Firaxis’ XCOM: Enemy Unknown not only revived the tactics genre back in 2012, but made the genre playable on console. After years of PC-centric genres being ostracised by publishers, XCOM reignited its own genre, but also pushed the industry to try and bring more PC-focused genres back from the dead and into more hands than ever before.
Right now, RTS games like Age of Empires have functioning, playable console ports with unique control schemes, MMOs often come to console, and even Total War: Warhammer 40,000 is somehow coming to PS5 and Xbox Series. However, as XCOM: Art Director Greg Foertsch explains, the loss of these genres is due to how ”enamoured with consoles” the game industry became.
Now working as creative director on Star Wars: Zero Company, which is essentially a new XCOM game, Foertsch explained that the obsession with console gaming is what caused the classic PC gaming genres to suffer a period of creative exile. As PC gaming continues to grow, those genres are now back with a vengeance.
“Early on in the 2000s, we got enamoured with consoles,” they told PC Gamer. “And I think certain games didn’t make the leap right—the technology reasons, whatever it was, they couldn’t make that conversion. A lot of tactics games you look at, they had an isometric sprite based thing. And the way they delivered the content, it never embraced the camera as a tool.”
XCOM is where everything changed, but that game’s explosion on console has pushed everyone to copy and then improve on what Firaxis did back in 2012. Foertsch admits “a lot of my PC games, I’ll play with controller” because many games have finally figured out how to make more complex games work with such a small number of buttons.
“You’re starting to see some of these games and genres that maybe had a difficult transition to the couch, actually being games that are that are great to play on the couch,” the creative director explained. As someone who largely played Baldur’s Gate 3 on controller, it’s true. Hell, even World of Warcraft is mostly playable with a controller nowadays due to the fan-made ConsolePort addon.
Foertsch explains that other devs are taking “some innovative approaches” with the turn-based tactics genre, but even outside of that there’s devs looking to bring their favourite genres across platforms. “It’s great to see other people’s solutions to problems that we faced, and how did they get around that? What did they do? What choices did they make? Because these games are deceptively hard—they look easy—but they are deceptively hard to make,” he said.
There are definitely some games, even with their snazzy new controller setups, that are infinitely easier to play with a keyboard and mouse. Nevertheless, it’s true that Firaxis’ work on XCOM: Enemy Unknown and Civilization (specifically Civilization: Revolution) had a huge effect on the comeback of pretty much every PC-centric genre over the last few generations.
