It was ”looking very promising” back then and was planned for PC and PS2, and was to use the Havok physics engine and they were ”one of the very few” using it.
The new XCOM from 2K is a total departure from the traditional turn-based strategy formula for the series, but the original creators already had plans to adopt a shooter style. However their plans, codenamed ‘The Dreamland Chronicles: Freedom Ridge’, cancelled.
”It was designed as a sort of remake of X-COM… and it was looking very promising actually,” revealed Julian Gollop. ”We were using a lot of new technology, including the Havok physics engine, which was very new at that stage.”
”At the time we were one of the very few companies that were using it.”
Their remake for XCOM was certainly an “ambitious project” with ”eerie” similarity with SEGA’s Valkyria Chronicles.
”We had a third-person camera view behind your character with a bar representing your Action Points, which went down as you moved,” he said.
“When you went into shooting mode it went into a first-person view and you could select snap shots or aimed shots, which altered the size of an aiming circle on screen. So you did the shooting from that view, and went back to the third-person view to move your characters.”
They planned to have a destructible terrain system too, which could open up levels to be approached in different ways.
“You could blow holes in buildings with a rocket launcher and see all the brickwork fly around, then move through the gaps,” mused Gollop. “It was quite advanced for its time.”
The project never survived though as publisher troubles plagued the studio, Mythos Games, which suffered closure shortly after ‘The Dreamland Chronicles’ fell through. XCOM releases on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC March 6th, 2012. Are you looking forward to it?
