X-Com Creator Julian Gollop Discusses His Most Important Games (2019)
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Julian Gollop, creator of X-COM, discusses his most important games in an interview, sparking a nostalgic discussion among commenters about his gameography and the evolution of the X-COM series.
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All of this adds depth and texture to a game instead of "humans good, aliens bad". The world isn't simplistic and I really don't want a game with a theme to either.
It’s the same with games about uniting as humanity to kill aliens, you exist in some liminal space between reality and fantasy to come to terms with what it means to be who you are, etc. That said, someone is free to make their game how they like, just as I am free to dislike its direction and make a comment on it. And so on, and so forth.
Humanity would lose. The end. Rather boring game if I may say so.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11324814-vilcabamba
Also the mechanic in the reboot was a bit misguided. They eliminated sneaking up and ambushing the enemy and replaced it by little animated introduction of the enemy as soon as they land into a very large circle around your soldiers, almost regardless of terrain. X-COM 2 brought it back a little bit with you soldiers starting in stealth mode and some of them potentially re-entering stealth again using a skill.
Original X-Coms: very simulationist. Reboot: Adds class mechanic thus reducing simulationism.
(In both cases lategame is rather easy).
Chimera: Small set piece, probably inspired by the Mario game. Also characters like in Jagged Alliance.
It takes a lot from other games, which suits some but not others.
The more obvious explanation is that having alien members in your squad opens up new gameplay opportunities.
Your comment seems like a caricature of a right wing person who thinks everything they don’t like is “DEI/woke”. It’s like you need the world to be black and white and when it isn’t it upsets your world view?
I guess the Thiel influence is strong here too but it seems like "The Last Scream of the Old World", which is a right wing, populist and anti-intellectual tone, will seep deep even into areas we wouldn't have expected or didn't even think it would happen because it wouldn't be necessary.
We're living in interesting times indeed...unfortunately.
Fighting campy superhero bosses just kinda made everything less tense (and frankly, the random spawns got kinda annoying).
If I live a million years I will never understand the paranoia over the ‘threat’ of inclusivity / diversity.
Browsing the reviews now, it's full of people saying how hard they tried to like the game. Good games make themselves effortless to enjoy. Even quite flawed games cause people to look past any awkwardness or glitchiness if they're fun at their core.
It's hard to express what makes unfun games not fun. But it was grindy in the wrong places, and just felt awkward to play. The balancing and pacing was terrible, and it just lacked charm.
It felt like it took itself really seriously, and it projected an air of superiority by deliberately not choosing to do some things that made the 2012/2016 XCOM games fun out of a sense that they were too "dumbed down".
If you go into developing a game being "Not X", then you better bring along a game-changing mechanic, graphics, or something else that separates and elevates you above that game. And PP didn't have that.
> by deliberately not choosing to do some things that made the 2012/2016 XCOM games fun out of a sense that they were too "dumbed down".
Because the way I experienced it, is that it was quite clear Phoenix Point was also meant to be playable on a console. For example compared to the original X-com's inventory management was dumbed down.
From cinematography, two big examples "that may have people leave the theater, then":
-- in Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, the Sheriff (Gene Hackman) re-telling the story of English Bob:
> You see, the night that Corky walked into the Blue Bottle, and before he knows what's happening, Bob here takes a shot at him! And he misses, 'cause he's so damn drunk. Now that bullet whizzing by panicked old Corky, and he did the wrong thing. He went for his gun in such a hurry that he shot his own damn toe off. Meantime Bob here, he's aiming real good, and he squeezes off another, but he misses, because he's still so damn drunk, and he hits this thousand-dollar mirror up over the bar. And now, the Duck of Death is as good as dead. Because Corky does it right. He aims real careful, no hurry... [...] BAM! That Walker Colt blew up in his hand, which was a failing common to that model. You see, if Corky had had two guns instead of just a big dick, he would have been there right to the end to defend himself. [...] Well, old Bob wasn't gonna wait for Corky to grow a new hand. No, he just walked over there real slow - 'cause he was drunk - and shot him right through the liver
-- the scene in Vince Gilligan's El Camino, in which a bunch of gunners is so hijacked by the unpreparedness to the havoc that most bullets end on the scenery.
Not documentaries, but statistically relevant like the ten "black" in sequence at the roulette, frequent as the wheel is having well over a thousand spins.
There's a reason why pretty much ever single new tactics game got rid of the probability based hit chance. It's a dead end in game design.
Having an RNG hit chance is fine as long as the probability “feels right”. “Point blank” should have a 100% chance.
If the target is a mime pretending to a statue, yes, probably, it will approximate that.
The turn-based animation of UFO/XCOM may have felt so static and poised - but it narrated a military action...
