid and seeing the kind of games that Fraxis made that. that you had already made, SIP4 at that point, and seeing the games that FRAX had made, the games I'd worked on.
I really did want, I was never like, I want the coolest looking game. It never really mattered to me. Like I really, I was a designer at that point. I was like, I really just want this to be like a very fun, like addictive, engaging experience. I'd played enough of those from... the company I worked for, that that's what I wanted. And I knew this wasn't that. And so that was really, that's definitely maybe my lowest point professionally because now I had a huge team on my back, a huge team.
And I had just spent a year, and I had made something, and it really had always stuck to me. I was like, I hate that feeling for my team. I just hated that. I was like, man, I just have taken so much of these people's time. I just felt really low and I was like, I don't know, maybe I can't do this. And I felt really panicked because, you know, it just, all of us were playing it and we're like, this is not that great of an experience. So.
I'm still surprised today at what I did. I must have been really panicked. And so what I did was I stripped everything off, out of the game. I just had soldiers. I said, okay. Like, how do I make this like fun, Sid fun? I was like, like immediately fun. Right. And so I was like, okay, like I need to make just, I need. I suppose you remember, you saw Sid just throw stuff away. Yeah. Right. Maybe that was like what gave you the mindset to do this. Yeah. And I remember sitting down with.
the leads and i said look i have to i have to re i have to rethink this whole thing yeah and they're okay because they were playing it as well and so they're like okay and so i i remember threw everything away made a very tiny map
and put a soldier on there and aliens, maybe two soldiers, two aliens, and it was just gray box. Everything was gray. And immediately, like, cover was... I wish I remember where this came from, but I think it was like just thinking about like Gears of War or something where I was like, okay, like I need to like...
have interesting tactical decisions. And, you know, they did a great thing about cover. So I was like, okay, like. Because you didn't have cover before then? No cover before. Okay, right. So I was like, okay, run to cover. That'll be it. That's a soldier thing. Like run the cover. Basically, I probably did take that from Gears of War. And so the way that I made this interesting and so, so simple was I said, okay, the soldier starts with a number on them.
And it would be like a, I don't know, one, two. And then the aliens would have a number on them. And then when you took cover, the number would go up. And based on the type of, if it was high cover, low cover, like the number would just. increase and that number was like everything was your like offense and your defense it was all rolled into one number it's kind of a stupid idea but but what happened was that at least that was my discovery of the like oh
That's something to aim for. It's a five second loop where you're like, oh, it's actually kind of interesting. Like now I'm choosing between where's the best cover and I'm trying to get near this alien to shoot them. And I was like, okay, so there was a five second loop, which oddly, I mean, that is the first thing I did. We still have screenshots of this like little tiny map that I made.
That is the thing that made XCOM. That is the thing that made XCOM. The tactical comment XCOM made me unknown work was the cover stuff, basically. Sure. That was the very first thing that I tried. The one number was obviously kind of stupid, so then we went to two numbers. Then I was like, all right, we're going to do two numbers. One's an offensive number and one's a defensive number.
And you could increase the offensive number by getting a height advantage or by, you know, using certain abilities or you could get a defensive number. But now it's aliens have one, an offensive number, a defensive number. You have an offensive number, a defensive number.
So we just started trying things like that and slowly it started taking shape as like, okay, this is now fun for five seconds. Now it's fun for 10 seconds. You put two numbers on there. It's fun for 30 seconds, right? And there's still problems with it. But starting to work up from the like, well, it's fun for 30 seconds. Like now what's the problem? Well, there's, you know, fighting one alien is not fun. You need to fight like three aliens at a time. Right.
And so then it started becoming fun for like five minutes. And then eventually you get to a place where you're like, okay, tactical combat is, is better, right? It's better. And there's, you can see, okay, this. is different. It feels like XCOM, but it definitely, the mechanics were different, but it started to become like moderately fun for like minutes at a time. And I think that was something that...
I'd never done anything that was like moderately fun for minutes at a time. So I think everybody started being like re-energized as like, okay, this is actually kind of fun to play. Right. This is going somewhere. I mean, it took years from that point to get to where it was, but it really...
didn't start with like cover was the first thing and that's where that's kind of the thing that pulled it through right huh um all right did you have it i'm still a little surprised that like it wasn't originally on a grid because that seems like that's a pretty significant shift at some point yeah yeah it was and well it was and then of course it was on a grid once we added cover i think that that you know that required right okay so so the second the second iteration this is called combat 2.0
You know how teams, you develop internal names for things, and by the end of the game, you hate those names so much? Combat 2.0. There was another one called Constant Combat. But yeah, Combat 2.0 is what this was called. And it was. It was cover-based, and it became Grid... base because that was the only way to do to make cover work right yeah yeah it brought in a number of things um that again you required iteration over years again enemy unknown was a really long project as well um
And it benefited from the fact also that there was an XCOM shooter going on at that time. Right. Yep. So the bureau thing, the bureau, and that I think also gave us runway, right? Because everybody was kind of focused on that and they really wanted that to come out first. And so that just kept.
It kept us like low profile in our publishers eyes and it just kept giving us time because they really wanted to like push that project, which was fine. I mean, you know, you had a little chip on your shoulder about it, but I think that. It was fine, and it actually ended up helping us quite a bit. To some extent, your project was around as a way to send everyone who was upset that they were making an XCOM shooter. It was like, it's okay, guys. It's fine. That's right.
is making your XCOM. I think having a grid is very fundamental to making a lot of turn-based strategy games work. Well, I don't know. Midnight Suns. Well, yeah, no. We'll talk about that. We will absolutely talk about that. Because I got weirded out by Midnight Suns when I first played it. But you made some interesting choices that make it work. The ones that I think are really...
counterintuitive like the essentially the infinite movement yeah yeah i'm like what is going on and then like okay i saw i get it i see why like you kind of need that to avoid the grid but at any rate i mean like right the grid really like limits you okay you can do this or you can do that and you're gonna end up exactly here and you know I mean it's all it's all like
pruning the problem space right grid is great for that right there's intuitive like you could talk about adjacency you can talk about cardinal directions you can i mean the grid is offers so much you can distance is now easy to understand right if the grid is visible for sure you can say like oh range now understand there's so many things a grid gives you because if you have like a vague circle you're always like am i in it am i out it so and so forth right
Did you have fights with the artists over the grid though? Because that's what I would expect would be the issue. Artists hates grids. And one thing that was really interesting that was really complicated was... um the resistance to put grid on 90 degrees right so to put cover on 90 degrees okay so for a while we actually had cover slanted which really messed with the grid right so we'd have cover slanted across like you could have across
Yeah. So it became really difficult to calculate. And so, so yeah, we had like angled cover. Um, and, and what I have like not.
objects on the map that were not aligned to the grid yes okay and it looked marginally better right but this was one of those things that i think um art and maybe even me too maybe where i thought like well yeah we can't just snap everything to 90 degrees that would look silly right um but it was causing an enormous amount of problems and like how do we explain to the player like
again you can't see now you're not lined up on the grid because maybe you're on the side of this like big angled car and it just it wasn't yeah yeah there was a grid but you weren't following it right yeah And so what I talked about was before we had these things called mutator Mondays. That was one of the mutators was make the cover. Make everything on the grid. On the grid. Make it 90 degrees. We did it. We were like, well, this eliminates a lot of UI.
This is so much better. And you know what? It looks fine. It honestly looks fine. And so that was one of those moments where we did it and... I just went to Greg and I was like, we're doing this. And he understood. But it was a thing where we were like, we can't possibly not have angled cover. It just won't look cool and realistic. And we snapped and we're like, the game is so much better and it looks fine.
Yeah. I mean, it just makes things so much simpler for the player. So much simpler. I mean, they're already handling so much anyway. Like, you don't want them guessing. Yeah, grids are funny. I remember with Civ 4, sort of classic grid argument. like designer versus artist argument in that I always hated the weird two, two and a half D diamond grids that were introduced in Civ two and Civ three. It just bugged the heck out of me because movie, if you.
move east-west versus north-south, you go twice as many pixels east-west. So it means like you just intuitively can't figure out how close tiles are. Like two tiles which look close together might be
as far apart as two other tiles that look much farther apart. And I just thought that was horrible for the player. I remember all that math. I mean, again, being the graphics programmer on Civ III, I remember all that math. It was weird. The way you had to animate, the way you had to start and stop animations based on running.
between these different tiles because of that whole. Yeah. And I get it for games that are like in a building or something. Like, I'm like, okay, fine. But like, we're this giant world map. And of course I wish that we just done hexes. Like eventually this problem just went away. Right. But I was like, no, I want the grid straight ahead. I look like a chessboard. Like, you know, it's, it's.
It's much easier to code, but that really wasn't the point. The main point was the player is just going to be able to handle it much easier. They don't care. And the artists were very against this because they were like, I don't want to see buildings straight ahead.
look better from an angle and maybe that's true or maybe that's just how they're used to things at that point everything was in that kind of two and a half d style um and so we put in this this hot key where you could hit a button and the the whole map would rotate by 45 degrees so like the artist had the view of the map that they liked, and we could use it for screenshots or whatever. And I was like, problem solved. And I doubt any Civ IV player ever even was aware that that button was there.
Yeah, I mean, there are just some, I mean, the more you can do to... Show the player the design, like elevate the design up to the player, the better off you are. Otherwise, yeah, it's all, it's going to be UI tricks. It's going to be caveats. It's the kinds of things like caveats that kill you in like strategy games, tactics games where you're like, yeah, we just got.
teach them this one concept and you're like you are going to run out of those fast yeah you only have so many of those you have a few of those right and and you really don't want to do it on things that are easily solved right don't waste it on easily solved things yeah so speaking of which let's talk about action points
Because that was the big thing that jumped out to me from having played the original versus the new version. That's true. That's true. So, yeah, the idea of... And I think I took that one, I think, came from tabletop gaming, right? So the idea of... So that also was a part of Combat 2.0. There was the introduction of cover. I guess we should say...
For people who haven't played the original, in the original XCOM you had like 10 action points. In time units, it just depended. You could gain more based on your soldiers. Which is another thing, like that's a big thing that you're going to lose when you drop down to two. So people will be like, oh no, I don't want to lose that. But at any rate, you have time units, everything you did.
It could be like two time units or five time units or whatever. So it meant you had to figure out all the different permutations of the things you can do during your turn. But actually what you said is a very interesting point. It's something that still is really important. thing as a designer and we did this minute sounds and everything is like when you give up an interesting design space so progression um
Progression is so important, especially with games that are longer. So like XCOM games are really long, but Civ is long enough too, where giving up something that you can hook rewards into or stat increases, like progression, is critical to making...
Those are the big wheels you're turning. It's like, oh, later game, you know, this is going to be rewarding. So something like time units that you're like, yeah, better soldiers, different classes have different numbers of time units. Equipping certain weapons.
they can give you time units like i can make 10 abilities out of time units where it's like oh yeah this ability like doubles your time units well that's interesting you should use it earlier when somebody's like hasn't used any time units as opposed to there's you could do so many things with numbers like that so you're right giving up time units not just from a like oh will this be similar for the player but as a designer being like yeah and i've made that that's where maybe my biggest
I have to really check myself on as a donor because it's very hard for me to think of giving up like reward, like progression, things like that is very hard for me because I always know like I was run out of those. I was run out of, I wish I could tie more rewards. more abilities, more gear, all these things, those stats are so valuable when you're making a game. So you're right. Giving up time units was tough because it was like, man, there was...
Time units do so much. They do so much. For the original game, for the tactical combat, it seems like half the game is about time units, right? That's a huge thing. Have I saved enough? But of course... Maybe there's a way to do that. I'm sure there's a way to do that in interesting ways. But it was a very complicated thing about the original game as well. Which is like, don't move too far. And again, somewhat interesting. You could...
Take this type of shot if you save this many time units. You can take this type of shot. Then a snapshot is the best you can do if you've used up most of your time units. Right. And all these different abilities you could do. in any order all they did was cost time units and so it's it is theoretically an interesting system right And as a designer, it's a very interesting system. And as a player, all it is is just, it's nonsense. It's funny, even you're talking about now.
I remember, you know, when I first played your XCOM, I was like, oh. You know, you made this really bold choice to simplify it down to just like two actions. And I get that. But even now talking about it now, I'm getting excited about time units. Timing units sound awesome. Think of all the things you can do. How does my squad interact with time units? There are certain aliens that do.
certain things with your time it's just a great number to like and having like it's something that's a factor of 10 right you can do those little 10% like oh you know something happens and like you're you know the person you're bonded with does something well so you get two time gets back
That's right. And yeah, I've taken this serum and I've gained like 10 time units, but next turn I'm going to lose 10 times. And it's just fun as a... as a designer because you're like well it ain't health right and it ain't damage oh that's a new stat right it's energy basically and so you go this is really cool yep um and with with two you'll never have that granularity right i mean forget it right so yeah
And one thing I think is, and there are a few things that I think about XCOM where there are a few things that I still think like this, a couple of things could have been done better. One thing. That I think I always just accepted is like well, this is how it works So the two actions that was one of the very first things I took that from
Tabletop gaming, probably from Necromunda or something. But tabletop gaming, that's more standard to where it's like you got to move and you got an action. You got to move and an action. And in XCOM, it was like, if you take an action. First like the action ends your turn actually will end your soldiers turn and
You could take a move and then take an action. Or you could take a move and then another move and then end your turn. I always hated how like weird and kind of that it wouldn't feel very intuitive. There are a few rules you had to learn where it's like you could move and then you could move again. That would end your turn. Right. Or you could.
move and take an action that's the standard thing but if you take an action it's just going to end your turn right away why would it have broken if you had just allowed them to like just to always take two actions so two actions would have been a problem right i don't know that i could have like oh sorry i meant take an action and move but i guess it's the same issue right so the nice thing
the nice thing about that i couldn't resolve about this was saying there's a move and then an action is that it really like rewarded or kind of prodded the player movement, right? It was like, it's almost free. Like, why would you take an action without taking a move? Like, there's probably a better situation. And what happened was we also... So we always talked about battle geometry, which is basically like your angles and where enemies are positioned and where.
the soldiers are positioned and always moving for better either better cover or a height advantage or a better flanking shot on the sailing So we always forced the aliens to move every turn, even if they survived. You got to force them to move just to make the battle geometry different every single turn. Right. And so players would always find themselves like, well, I got to move. I got to move. I got to move all the time.
And if there are enough interesting spots, then the player always feels like, okay, you should always move. And then again, those are the kinds of rules that are fun because you break them with a class like the sniper where it's like, you know, if they move, they can't shoot. So their gun requires. They if you move you can't shoot this diaper apples and then that kind of breaks that rule
But yeah, so yeah, we basically used tabletop mechanics for the soldiers and just said, all right, it's moving action. That's it, right? So time units out the window. So when did you make that choice? That was on Combat 2.0. That was just to simplify everything. Because a lot of the feedback I was getting was like, this is so complicated. This is so complicated. And it just didn't feel... I mean, looking at...
Again, the five-second loop of every game Praxis has made, maybe every good game, I don't know. But they were always such simple decisions. And it was... The XCOM prototype I made and even the original XCOM, they were not, the five second loop was not simple at all. It was like, okay.
I got to like sit here for a second and there was like no easy decision here. Like I got to do math, right? I got to do math before I move. Which is really weird. And so instead it was just boiling it down to like, let's just make these decisions simple. and then it's easier to build fun on top of that so yeah time units out the window and then everybody could like
Everybody could play, right? In its simplest iteration, Combat 2.0, everybody could pick it up and play and be like, okay, I understand what's going on here. You couldn't really see what the design was in the prototype. But at least with Combite 2.1, people were like, the design is pretty upfront and obvious. The soldier's got a number on him. I can move and I can take an action. I can shoot a gun.
