Franchise / Sequel Pitch

Logline

After the events of XCOM 2, Earth has been liberated from alien control, but new problems arise. Human nations struggle to rebuild, alien remnants fight for survival, and a hidden enemy begins to stir beneath the ocean. The Commander must reform XCOM and stop the rising terror from the deep while preventing the world from tearing itself apart.

Franchise Fit

The XCOM series is built around strategic turn-based combat, tight resource management, squad maintenance, and combating an alien invasion. An XCOM sequel has to preserve these four pillars or risk fracturing the franchise. XCOM: Enemy Unknown expressed these pillars through a traditional military response, XCOM 2 expressed them through guerilla warfare, and XCOM 3 will express them through a black ops structure.

Player Fantasy

The player fantasy of XCOM 3 is commanding a covert military operation during a chaotic post-war transition. The player must navigate political instability, faction conflict, and alien relations while secretly defeating a new underwater invasion.

Narrative Premise

Two years after the events of XCOM 2, Earth is politically unstable. XCOM has been disbanded, world governments struggle to rebuild, and tensions rise between humans and the alien remnants. While world leaders debate humanity’s future, isolated coastal settlements begin disappearing under mysterious circumstances.

The Spokesperson contacts the Commander and pushes for XCOM’s reformation after receiving distress calls describing creatures emerging from the sea. During a world summit discussing the crisis, an alien doomsday cult called The Last Hope attacks, killing many of the world leaders. In response, XCOM is restored and tasked with investigating the disappearances and stopping the growing doomsday cult.

Rising Threat

Operating from a mobile aircraft carrier, XCOM publicly combats The Last Hope cult while secretly investigating the Terror from the Deep. Raids on cult strongholds reveal the cult is desperately attempting to escape Earth before it is devoured.

XCOM eventually uncovers abandoned Templar facilities containing records of strange psionic activity occurring at the bottom of the world’s oceans. The Templars discovered their investigation teams had become compromised, and the dominated agents began abducting or killing their fellow operatives in an attempt to spread “the truth.” The surviving Templars sealed themselves away in cryosleep, hoping their distress beacons would be heard.

Further investigation reveals the existence of underwater gateways connected to a massive psionic hivemind that abducts and mutates humans and aliens alike, using them as thralls to expand its reach and devour all life on Earth.

Faction Conflict

As panic and instability worsen due to increased Last Hope attacks, humanity begins to fracture into competing ideological factions, each wanting to influence humanity’s future. As XCOM debates revealing the oceanic invasion to the world, both human and alien resistance factions contact XCOM offering their support to save the world.

The Commander must decide which factions to aid, integrate, or destroy. These decisions will decide the fate of humanity and aliens alike as XCOM fights to save the world.

Finale

XCOM eventually learns that this is the threat that the Etherials had been fleeing from and that the hivemind has been following them relentlessly, assimilating each planet they leave behind.

After recovering a sample of the hivemind with a drone, XCOM scientists discover that the enormous aquatic brain-like structures on the other side of the gateways are composed of single-celled psionic creatures. Research reveals that when surrounded by a mindshield the microscopic organisms become unstable and burst. If a planet-sized mindshield is created, XCOM can deploy and defend it on the hivemind’s homeworld, eradicating the psionic threat once and for all.

Core Gameplay

Strategic layer:

• Rebuild XCOM’s global network.
• Strengthen the new XCOM base.
• Manage funding from unstable nations.
• Keep the oceanic threat hidden.
• Balance public peacekeeping missions with secret cover operations.
• Research and build new technology.
• Recruit and train soldiers from different post-war factions
• Assign soldiers and squads to automatically complete secondary objectives.

Tactical layer:

• Deploy squad into turn-based missions.
• Use cover, flanking, abilities, consumables, and the environment to your advantage.
• Complete mission objectives.
• Fight human, alien, and hybrid enemies.
• Manage soldier health, ammo, death, and panic.
• Recover resources, rescue civilians, and destroy enemy supplies.

New Systems

Secrecy meter

• Tracks public knowledge about the Terror from the Deep.
• When the meter is filled, the world learns about the alien invasion and humanity succumbs to unrecoverable panic, causing the campaign to fail.
• A soft time limit which is progressed by time, failed missions, enemy actions, and a failure of public-covert mission balance. The timer is reversed by successful missions, mission rewards, and faction completions.

Faction diplomacy

• Factions issue missions instead of nations and if kept happy can give additional supplies per month.
• The only major faction is the Council of Nations, which issues repeating general missions, gives the most supplies based on its happiness with XCOM, and can never be destroyed.
• Minor factions are small independent story lines that focus on different choices for humanity’s future. When a storyline is finished the player will choose to either integrate or destroy the faction in some way, affecting the game’s ending.
• Some minor factions are exclusive to each other and prevent their opponent factions from being integrated into humanity.
• The planned minor factions and their roles would be:
  • Human Supremacists – Should alien species be enslaved, killed, or banished from Earth?
  • Old World Supporters – Should Earth return to how it was before the alien arrived?
  • Warlords of Earth – Should XCOM rule the world?
  • Reaper Survivalists – Should the ruined and corrupted cities of old Earth be retaken?
  • Advent Remnants – Should the Skirmishers and Advent soldiers be allowed to live?
  • Templar Survivors – Should humanity support or suppress their psionic potential?
  • Sectoid Hybrids – Psionic halfbreeds being culled by both humans and aliens. Should they be allowed to live?
  • Muton Martyrs – Mutons seeking redemption through death against the hivemind. Should the species be left to die out?
  • Viper Queen – The last Viper queen, seeking to cooperate and ally with humanity. If she is killed the species is unlikely to survive before a new queen is born. Should XCOM aid in her defense?

Public and covert missions

• Public and covert missions must be balanced to ensure neither threat succeeds.
• Covert missions differ from public missions in that they respond to the Terror from the Deep threats instead of Last Hope. These missions are often underwater, but not always.
• If one category of mission is ignored for three consecutive missions the secrecy meter will rise, due to unobstructed alien activity.

Mission rewards and consequences

• To minimize resource management frustration, each mission will give a small amount of money/supplies and allow the player to choose their main reward from a short list of options.
• Similar to XCOM 2, each mission will have a negative consequence if not chosen.
• To minimize poor mission management or bad luck the player will be able to send a second squad to the opposite type of mission. These missions (if properly staffed) will automatically succeed, increase soldier experience, prevent negative consequences, but not reward any money/supplies and produce heavy injuries.
  • These do not count toward the public-covert mission balance, as the Commander’s attention is needed to reset the timer.
• Player difficulty will determine the amount of missions available per month, with higher difficulties increasing the mission maximum to six with players at most able to respond to two.

Underwater equipment

• Most standard XCOM equipment will not function under water and new equipment will need to be researched and made.
• With doubling the amount of autopsies and equipment research it may be beneficial to allow engineering to research equipment upgrades and technologies instead of the science department.

Limited recruitment

• Because of the world’s instability, preexisting obligations, and XCOM’s necessity for secrecy, a limited pool of soldiers can be recruited at any time.
• Mission rewards, monthly supplies, technology, and faction integration can increase the amount of available soldiers, but the risk of running out of men needs to remain as a second fail state for the player.