And personally, in front of "UFO: Enemy Unknown" I lived the pleasure of the masterpiece, not the balanced game - some of us have little taste for the win-and-lose. We learnt assembly when we were kids to make those sides of the gameplay adapt to our will - and went on hacking since.
Of UFO/XCOM, one particularly stubborn subsystem to change was having the "radars" not missing any new alien ship.
In any case, I really don't get it. So you point your gun at an alien and you see a chance to hit at "85%". What do you do? Do you think to yourself "oh, cool, that's a certain hit"? It's not: there's a 15% chance to miss.
I think ragequtting over that is just the standard phenomenon, in both strategy games and real life, that people never make contingency plans, they just make one plan and assume there's no chance of failure because they're so smart to plan ahead and the competition is clearly too dumb to have any plans of their own. In my book, any plan where one imagines themselves emerging triumphant after beating all the odds like the dice are loaded in their favour by the gods is not so much a "plan" as a wish-fulfillment fantasy.
And I, for one, don't find those fun. YMMV, but let's not assume that everyone enjoys the same things, in games or in life.
P.S.:
>> There's a reason why pretty much ever single new tactics game got rid of the probability based hit chance. It's a dead end in game design.
You mean, they still have hit chances but they don't tell you what they are so they can tweak them behind your back, so you win enough to buy their next game? Oldest trick in the book [3].
____________
[1] I hate losing men.
[2] There's an "Iron Man" mode but that turns out to only play the Black Sabbath song in a loop.
[3] https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
I am surprised Firaxis didn't work on an X-Com 3. I would guess the fan base is still huge.
I'm getting old and I don't play videogames anymore, but if I have a month of free time imprisoned in a cell with nothing else to do, I'd give xcom2 with LwotC a go. (and Master of Magic, and Master of Orion 2, etc).
[0]: https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/Long_War_of_the_Chosen
https://www.gog.com/en/game/xcom_ufo_defense
Not this one:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/200510/XCOM_Enemy_Unknown...
There's a bit of confusion because the first game was called "UFO: Enemy Unknown" in the UK and "X-COM: UFO Defense" in the US [1] but the one discussed in the article is the 1994 game:
Also: graphics [1]._____________
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO:_Enemy_Unknown
[2] https://dcnxazdl1qzggl.archive.ph/2Ue9d/b72fb5aeb68b363eebfc...
Firaxis didn't but Julian Golop's company, Snapshot Games (discussed in the article) published Phoenix Point which is kind of like X-Com 2.0.1:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/839770/Phoenix_Point/
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/phoenix-point-becomes-epic-...
https://openxcom.org/
https://mod.io/g/openxcom
Although later creations were more popular it's that first one that really stands in my memory 40+ years later.
I guess it might be time to fire up an emulator and play again, as I do every couple of years:
https://torinak.com/qaop/play/chaos
That one you posted is pretty good until you get to casting a spell, and then they little keyboard sans-cursors and the lack of apparent touch control all goes wonky.
I thought I had the original game in my GOG account but it turns out I only have a clone (Xenonauts). I haven't played it at all and I bet I wouldn't have played the original XCOM either if it was in my GOG account.
The reason? I'm sad to admit that but it's the graphics. I can sometimes play older games, e.g. arcade games from the '80s or '90s, but I really struggle with most older graphics games. That makes me sad because there are some real gems that are now older than 20-30 years and I'd really like to be able to enjoy them, but I can't.
There's a time to play, and a time to admire graphics, I guess. Oh Ecclesiastes, you were so right.
Unfortunately I’m also a software dev, and an interface snob, and the UI/UX for the old games sucks. They had access to the exact same mouse+keyboad back then as we do now, but the standards for controlling a Turn Based Tactics game just weren’t established yet, and interfaces ranged from ignorant to amateurish to experimental to actively user-hostile - and I don’t know which one to characterize old XCOM as, but I don’t have any patience for it nowadays.
It’s such a shame that old games with good gameplay are effectively hidden behind bad UX. Rereleases like the recent Tomb Raider that practically preserve the original experience, but fix the UI issues (the tank controls of the original, in this case) are a blessing.
Have you tried interpolation, such as HQ4X, SuperEagle etc.?
If that is not enough, add textures, colour-dependent.
It is the little things, like the 'ping' of bullets hitting enemies or terrain, or seeing an alien scurry past between hedges.
"random-number stuff was really too brutal for a lot of players to handle" -- I never finished XCOM 2 specifically for that reason. I think, having not come from a background of table top RPG's, it just didn't click.
[1] https://www.vgchartz.com/game/47651/tom-clancys-ghost-recon-...
It was an enjoyable read at least. Lots of standard horrible practices in the game development community, and some actually surprising ones. Such as, "they didn't even hire the X-COM people to work on any of the X-COM sequels?"
The first X-COM felt like those, afterwards not so much.