Naming the brave souls on the frontline battling the alien invasion in XCOM 2 is just the first step in deeper customisation that Firaxis is developing. We can also affect gender and nationality, including voiced accents.
Not every accent will be represented, admitted senior producer Garth DeAngelis, but there’ll be a good selection with ”more English accents” too. Want a Chinese solider with a thick Scottish bark? Sure!
”We’ve actually pushed character customisation further,” said DeAngelis. ”You have to be able to name your characters, that’s personally one of my favourite parts. You’ve got to create your own stories, and character customisation has been pushed. We’ve doubled down on character customisation. There’s so much more you can do with it, there’s so many more knobs you can turn now that feed into the resistance theme.”
”All of that stuff that you couldn’t do in Enemy Unknown gives even more agency to the player—it gives them exactly what they want,” he added, referring to gender choice and place of birth.
”You heard accented voices,” DeAngelis continued, pointing to the gameplay demo, ”which I think helps sell it as well. There’s actually an English accent in there—and we want to have more English accents in there. We love our English friends!”
“We obviously won’t have voices for every single nationality, but we’ll have a system that will tag—when we have the voices to support it—it will line up with that voice that says, ‘oh, he should sound like this.’ You can still change it if you want, on your own, but it will be set up like that.”
XCOM 2 assumes that a playthrough of the original XCOM: Enemy Unknown didn’t go so well, and it doesn’t even consider Enemy Within to be part of the timeline. The aliens ‘won’ their invasion of Earth and have set up their own ‘model government’ to pacify humanity.
XCOM2 releases on PC in November 2015.
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