XCOM: Release Date Unknown: FPS Slips To 'Fiscal 2014'
I hope you're all now familiar enough with the Walker Principle to have assumed that XCOM wouldn't be released on its stated release date. As surely as the Sun rises in the morning and floats off into outer space, there was no chance the concerning FPS remake of the classic strategy game would appear on the 6th March 2012. And you'd have to be a fool to then believe it could come in the months after, last November's slip pushing it into 2K's "fiscal 2013". Well, now only two months into that mad-money-date, it's been announced as slipping again, this time all the way into fiscal year 2014. Which starts next April. Because of the reasons.
Goodness knows what's happening here. The extremely attractive-looking game may be the root cause of the "remake it as an FPS" meme, but it was EA's Syndicate that plopped out and ensured there was something to worry about. While X-COM fans were somewhat understandably aghast that their precious game was being crowbarred into a deeply odd choice of genre, that's rather been curtailed by Firaxis's making a proper one, and Xenonauts leaping in too. And actually, XCOM never really looked that terrible. The fantastic 60s stylised design, combined with the rather significant knowledge that Jordan "The Cradle" Thomas was working on it, meant it wasn't one to sneer away.
But oh boy, has this one been through the mill. In July last year, Thomas was explaining why the game had been so significantly changed since a year before that. You can watch that footage here:
We're coming up to the magical time of year when more revisions would have been revealed at E3, but I doubt that'll happen now. Another slip, despite the game still having another ten months to be finished to fit within the last one, likely pushes it into the third quarter of 2013 at the earliest, if you assume they'll want an E3 build up once more.
2K aren't the sort to give explanations, but they are the sort to support a game to let it be a BioShock. Presumably Thomas and co are struggling to find their angle here, to make a game that won't be thrown on top of Syndicate in the 50p bins. With the release pushed back into what's essentially "some time in the future, not soon," hopefully they'll have time to get a grip on it and make something truly worthwhile.