XCOM First Person Prototype (The beta version of The Bureau: XCOM Declassified)
307The unreleased FPS beta version of The Bureau: XCOM Declassified.
Wikipedia: Take-Two Interactive, purchased the intellectual property rights of X-COM from Atari in 2005. Irrational Games, led by Ken Levine, was primarily focused on the development of BioShock but the team wanted to develop two projects simultaneously. Both offices created different pitches for a new X-COM game. Initially, the team attempted to return to the strategy root of the franchise using the engine that powered Freedom Force but because of the popularity of and the team's expertise in first-person shooters (having worked on SWAT 4 and System Shock 2), they changed genres. However, the team found it difficult to translate the strategy elements into a shooter and many pitches were abandoned. The Australian branch experimented with asymmetrical multiplayer, in which a group of players play as human soldiers while another group controls the aliens. Neither branch assumed the lead developer role in this stage of the game's development until Levine's Boston office withdrew from the game's development to focus on BioShock's development. Irrational Games Australia would later split to become 2K Australia.
When 2K Australia assumed full creative control, they decided to use the setting pitched by the Boston office. The game is set in the 1950s and humanity is technologically incapable of fighting against advanced alien enemies. Because Take-Two Interactive assigned the Australia office to assist in the development of BioShock and its sequel, the game's development progress was slow. The team's skeleton crew had neither sufficient time nor resources to complete the project. The game moved out of pre-production in 2009 and when the studio finished the development of BioShock 2 in 2010, the game entered full development.
A gameplay demonstration was shown to the press at E3 2010. Players could complete rescue tasks, anomaly missions (to gather Elerium), and unknown missions (to research and battle aliens). This weapons were futuristic: there was a lightning gun and the Blobatov (a glass grenade). Players were tasked to take photographs of the aliens and could withdraw from a mission once sufficient information about the mysterious enemies was collected, but they could also complete optional objectives in a mission. Players could also explore the XCOM base in first-person; the base would gradually expand as the player completed more missions.
After creative leads from 2K Australia left the company in 2011, 2K Marin used the opportunity to fill leadership roles. 2K Marin did not want to continue with the mysterious and unknowable direction so they experimented with some conventional game features. The team attempted to create stealth gameplay and developed a system in which enemies would remember the protagonist's last seen location, similar to Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell series of games. A suspicion system, in which enemies would be alerted if the players acted abnormally, was also created. Jordan Thomas became the game's narrative director and he pushed the setting to 1962—the height of Cold War.
2K Marin was unhappy with the state of the game and asked 2K Game's permission to create a new demo for E3 2011. 2K Marin wanted to increase squad tactics and switch the game to a third-person perspective so that the game would tie in more clearly with the X-COM identity in which "tools, teams and technology" are prominent. The changes were time-consuming and the team failed to complete the demo on time. The radial wheel was introduced in 2011 as well as Time Units (using skills and battle focus would drain time). The E3 2011 demo was still primarily a first-person shooter although it switched to third-person when the player issued squad commands.
After seeing the positive press reaction, 2K Games agreed to let the team reboot the project. Thomas envisioned the rebooted project as a link between Firaxis Games' XCOM: Enemy Unknown and the older X-COM titles. Most of the stealth and horror elements were discarded and the game was redesigned to become a tactical shooter.
Having missed multiple milestones, the game entered its alpha stage in mid-2012; the game was playable from beginning to end. The game entered the beta stage in March 2013 and the publishing arm of 2K Games began promoting the game more heavily.
In late 2012, the studio experimented with real-time strategy gameplay, in which players control agents from a top-down perspective.
With the game's setting shifted to the 1960s, the art style changed to be more realistic and darker. It was inspired by The Day The Earth Stood Still and X-Files, which were described by Morgan Grey, the game's creative director, as "classic alien movies", but also Mad Man, which the team thought was highly authentic to the setting.
https://twitter.com/NeoGamerbr