Developer Firaxis Games is developing XCOM 2 exclusively for PC (including Windows, Mac OS, and Linux).
This comes as a bit of surprise seeing as XCOM: Enemy Unknown and Enemy Within were both released for the PC, Xbox 360, PS3, IOS, and Android. However, Firaxis has decided to stick to developing XCOM 2 on the platform it’s most comfortable with.
“When we looked at what we wanted to do with the sequel, we had all these very, very ambitious goals,” Firaxis’ Creative Director Jake Solomon told IGN. “To do that, we had to use all of our studio expertise…and our expertise here is PC. That’s our home, and that’s where we’re really comfortable.”
These ambitious goals included adding features like “high fidelity characters and environments,” “better looking destruction,” and “physically based rendering.” Solomon and his team believe this can be achieved if they focus on making the game exclusively for a mouse and keyboard. Solomon also stated that since the team working on the sequel is relatively small for a game of its scale, it’d be easier to focus on making a quality game for the platform they’re well-versed in developing for.
Firaxis does have a pretty reliable track record when it comes to developing quality titles for the PC (as evidenced in Sid Meier’s Civilization series), but will this be a financially viable decision for Firaxis and publisher Take-Two Interactive in the long run? We won’t know for sure until XCOM 2 is released, though the popularity of the previous installments of the series have endured well on Steam.
In the meantime, you can watch the reveal trailer for XCOM 2 below.