Yeah, that's it. Was your priority starting to change a bit during the... I don't know. I'm maybe thinking for you, but like... you know, early on, like what you were jazzed about was like, I want to remake XCOM. Yeah. Right. And so at that point, maybe it would have been okay to be like, okay, the people who like XCOM are going to, you know, like I want to make them happy.
Right. As opposed to now what you're saying is to some extent, like, I want to make sure everyone can play this game. It was, yeah. And I think it was, it basically came down to like, I want to make a fun game. Right. Because I'd seen the games that. had been made at Fraxis by you, by Sid. And I was like, well, I know what a fun game is. And I was like...
I mean, it has been my lifelong philosophy. If you make a great game like that, it'll kind of work itself out. I don't know if that's entirely true anymore, but it really was like... I felt my job was as the designer. I like what keeps me up to this day. What keeps me up sweating, staring at the scene late at night is like.
the game's not fun, right? The game's not, maybe fun's an overused word, but the game's not engaged, whatever you want to say. Like, I only sweat about, like, how fun is the game. Like, that's the only thing that bothers me. Like, I... I'd trade anything at the end of the day for the game that I have made is considered fun. And so I think from that point...
Maybe that was just always part of it, but that was where it became very stark. The thing I had made was not fun. And I was like, okay, I'm going to do everything I can to make fun game, which to me just came as like, all right, I got to make this thing simple as hell and start from there. So yeah, I think it was more a case of if it's not fun, it's never going to succeed. Okay, so Combat 2 came out. 2.0. 2.0. You got to get the term right.
people like that a lot more people like that a lot more so what what happened after that and then it was you know years of iteration that's i think after that we had we did a whole other vertical slice um And I think we still had angled cover, and maybe it took us another year. And we were clearly making advances in game, but people now can understand the game. It was a little more straightforward. I didn't have a strategy layer yet.
right um but we're still working on combat i don't know how much how long the second vertical slice took but it was this it was pretty cool looking and the game that was a little more clear to understand i think at that point we still had like soldiers like two numbers on them here's my offense here's my defense so as they moved around they'd have like two big numbers on them
And then we'd have a little pop-up of like, okay, well, if your offense is five and the enemy you're shooting at is three, you know, like it means that would translate into your two hit percentage and things like that. Yeah. Two hit percentage we should talk about too because I'm not convinced that that's a...
great design idea. I know it's fundamental to what XCOM is. You did this. Yes, I did. I'm not arguing against you. Just my experience of then going to Midnight Suns and then going back to play XCOM. I was like, ugh. Oof. Oof. It's nothing like doing everything right and then having a catastrophic failure as in missing a shot. Yeah. Well, you know, it's interesting because we both iterated on, essentially you've iterated on XCOM three times. Yeah. And I've iterated on Civ.
three times, I guess, you know, and, um, it takes some time to, you dropped a lot of stuff. Like we're very talking, I mean, dropping time units is huge. Right. And, um, you know, you, you made a lot of changes, but it's still, it's funny. You can still, there's still.
stuff to change there's still stuff we're inheriting where we're like you know what actually would be better without whatever because um i've moved away from probabilistic combat as well right like old world there there's like a very small thing there's like a critical chance but that's it everything else is um
completely determined deterministic like it'll tell you what you know everything every time you attack i'll tell you ahead of time exactly what it does which is what midnight suns does as well uh and in fact you're you're i you know i actually jotted down when i was playing what you do how you do critical I'm not super happy that we have criticals. If we're going to go all the way, we really should go all the way because we have an undo mechanic.
We pre-roll everything, so you don't undo and then keep attempting a critical. But it's still kind of awkward. We actually have a feature in where... like in in multiplayer we go ahead and we'll actually show a little lightning bolt over units that will get a critical that turn so like you don't
You're not encouraged to try all your units just to see which ones will get a critical. But you do the thing where... uh it's just attached to the card when you draw it it becomes it becomes input randomness instead of output randomness like it happens before you decide and i was like oh that's great yeah you know i should do something like that basically oh yeah having a lot of stuff happen on draw was
great and that just kind of helped solve a lot of things for us and we have a character and that sounds jumping in here but we had a character minute sounds who Her ability set, her name is Nico, her ability set is based on randomness. Right, yep. And so we called her roulette, which is this card could do this, it could do this, it could do this. And the only way to do that was like, it happens on draw.
Like we will choose which one of those things it is because otherwise it just doesn't fit within the unit. Like it just, the whole tactics it's built on like predetermined outcomes. You've got to be able to plan. multiple cards ahead and so yeah if you have randomness it's cool and then you see it when it's on draw you'd be like okay now now i can still play with this thing yeah
Yeah, so it's just interesting that we both moved away from. Are you familiar with the phrase input randomness, output randomness? I'm not super happy with it, but that's a common way you've just described. Yeah, and the way I've said to people is that it is...
You know, Midnight Suns is XCOM basically reversed thematically and mechanically in the sense that in XCOM, so you know, right? You know what your soldiers... can do you just don't know if it'll succeed so this is input for example so in exome you always knew what your soldiers could do you just didn't know if it would succeed right there's a chance to succeed or fail
And in Midnight Suns, you don't know what your heroes can do every turn. But what they can do will always succeed. You'll know exactly what they can do. And I think that that was basically just reversing. And even thematically, like in XCOM, you're like... the you're fighting against superheroes like you're the weakest thing on the battlefield right and then in Midnight Suns it's like now you are you are they're trapped in here with you right yeah okay well yeah let's talk I mean let's let's
finish it up here let's talk about two hit you know percentage and like i mean obviously you inherited that from the original xcom and it's not it wasn't that's not at all like a unique mechanic at the time like that was just the way you know you're playing risk you know you're on the dice and seeing what happens and yeah yeah so is this something you thought about when you were designing the first one or it was just yeah
You know, the original did have it. The original did have a two-hit percentage. And so I kind of carried that over, but it was based on... ours was much more upfront about the math so we wanted to say like okay the reason you have it would just list out the reason you have a two hit is eventually it'd be like look your soldier has these bonuses or you flank the alien and so that takes away this or you've got a high
You know, you've got this, you've got elevation. So that gives you this bonus. And so that in itself is, it's almost like the time units thing we're talking about where it's like, oh my gosh, it's so fun to be like this ability boosted. This thing takes away. your soldiers, you know, confused and so that whatever it is, it's fun, right? As a designer, I think even for a player manipulating a number like that, that is...
That has that powerful an outcome can be fun. We're like, I'm going to do everything I can to get this really high percentage. But of course, you know, percentages. They don't map. You can think like an engineer. You can think like a designer. You can think like the universe and say, well, the percentage means this. Percentages don't mean that to players. Right. As, you know, Sid has talked about before. And it's very true.
75% is 100%. To players' minds, a 75% chance to hit is damn near close to 100. It is more than 50. And so to account for that, of course, 75% in XCOM is not 75%. I take 75% and I multiply it by 1.2 basically. And so it's always the percentage you see. Now, at the higher difficulty levels, the percent you see is the actual percent. But at the normal difficulty level...
Is that explained in the difficulty level help at all? Not at all. Not at all. Never explained. It is 1.2. And then I add a factor for if you have missed a shot, a previous missed shot starts stacking chance to hit on the next soldier. Okay. So. It's just meant to not make you feel bad. So the number you see in normal difficulty in XCOM is not the actual number. It's always skewed in the player's favor. Because of that weirdness of...
80%, like, come on. Like, missing an 80% shot, like, it just doesn't count. It doesn't compute, right? Yep. But even so, you can miss shots. And it was... It's a weird thing. Again, as I said, what do you do if it's less than 50% like you do anything or there is so if less than 50% I'm pretty sure that there was no there's no bonus attached to that. Okay, there is a miss
Yeah, we would just start stacking like any misses you had. I think if the shot was 50% above and you missed it, that would just stack. Whoever shoots next, they're going to get a 15% chance to hit bonus. That's invisible. You won't know that, right? But we just have a missed counter and it's like, okay. Yeah, we're not going to like make you feel too bad. But regardless, the problem with two hit percentages, number one is you can't as a human being.
You cannot psychologically, like, you just don't understand the numbers, right? Right. Your brain won't let you understand. Like, 75 is a one out of four chance to miss. That's a very high chance to miss, right? Right. That feels weird. You can't account for the players situation in every situation. They can do everything right.
And they can still miss. And that's catastrophic in XCOM. Like it's absolutely catastrophic to miss a shot potentially. Right. That's a really weird situation to be in where you're like, well, that's just the breaks, you know. Yes, you did everything right. You've made the right choices, but I'm not going to reward you for it. You're just going to have to just accept as a player, like, that bad thing just happened. And you can. I think players can.
But yeah, now we're gonna start talking about permadeath. Yeah, because like to me that this question also fits into the framing of the rest of the game. We had some similar issues with percentages in Civ IV. We would tell you what percentages that you're going to win combat. It's a little different because it's not just yes or no. Sometimes you do more damage. Sometimes you do less damage. But like...
Losing was never really catastrophic in Civ. Right. Right. Like, you know, you don't like, okay, I didn't kill this alien. So now he's going to kill my soldier and now he's gone. Right. Right. I mean, obviously we lose units, but you had just so many more units and you can build more units and whatever. And so like in that context of XCOM, it makes this type of randomness like a lot more dangerous. It does. It does. And so you have to.
One, it's why, you know, XCOM must be turn-based, right? You must, as the player, be in control of everything. We have to be as upfront with you as possible about, like, why is it easier to hit percentage this? And even so, we didn't show you, like... what aliens hit percentages were, who they were talking. We didn't give you all the information. And so these bad things were happening. I assume you were doing all sorts of funny business in the background for what the aliens hit you or not. Yeah.
you know and it's it's a you know of course you know it's not about the aliens being smart it's about the aliens making the game interesting right yeah i was all based on making the game interesting but the the interesting thing about this was the fact that anybody accepted permadeath when you could just reload but what would happen
is that missions were 40 minutes long yep you made a lot of choices before then that put you in that situation your health would get whittled down and then it in a lot of cases when a soldier died you'd be like I mean like there's there's no easy way to work out of this except for like reloading 20 minutes before right and so a lot of times people go like okay that soldier died like I either have to accept that or reload from a long time ago right and so
permadeath was a thing that would happen um and it felt the missing the shots obviously may have felt you know less than fair if you missed a really good shot But being upfront about as much as we could, like saying XCOM feels almost like a sport.
where it's like okay these are the rules and you know if you sometimes like if if you can think like well i guess i could have put the soldier on better cover or something like that i guess i could have done this earlier in the mission players would learn to accept permadeath and it always it always is really interesting to me how players did accept permadeath and it was such a huge boost to the game because what it meant were that the stakes were real
In XCOM, the stakes are very real. They're actual, unlike a lot of games, and Midnight Suns as well, there's no real penalty for losing. And in XCOM, it was like, oh, there's definitely like... Because you know the stakes are real, because you know bad things can really happen, then the highs are much higher. Because you're like, ooh, when I succeed, I succeeded against real odds, not fake video game odds. It feels good to win. A combat mission of Midnight Suns.
But there are a lot of ways to do that. And you were never in like real jeopardy. In XCOM, you're like, well, when you succeed, you were in real jeopardy. Like, those guys could have died. Maybe some of the guys did die. Every time you go on a mission, you're in real jeopardy. And it created like a sort of like, oof, the stress is a lot higher.
Right. So it was a powerful part of what the game was, for sure. Yeah. Permadeath is something that I have a lot of mixed feelings about in XCOM because I would like to have seen how it would have played out. with a more forgiving system. Because to me, the big issue with permadeath is it encourages very conservative play. Yeah. Right? Like that's the issue I often have with it, which is like, well, I'm just going to creep forward as slowly as I can.
And I know you guys introduced things like time missions and various other things. XCOM 2, not to everybody's joy. I did implement timers in XCOM 2 to basically say like, no, no, no, no, no. You can't do that. Yeah. addresses the problem to some extent it's a hammer for sure but yeah like it's kind of like that that at his core
I'm playing conservatively because permanent is there. Yeah. If instead like it was like, okay, we're just going to have a very detailed injury system. Right. And like, you know, that like It's very rare you could lose a soldier or maybe even just do, I mean, I assume this is the way Midnight Suns works. Like there's no way.
your soldiers can die period you know like they may be like you're like this guy has been is going to be out of commission for like three months okay fine but you know that like you won't lose your investment like would that be would that lead to a better game or not yeah It's a good question. I don't think, because again, I think, you know, Midnight Suns, the worst that can happen is the heroes get injured and they're out for like two or three missions. Right.
And so there is some penalty to it. And but that's really the function of that really is to force you to. jog up your squads yeah mix up mix them up which is good too that's just another positive right yep yeah it was always something we're always focused on on xcom and midnight suns as well as like using as many mechanics to force players to like
Play with the hands you're dealt. That was just over. Play with the hands you're dealt. Even if your soldiers don't get killed, they take a shot, they're injured. You cannot take XCOM soldiers on a mission. If they are missing any hit points from the previous mission, you can't. And that was basically to be like, yep, because you got to, it's...
As a player, if you were able to take the same soldiers on the same missions, you would go, this is getting boring. Like, why do these missions play out the same? It's like, yeah, because you've got your super squad and you know exactly what works with the super squad. Instead, it's better to be like, nope, you got to bring this rookie with you.
you and all of a sudden you just have these great moments or you know the rookie dies and you don't care but it builds these like really cool emergent stories permadeath you know That's maybe an example of something where I would say if somebody was like, what if we got rid of permadeath? My gut reaction is like, no. Because? Because I do think that...
I do think that the feeling of the stakes, like raising the stakes and making a player feel like, oh, there's real stakes here. Like, I do think that's very powerful. It makes the combat experiences really powerful. But again, I've done enough of this to know. I did Midnight Suns and it was like, it's fine. For XCOM, I would say that I would be...
Does it make the design better or worse? I don't know. I think the fabric of what XCOM is, I think you'd have a real hard problem selling that to people like XCOM without permadeath. It would just be too much of a problem, I think. I mean, are there things in Civ where you're like, well... I don't know if it helps it or hurts it, but like it just isn't worth the like.
trouble how people would react. At this point, especially having been able to make old, I mean, it's funny, we are in such very similar situations, like having made Old World where I didn't, there wasn't a requirement for anything. I really only took forward the stuff that I wanted, which is kind of similar to, I mean,
Midnight Suns, you kind of inverted a lot of stuff, right? So, you know, we both got a chance to really drop everything that we didn't want. So, yeah, I don't think there's anything that's completely untouchable. i mean some of the stuff is just so much like obviously you're gonna have cities you're gonna have a tech tree right like because they're really important but but i guess you're asking is there something that i think is problematic but i can't i feel like i can't take out yeah right uh
I don't know. I mean, nothing really springs to mind off the top of my head. And I just think, yeah, I just think permadeath is kind of it. I... You know, if I was making XCOM, I also would think hard about this because I do think like, okay, so yeah, maybe there is a good example.
uh something that i did drop in old world which is i we dropped um counter counter damage attack like when you do it when you do a when you do a when you attack a unit in old world you only do damage you don't risk anything you're only hurting the unit you're attacking okay right um and that's a big one there are there is a like a five percent of players who like just like they're like what There's two things we dropped that have had that response. One is...
uh, forcing people to found their cities at preset city sites. And that's to prevent city spam is to like, you know, have a sense of like, okay, this map should have this many other cities. It's also to like focus. focus like a lot of like the diplomacy and stuff around these specific sites like there's a lot of benefits but yeah there's you know like you know a certain a certain percent of our negative steam reviews are just like like
I can't found anywhere, thumbs down, right? Just straight up. And another, the next most common one is like, combat is weird. Like, I can't defend. I get attacked, I don't do any counter damage, thumbs down. And I did it for a very specific reason. I wanted the game to be more dynamic. I thought attacking is more fun than defending.
