The Truth Is In Here: 10 Mins Of Jabber-Free XCOM 2
It's a good day for watching videos of exciting upcoming games that isn't polluted by jibber-jabber. Getting to appreciate the sound design of No Man's Sky was a fine thing, and now I can see some of my most-anticipated game this year, XCOM 2 [official site], without interruptions from interviewers and soundbyteers. This ten minutes of alien-bothering appears to offer a meaningful glimpse of how a mission can play out. It looks significantly more XCOMy than some of the talk about big changes - especially in terms of role-reversal - might have suggested but, I think, in a good way.
This is mostly stuff we've seen before, but now in one big, flowing clip without any disembodied voice. The footage comes directly from the Firaxis tap, so may well be scripted up the wazoo, but given XCOM 2 is only four months away at this point, I'm willing to believe that it's fairly representative of what we'll get.
A few random things I noticed:
Environments look much larger, but some of that may be down to e.g. lots of skyscrapers in the distance, providing a sense of scale and also more sense that you're in a slice of the world rather than a special arena.
the music has become more action-y, with a bit less of the dark Tangerine Dream doom-synth of the first game.
A few more international accents in there? There's even a "bugger" at one point.
It definitely seems more destruction-heavy. Maybe more bloody too.
More elaborate death animations for your guys.
It would not an inaccurate statement to say that am looking forwards to November.