“It’s surreal,” he says.
It’s exciting, but a little terrifying."
On the face of it, that panic might seem unfounded.
Over the last decade, Solomon has become one of the most revered names in turn-basedstrategy games.
Straight away, Solomon says he pitched a voxel-based animal creation game called Dusk.
“I think simulation-style games are great at that, and I think that Minecraft is a great example.
Just by playing the game, you end up with something that you’ve created.
And that’s such a powerful feeling.
2K greenlit development for Dusk, and Solomon set to work on it.
But it wasn’t just XCOM 2 that ended up being the nail in the coffin for Dusk.
“Finding the game reason for why am I sticking horns on a rabbit?
That was giving me trouble.”
“But I do think for a game like that, you have to have a pretty strong theme.
How many variations of animals can you create where you feel this is completely unique and authentic to me?
It’s not as powerful, when I think about it.”
In fact, Solomon doesn’t know what his next game is going to be just yet.
“It really is a thing where I love design,” he says.
“I love thinking about design systems, I love thinking about any idea.
I’m gonna chew on it and chew on it and chew on it.
I just can’t not have that in my head.
Even if I was on vacation, the back of my mind is working.
It’s not in a way that takes away from the others around me.
He stops for a moment, and laughs.
“Listen to me, I sound miserable!
I’m truly a generally happy guy.
Maybe I should take a vacation.
See what that’s like.”
I love that company.
I love the games we made there.”
It’s just that that passion now lies elsewhere, and outside of Firaxis' wheelhouse.
I think it just wouldn’t have been fair to everybody.”
But for the first time, it didn’t appeal to me as much."
In classic XCOM style, it was time to take a risk.
In many ways, you could say that Solomon’s been building toward the life sim genre all along.
And as a designer, creating those systems is Solomon’s bread and butter.
“Simulations are all driven by system design as well.
It’s a number of systems interacting in ways that are surprising.
And that can happen in our game as you said before.
That’s as dramatic as any scripted narrative anybody can write.”
He concedes that Midnight Suns lost some of that XCOM drama.
Those stories are more impactful, because you have ownership of them as a player."
In fact, Solomon cites just three things that allow that sense of ownership to take hold in XCOM.
He’s got a ponytail and a Fedora.
I know I wouldn’t like this guy immediately.
But he’s a great ranger.'
XCOM is almost entirely mechanics, right?
The story is there, it’s great and serves a purpose.
“In Midnight Suns, that wasn’t the case.
The narrative had a much stronger role.
And so it was different in the way that I thought about the characters.
And for me, it was really enjoyable just because I’m such a passionate fan of Marvel.
It was personally very, very enjoyable for me to play in that toolbox.”
Because for me, I always tend to veer backwards.
I like the safety of putting the rules front and centre."
“That is typically the way that I like to approach design.
We just tried to put as much information out there in front of the player as possible.”
But it was very, very rewarding.
I love that part of Midnight Suns, and so that is actually really exciting to me."
“I never had an experience where people had expressed disappointment before playing, you know?
I think a lot of people were open to it.
Are those… are those cards?Cards!?'
So yeah, I can sympathise with people for that reason.”
No, it’s not going to be okay.
You have to find the way to make it okay.
You must find what’s going to make it okay.
“And the problem is that, as a designer, you did your best job!”
“You already put your best ideas in!
And then it comes back and it’s like, ‘This is not fun.’
You’re like, ‘Well, that was my best idea!’
And your brain will be like, this is too stressful.
“Start with the first least fun thing and change it.
Even if that was your best idea, ‘Tough luck, dude!
You’re the one who got this awesome job of game designer.’
“To some extent, I’m probably scared to ever touch it again,” he admits.
“I’d be afraid to go back to that.”
“I think I’d be gun shy anyway, to mess up the contributions that I did make.
I’m okay for those to stand.
I’m okay with that.”