You know, I want people taking actions. And that fit with the order system, right? Like we have orders, you use them to move your units around. If you're just sitting defending, you're not using your orders, right? It doesn't really fit well with that, right? Like I see that as kind of similar to permadeath, right? Like it's something that is preventing people, I think prevents some people from...
playing more aggressively on the XCOM missions. And I would be curious to see what it would be like. Without that. Well, I think the real question is how much is permadeath really a factor? I think it's probably more of a narrative factor. Well, but it does. It does. I think those that the fear of permadeath. it does create conservative right does create conservative gameplay right um and then you know how many players
Actually, how many soldiers actually die over the course of the game? Sure. Versus, yeah, maybe the negative pressure it puts on them mentally, the fact that permanent ethics exists. It may not be worth it, right? It may not be worth it. There's a great... narrative sense and it definitely has created for me like
Some of those really cool gaming moments were like, I can't believe it. The game just killed this sniper that I love. And I had her all decorated up a certain way. And now she's dead. And you see that kind of stuff.
That kind of emergent storytelling is powerful for people. And those are a lot of the posts you see from people is like, I just, I love these people. This person died and I want to talk about who they were as a soldier. And it's really, it's really cool. But of course you always have to evaluate.
Everything is like, well, how fun is it? How cool is it? It's never enough for a design mechanic. Whether you're adding it or taking away, it's never enough to be like... this would be really fun it's always like well at what cost right what cost how are we gonna what do we have to teach the player is it free is it intuitive well then okay let's really think about putting it in if it's something we've got to teach them it's like dude we could
We can make fun game mechanics all day long, but everything comes at a cost. If it's going to fundamentally change the way they approach the game, then yeah. But having said all that, if I was to make an XCOM... Like, I don't know. I don't necessarily think I'd have the guts to drop permadeath. Because it is, you know, if someone asks, if someone says, hey, describe XCOM in like one or two sentences, probably the word permadeath is going to come up. Right? And so it's tough. Like, I, it's...
We have to evaluate our inheritance. We have to think really critically about that. We aren't just making random games. There are... There is still a sense of what XCOM is and what Civ is and whatever. They're not our games, right? So it is the sort of thing, even if I was going to make Midnight Suns 2 or something like that, I wouldn't view it as... I viewed Midnight Suns as very much our game before it was released. Right.
i viewed x-com and i mean i mean that was remaking a game there but like the minute the game's out there it's like it's probably owned more by the community than it is by the designer right i mean it's like it's their game right they're the ones who bought it so You're going to have to say, well, their values are going to steer what this thing is. Like, I'm definitely not the one who's like.
I mean, an auteur or anything like that. It's like, okay, they're playing the game. They're the ones who want it. So yeah, I think the other part of Permaneth is that it's woven deeply into the fabric of the game's... theme right the thematics are very much like it's a very important part of like you are you are outgunned you are like it feels hopeless right it feels hopeless
It does a lot to reinforce it when your soldiers actually die. It's just the narrative is a dark narrative. So it is very woven pretty tightly even into the theme of the game. What I would probably do is boil the frog a little bit. Yeah.
okay, the game still has permadeath. Right. Right. And maybe you even like... intentionally do that a couple times early in the game but the soldiers aren't that far developed so and it's okay to lose some of your early characters right but then just like Add some other mechanics that come up before death, like much more serious injuries and other things that basically prevent.
you know prevent death you know in that kind of like the worst case scenario and so and so like it's like officially the game still has permanent death but like functionally speaking players encounter so we do we do that so there is something um there's something called bleeding out which happens in extra sure and so you're
The stat that contributes to whether or not you bleed out, that's something that grows as your soldier levels up. They develop the stat, and I forget what it's called. It's probably a constitution or some dumb idea like that. that, um, increases that stack gets larger as you level up. And then we can control that curve to where it's like, yeah, it is most likely that someone.
shot and again it has to do with how much damage they took and things like that that becomes increasingly likely that higher level soldiers bleed out they don't die yeah and then it's a case of well you can evac that soldier um and there's a cost there is like in excom 2 you could evac that soldier somebody's got to pick them up and evac out with them so now you're down two soldiers um or you could carry a med kit and you could stabilize them and if you didn't do that it's like
Well, then, again, I think the player goes like, oh, okay, like, yeah, whoops, like that. I think they're very accepting of that scenario where they're like, oh, yeah, there are a lot of outs here where it's like, yeah, they were bleeding out. And, oh, my one person with the med kit, they were down, too, or they were not. They just start to realize, like, there were a lot of ways to resolve this and it didn't happen.
it becomes a story like yeah okay yeah that's that's really good design because that's like seeing the value of that of permadeath from like a thematic point of view but also addressing the the downsides of it right yeah so yeah no that's that's good Cool. All right. Wow. Well, we've addressed a lot of things. Chance to hit. Yeah. I mean.
Good luck to whoever makes. Somebody's going to make the next XCOM. I don't know who it is, but somebody's going to make the next XCOM. I could see them keeping Chance the Hit. That is a fundamental one, but that would be the first thing. I've said this.
That would be the first thing I would give a real hard look at. Because I just... The one thing... So the one thing, though, that was nice about it, I will say, is that it also... It really... brings in your decision space like you don't have to think so many moves ahead so sure the benefit of x-com was midnight signs you had three heroes right right you had three card plays you could find ways to get more but you had only so many cards in your hand, only so many enemies on the board.
The decision space, the overall decision space as a player, is much smaller than XCOM, where you could get up to six soldiers, which felt good because it's military. You've got a squad of soldiers. There's a lot of enemies out there. There's all these places to move. The map is way bigger, right?
missions are three four times as long just a really big decision space and so the nice thing about when you're sitting there and you're looking at these enemies and you could kind of move everywhere and you've got all these abilities available to you Chance to hit does trim your thinking. So you don't go like, all right, I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna do this. You kind of think like that, but you realize like, well.
Really, the decision space kind of ends. I have what I want to happen, but I don't think too far down that road because I have to see what happens next. Because I go like, well, what's happening next? And that can be, it's not a fun experience, but it is fun in the sense of, oops.
like strategy change, like it's always fun to be like, well, I got to redo my tactics. Like it can be frustrating that I missed that shot, but it is fun as a tactics player to go like, whoa, now we've got to think on the fly. And so your decision space kind of goes to like, well, who's...
And I think, I don't know, it'd be interesting to see how most players play, but I think I always went with like, okay, this is my most likely thing to happen. I'm going to do that first. And it's like, okay, that's satisfying. That worked the way I thought it was. A 90% shot to hit. I did it. It did what I thought.
Move on to my next one. But it does keep you from thinking too far. You're like, now I'm on my next soldier. I got like 30 seconds of gameplay here. And I don't have to think too far ahead. Yep. So there is some benefit in that when the decision space is so large, like it is an XCOM, as opposed to midnight suns percentage chance to hit, like kind of helps you to like prune that space mentally and be like, all right, I'm not too worried about all these decisions I'm going to have to make.
yeah uh yeah there's a lot of talk about here because i am thinking through midnight suns at this point and like it's uh yeah it helps that you only really have basically three moves yep because you know if since it is deterministic
at that point you feel like, well, I should actually get out the graph paper and like, you know, make sure that I do the optimal move. And we totally have that problem in old world too. Like since it's deterministic combat, you're like, well, I should be able to figure out exactly. And we give super a huge amount of freedom.
to how you move your units because you can move them multiple times. So like, yeah, I should be able to arrange it. There is a best thing, right? There is legitimately a best, there is an objectively best sequence here. And whenever that's a situation, you have to figure out ways to save the player from themselves. Because you don't want them to get sucked down to that. And the thing that... It's super weird because this is kind of a non-game thing. But the thing that made that...
Work in old world is actually the undo button. Yeah Because people no longer feel like they can they can basically try things out with their hands They're like, well, I'm just gonna try this out and i can just back it up if like i kind of felt like oh you know i should have actually sent my horse to the other side because then he could have got the flanking bonus or whatever right and it was just it was just weird because that was not the initial attention for the undo button yeah like we
they just wanted to prevent misclicks and also it was like useful for debugging but you know i found that like okay these two things go together really well like when you have you know determinants of combat but you allow on dues um and i think that it's like um you know it's
There's no real gray area there. Like, you can't really have undos with, like, a problem to listen. Like, I know, like, playing Slay the Spire now, I'm just, like, so frustrated that game doesn't have an undo system. Because, like, and it's so... It would be so... simple right like you got you get your cards
And I don't know how much you played Slay the Spire, but like, yeah, like there is absolutely a right way to order to play your cards. And there's no reason not to do it that way. So anytime you accidentally like, oh shoot, I should play that card first. Like, please let me.
rewind like there's just no reason why i should have i should have done it that way like it wasn't like i made there was no new information that came to me right right and so i think the reason how we got around that on midnight suns was that
The mechanically, frankly, the idea is that there's no, it's not about Midnight Suns, at least at the normal difficulty levels. The gameplay is not about like... can i survive it's more about like how many of these guys can i take out like how many success is not like did i keep all my heroes alive most turns it's not that most turns it's like
How much damage can I do? Like, how much can I actually pull off here? And so that's the kind of thing where it's like, if you don't do it right, you're not like, oh. oh no, like now my, now at the higher difficulty levels, it does become like, okay, I've got to play this the right way. But at normal difficult levels, I was trying to make it a game of like, success is like, how well can I do this? Not like, I need to do this well.
And so because of that, it became like, oh, I could have done that better. But it typically doesn't result in any sort of catastrophe. A lot of this is about the pacing, right? Like Slay the Spire feels like it wants to be played quickly. And that's why when you kind of accidentally throw out the obviously wrong.
card you're like well i just want to i was playing quickly because i don't want to play this game slow right with midnight suns you know you you don't play that quickly i mean you don't want to play it slow but like it's you know you're supposed to think about it right you know um
Yeah, these are all really weird, tricky issues. I've lost track of where we were. You're talking about whether XCOM 3 should have a two-hit percentage. I can see the benefit of it because I can see... it's beneficial to you know cutting off that decision space there's there's because otherwise like you're gonna have to pare down x-com some way because it's just big you could have your soldiers you could have but like
If you want it to be like previous XCOMs where it's big maps and movement, you can kind of move wherever you want and you got all these enemies and the soldiers have all these abilities, like towards the end of the game, I think it would become a really like... it would become a really like heavy, um, decision space for the player. Yeah. Do, um, could you just do the kind of thing? Like there's a couple of times.
you know, examples I can think of from games that do this, like in Civ III, if you remember, we originally had Dark Ages, and people hated them, so we turned them into Golden Ages, and WoW famously had like... Carrot, not stick, right? Yeah, they famously had like... some they would penalize you for playing too much and then they flipped it around to basically give you a boost if you like
right didn't play for eight hours basically um can you just do that with x-com where like there's always you always going to do this much damage but then there's just a chance that you're going to do double damage or extra damage yeah one of those Yes, and I remember one of those, I have to credit Ananda Gupta, a guy who I worked with, a designer I worked with. He was the one who really would keep reminding me, as I would say, things he'd like.
Is there a way to use the carrot and not the stick? Is there a way to use the carrot and not the stick? I remember in Civ Rev, we changed the aqueduct. I remember being like, is there a way to turn this into...
It used to, you know, if you don't build an aqueduct, your cities are prevented from growing. Right. I was like, can we just turn an aqueduct into a population boost? More growth. Yeah. Right. As opposed to like this horrible feeling of like, you must, there's a, it's just the worst feeling in Civ to be like, you.
you must do this now. You're like, what? That's like counter to like the feeling of Civ is like, Hey King, you need to build this, this exact thing in this city. Um, so yeah, it'd be interesting to think, like, is there a way to. Well, carrot and not stick it. Yeah, like, well, so what was your suggestion?
Basically like there's always a certain base amount of damage where your weapons are gonna do and then there's a certain chance Which can be modified by all the normal things that it's gonna do double damage or an extra damage point or whatever, right? Yeah
yeah i mean that would definitely be one way to do it is just wrap damage and um uh and chance to hit just yeah make that the yeah you're going to do this amount of damage yeah that'd be interesting like a height advantage gives you you're going to do this much more damage right it's possible
Yeah, I mean it's it's one of these things you just you know obviously everything left to have more hit points But like you know at the end of the day the two the result is probably the same it feels a lot different. Yep, it does like the Like not having a catastrophic failure. That's all we're talking about is eliminating like catastrophic failure. Right. Yeah.
yeah i think that that yeah that's the the that's the low that that missing a shot is just the that's the part that i just can't get my head around i just can't as a player going back to that and playing that i was just like what is this i was like this is just really tough to swallow In 2009, you just weren't ready to think in those terms? Yeah, that was definitely something I inherited. The original game had that and I was like, well, we're just going to make it.
We're going to make sure the player understands what these numbers are so it becomes fun to sort of juice them and figure out, strategize to make the number as high as possible, which can be satisfying. What changed? Did you just hear enough people? Were you experiencing it yourself? It was making Midnight Signs and going back and playing XCOM.
I just. Okay, that's it. Yeah, that's it. So you didn't necessarily feel that way at the end of X-Men 2? No, no, not at all. I probably would have said like, no, no, no, let me tell you why it's such a great idea. And then I just had those moments. Isn't that so funny as a designer? Like you can hear everything, but when you experience it.
And you were the worst at this. I remember when we would play, we were on a certain project. And you wouldn't be open to certain, you were always open to suggestions, but you'd be like, I don't know. And then if you were like... You were at the hands of me and you were like, I see what you're saying.
I am going to give that a second look, actually. Well, that's what's great about multiplayer games. If you guys felt something was not quite right, you're like, okay, well, we're going to show you today at lunch. I'd like to show you what happens when you're on the receiver. So I think it was a case of I'd heard them...
and i think it's it's like anything it's fine to hit is fine but it definitely was one of those things that after making midnight suns and enjoying the deterministic nature of that And other games, obviously. So you get things like Into the Breach where the randomness may be where the bugs appear, but it was so deterministic. I just loved that. That's definitely what drove me towards Slay the Spire. It's definitely what drove me towards...
The way that Midnight Suns works. And then when I went back, I just hadn't played XCOM. And those experiences, I was like, yeah, there's no joy in this experience at all. I don't even understand what I could have done better.
That can't be the... It's more like that can't be the right answer. Maybe it is, but I just feel like there's a better solution. What's neat about that is I actually interviewed the Into the Breach guys recently. Yeah. And for them, like, how did you get Into the Breach? Like, for them, they started with XCOM.
Right, like to them, they're designing an extension of like, we played XCOM and this is what we like, this is what we didn't like, and we wanted to pare it down, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so it all kind of loops around. Yeah, I played it in the Breach and Slay the Spire, and I was like, yeah, I want to do two.
deterministic you know that just makes it made more sense so we started with um uh midnight suns we started with a chance to we started with probability right yeah so it was actually chance to ko Okay. So we kind of pushed it a little bit, but the idea was your attacks were dealing damage and there was a percentage chance to KO, just straight up KO the unit.
and so the the lower their health was then there was this there was always this percentage chance of like well i have this like i could just straight up kill this i could ko this unit and it was always it was exciting but it was just another probability thing and it was just I don't know. And then we, after playing End of the Breach and after playing Slay the Spire, it was like, yeah, we've got to just make this determination. It just makes more sense.
XM has random damage as well. Like all this randomness where you're just like, okay, you know, you can't plan very far ahead, which is again, I think it's a benefit in some regards but boy it's tough when you make a game that is deterministic it's just so much fun to be like oh yeah i can plan ahead i can do what i want to do yeah i feel smarter you know yeah yeah
Yeah, let's talk about the strategy layer. We were going to address that and got distracted. Yeah, the XCOM strategy layer. Yeah, it started out the same way where it was just like the original XCOM.
where it was kind of real time like that type of thing it was real time it was real time and you know it stayed real time but in the base it was like top down and I hadn't put a lot of thought into it I knew for one thing that I wasn't going to do multiple bases so the original you had to build multiple bases and it was I mean it really was one of those things where
It just increased the complexity by just a linear factor, right? As you built multiple bases, like it was just a linear factor, increasing complexity. There's just no way you had to staff those soldiers and they had their own research projects.
