JAGGED ALLIANCE 3

Escaping the spectre of XCOM by never telling you the odds

- Phil Savage

It’s hard to overstate just how important Firaxis’ XCOM reboot was. In the years since its release, the turn-based strategy genre has experienced a renaissance that owe a huge debt to Firaxis’ clever mix of old and new. But what if you’re trying to make the successor to a different turn-based classic? Then, it seems, XCOM’s legacy can be a hindrance.

“We found that, no matter what we did, everyone played just like they played all the other games like XCOM,” says Brad Logston, senior producer for Jagged Alliance 3. “They weren’t playing it like Jagged Alliance. We didn’t even know how to fix it. We were doing things like tweaking AI, tweaking weapon damage ranges, all these different things. Nothing was really working.”