SotS II dev would love to make an X-COM strategy game
Simon Williams September 1, 2011 - 2:02 pmTalking exclusively to BeefJack, Sword of the Stars II producer Chris Stewart expressed some strong opinions on claims by 2K President Christoph Hartmann that “strategy games are just not contemporary” – and revealed that if 2K don’t want to make a strategy X-COM title, Kerberos Productions would love to.
In an interview to be published tomorrow on BeefJack, Sword of the Stars II producer Chris Stewart has questioned the assumptions behind 2K President Christoph Hartmann‘s claims that a strategy X-COM title would not be relevant in today’s market.
When asked for his opinion on Hartmann’s statement that the X-COM franchise had been brought back not in its classic strategy guise but as a first-person shooter because “strategy games are just not contemporary”, Stewart replied:
“I could be frank, but I may want to work with him some day!”
He continued: “Basically, he’s looking for a way to tell fans of a classic brand why they’re not getting an updated version of a classic, but a different type of game altogether with the name slapped on.”
“That’s their call, they own the brand – shooters are a big market – but I don’t know that you can rationalize the decision by blaming the genre, which is what he’s doing. The idea being, shooters are awesome and strategy games suck, despite there being a lot of teams, Kerberos included, that have shown that you can absolutely take the old genres and make them contemporary, keep them true to their roots, and there is an audience there that is not inconsiderable.”
Stewart asserts that “X-COM earned its place in the gaming books and we should still be playing it, the best version of it possible, for years to come provided someone would just make it. It doesn’t HAVE to be a shooter.”
“So if 2K doesn’t want to make an X-COM or X-COM-style strat game, that’s cool. Someone else can. I know we’d love to.”
You can read the full interview with Chris Stewart of Kerberos Productions on the upcoming Sword of the Stars II from tomorrow here on BeefJack.