The way it was implemented, there wasn't a real strong benefit for it besides thematic that you felt cool because you're building bases. And so, unlike Civ that has this sort of like... research is elevated right it's sort of like you've got your symbols everything can be elevated so having multiple cities is fine you're feeding a lot of these like um all right and in in excom there was just a lot of stuff that had to be managed per base um and so
I knew it was only going to be one bass. So that was from the beginning. But I just, I remember not being able to think of how to make. The original XCOM was very much a simulation, and as much as I thought, oh, that's cool, like it's this whole simulation happening, so much of it was hidden, and maybe because of working for SID.
Or maybe because of just my nature, I really like things to be upfront and obvious. I want numbers. I would be considered a board game-y designer. I'm a very board game-y designer. In terms of, like, I really want everything to be up front so the player can make a choice and understand, like, the trade-offs, right? Right. That's just how I have to be able to... Well, it's also a much more Fraxis thing. Yeah. As opposed to XCOM, which is...
come from a different place. Yeah. And so I was kind of struggling with like, well, that isn't how the strategy layer on the original worked at all. So I couldn't replicate. I could do some of the systems like research and building things, but I... You know, I simplified I copied the original game strategy layer and it was like you had to hire engineers to build things You had to hire scientists to research things you had to do a lot of like
very involved base management. So I knew I was going to simplify a lot of those things, but how the missions appeared, I think was the biggest change was like, how do I like there. Companies need to leave the XCOM or countries need to leave the XCOM project. How do missions appear? And am I making any sort of like interesting choices about those? And so just kind of thinking of how that worked, I didn't. I didn't have a strategy for a really, really long time. But the...
My first strategy lair, now that I think about it, it was, I really was a one-trick pony. And so what it was were like... It was like countries had numbers on them or cities had numbers on them. It was cities, I think. Right. And so you would just see these numbers, like a single digit number that represented their panic. And it was running real time like a simulation. You kind of had to make choices.
about i don't remember exactly i think this is also out there on the web as well but it was it was just and it was a flat it was a flat screen right it was just this flat screen you could look at the world and you would see like numbers on every city and they would turn like from green to red and things like that so it wasn't a really well thought out strategy layer um and i was so there was another like low point where i was like oh my gosh i've waited too long on this and this isn't good
And so I actually directly went to Sid. And I should say, over the development of XCOM Enemy Unknown, I went to Sid all the time. Yep. All the time. I used to go to him. multiple times a week at least and i would sit with him and i would say and i would just sit in his chair and i would just say like this is what i'm trying to figure out
I think he would call it crying in his chair. But I come sitting in this big, comfy green chair. And I'm just sitting there and I explain to him, like, I'm trying to figure this out. And he was... This is, I mean, Sid would just see immediately to the heart of what the problem is. And he would suggest like three or four things where he'd ask me questions about it. And then by the end, I'd feel, oh, okay, this is good. He helped me so, so much on XCOM. I would just go to him all the time.
and lean on him and so i was talking about the strategy layer and he kind of like got invested in this problem um and so he was like well He wanted it to be turn-based. Yep. And I was like, no, I still want it to be real-time. But we, he and I, we, then we made like using like game board pieces and a whiteboard. We started making a, like, just a board game together. Yep. And then finally he was like, look.
we we got to an impasse on the design of it and he was like look he's like you're a programmer i'm a programmer he's like why don't you come back with a prototype I'll come back with a prototype. We both worked all weekend. And then we came back together and showed each other our prototypes. And he had this turn-based prototype, which was...
Pretty cool. And then I had this real-time prototype that eventually ended up being what we went with, but I took a lot of ideas from his turn-based prototype. Right. But yeah, it was, he was a really, really big part in me. I mean, figuring out all of XCOM, but especially like the Stratus Blair, like I had a lot of crazy ideas. What were the key elements that he like?
Turned you around on. I think I can remember. I know this prototype exists somewhere. I can still see his prototype. But I think he had this. I think he was helping me see like how to make choices about like how to make it interesting to choose like what missions to go on and where to build.
like how to expand so eventually it became like instead of building bases around the world you'd build satellite coverage um and uh so yeah i i forget he he helped me like find a way to sort of like escalate the like dread meter around the the globe and like how countries would end up leaving and how you could feel okay with it as a player like you could see like the choices i made led to this country leaving like i definitely like
devalued this this country and i made a choice and and that resulted in this country leaving so it was another thing of like well this bad thing has to happen for the game to be interesting but if a bad thing happens the player has to understand like why to make it more transparent yeah make it more transparent
yeah um so we talked about like how to stack up if missions occur here you've really got to give the player a heads up like you did that for a reason you chose the other mission for a reason did you play pandemic Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That factored in. That factored in for sure. So you had that kind of feel, you know, like you're not going to be able to solve everything and things are going to blow up. Such a brilliant...
The mechanic of turning the cards over and putting them back on top. The ability to... And how clear that is. You do it yourself. That's something that's an advantage board games have over video games. Yes, and I play Forbidden Island with my dog. which is just the same thing.
um in a simplified form and it just makes it really clear you go like these are going back on top right they're gonna come up right yeah we need to so there's still randomness there as they're shuffled up and stuff but you know like they are the most likely to so we better do something about this so yes pandemic factored in for sure and in fact that's why I think I played pandemic with you I'm sure you introduced pandemic to me I think that's why my first version of strategy layer was
Oh, it was. It was lines between regions and numbers on them. And so they would infect. What would happen is that once it crossed a certain threshold, that panic would infect. The other cities. So, yeah, it was a complete ripoff of the pandemic, in fact, now that I think about it. Yeah. So, it was the kind of thing where you, but now you're like, well, I really can't let this place get out of control because it's going to infect the people around them. Yep. Yep.
Wow. Yeah, there's another aspect which I think is interesting to talk about for the strategy layer, which is that... So Sid has a number of pithy scenes. Games are a series of interesting decisions. The players should be the one having the fun, not the designer. Who's having fun is my favorite question. That is a good one to ask. Yep, absolutely. And are you familiar with the covert action rule? Oh, yeah. One good game is better than two great games.
And the funny thing about that one is like XCOM is sort of like flying right in the center, right in the bullseye of that. Like, you know, he has this thing he like always talks about. Like, well, actually, one of your games is particularly known for, you know, violating this rule. And... At any rate, thoughts? Midnight Suns as well, right? I think it was the same thing of like, you have to find the center of gravity. Where's the center of gravity? Where's the heart of your game? Right.
Because it's true, the real problem, and I think Midnight Sun's probably suffered from this more than XCOM, is that where are you spending? If you're spending... If it doesn't match, if you can in your mind say, well, the center of gravity is in this part of the game, that should really control the amount of time you're spending in any mode that's not bad. Then be really careful. You can make really meaningful decisions.
here because part of this too is is the the one more turn mentality so it's a very four axis thing one more turn but it applies to x-com and the strategy is important for that so you fight tactical battles And at the end of that, you get resources, you get alien artifacts, you get new research, whatever it is. You come back to the strategy layer and you're excited. Now you're like, I got to put all this stuff to work and I got to use these resources to buy new toys.
And that is just going to now my soldiers are better in some way. Or I'm excited for this research that's about to happen. But in order for the research to happen, I got to speed up. I got to, like, move. Time's got to move forward. And so it always, like, drives you to say, like, okay, you're always being driven back into combat. Like, everything you do on the strategy layer is to...
almost everything in the strategy layer is to improve your combat capabilities it supports combat it gives the framework for what you know right battles and so it just drives you back into combat and so it was definitely a case of yeah there are two modes and x
come but it was always just kind of driving you back into combat where you definitely spent most of your time midnight suns got a little away from that where it was like you could spend a lot of time a lot of time outside of combat too much And it was funny because the math really doesn't work out because combat in Midnight Suns is fast, like compared to X-Men. Missions are a third, you know? You could do a mission in Midnight Suns in like seven, eight minutes, and that's what...
I wanted from the very beginning, I was like, missions are going to be fast. They're going to be fast. Yeah, and I like that a lot. There's no moving around a map. There's no fog of war. There's none of that stuff. It's just you're fighting in the same space and missions are going to go fast. Well...
If you do that, and then if that is really kind of like the joy, and not that there isn't a lot of joy in forming relationships and learning more about the Marvel Universe and the strategy there, there's narrative on the strategy. That's all great, but like... If it gets out of whack, then you just, there's this real...
thematic and mechanical dissonance of like, wait, this isn't matching, right? I'm spending so much time. Like, I think if you took a stopwatch and if you found someone is like spending like 50% of the time in one thing, if 50%, if you ever get close to that percentage, like something has gone wrong. It's a problem. Should always be at least 70-30, if not 80-20, where it's like, yeah, this is all really fun. They can be super meaningful decisions. And in fact, the strategy layer...
in XCOM feels like where the game is being won. I'm making real big decisions about where do I fight next, where do I build next, all the narrative is occurring on the strategy layer, research which unlocks big moments.
But really, it's like you're really kind of winning the game in combat. And that's where you spend 70, 80% of the time. Yeah. The right balance. Yeah, I talk about it a lot with the Into the Breach guys. Because they also, like, they overdid the strategy layer like four or five times.
And eventually they just like boil it down to like, it couldn't possibly be simpler. Like just choosing this territory, this territory, get a star or get a whatever, you know, get an upgrade. And that's, that's it. Right. And, yeah.
Yeah, I will say that Midnight Suns, I did have like, you know, maybe three hours into the game. I was like, I've only done like four. Can I just try some combat? The beginning is really, really... I mean, this is the challenge for... Because you're introducing so much... stuff like it's like I get what's going on right this is the challenge of being a super fan right I think that this that is on no one but me I think that Rocco and I Rocco my narrative director and I
we're we are mega mega super fans of marvel and so you get blinded by i mean it seems silly you really get blinded by like i cannot believe i'm playing with these toys We were given a close to blank check to do what we wanted. And so we're like, yeah, man. the marvel games team like they didn't know yet what the game was so they supported us and being like yeah let's have all this narrative stuff up front and and i think i for sure got a little lost in the like
yeah, this is awesome. Like we got it. And we had introduced a bunch of concepts, but even so, it's like it could have moved faster to where it took a while then you then you get into the game you get into a much better loop of and in fact before the game shipped i cut i cut um like 30 or 40. scenes and dialogues throughout the game solely for that reason because I was like
look, this is like, there's too much time between missions. And so like, I just started being like, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut all these conversations, cut these scenes, which even the cinematic team supported because they're like, yeah, there's just way too much going on here. And they weren't. essential to i would just yeah i mean it was just like in slack you know i would just post and be like okay here are all the narrative events that occur during this
um this abbey visit and i was just like this one cut this one cut this one turned into an ambient scene which means you could walk right past it and they'll just keep chattering as opposed to putting the camera on them and we all you know we all wanted to do that because we knew even though they were really all of them were cool moments But it's like, this is just too much. There's just too much time between.
yeah yeah i didn't have the like the sort of the the long-term loops like it's hard to establish their importance when you're like you're kind of unaware of like okay what's the flow of this game like okay i get there is a day-by-day thing but it's taken so long you have the first two days I don't see that necessarily. Speaking of story, XCOM, I guess sort of the first Fraxis game with a story, right? Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, I remember...
There's a guy named Jack Scalise was the guy who helped us. Oh, my gosh. Jack Scalise. He's this great guy. we were working on the narrative and we kind of this really high level idea of narrative and there wasn't much in enemy unknown but
We did have cinematics and, you know, we had a story going on that we kind of wanted to tell. And we had never done anything like that at Firaxis. And so 2K sent out the fixer, right? His name is Jack Scalise. The fixer. Yeah. And he was just like. I have a picture of him.
my head now yeah he's this big so my only narrative directors ever worked with are big italian guys he's this big italian guy i hope he has a new jersey accent oh yeah new york he's got a he's got a chin he's got a chin like the like you know like the
Brooklyn Bridge. I mean, he's just this... Oh my gosh, that's great. Yeah, Scalise, he's awesome. He's just a big dude. You would think that he was like, oh, this guy breaks knees. Like, this guy's definitely a Columbo family soldier, right? But instead... You know, he's this narrative director. He was awesome. He worked as hard as anybody I've ever worked with. He just came out there, moved out there for like three months. He like played what we had and he was like, all right.
He's like, this is terrible. He's like, this is what we need to do. Had you been trying to do a story? We had. We were struggling. We also didn't have the cinematic. Did you ask for help? I don't tell you. I don't know if we did or not. I think that I was very open to him coming out because, you know, because we knew this was something we hadn't done before. And so he came out and he was like, he had done this for so many games at 2K. Like, this is what he did.
did was they brought him in to be like, yeah, I do the cinematics, right? So he came in, but he did the tutorial, which was very cinematic for XMNN. He helped us like shape the overall story. He did all the cinematics, which we did in-house. He helped us write the story and talk. This is what you think about a game story. It was very lean. XMNMN's story is very lean, but he did all of that in three months.
He and his team were just such a help. They just came out and were like, this is how you do game narrative. This is how you do in-game cinematic. We just had never done anything like that. And it was awesome. So yeah, Scalise. And then after Scalise, then I got Chad Rocco, another New Yorker tough guy. Yeah, Rocco is, my kids call him Uncle Rocco because he's been with us forever. Does Take-Two have mob roots or something? I don't know.
Yeah, I mean, you know, David Ishmael, he runs Tim K now, and he's from New York. But yeah, Rocco was the narrative director on the other games, and so he would help me sort of put together... And I was definitely the kind of guy where I'm not, I don't, until I got to Marvel. So in the XCOM stuff, I was like, I have a very high level view of the narrative.
It's challenging on the XCOM games for the writers and for the narrative folks because... it was all stood up on a skeleton of gameplay i would be like these moments need to happen here right these gameplay things need to be um accommodated or resolved at these points and they need to happen like this there you go
Put a story on top of this, right? But it has to follow this, right? I need these big moments to occur here. If there's an alien base and it's going to lead to this big research thing, and this is the actual research thing, this event, so you guys can put whatever story you want.
want as long as it sits on these tent poles. I always do, we call narrative tent poles. I'd say like these tent poles occur here and you can never predict because the player can kind of do a little what they want, but so they'd have to build a sort of story on that scaffolding. Yeah. Okay.
And then we made an expansion pack on War of the Chosen, which was much more narrative. And I really liked that. And that's what gave me the confidence of like, well, we could probably do a Marvel, you know, we could do a Marvel game, but that was obviously.
The Midnight Suns has over three hours. You know, somebody, they do this for every game on YouTube. You can go see like all the cinemax. Just watch it all. And it's like over three hours of cinemax. It's like more than... a marvel movie of cinematics what frax has come a long way yeah yeah i mean change yeah i that one it not that it was bad i loved it i loved i loved that game i loved working on i loved what the team did
But that definitely cured. I was like, yeah. I'm going back to systems, man. I'm going back to like emergent narrative, I think, for my next game because that was tough. That was real. It's just a... It is a different beast. Narrative and the narrative team, they deserve as much respect as everybody else doing everything in a Marvel game.
That's as big a reward for a lot of players as the system rewards. Game rewards are fine, but the narrative rewards are just as important. And the narrative team deserves this much respect, but the narrative team needs... way more runway to get their work done like you can't be like iterating you're not iterating on cinematics right nobody's doing that when you have three hours of them so it just was a completely different beast it was a lot to do the team was amazing but it definitely
It's just a different way of making games for sure. Right. Would you, I mean... There must have been. Was there some iteration? Like, would you, like, I mean, they'd write a script that you'd have to have the people, you know, block out the, whatever, I don't even know the terms for it. And you have the voice actors got to do it. Would those things get redone? The way it would work was that Rocco and I beat out the story.
early on years before he and i beat out the story and and i was way more involved in in the narrative here because i was such a marvel yeah super fan and so you know Rocco knew how narrative beats should work, but I had a high level view of like, this is, you know, these are the elements that I want. And so we beat out the story and we got that approved by Marvel, of course, is a big involvement there.
