Three new XCOM 2 mods have been announced by Long War Studios, as part of the company’s recent partnership with 2K, during the Firaxis Megapanel at PAX South 2016. But Long War Studios isn’t planning to create a new iteration of the massively popular Long War mod anytime soon.
For those unfamiliar, Long War Studios is a recent addition to the development scene, founded by three of the core members behind Enemy Unknown’s Long War mod. Work on the mod began after John Lumpkin finished the 2012 XCOM reboot and went looking for mods to further extend the game’s life. When his search came up short, he set work making the adjustments he wanted to see in the game. But it didn’t take long for the project to pick up momentum. The first person to reach out offering to help was Rachel Norman, now a co-founder of Long War Studios, but the list continued to grow.
“We’ve actually never met in person, we all met online,” Lumpkin said. “We had, probably, about 50 contributors (or more) to Long War. These were coders, artists, voice actors, translators. We had people on every continent except Antarctica. I’m not sure what’s wrong with the people in Antarctica. We never could get the Antarctican voice pack.”
The original vision for the mod was relatively small. Lumpkin and the rest of the team wanted to make the game a bit more challenging; something to ensure that a second (or third) playthrough wasn’t a breeze for returning players. Despite the impressions some fans had, the Long War team wasn’t setting out to torture XCOM fans. The team just wanted players’ decisions to feel like they had more impact.
“The DNA of the mod was something for people who’d finished the main game, didn’t need to find out the plot or anything like that,” Lumpkin told iDigitalTimes. “To [give] it much more of a war feeling, with reversals and triumphs and the idea of managing a massive team of soldiers instead of a dozen.”
But with each new addition to the team, and each new suggestion from the community that grew around the Long War mod, the project’s scope continued to grow. Eventually, the Long War team began to think about creating its own project. It wasn’t an overnight decision, or one the team made lightly, but the timing was perfect for Lumpkin. He’d just finished graduate school and was more than happy to make game development his new day job.
“We started chatting a little bit about it last year,” Lumpkin said. “We’d talked to a few people with industry experience and they encouraged us…so we started kicking around some ideas, talked about forming a studio and figured out who we could bring to work with us, who would be willing to work on a Kickstarter thing. Then, in the middle of last year, we got a call…from 2K.”
The publisher informed Lumpkin and his partners that Firaxis was hard at work on XCOM 2 and wanted to know if the team would be interested in creating mods for the then-unannounced sequel to Enemy Unknown. Lumpkin flew to Maryland in September to meet with the XCOM 2 dev team, while Norman and another partner used Skype to discuss the proposed partnership with the decision makers at Firaxis.
And those discussions proved quite fruitful, with Long War Studios ultimately convincing the XCOM 2 team to leave “modding hooks” –think of them as placeholders for new add-ons – in the game’s source code. Adding mod hooks makes it significantly easier for modders to add new content to the game without impacting the performance of other XCOM 2 add-ons that have already been installed. Theoretically, that means the community can spend more time creating new content and less time troubleshooting conflicts between existing mods. That extra time should come in handy because the Long War Studios founder says the sky is the limit when using the official XCOM 2 mod tools.
“I don’t know if you can make XCOM 2 make you a sandwich,” Lumpkin told iDigitalTimes. “But, in terms of the kinds of games you can make with it, it’s pretty amazing.”
Rather than build a new iteration of the Long War mod, Long War Studios plans to build a series of optional add-ons for the XCOM 2 campaign. The new mods include submachine guns, which deal less damage than assault rifles but give soldiers a bit more mobility, and a new Muton variant (the Muton Centurion) that should generate more than a few headaches. The Centurion is stronger than the other Mutons encountered in XCOM 2 and even provides combat bonuses to his allies. Lumpkin says Long War won’t introduce players to the Muton Centurion “until they’re ready” but we can only imagine what kinds of havoc the newest Muton will be able to cause.
“We do want to kill players,” Lumpkin said with a laugh. “We want them [to be] in a bad way. So this is kind of a boss Muton. He’s not elite levels of bad but he’s bigger…and he can use an ability that helps all the other aliens around him. He’s meant to be a scary purpose.”
The most technically-challenging of the bunch is an XCOM 2 mod that introduces a new developmental path for soldiers that makes them better leaders on the battlefield. Training will be expensive, and time-consuming, but Lumpkin says units who’ve been pushed through the new Leadership tree will have a major impact on whatever battles they take part in.
Interestingly, Lumpkin isn’t sure this will always be the go-to model for creating XCOM 2 mods. Given their desire to start with something small than an overhaul mod, creating smaller add-ons made sense for Long War Studios, and will likely continue to make sense for modders in the weeks immediately following the release of XCOM 2’s official mod tools. But that doesn’t mean we won’t eventually see a Long War-equivalent at some point.
“It’s impossible to tell for sure,” Lumpkin said. “I think, over time, it will be interesting to see how the community develops around this. Lots of people who modded XCOM, with Long War or just in general, have been showing up on the forums again and expressing interest. Whether those turn into the kind of teams you see build these full mods remains to be seen.”
Update: After this article was published, John Lumpkin reached out to clarify a statement from our interview. According to the Long War Studios founder, the LWS team has"plenty of ideas" for a potential successor to the Long War mod. But the team doesn't know yet whether or not it will create such an overhaul for XCOM 2.
Be sure to check back with iDigitalTimes.com and follow Scott on Twitter for more XCOM 2 coverage throughout 2016 and for however long 2K, Firaxis and Long War Studios continue creating new XCOM content in the months ahead.
