


“Usually he puts up a prototype,” Shirk said in an interview at E3, “nobody knows it’s coming. Speaking with PCGamesN, senior producer Dennis Shirk said it’s one of his secret weapons.

I don’t want to get into specifics, but Sid has this kind of prototype engine that he’s always doing stuff on.”Īs revealed in 2016, Meier’s custom prototyping software has been in use for decades. “He made me a prototype of basic XCOM with interleaved turned. “Sid was actually a big proponent of that,” Nauta said. But the decision was nonetheless controversial. In an interview with Polygon, Nauta explained that his team settled on Interleaved Turns early on. “They” refers to Mark Nauta, the lead designer on Chimera Squad and the successful XCOM 2: War of the Chosen expansion that came before it. It shows how the game’s Interleaved Turns will unfold. “When told me they were considering initiative and interleaved actions,” Solomon said in a tweet, “I said ‘Ooooo, I don’t know that I would do that.’ And they did it anyway and it was great and clearly the right decision.” You can see XCOM’s new Timeline in the upper right-hand corner. Simply put, the Interleaved Turn allows Chimera Squad to do things that no other XCOM game has been able to do before.īut even Jake Solomon, a creative director at Firaxis Games and the design lead on the entire XCOM franchise, was initially against it. It seems like a subtle thing, but as I said in my review, it completely alters the flow of the game and helps it stand apart from other titles in the franchise. Instead of moving all your units and then waiting for the computer to move all of its units, allied soldiers and enemy units are shuffled together in a kind of rolling initiative order. The change to the XCOM formula in Chimera Squad is referred to as Interleaved Turns. The industry legend was a big proponent of the changes, and even built a custom prototype himself. None carry more weight than Sid Meier, the creator of the Civilization franchise and the director of creative development at Firaxis Games. The decision to mix things up was controversial, and early on many members of the development team got in on the action. XCOM: Chimera Squad changes a lot about classic XCOM, but the biggest departure is in the turn order itself.