And then it would get down to like, okay, now we work on individual scenes. And then, you know, somebody writes those scripts and then Rocco reviews those. And I wouldn't redline those. I'd typically just be like, yeah, this is great. Then Marvel games has to review those scripts. And then. than those we can implement it but
It's tough to make changes. You know, you get that far down the road. It's really tough to be like, well, we need this scene to do. We did with a few scenes. We'd be like, all right, well, this isn't working now for whatever reason. Either later narrative changes or... sometimes gameplay changes but a lot of times they just need so much runway to get that work done because it requires a lot of as you say voice actors are
We had entire, you know, external partners who worked on it, internal people, production, all these things to line up cinematic are very costly. And so it's the kind of thing where... Yeah, I'd be pretty uncomfortable working on that type of stuff just because it just seems like I'm not... I would be really...
It'd make me really anxious to feel like I've got to make all these decisions now. And you do. Three years before you ship. You really do. And this is it. You might as well pretend like you're shipping today. Right. Because the decisions you're making now are just the ones you're going to be stuck with. Yes. You have to be right.
you have to accept what you weren't right on um which is tough right because yeah the gameplay is kind of like well yeah you know you're not right so you're like yeah this is our best shot and we're gonna like work on this and work on this um I don't think narrative is, is as, it's not as subject to like the, you know, when something's like when it comes to design, you know, when something's not right, it's not fun. It's like, it's pretty obviously not fun. Right.
The story is still the story. It's going to be hard to get an objective sense of is this good or not. so yeah yeah but it was that was my experience of working on a very very narrative full-fledged narrative game it was it was really cool but it was it was only really cool for me because it was marvel like i would
If an XCOM like that, I don't see, I see myself being like, I just wouldn't be as interested. Could you imagine making something like that from scratch? You know, like that just sounds like. What, like a new IP? Oh my gosh. That would be so hard. For me. the engine that drove me was my passion for Marvel, so I never got tired of the narrative stuff, and I always wanted to push it to be as great as it could be, and I always got super excited when...
New Greybox scenes came in or reads came in from the voice actors, but it was purely my love of Marvel. I was like, oh my gosh, this is so cool. We made a scene where Captain America is fighting alongside Blade and they're quipping. I loved that, but that was really my passion for the episode. So let's jump back to the release of XCOM. There's a couple of interesting things there. First off, like that video you made.
was like amazing the the one in the whatever it is the game store oh selling the that when i saw that because at that point i was gone from fraxis right and that was one of the one of the I was so proud of the company for doing that. I was like, this just, you guys just some, I don't know what it was like blessed. Like that was such a good idea and execution. So in that I give credit for that to Garth, my producer.
sir okay he had seen there was a video where um i think it was danny woodhead so he's like this I think he played receiver or something for the New England Patriots. And this guy did not look like your typical football playing star. And he went into a store and tried to sell his jersey to people. And they were like everyone like a Tom Brady Jersey. Yeah, it was like he was like what about Danny?
And they were like, who's that? And it was hilarious. And so Garth was like, you've got to go in and sell XCOM to people. And I was willing to do a lot. I remember being like. Very... nervous about that. I mean, I couldn't imagine doing that. Yeah. And then after we met such crazy characters, none of it was set up. It was just like they had everything legitimate. It was like hidden cameras. And you can tell like they're purely hidden cameras behind like.
Okay, so they couldn't see. They couldn't see. It was literally just you walking up to people. Those reactions are 100% genuine. The cameras were completely hidden. It was just me in that store. It was the regular workers. And it was just people walking in. And they legitimately were like. Who is this guy? And I was just like, okay. And I hated it for the first 30 minutes. I'm like, what am I doing? I felt like such an asshole. And then...
I, after that, I was just like, you get to a place, you're like, well, I don't, you know, again, it's one of those things you're like, well, I didn't die. So you're like, what happened? I don't care. So I was like, I'm going to talk to this dude. And he's all decked out. I remember one guy who's. All decked out, and I think he was all green, head to toe. And I think it was even like marijuana leaves on his shirt and his outfit.
And he was like talking to me. I was trying to sell him this game. And he was like, he was like telling me he had an Xbox in his glove compartment. And I was like, what? I was like, dude, I got the game for you. I guess I should back up because not everyone has probably seen this video, but this was the promotional video for XCOM. Jake went into a GameStop or whatever. Went into a GameStop. And he was just randomly...
assaulting customers with recommending telling them that you need to buy this new game called XCOM. Trying to get anybody to buy this game and I will legitimately I did not sell a single one. No one, no one even pre-ordered it. I was like, I was like, no one even like, they were just so weirded out that I was like aggressively selling them on a video game. I don't remember, you didn't tell them who you were at all, right? You were just like.
I think you should try this game. Did you have like an XCOM shirt on? I did have an XCOM shirt on. You know? Yeah. It really was the kind of thing where they were weirded out by it. And then I... Then I got into like, okay, fine. This is like ridiculous. So I'm just going to start joking. But I really was trying to and not a single person even.
bought or pre-ordered the game. I was like, it's available pre-ordered. Okay. And then they would just buy what they came in there to buy and walk off. And I was like, all right. I was like, and so they're part of you like,
this is going to be a complete failure. Yes. Yes. We finished that and I was like, I don't even know if this comes across as funny or if I look like a jerk or if I just look like pathetic. And I was like, I don't know if any of these, the interactions were funny to me, but I was like, I don't know if this is.
going to come across on camera these people i was talking to um and then after we made it they did show me marketing show me the first cut i was like that's pretty funny and so that has come up multiple times from marketing to being mike you have to you have to do this again right um
And I've always said, like, I won't do it again. I was like, it's just. So once a lifetime. It was too funny and it won't be funny the next time. And I don't even know where I would go to do it. But it really was the kind of thing where that has come up again as people like you've got to do this. for Midnight Suns, you got to do this for XCOM 2. And I was like, no, I was like, I'm not, I'm not doing it. So yeah, I mean, what was that now? I mean, over 10 years ago, right? That was over.
October 2012. Yeah. Over 10 years ago now that that happened. Wow. Jake Solomon, undercover. Jake Solomon, undercover. Make sure and search that on YouTube, not any other site. I don't know what that video is going to lead you to. That could go a lot of different ways. I've been unemployed, okay? I'd like to point you guys to my OnlyFans, Jake Salman Undercover. After dark.
All right. So XCOM came out. Yep. And I mean, as best I can remember, people loved it right away. Like it did really well. Yeah. And the interesting thing, the one thing I remember about that was marketing was really cool. because it was supposed to be the the shooter was supposed to come out yeah and they got delayed and so then they were like well you're coming out first and it was because of that we were a complete secret
Because of that, we got the cover of Game Informer magazine before we came out, which was a really big deal back then. That was the cover. And we got it because they were like... Wait, what? You're making a strategy version of XCOM? Right. And that's what got us the story was because everybody only knew about the shooter and there was a lot of, you know, there was a lot of like press was down on the shooter version.
and they were down and fans were down on the shooter version and we were complete secret it had never leaked and so game informer was like oh like this is a great we will do this as a cover story it's like it would be very odd for us to get a game informer cover story but they gave it to us which was a huge boost i remember that yeah and then one of these classic like disconnects with executives where they're like
Like, oh, people seem really excited about this thing that obviously everyone wanted to begin with. Well, look, I've said XCOM would not exist without Civ, right? And you've said...
If Civ didn't sell when it sold, it would have been canceled 10 times. And without Civ, XCOM never would have been made because people would just look at it and go like, I don't get it. And so Civ's sales are... crazy right there people should know like civ sales it's a monster it is an absolute monster it always has been they sell over 10 million copies right like it's a lot and so the so what happens is that they at least you know executives aren't...
you know, they're just trying to do their job. And so you can't deny numbers, right? Like you can sit there and go like, I don't get it. But like, if your job is to like, you know, sell, then you look at those numbers and go like, I don't care that I don't get it. Right. And so XCOM only exists because.
I could point to Civ and say there is an audience for these games like sure make the shooter because you think that's what everybody wants nowadays but like Exxon only exists because Civ was like look you can actually You can actually sell to a lot of people making turn-based games. And when you talk to the press, they're going to be like, well, yeah, that's what we wanted all along. Just ask us. I think we got a lot of goodwill.
frankly, because of the shooter, right? We were a surprise announcement. And then it was like, because of the shooter, then everybody were like, willing to be like, this is great. Like, we love you already. There was a lot of concern about like.
It being dumbed down because, yeah, didn't have time units. And so the fans, the vocal fans, the original, like I had to go out there and prove my bona fides. It's like, no, I love XCOM. Like it's a very complicated game. It's a very deep, complex game. It's deep. um so there's a lot of that you can't build multiple bases there's no time units like there was that kind of stuff but i also i remember i got this cool marketing event where i got to go that
These shouldn't exist anymore, but I do miss the old days of marketing. We were in New York at the Soho house. It was very cool. Blow it out. We went to the first press event I did in Europe. was London and it was at the Royal Observatory. And then I got to play it on the...
What do you call that? The dome? Yeah. Wow. I played the demo for XCOM Enemy Unknown on the dome and inside the Royal Observatory. It was crazy. Now, the only reason... I was able to do that is because that was already booked and it was booked for the XCOM shooter.
So a lot of the press I did was like, I was like, I can't believe they're going all out like this. But a huge amount of press came, and especially in Europe, XCOM was very popular. That's so funny, because they wouldn't have put that stuff all together if it was... It was because it was already booked for the XCOM shooter. And when they shifted that and we were released, we got to like...
we got the full AAA shooter launch love. So it was really cool. But yeah, when the game came out, I'd never put out a game and I'd never, even though... I could tell I liked playing the game. Although we got, people should know about things called mock reviews. Okay. Yep. We got mock reviews and they were like 60s. Really? Yep. They were 60s. The mock reviews were generally like 60s and 70s. That's not good. Right? Not good.
And so I didn't know. I'd never even seen mock reviews. Like I never saw them on what they were for. I wasn't part of that stuff. So these came in and then it was like panic time. And I was like.
okay. I was like, I don't know. I don't know what to do. I was like, I can change. They had some feedback about like... you know it got monotonous towards the end game so i was able to make a few changes but i was like the game is what it is like you get mock abuse sometimes so late that you're like i don't know what you want to do with this right yeah um
But I was like, that's weird. Because I was like, I like playing it. And a bunch of people on the team like playing it. And I was like, that's weird. So I truly had no idea when the game came out. I was like. The first time were the previews. And the previews seemed to be very positive. Right. But I was like, I don't know. And then the game came out and it got really great reviews. And I was like, oh. I was like, okay, I guess.
I guess it's good. I don't know. It sold great. It did well. And I don't know if you're like this, but like, I like the work. I like the day-to-day work way more than the like, I don't have it in me to be like, all right, let's relax. I hate when a game, I really, I genuinely hate when a game launches. It's a phenomenon. People have a hard time after the game's done. they kind of feel like aimless or they're not sure what to do or whatever. Um,
Yeah. Yeah. So I was just like, I don't like this at all. Like once the game came, I was relieved. What if the game had done poorly? Well, then I would have been like, you know, I really don't like this at all.
Yeah, it was really nice. I mean, I'd never, you know, it was nice. Yeah, I wanted to hear, like, what did it feel like? Because you must have, I mean, the way it performed, I mean, it must have been kind of what you dreamed of, basically. It was what I dreamed, yeah, definitely. So, like, what did that feel like, you know?
Man, it was, it was a relief. I think it's been, you know, it would be tough to be in a position where you put that much, because again, it was still back in the days. You just work, working like insane hours. Like, you know, I had. Um...
I, my first daughter was born and, and Jenny, my wife, like I was just spending so much time working and, and I was so, I remember just thinking like, I don't know, the mock reviews were so bad. I was like, like what happens if this comes out and it's not, it's really curious. Was it like a cohort of really hardcore XCOM, original XCOM players? I wonder what happened there. I won't even say whose name was in it, but it was somebody who was a known journalist.
And they were a part of it too because those are the ones who do mock reviews a lot of times. They just were really hard. It was like across the board, 60s and 70s. And I was like, wow. I was like, uh-oh. But there's not much you could do at that point. But mock reviews are always... I think I got bad mock reviews for XCOM 2. I got mock reviews that were well below what Midnight Suns did. And it's...
It is the sort of thing where it's frustrating because some of the feedback's good, but you're just like, I don't know where these numbers are at. I don't know. You don't know what to think. And all it does is panic. I mean, it absolutely panics people from...
the publisher on down to people on the team where i was like yeah i was like don't share this don't share this with the team don't share it and they're like we have to and i was like i understand where you're coming from i was like but like i don't
believe i've gotten bad mock reviews every time i've made a game if we're gonna get bad reviews we're gonna get the bad anyway and if you don't then there's no reason to tell them this because it's too late i mean this is why this is why i like early access And we sort of did early access with the Civ IV. We had those people playing it a year and a half before we shipped. Because to me, fortunately you made a good game, but if you make fundamental mistakes, you can't find it.
three months to go you're it's it's too late you know you got to find that out oh at least over a year before you ship and um you know i can certainly understand why a publisher wants those yeah because they're like if these are true
we'd like to know how to position this. I get it. But it was, they were good. I think it's more evolved now to where the Midnight Suns mock reviews were very like, they were much more helpful in terms of like they played through. I mean, it was interesting though, because. um and again so many of them are great one of them was um uh he was a guy named sean baby okay cracked you know yeah i remember and so they like here's the panel of your mock reviewers and then he started talking i was like
Sean, baby. He was like, yes. He introduced himself to Sean something. Yeah. I mean, he actually nailed our final Metacritic. So he was actually, he gave us a good score and he nailed it. And he was like, I like this a lot. But then you get some scores. It's like, you've got to score in the 60s for Midnight Suns. And I was like, I don't know what to do with this. But it just absolutely panics people when they see that. And you're just like, okay. Like the team's deflated.
But the feedback was really good. And so I was like, you could just give us the feedback. Maybe take the scores off of these things. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Huh. So, yeah, it was really interesting. Yeah, early access, I think, is, you know. I think that would be helpful. We never had the kind of thing that Siv had. What did you guys call that?
Frankenstein? Frankenstein. Yeah, the Frankenstein group. Yeah. Sorry, that was Civ IV. They played the game like over a year before we shipped. I'm pretty sure they did that with Civ V and with Civ VI. Yeah. and whatever and uh uh yeah i think that's like a really important part of game development if you can if you can pull it off um i understand why
for access can't necessarily do early access, right? Like it got a bit of an advantage you have as a smaller independent studio. Um, but yeah, I really like, I really like that, that system. Yeah. Um,
Cool. All right. So XCOM did really well. XCOM did really well. You're feeling good. So how quickly were like... did you just want to start on xcom 2 basically i mean you did the expansion right uh ananda did the expansion ananda gupta did the enemy within expansion which was a really really good expansion um i I never take credit for that because the way he described it to me, I was like, maybe. And then he did, and I was like, oh, that's pretty good. And I was like, uh-oh.
I don't like people being able to do a great job without me. That's not good. But no, he did a great job. He did the Enemy Within expansion, and then I went to work on X2 right away. Right away, okay. Right away. I just started designing X-Men 2. Okay. And you were ready to go right away because? I think I just wanted to. I didn't have any doubts about what I wanted to do next. I wanted to make XCOM 2. Because...
You wanted to do, there's things you couldn't do in the first one or you just loved it so much or you wanted to fix some things? Yeah, I loved it. I think that I'm a very, again, I've been married 23 years. I had up until, you know, a month ago, I worked the same job for 23 years. That's true. They lined up pretty closely. My truck is like 13 years old at this point. It's like, I just, whatever I like, like I just am not a like...
other side of the hill guy. I liked XCOM, so I was like, I'll just make XCOM 2. I would have never made Midnight Suns. If it wasn't Marvel and my relationship with Marvel, because I was, you know, I was like, man, we're just going to make an XCOM 3 before Marvel came along. Yep. But, yeah, so I just jumped right back in. You want to say that out loud? I mean. It's over now. Yes.
