As a PCG editor, I know something about games in development and plenty about finished games, but I know very little about the process of getting one off the ground. I’m particularly curious about why no one has had the [brains? balls? initiative? gumption? pixie dust? hookers and blow?] to make either an X-COM 2 (TFTD was a glorified expansion, and I choose to pretend none of the other games bearing the name ever happened) or a decent clone by a name of their choosing. You know, one that the fans don’t have to finish for them.
I know it all comes down to dollars and cents, but are publishers really so frightened of losing money on a remake of a game that shows up prominently on the top 10 games of all time list (if not THE top game) of pretty much any PC game critic who actually played it? I can’t believe that confidence in turn-based games is so low when the Civilization franchise is still going strong, Heroes of Might & Magic V did well enough for an expansion, and you still see upstarts like GalCiv doing well for themselves.
I may be wrong about this part, and if so please fill me in, but wouldn’t a game like X-COM be relatively cheap to produce, even after a respectable level of polish, if you just licensed a half decent engine? There would be a lot of art to do, I suppose, but if you stick to the original design concept of randomly generated maps, you get a ton of replayability out of relatively little. And if you went with an anime-inspired art style, maybe even cel shaded (kind of an homage to the original game’s opening cinematic) you could get around a lot of the expensive and time-consuming process of making things look realistic.
Seems to me like the worst thing that happens is, if it bombs in the US, they localize it to some Eastern European languages and make their money back in the Czech Republic. They can’t seem to get enough X-COM clones over there, yet can’t MAKE a good one to save their lives. In the meantime, they get a sure-thing critical darling that would certainly have an instant modding community spring up around it, as demonstrated by UFO:ET.
So what am I missing here? What’s stopping this from happening?