Yeah, I was already thinking about X3 when Marvel came. And if people didn't know that, it's just obvious that's what I was going to be doing. But Marvel came to us towards the end of... the XCOM 2 expansion pack. And my thoughts were already drifting towards X3 and then they came along and I was like, okay, I got to do that now. But for XCOM 2, you're just happy. I was just happy. So what were the big things you want to do with that project? Because presumably you want to change something.
right so yes yeah but the problem was i had like way overshot what a sequel should be because i just didn't know what it should be but thematically um i got the idea from ken levine so ken levine and i are good friends and he is a really big x-com fan and i had always gone down to gone up to Boston to play his games and give him feedback. And we'd known each other for a long time because at one point he was making an XCOM game for 2K. Oh, okay. I remember that. And so...
And then he stopped making that. And then he made Bioshock Infinite. And I'm spilling a bunch of secrets here, I guess. But it's so long ago. Nobody cares. I think. I don't know. You're out the door, Jake. You're safe. I have lawyers now. And they probably would hate for me to hear this conversation. Anyways, I think, allegedly, Ken was working on the next company. And he had this really cool concept for it, which was... he called it xcom lives and the idea was he didn't want to tell
The XCOM story. He wanted to tell the story where XCOM lost. Right. Yep. And that's the idea I took for XCOM 2. I totally lifted it from him. And I told him. I called him before and I said, hey, look. I really want to take this idea and make XCOM 2 about the idea that it's in the future and XCOM lost. That's just a really, mechanically and thematically, it's super interesting.
Ken was like, do it. He's like, XCOM is yours. He was like, I do not care. He's like, please take it. I can't wait to play it. So I... So, yeah, I okinned for that idea thematically. But then that opened up all these mechanical ideas. Basically, I started thinking about, okay, Ekkom is a resistance group. Now you're a resistance group.
I don't have to worry about this concept of like, oh, how do you like reset the timeline and how do you redo? Like, is there a linear story where like we have all this like cool weapons? Like what happened to all those things? You either just say like, yeah, the... They don't share a timeline, but this one kind of helped me to say like, sure, there's a shared timeline. I could bring some characters back narratively, but what a cool idea. Again, not my idea. What a cool idea.
This is a game where XCOM lost. I just thought that felt the thematically just fit XCOM and so yeah, and I wanted to do things like procedural um tactical maps all the maps in in x-com enemy unknown were handmade and now we were going to like stitch together pieces and make procedural tactical maps so you could sort of always have a new experience
And then sort of just still keeping the same soldier classes, but now we were going to have a mobile base. And so there were a lot of fun things. We had like really... In the beginning, we had actual interceptors flying around on the map in this very real time. More simulation feel too. the strategy layer. But so much, we just changed so much. We added a bunch more enemies. We added stealth. We added all these things, which is really exciting.
But actually partway through that project I actually left. So I wrote an initial design and we worked on initial design. Maybe I was there for like a year and a half. And then I left to go work on A sort of dream game that was like...
The guy ran 2K at the time. Christoph came to me and said, like, oh, Jake, do you have any... Sorry, Christoph. I'm glad you drew the accent. Do you have any big ideas? Because I'm wanting to make some big ideas, and I think maybe you can... And I was like... like i do have a big idea so i took a team a real small team and we went and worked on a game called dusk which was voxel based landscape but also
it was about crafting creatures so it was like almost like you craft the ecology of the planet you're on so now you could whatever you can put wings on a wolf and you could whatever there are these procedural animals and you could also then craft your own animals and It really never took shape as a game because maybe 10 months we were on it and the tech was so challenging at that time that it was really tough to implement the idea.
XCOM 2 needed me to come back, and so I came back to XCOM 2, and then it was a sprint to get that game done. It was maybe 15 months after that that we shipped the game. What was... what did what did x what was x come to missing at that point i think it was just it was a i put them in a tough position because i had made a design and then they're like well jake needs to stay the creative director
But he's going to be on this other like pet project. And so they probably didn't feel free to like change. Deviate. Right. Because it was like, but I was like, I guarantee I would like. My first ideas are not great, and I probably would have ripped them to shreds by the time we got to the end, which I did. I ripped all my original ideas to shreds by the time we got to the end. But they were stuck in this tough spot of like, well...
Jake, God left us these commandments. That's right. And I will shepherd these commandments. And maybe they seem like they're at odds with each other. And some of these don't seem like they're going to work and blah, blah, blah. But if we mess with these, you know. It doesn't seem like a good idea because he must know. And it's like, well, no, I would have felt free to shred them. They didn't feel free to shred them.
I wasn't giving them much guidance because I was so focused on this dream project I was working on. And so it wasn't working. Could it have worked if you had been like... Playing the game once a week or something like that? Yeah, probably. Maybe. But that's something I'm really bad at. It's like providing...
feedback to other people's ideas. They didn't have their own things they were doing and it was just really hard for me. I was in a position at 2K where I was on a board of creative directors. We'd play other people's games. And I was really bad at it. I was like, my feedback to almost every game was, I wouldn't have done it like that. And I don't mean that in like, what I would do is better. I'm like, I just don't understand. Like, I just...
I would have done it differently, and I wouldn't have done it better. I would have differently, and I don't understand what you're going for, but I bet it will become clear when you ship the game. I just can't see games in a half-done state. It was just like, I don't know. It was tough for me. It's tough. I don't know if I could ever.
fill in a creative director design director role and like just overseeing stuff like um like i know when when like i was you know in the last few months at fraxis you know they're like well you can you know you can stay on and like you know you can you know you can advise or direct john right to make so five there's like
I just thought I'm just going to make his life miserable. And I even thought if I had stayed, probably I would have maybe done some work helping you out with XCOM. I probably would have made your life miserable too. I'd be like, you should do it like this. Here's why I should.
Tell you what, move. Right, right. Yeah, and that's the thing is I still, you know, I still am a, like, and I think you are, like, I'm still a low-level system designer. Even though I'm a creative director. I was a creative, I mean, my sons, I was a creative director, and it was a big team, but...
I still think I bring the most value as a systems designer. Because I still think the player experience is shaped by system design for the games we make. It's shaped by the system design. So it's tough for me to like... yeah talk about the player experience without like being like well if i design a lot of these systems that control the player experience like it's the best value i could bring to the situation and like when i see you
what needs to happen with a game. I see the whole thing. All different parts and they fit together. I can't just change this one part. I'll have to change this part. And then this thing needs to change too. And then suddenly it's sort of a different game. It's everything.
So yeah, I came back to XCOM 2 and then we closed that out. Really, really rapid sprint for 15 months. We closed that out. But that game... I love XCOM 2. I really like, I felt pretty good about XCOM 2. and then really we made the expansion after that called war of the chosen where the team was i'd never worked on expansion before then yeah not even any frax expansion i'd never worked on expansion um i'd always worked on just
core titles right and so it was my first expansion and i was like okay the team was just humming along everybody we had made a couple xcoms we just finished x2 everybody knew what they were doing and expansions were a lot of fun It's like, oh, let's look for the holes in the design and let's fill the holes. And it was fun. You'd be like, we added so much in War of the Chosen.
So, so many features and classes and enemies. And it was so much fun. And I really felt like when I finished War of the Chosen. I really am happy. I know I won't make another XCOM. I mean, never say never, right? But it seems hard to imagine doing it now. I won't do XCOM again, but I really felt good at the end of War of the Chosen because I was like, I think this is like the game I pictured.
when i was like a kid i mean it is over full of mechanics i will say it is way over full um that's kind of the problem in expansion you can't really pull things from the core game which you know right it should have but But I loved War of the Chosen. At the end, where we ended up, I think I was happy. The team was happy. It was like, this is like a really... I felt really good at the end of that one. Yeah. Well, it reminds me of another Sid...
He talks about how he loves the beginning of a project and the end of a project. And I don't know if he ever really works on expansions, but expansions are kind of like that supercharged, right? They are. You can change all the stuff you want to. It is hard to get rid of stuff, though. That's not really on the table.
um if something's not working but you can still mitigate it with various things so when you got to the end of war of the chosen like what are the big things different about xcom 2 that makes it like a superior product to xcom one if that's the right way to put it um i think that Combat-wise, I think that combat-wise, there were some really...
It was an interesting thing that I think wasn't better. But comment-wise, in general, I think stealth added a lot of interest to things. I think that having the timers, so... Talked about this before, the idea of you play conservatively in XCOM Enemy Unknown. And I was like, well, we've got to fix that. I don't want players to play the least fun version of the game. I was like, you've got to be running and gunning, man. You have to.
You have to take risks, right? I think that it's most fun to take risks, especially if it feels perilous to take risks, but the vast majority of time your risks pay off, right? Like that's the best experience for players is you think you're in danger. You think you're in an unwinnable situation or not unwinnable, but a really difficult situation. But somehow the vast majority of the time, you know.
You pull it out. Like that's the, when Exxon feels the best, you're like, this is a tough spot, but actually behind the scenes, you know, we're like, now you're fine. We've got a lot of tools to help you. And so how much to tell, talk a little bit about all the stuff, but you've talked about how you have kind of like progressive odds.
that like, you know, bump up the hit percentages. Yeah. Like what else, what else is going on? Well, the AI, I think the AI was selective in, in who it would attack. And, and so making sure that it, you know, and again, this is standard AI, right? But we didn't make the AI play.
well. We would always say the most important thing was for the AI to move to different levels of cover and different areas where they could be flanked. Like the AI would move to areas. They knew where you could flank them. They would take into account soldiers.
movement ranges and they would say i'll move here because he can flank me with like two soldiers so he should do that right like the players should actually do that we'll move to low cover because that's not smart but what it means is that as a player and i go to shoot things i'm seeing all different hit percentages not like if all the ai moved to like high cover it'd be like i don't know how to choose between who to shoot here they're all
Every two hit is the same number. That stinks, right? That's one of the great things about making an asymmetrical game. I really want to get away from... It's making symmetrical games. Yeah. Because like you make, you'd make Civ and like, yeah, we basically have the same philosophy. You want the AI to play the way that maximizes fun for the player. Right. But if it's a symmetrical game and you just have the AI making essentially dumb decisions. Right.
you're having the aliens do they're making some obvious that those decisions are dumb if it's a symmetrical yeah it's actually like why are they doing this this seems dumb and but it completely feels totally different if it's if you're playing like a game that's asymmetrical right that's that's exactly right is that then
it becomes a case of like, you know, it's unknowable what the aliens are doing. But yeah, they're making all the decisions to make the game more fun for the player. Move to a spot that's within flanking, you know, move to spots that will... be a different hit percentage for the soldiers than the people on the avian squads. The random maps were amazing. I think those added a lot. Even just as a developer.
Because I was playing the game over and over, I never got tired of X-Men 2. Sure, it helped you, which means it's a better game in the long term. You're the one who told me this, and you probably got this from somebody, but if not, I tell this saying to people all the time, which is that... The Metacritic of a game.
There is some sort of proportional relationship to the hours that the designer has played. Yes, right. And I truly believe it. And again, whatever you want to think about. But like, I believe it. I think it's a very succinct way to say like the Metacritic.
final metacritic score is is proportional to the hours the designer plays right yep it's a hundred percent true like it's the number of times you've gone through that loop you know playing it seeing what's wrong polishing off the edges polishing off the edges then you get down to the finer edges
once you get down there you're like okay this is gonna work like yeah now we're working on things that I'm you know then you get to a point like we could ship with this but I know it's gonna make it better can we change this can we change this So yeah, X2, I think it's just the narrative is better. I think the overworld, the geoscape was more complex, but I just thought it was more interesting. There was a lot more interesting stuff happening.
in the strategy layer um so yeah i just i really i was really happy with that game um that game i'm really happy with um so yeah i mean if If I don't, which I assume I won't. I mean, who knows, right? I'll be one of those guys. I'll be like, Jake's back. All right, everybody, I need crowdfunding because I am back and I'm going to make something called Y. Fifteen years from now, you and I will go back to Fraxis. That's right. I'll make one more Sid. That's right. I'll make one more X-Con.
That's right. Put it on the schedule and then we'll ride off into the sunset. I mean, it's funny. I love... I would have happily made, and I've said this before, and I mean it, I would have happily made XCOM games until, that's just the person I am. XCOM is a really rich design space for me. I think it's... I think Civ is probably tough to do multiple times, right? Because if you do a Civ, you kind of like, Old World's completely different. If you do a Civ, you're like...
Do a Civ again. You're like, I just did it. I did my version of Civ. You answered all these questions. I just did it. Like, XCOM, thematically, you can change enough to where, like, the mechanics got to change because I changed the theme on this thing. And, you know, so I think that... I would have been happy doing XCOM for a long time. But I'm happy that it ended at War of the Chosen, too. I'm happy that that's the ending point. Yeah. Cool.
All right. Well, let's get to Midnight Suns. We've kind of partially covered it, you know, as we've gone on. We bounced around. I think that the thing I'd like to actually start off with it is... How it's so different. Because when I first heard about the project, I was like, oh, yeah, Marvel XCOM. Okay. That makes sense, I guess. I guess I could see that. Yeah, when the project leaked, that's what they called it. Marvel XCOM. It was leaked before.
yeah they leaked it before it came out and it was called Marvel XCOM and I was like oh yeah I remember the leak because it had already leaked to us yeah you already knew there were a couple sources it was a very like a sieve yeah I mean, you work on a project that big. I mean, there's just no way to button it up in this type of community. But yeah, the thing that jumped out to me more is that...
You know, yeah, it's sort of XCOM in that there is, you know, you have your crew, right, or whatever. But the combat is so different, right? And... I guess we'll start was it looked like it was like obviously a ton was taken from like Slay the Spire and Breach. And so like, let's talk, how did that all come about? Like what, let's talk about that. Like, did it start in a different place or was that the idea from the beginning or how did this all come about? No, I think we.
started from the idea of XCOM. You start with what you know and it would have been you always want to make It certainly would have been easier if we were able to make a great Marvel game based off of XCOM's mechanics. That would have been easier and it would have been great. We would have been able to do it a lot faster.
And we played with that. We played with a couple of things. But really quickly, I mean, very, very quickly, we realized that those mechanics... were not appropriate they felt terrible so the the fantasy always when i think about games from a high level at least the games that i work on you always think about like what fantasy are you delivering to the player and the marvel fantasy i think is pretty clear um
And the idea that you could miss shots or you could somehow do low damage, you know, with these superheroes, it felt horrible. Like when we had... Random damage in there or any sort of like chance to do attacks or chance to deal a certain amount of damage
It felt really counter to the fantasy and it was really deflating. Um, and it, you just, it just didn't fit at all. And so, and you actually, at some point the prototype, you had that you were like, I'm Spider-Man and I'm attacking and I just missed and you're like, this feels weird. Yes. And, and. We had some types of chances. And so...
The first thing we did was actually we did a physical version of this, of the game. So we laid out this like tiled map and we used these old Marvel Heroclix figures. And I worked with... Mark Nada and Joe Weinhofer and we sat in my office and we just made a sort of tabletop Marvel tactics game. And it was pretty fun. It was the things that actually we kept from that was the idea of this sort of linear movement.
And leaping off of things and using environmentals, things like that. But we still had like chances to do damage. And then we practiced, we tried this idea of you had a chance to.
you always did damage but you had this sort of like chance to knock an enemy out um just straight up knocking me out and it's like an interesting idea but it's actually kind of ludicrous like what do you do when somebody has like triple the hit points like i don't know we just we tried a bunch of stuff but they were all based on like probability because
Randomness is a really important part of tactics. Like from turn to turn, randomness helps for you to say like, okay, I've got to adjust my tactics. And now I have a, every turn is like. to simplify but it's true i think every turn in a tactics team should be a puzzle to solve right so the player goes like all right now i've got this puzzle right maybe it's continuing from the old puzzle but it's a new puzzle and i've got to find out a way and the puzzle generally comes down to
How do I take out those guys and keep these guys alive? Maybe complete some mission objective. That's really the puzzle. Randomness always helps to make that puzzle fresh. If you're going to play...
you know a thousand turns of a game like randomness does a lot to make sure that puzzle is fresh every time. So we just knew we needed randomness and so we relied on the randomness that we had in XCOM which was more about you know your abilities outcomes are random random damage you know random effects things like that so it didn't work and and
It didn't feel good. And so I had been playing, you know, Into the Breach and I had been playing some Aspire and people had suggested that as well. And so... I forget exactly when this happened. I think we also tried, there was a game called SteamWorld. quest maybe there's a bunch of steam world yeah yeah i think it was like steam world quest and it was another it was like card based and um and so playing all those we we realized that using
these sort of deterministic mechanics, and especially Slay the Spire. Like, I was really excited about using cards.
being able to put all these extremely varied mechanics right in front of the player like using cards are fantastic for saying yeah we can have these really varied mechanics they can be fairly complex like every ability can do two things does this kind of damage and then it's got some sort of modifier thrown on there and it makes it really really interesting all of a sudden we found out a way to say like yeah we've got a lot of heroes so it was really worrying to think we have
12 heroes and we've got to make them all feel differently well once you start talking about cards right you can say like oh that's it's really easy to think about we'll give them a corg loop sort of like hook we'll design some pretty complex mechanics cards give you that as well we switch to that
Fairly early in the process. We switched the idea of using cards fairly early in the process, maybe six months or nine months in. And it was not a universally popular... decision with i i completely understand i mean i even at the time i understood and it wasn't just artists it was everybody being like whoa right we're making a marvel game like what are we doing making a you know had not enough
Had people, not enough people played some of these other games? I think so. Yeah. I mean, the team was big, right? So, and I think that you have this, there's the Marvel factor makes you kind of think about like presentation being really, really, really critical. Right. And cards have so much baggage, mental baggage from people. One, there's like the microtransaction baggage. Sure. We fought a lot when we announced. People saw cards and they go like...
Oh, this is just microtransactions. And we were like, no, no, no, definitely not. You cannot acquire cards outside of the game. They're all in the game. They're just representations of abilities for the most part. We want to use card mechanics to sort of...
be our randomization mechanic but um but people saw cards they thought microtransactions and then they just think like it just feels like so some people stuffy they think of you know their grandma playing pinochle right they just think like cards like you know Even XCOM players were extremely resistant to the idea of cards, which really surprised me. Cards have a lot of baggage, I think. But internally, it really solved...
It's really interesting because in a sense, card games are super hot right now. At least in the indie space, there's just an onslaught of like... deck builders and you know obviously like tabletop games are doing super well yeah um and is like the x-com audience like slightly the venn diagram doesn't overlap as what you thought it would or it's it's a it's a challenge because you want
You would think that it would be okay. I think that there was, I think, some disappointment from XCOM players that it wasn't XCOM 3. Sure. So I think that, like, fed into that maybe.
But yeah, it was the kind of thing where cards just overall, I think, really... can trigger some just negative like i'm not this is not for me right i don't play card games right and so yeah they're they're they're popular to people who are kind of like open to the mechanic or have played other card games and you realize well card games give you a lot and for us like
you know, card games were, they were, yeah, they were like representations of abilities. Um, so yeah, I mean, I think that even internally on the team, people are like, Whoa, what are we doing with this stuff? But, um, it really was that. The combat was fun really quick. Once we put the card stuff in there, then the combat became, you know, it was still a sliver of what it ended up.
being when we shipped, but immediately we were like, oh, this is already interesting. This is already kind of interesting. Okay. Was the original version, like, did it not have a grid? Like, was that always the case? There was never a grid. There was never a grid. Never a grid. That...
That was the sort of thing that I think... was a thematic decision pretty early on that we made because it also just felt odd for us these different heroes and movement felt like such a big part of who the heroes were that it was kind of tough to think about what grid movement meant for some of these heroes from the other heroes and it just felt better to say you know
So we came up with basically like the pool mechanic, the pool stick mechanic of like everything's just sort of linear. Like positioning is not about took away tiles or grid or anything like that. It's more about like.
angles you know then right positioning became uh about sort of like linear momentum and angles and things like that so yeah we never had a grid i think we that was one thing that we from the beginning we're like we're going to try to find a way to do this without a grid right okay um
So did you have the kind of like the infinite movement concept then from the beginning or is that something you kind of figured out? Because that's to me like one of the concerns about like losing a grid is like it being very fiddly about where you can go, where you can't go. Right. So we had the moves. So the moves were really.
Like this was one of those things that we probably tried like 20 iterations of over the course of the game basically. So we were trying to think about like what's the best way to do moves here basically.
you know, the way it ended up, you have one move per turn. And any hero can use it, but only one hero gets to use it. But then once they use it, yes, they can just sort of like move until they use an action, right? Because... you don't want to we didn't want to put in an undo button we didn't want to we just kind of wanted to say all right you can just continue to like position yourself
But we had all kinds of at one point moves were cards that would come up in your deck, you know moves were just like another card that would come up and yeah We you know we had all all kind of you know when we started like every hero had their own moves and every hero had their own abilities to use like XCOM. We went over I don't know how many versions of this. It's just funny to me because it's such a bold choice of like...
You have to figure out all these different ways to mitigate the problems with movement of like, okay, yeah, we have undo, but that seems weird. And like, you know, like we can be certain generous, but at some point you're either close enough or you're not close enough, right? Like, you know, you're going to have to. have some sort of some sort of limitation and and whatever and like why you know why just you know like so if you
The point is, if you have the wrong character move, or you have a character move, and you just can't quite get close enough, there's just all sorts of problems. And then just this thing of, well, what if they just can move forever? It makes no sense. Right. None. It makes no sense. But a lot of times, it's important to not worry about that. Just at least try it out and see if it's fine. Does it really break something thematically? And then sometimes you don't need to make sense. Yeah.
It's like a player-friendly thing that you're like, this is just going to like, the only other way to put limits on this is a bunch of UI and we're going to have to explain it. And so, yeah, that was the idea. It's like, it's super player-friendly, so let's just do that. Yeah. The other thing that kind of stood out to me is just the idea of all the cards are shuffled together. Like Slay the Spire, you're playing one character. And a lot of card-based games, it's the same.
the same concept basically like you know you're you're using your your cards for this one thing whereas and that maybe i don't know maybe steam world did this or you saw somebody else that did this but like it was like to me it was like really fresh i'm like oh you you know you've got these three characters and the cards are just shuffled together
and maybe maybe one of the characters cards just don't come to come up and that's okay or like one of them's dazed which means now like two of these cards your deck can't you know or your hand can't be used right like yeah and that was that was credit to scene world on that and they had a really interesting mechanic which was you got an extra if you did if one of the um whatever one of the units played three of their cards they got an extra move
So it was like they almost rewarded you for being like, well, I could have one of these characters take all of the – use all of their abilities and they got an extra one for that. But yeah, it was interesting because then it became like – it also solved the issue of we used they used to have their own abilities and their own actions yeah i would have gotten tight if i tried to do that i would have gotten tied up i would have been like i would give it each
probably would have given each character their own hand and like taking their own turns and like we did all those we did okay yeah we did all those we did it where it's like yeah everybody there's not like three card plays it's like every hero has a card play and of course that became extremely complicated because to make that
work they had to have their own decks and so it was like okay they all have like three cards and then it's like you got nine cards out here and so it really just became this idea of like yeah you got one hand and over the course of a
combat it'll probably end up feeling fair but yeah sometimes yeah one here has more than the others and it's maybe not to hear what you want and so then we added um redraw right yep um and it was really interesting we had and i told you uh about this a little bit but there was uh this really awesome magic the gathering player that um came and played an early prototype and just gave his feedback on it and talked about card design in general and he really didn't like the redraw because
The way he described it is like, you've now expanded my possibility space to every single card in the deck. He's like, when I see Redraw, as an advanced card player, he's like, before it was like... use these six cards, use these three card plays to use the environment, use your heroism, use all these tools you have. to solve the puzzle in front of you he's like when you put the word redraw there he's like now i'm thinking every card in the deck is a possibility
Right. And I was like, yeah, I guess I can see that. I was like, but redraw just gets you out of a lot of things. And it's, you know, again, it's another mechanic you can hang progress on. Yeah. I was just about to say, like, it's kind of like the.
The thing you wanted from time units, right? Like, yeah, you can add extra redraws, or you can take them away, or like whatever. Cards can give you redraws, and some heroes, when you redraw, they gain something, and Iron Man's whole moveset was built around redraws. His cards, you don't...
A lot of his cards, like, you can't redraw them because that's Iron Man for you, right, thematically. Instead, his cards get better when you redraw them. It's like it'll automatically upgrade the card. So it's a great hook to hang stuff off of. And it also just... It's kind of like a get me out of trouble thing as a designer, too, where you're like, oof, bad hand. Like, yeah, you got two redraws. Like, that's fine. Just use those. So, yeah, redraws and card plays.
you know the heroism was another big one having this heroism meter right um so there are a bunch of things that now you could say okay we've got a bunch of like crunchy stuff that we could build a bunch of heroes out of and the cards help you then make way more complex designs than you could do in something like XCOM. It's like, you gotta be careful at how complex these abilities are, right? Like you can't just sit there and read, what does this do? And this does this weird thing. And yeah.
All the tricks. I found heroism interesting in the context of like actually how few cards there are. Like I was wondering if you ever... if you had if you probably started with a larger deck or or not because it's it's a really small deck right each each hero is just eight cards eight cards and they have a total of 10 abilities they can choose from um each of those
each of their 10 abilities can be upgraded and then each ability can then be modded and so you can gain random perks later in the game.
you can start to put random perks on cards okay and that's kind of like the second half experience of the game as you go oh like you'll you'll build decks and you'll get to a point about halfway through where you're like okay i've got whatever um iron man or magic like pretty dialed in and then all of a sudden mods will start appearing on your cards or you could apply them yourselves and then when you get random perks you go oh i got to rebuild the deck all about this one card now
got some random perk that's just insane right and so now i'm gonna rebuild my deck about around this card um so yeah so we always had um one thing we had when we started out was we had shared abilities um This wasn't a great idea, but it was the kind of thing where every hero had their own unique abilities. And then every once in a while, these shared abilities would come up that anybody could use. So it'd be like punch or shoot or whatever it is, hide.
And then any hero could use those. But of course, as every hero had different stats, like it just never worked. You couldn't actually display the effects of the cards, you know, so.
Yeah, but I think we always started, I think we always had, like, every hero had 10 abilities. We just had, like, the modifying them really helped because now it was like, well, then it's almost unlimited at this point. Right. Okay. I mean, I think that having a small deck... like is really useful because like some some deck building games let you like really bloat your deck and then like you kind of lose track of like what to expect right um and like whereas you know with
uh you know with this game you really have a sense of like you know your deck is only 18 cards and you're seeing six of them right right so basically you're seeing like a third of your deck at any time so when you would 24 cards Eight times three, sorry, 24. Yeah, you're right. But you've seen a pretty good chunk of them. And when you know you're going to draw more, you know what's coming. You're using quick, yeah, so exactly right. And so...
It was a little bit of a, you know, you have to do data, too, to make sure. The great concern was that. Based on how many turns we expected combat to take, based on how many cards you went through per turn, then my great fear was that did you get a card and it doesn't come up in combat? Because that's like the worst example.
oh, I just got a cool card, it's really awesome, and it doesn't come up. You could go into combat and it'll just never come up. Now that can happen. It's very unlikely with the size of our deck, the amount of cards you go through per turn, how many turns you take per mission. We kind of kept that in mind.
Let's make sure that 90% of the deck, if not more, will come up in a standard mission to where the players are like, I put all this investment into this one card. I built my strategy around this one card and it doesn't come up. Like, this is a bad feeling. Right. Yeah. I also like the... Like the environmental aspects I thought were really interesting too, because essentially they're like extra turns.
right right um which gives you like a lot more flexibility it was basically so we have this heroism resource and the idea is that like you have any resource you know again You should probably care about it. But for me, if you have a resource, you've got to have a lot of syncs for that resource, right? It's better when you have this web of there's all different ways to spend this thing because that's when it gets interesting. So you've got your heroic.
Cards and if you have enough Harrison to use them, that's always awesome We made them visually satisfying with super powerful cards, but then we also said like well you could also use heroism on environmentals, right? So you could use them around the environment. That's always going to cost you some amount of heroism. So now you've got this choice of like, okay, I finished my turn. I could spend heroism on...
like the environment now and now i should use it if i'm lined up properly or something like that i could use the environment or i could save the heroism to use on heroic abilities or it just makes a sort of interesting choice between what am i spending my heroism on maybe i'm doing both if i've got enough heroism so yeah Yeah, the environment was, that was a fun, that was a really fun one. The idea of like leaping off of things, you know.
That really kind of helped the whole heroism stuff click when we're like, okay, we'll make this cost heroism. It's a little weird for it not to cost actions. So we were really clear to say like card plays. You have three card plays. But using the environment is like, it's just kind of like free, right? There's only free attacks. Yeah, it's kind of weird to wrap your head around. I assume that must have looked a lot different before there were cards. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I forget. Gosh, I don't even remember how we did those before we had cars. It must have been, I think it was action points. Just action points. Yeah. You see who actually fits that.
I don't know about better. Yes, it does. I think it does. Yeah, you start there and you had to figure out a way to make it work with cards because it's still a cool thing. Yeah, it is definitely one of those things that there was feedback on where people were like, I don't get why this doesn't work. cost me like they understood that there were three card plays but it's weird then that there's one move there's three card plays and then use the environment forever
And you're moving to use the environment. So if you go and, well, I'm going to go pull this pull down on people. You see your hero run over to this location, pull it down. It was, I admit, a little weird. It's one of those things that once people got it.
they got it but it's always a little disappointing as a designer you're like yeah i'm sorry i'm gonna have to tell you something that i know is gonna come off a little strange right it's better for the design but i wish it was you know i bet it was i wish it was a little cleaner than that yeah um Yeah, and you also kind of picked up the thing where you were showing the intention of the enemy units early. I mean, it seems like a lot of what makes the game work is...
just how clear the UI is about everything that's going to happen. You attack this unit, that means you're going to go stand right here, right? And it matters to some extent, but it's good to let them know. You mouse over every environmental thing, it'll show you exactly where it goes.
Yeah, the radius. All the knockbacks. It's very good of like... All their damage meters will then preview. You knockback this guy here and it's going to hit this guy. It might hit your own guy. So it tells you about that. All that stuff is great.
We, um, and then of course, then, then you go ahead and break those rules. So then we said like, oh, and by the way, and this, I think this came from Slay the Spire. In fact, is that like the, the villains that you would fight, like they wouldn't tell you. That just came from Slay the Spire.
But yeah, I think it was something where enemy intentions, which is like who they were going to attack. Like we tried, we definitely had those on and then we turned them off and we were like, does it make that much of a difference? And the funny thing about that was.
This is one of the things where playtests can lead you a little astray because people would playtest the game and they'd say, well, I don't know who these hero icons are. They'd be like, I don't know. So I'd see enemy intentions. They'd see a symbol next to the... enemy and they'd be like what does that mean well that means it's attacking blade and they're like well i don't know what blade symbol is and it's the kind of thing we're like okay
And it's really tough to navigate feedback sometimes, but I'm like, well, we're definitely going to make sure you know what that symbol is when you play.
and you probably will know this kind of thing where it's like it's hard to understand the first time it happens maybe but i think players are going to figure it out you know yeah but it's always tricky because like it came up a couple times they're like well what is that and it's like well that means they're going to attack this person can't talk tell dr strange's icon from from spider-man's icon i'm like well maybe not spider-man but some other hero's icon yeah but i think you will
It's the kind of thing where it's a problem once, but you know. Yeah, when you solve problems, like you have to prioritize them to some extent of like, okay, if they don't figure this out at this point.
is it that big of a deal right like what what's what's the worst is going to happen if they don't they don't get this right it's not ideal but you got to spend your right like you're tutorializing on other things yeah yeah the the challenge there was like we always worried about well how much info is on screen and so then it was like well do these are these
Are they putting a burden on the player? Something like that. You're like, I guess I should probably know what that icon means. And again, it did end up being a positive. And in fact, one of the ways that we fix that is that some people are like, well, if you play on the lower difficulties, you don't even... A lot of times you don't have to worry about who they're attacking. And so we're like, okay, well, we should probably.
now we should make it meaningful if this person attacks you, they're going to stun you. And by the way, here's hero abilities that give you boost if you attack somebody who's targeting you or something like that. Start making those enemy intentions more meaningful. Yep. I just thought of the one-two hit thing in the game that I kept failing at, which is the drop, Ghost Rider's drop.
And I actually restarted the mission. Like, I don't know if you have it attached to a seat or something. I started the mission like three or four, restarted it three or four times. I'm like, I'm going to do this until I get the bad guy to fall in the drop. I just want to at least see it happen because it was like only like 39% or something. be like well and that's as you and i've talked a lot about chance that's the only chance in our game really the only chance in our game is to drop it is
I was like, well, we can put that in there. What the heck? Yeah. Well, it's funny because the drop, that was another ability that we went back and forth on forever. So the first implementation of drop was when Ghost Rider makes... his, his, um, uh, portal, his hell portal, um, his, what is it called? Well, whatever. He makes his little, um, you know, portal to hell basically. Then it was.
The next enemy knocked into it has a 100% chance to be KO'd. So we were like, it was great, right? It was like his drop that he creates is 100% knockback. And we were like, well... It takes strategy. First, you've got to spend a card play to create that portal. Then you've got to get positioned and spend something to knock them into the portal. But we were like, and it felt great. It was one of the coolest abilities. It felt so satisfying. But it was...
obviously so ruinously overpowered that it was one of those things that really pained me to pull out. And I was like, oh, they got a double percent chance, which is so terrible. It's not nearly as satisfying.
And it was one of those things, but I was like, I'm playing with him and I'm like, this is so obviously broken. I will just spend this on the units. I can just build my deck in such a way that this is absurd. I'll never... face a bad i'll never face a scary guy again i'll just use my drop yeah um and it was one of those things that When I pulled it and I knew this was gonna happen when I changed it, it was like the feedback from QA was like and understandably, but they were just like
This is the worst design change. And I was like, I know, I know. I was like, but there is no way to, we were trying to find a way to fix it. Is there a way to make it as cool as it felt where it was like a hundred percent.
drop is just a fun way again you just try to find ways to break mechanics and that's a way to break them it's like now his drop is 100 you're like that feels awesome it's very satisfying but it was just absurdly overpowered and it was like we got to pull it and it hurt to pull and people
were not thrilled internally when we did that because they're like you just took away my favorite thing to do yeah you're like yeah but over 20 hours it will you will bore yourself to tears with this strategy so yeah that's interesting because it's kind of like one of the
Kind of key differences between like Slay the Spire and Midnight Suns is like the whole point of playing Slay the Spire is to break it. Yeah. Right. To just do something that's just absurdly overpowered because you're not going to, because it's a roguelike and you're not making a roguelike. It's a very different framing. I do think that every card game, the joy in it is breaking it. I do think if you can find a way in the randomness, that is the real joy of decks. the unpredictability of...
you have one card and you just have this fantasy of like, if this comes up at the same time, this comes up and this happens like, yes, you will do some absurd thing, you know? And so you still want that to exist, right?
is people are going to probably play through Midnight Suns once, right? I mean, who knows how many times exactly, but basically that's what you're probably figuring on, where the whole point of Slay the Spire is no one would play the game once. That doesn't make any sense, you know? So yeah, you have to evaluate.
those decisions in that framework right and yeah and it's it's different slave aspire too of course is the selection of cards available to you is like i don't know if i'll see it right you start building a strategy towards something you're like oh like i didn't get what i needed like now Now I just have this half-built deck. As opposed to Midnight Suns. You'll get what you want. You're going to get what you want. I think I say it works really well about Midnight Suns.
surprised me like i didn't anticipate is that you know i kind of went in knowing that like okay The cards are going to be interesting because it means I'm not just doing the same things with my soldiers every turn. I'm not going to have the same decisions. I'm going to be forced to make different decisions every turn. But when it feels like that, because of that, I realize, I don't know if you were...
them in this way but it seems like that's why you could kind of get rid of the terrain and levels like actually having like because it seems like in in XCOM that's what forces different decisions right the terrain and so like when I first saw you know the levels here i'm like okay this is a little weird that like location doesn't really matter at all it doesn't matter how far you away are from the enemies and you know you have this this infinite move thing and like yeah i you know like but
it still work but it can only work because of the cards like without the cards it would feel i mean i don't even know what it would be like right like right it's all everything is like a matrix of choices and it's like you've got all these vectors flying off here and it's every mission is
All right. What is the mission objective? Might be one. What are the enemies and their abilities that I'm facing? Might be two. What is the layout of the environmentals in the map? Might be three. And then, of course. what are the cards that come up in my hand and that's enough to be like every turn you know or at least every mission you're like every turn is like what cards come up maybe what abilities did the enemies play or what enemies did appear
um so those are always the things that turn to turn what the enemy did may have changed the tactics and what cards came up changed the tactics and then yeah the maps are just enough to where you're like okay this is very different and you're right i think that in x-com it helps
like being able to move over like these large areas of terrain that always made you had multiple encounter spaces you know and you could never tell where you're going to have this fight and yeah and I think you would push beyond the kind of like the complexity
limit if you stuck like hard play like that in x-com oh right because then it's just too much too many things moving in too many different directions at once we had a version that we didn't even really There was a prototype done by one of our designers where it was like...
okay, you're actually moving through a space. And this was very early on, we had moves and things like that. And it felt cool, but I think it felt cool because it was familiar. It was like, okay, this feels like XCOM. We're like, now you're moving through a space and fighting new guys in a new way. area and things like that um let alone the content cost of doing something like that in a game like this yeah that was one of those things where we knew we were going to do arenas pretty early um
But yeah, you always hope decisions like that work out. Is this going to be enough? Is this going to be enough? It's almost like the cards. The design choices, the complexity is still there. But it's, yeah, it's really just in the cards do a ton to help that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's their main purpose from my perspective. It's a very long game. Very long game.
A big change. Another really big change is it seems you can't really lose the game. We touched on that earlier. There's no way to lose it. But that's a... That's a pretty big shift, right? To how you view how the strategic layer is going to work. Yeah, it was... right because it basically it was a little bit of a strategic layer and like a lot of an rpg layer right like it really was kind of like rpg where it's yeah it's you can
Play it for as long as you want. You don't have to pursue the main storyline missions. I don't care. There's no timer on it. There's no lose condition. In XCOM, yeah, you could actually lose the game on the strategy layer. And in Midnight Suns, there was never a question. Like an RPG, progress the narrative when you take the next narrative.
See the narrative goalpost. When you want to do that, go do that. And then we'll progress the story for you. Until then, I guess do whatever you want. Were you on board with that from the beginning? From the beginning. I knew there wouldn't be permadeath. And I was already ready. to say like I wanted to make a game that I felt like I got a little caught up with X2 where people after XCOM Enemy Unknown there was a narrative about like ooh
Like Enemy Unknown was being equated with like Dark Souls a little bit where it was like, ooh, challenge. Like it's real challenge.
I think I got a little caught up in that narrative when I wasn't actually realizing like, well, XCOM actually feels challenging. I don't know that it is as challenging as people say it is. It's certainly stressful, right? And maybe Permadeath makes you feel like there are these real... consequences other games may not have but I think maybe I leaned into that a little too much and I was ready to make a game where I was like I don't want to lean on like I didn't want stress to be
And Exxon 2 kind of stressed me out when I'd play it sometimes, and I was like, I don't love this about the game. I kind of wanted to make a game that was a little more fun, a little more lighthearted, and where stress wasn't a mechanic, and it was just sort of like, yeah. And as we talked about before, it's about...
XCOM 2 is, can I survive? And Midnight Suns is like, how well can I beat this mission? I really kind of wanted to do that. The thing that would stress me out about trying to design XCOM would be trying to figure out, you know, it's a pretty long game. I don't know what you...
how you imagine like a playthrough is like 30 or 40 hours or something yeah probably 20 probably yeah and like i i would be very concerned about the kind of like the potential that the player we're getting in a position where they're still playing the game but they have no way they can win it anymore Because some of the kind of like they failed at certain important, important junctions at the strategic level. Right. Like how.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there's ways to guide the player back or something. What are your thoughts on that? That was really challenging because XCOM would... progress the way it would progress is that um like there would be a sort of countdown like in in x-com 2 there's a legitimate like a doom timer like really like you got a very board game thing of like hey you got it
You've got to do something by this. Although we gave you ways to mitigate that and take some blocks off of the Doom timer so it didn't fill up. The real challenge was that the enemy schedule, as we called it, would advance. The enemies would get tougher. irregardless of where you were, like the enemies would get tougher. And I always thought that was...
Fine. I wasn't worried about that so much. But then you're right. If you didn't research things, we just needed you to be sure like, hey, you need to research. There were really only a couple of. techs that needed to be researched to keep you in the game and it was the laser weapons and the plated armor and then the plasma weapons and the powered armor there were only ever four techs
The thing that really helped was that those were easily the sexiest acts. It was like, you want better guns? And by the way... you know everybody gets better guns when you do this right like if you want better guns and the player's like of course i want better guns so that helped us a lot is that like you were always working towards them and then
We were always giving you more scientists. And so that research, which was essential, even if you ignored it, there was no way to avoid getting more scientists. And then that time on that research would just shrink and shrink and shrink. And it would sort to the top and it would be like, hey. I don't know what you would be doing if you weren't taking the big gun tech, right? Right, yeah. So I think it helped it in that regard. But there certainly were ways on higher difficulties.
They're real challenges. You could get behind the curve. The one way you could fall behind was losing your best soldiers. And so what we did there was we made sure that the – this solved another problem too. the biggest stat boosts you got were from your gear, not from your soldiers and your classes. Now you lost flexibility because you didn't have all these abilities, but like the gear gave you massive boost to your damage and your armor.
And it it kind of fixed you and I talked about permanent quite a bit There is a real problem with permanent which is that wait, I've reached the end of the game The enemies are super tough I need all this flexibility that colonels have. They've got tons of abilities. They're great. And I need all that because the enemies, their difficulty is rising. But...
You've designed a game in such a way that rookies must be viable. You can't kill soldiers and then go like, oh yeah, no, you can't take rookies. It's like, well, what do you mean? You just killed my soldier. Like rookies must be a viable option at the end of the game. Right. And so that meant that you had to say, all right, well then gear is like the most important thing. Like rookies have to be viable to the very last mission. It may be tough, but rookies have to be a viable choice. Yeah.
And you only have six soldiers. So, yeah, that was always a challenge. But doing that helped the players stay, you know. Yeah. You know, stay at least in the game. Yeah. And you need the game to progress independently because otherwise players will... then figure out that it's not progressing independently and they'll game the system around that and like this stuff is really difficult yeah and it really was the greatest that i think the the real highs of x-com were the fact that you know
you would be outmatched, and you'd have these really tough combat missions, and then the minute you research one of those big four attacks, like, all right, I got the big guns, I got the laser weapons, then the next three or four missions, you'd be like, oh, I am wiping the floor with these guys. But on whatever schedule, it's like, oh, now the Mutons showed up. And you're like, oh, man, I'm back to being outgunned here. So you had these like...
Jumps, you know these jumps that really felt good as you'd have these missions of pressure and then missions of elation where you're like, okay Now I'm feeling better. Thanks. So it was also you made that like people comparing it to Dark Souls and things like that I mean, I do think it is worth mentioning that like
XCOM is like one of the games people point to as like saying that like it brought consequence back to games, right? Like there was this period. It felt like games were wavering a little bit and it was just like, okay, we got to make sure we guide the player. You know, we don't, we don't take, you know, we never let them.
like drift off to the, you know, off to the side. We got to make sure they have a good experience, which obviously is like a good priority, but like everything you can go too far. Right. And it's interesting because to some extent your design philosophy.
is actually very player-focused. Very player-focused. It's kind of a little bit odd that you're associated with the game that really brought that... back if you think about it um but it's a really important part of like the x-com legacy i guess well and i think it's it's part it's just all perception to where like again i think the the x-com is great when you feel
Everything about what the game or the narrative of a theme or whatever is making in the way the aliens look they're terrifying and you just feel like know i'm in a lot of trouble here but like honestly if you looked at let's say the numbers if you could see the game design as a matrix you'd be like you're gonna be fine right like you're gonna be fine you're okay you can lose soldiers you can we have so many built-in things to like protect
you as a player to say like you know the numbers aren't even the numbers you're seeing and bleeding out as opposed to dying and all these things that make you feel like oh my gosh There are enough deaths to keep you honest. You'll have enough soldiers die to keep you honest. But there's so much that I think feels more threatening than actually is. And then it makes you feel great. You're like, wow, I beat those crazy odds. Yeah, you get the highs. Right.
Cool. All right. Well, we should probably wrap this up. But one question I always like to finish with is why have you devoted your career to making video games, making these games? That's a good question. Why have I devoted my career? You could have done business. I could have. I could have done business. I don't think there is anything more rewarding. To me, it's... It just, it isn't.
So I thought about this a lot, and it was a weird thing where early in my career, you know, when I would actually talk to people and then ask me, what is it you do? I wouldn't even tell them I make video games. I'd tell them I was in software. I was a little bit like... I don't know. I wasn't embarrassed about making games, of course, but it just didn't feel serious. It just didn't feel like a serious thing. But as I've gotten older...
And as I've like been able to see games go out there and the impact they have. And it was like, man, we have a job. I don't want to overstate this, but we really do have a job where we get to like bring joy into people's lives. There's like nothing more rewarding. It feels like a very, very worthwhile career. Like you could be doing a lot of things. Yep. But doing something like this where especially in –
premium games where you have this honest handshake with a player and you go like, hey, look, you pay me this. I'll give you a game. If we both walk away going like, fair deal. Like, that was great. Like, I don't know what more you want out of a career. Like that just feels so good where it's like you have a community that's like, hey, we really appreciate this thing you do. And you're like, I really love.
My daily job is fantastic. I'm creative. I work with amazing people. That's great to be able to get paid for that. I don't know. I just can't picture doing anything else. Maybe it just comes down to like you can say at the end of your life, you can be like, you know, I brought joy to like lots and lots of people. Any game developer, I think, gets to say that. And that's...
I don't know. What more do you want? Yeah. Yeah. It's easy to forget that in the day to day. But yeah, I mean, whenever, whenever I talk to someone and they just say, Hey, you know, I, I really loved your game. Like it was just, you know, I had fun with it. Right. Like, I mean.
yeah like it's it's amazing that we've been able to do that yeah it's been in today's world there are a lot of things that maybe don't bring people joy so it's nice to be able like hey you do an unup you know like an unapologetically joyful thing for people like that's great you know that's great Cool. All right. Well, thanks for doing this. I think we got a lot of content here. Fill up people's podcast devices. Cool. All right. Cool. Thanks for doing this. Thank you, Soren.
How long have we known each other now? 23 years? 23 years. Okay. 20 years since what? May 15th? May 15th, 2000. May 15th. We'll have to have an anniversary. Yeah. Cool.