Well, hey! That sounds pretty awesome.
Actually, I believe it's being developed by the Bioshock 2 people.

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2012/01/06/why-firaxis-loves-xcom.aspx

I think, judging from the video and the fact that they supposedly play UFO Defense every Friday, we're in good hands. :D

I hope that all those games, X-com, jagged and syndicate fps or whatever are good. Why must we hate all the games?
...
We didn't?

Well then.. there you go.. *uses stealth-mode*

To be honest with you, this makes the FPS forgiveable, as in I'd happily buy it so long as it's good. As it stood before it represented (like Interceptor and Enforcer before it) the death of the proper X-COM series. Now it's more like a spin off that might well be good in its own right.

When it comes to gaming, seeing is believing. What I know for now is they all claim to be "huge fans" of the original, that they desire to preserve the design philosophy that made X-Com so special people play it to this day.
That's all great from a PR perspective, but I'll wait until they show the game in action.

I am really heated for this!

Just one thing I saw that worried me was in the battlescape screenshot there seems to be a blue line across the screen showing the X-Com front line. This implies that ground battles will be just "take over the map by advancing across it" rather than hunting for the UFO and worrying about missing aliens in the fog of war or having them move behind your men.

I'm pretty surprised by the amount of posts that blindly believe that a new XCOM game will be good just because Firaxis is developing it. Yes, Firaxis has produced great strategy games (imho some of the very best ever developed), but all developers of these games have left years ago, Meier hasn't been actively designing games for years and is unlikely to start doing it again, and even Shafer (the designer of the rather mediocre Civ5) isn't with the company any more. So, does anyone know who will actually develop the game (and what he has done before), or are people just blindly believing that Firaxis is infallible in choosing lead developers (even after the Shafer debacle)?

Don't get me wrong, I'd be happy if the XCOM series got a worthy successor, it really deserves one. But I don't understand why the mentioning of Firaxis alone lets the hopes soar so high.

This guy is the Lead Designer for the new XCOM. Where did You get the info about those devs leaving years ago anyway?

That info is common knowledge for people who are following the franchise ... ir was published by Firaxis each time one of those lead devs left.

Thanks for the info. If that is the lead dev for XCOM, then ... hmmm. His credentials are that he has done "programming" and "additional programming" on former Firaxis titles, the only title that he did any design work for was CivRev (the "streamlined" Civ game for the Xbox), for which he did "additional design".

That doesn't mean he'll be bad as a game designer. He may be a talented designer who just didn't have a chance to show it in the years before. But this reinformces my point that the simple fact that Firaxis is developing the new XCOM game doesn't give reason for optimism (nor pessimism). Unknown lead developers can be great (Johnson was a total unknown when Meier picked him up) or awful (Shafer's Civ5 design shows his inexperience very much, unfortunately).

However, the situation that we have here is this:
- We have a company that produced great strategy titles in the past
- The lead devs of these games either left the company or aren't doing design work any more
- The company produced very mediocre titles recently (CivCity:Rome, Railroads!, Civ Revolution, Civ4: Colonization, Civ5, Civ World)
- The company has lately been accused of cannibalizing its successful franchises by developing "streamlined", simplified games that bear little resemblance to their more complex predecessors (CivRev, Railroads!)
- The company went into financial trouble (layoffs) and had to trash projects (CivRev 2)
- The lead developer for the new project has the rap sheet of a tech guy who (so far) only did design work on one of the least engaging projects of the company (CivRev, the one that just had its sequel trashed)

I'm not saying that the new XCOM game will be crap - I hope it won't be. And I maintain that currently extreme pessimism is as unwarranted as extreme optimism. However, I'm not sure how the simple fact "It's Firaxis!" would outweigh all the points above.

Yes, I was drooling for the better part of the week after reading the news on a local video game magazine's website.

Well, i'll have to investigate that, as i'm not on time with the 'who's who and where'.
Seems worth investigating though, thanks!:)

True that, still, the company IS known for making some pretty darn good turn based games. See, i'm more of a Jagged Alliance guy myself, and if the JA franchise landed in the hands of people who are at least experienced in the genre, would be great news. Streamlined is still better than the alternatives. I'm far from cheering that 'it's Firaxis' and all, but it's a pretty good sign, well, better them than some cheap-o-dev, who'll butcher the thing. Long story short, while blindly believing that this game will rock is foolish, it's still a big plus.

Up to 2007, yes. :)

Seeing the JA reference, I absolutely understand where you're coming from! :) That's another franchise that deserves a worthy sequel, but didn't really get on in all these years ...

Well, the thing is that Firaxis has accumulated a reputation by now of actually _being_ a cheap-o-dev that butchers its past franchises. Ask how fans of the original "Railroad Tycoon" feel about "Railroads!" (a simplified, buggy, largely unsupported re-interpretation of the original games that in no way managed to capture their magic), or how fans of the original Colonization feel about the recent remake. (Civ5 has drawn similar criticism, but the situation is more complicated there). If Firaxis gives the same treatment to the XCOM franchise, then the fans probably won't be happy. But as I said, currently there aren't really any hard facts around about the new game's design, so we'll have to wait for more info. :)

XCOM was delayed it seems, so now XCOM: Enemy Unknown is actually going to be the first new XCOM game.

***

I expecting to enjoy the new XCOM remake. It being made by Firaxis is enough for me to be confident its going to be a good game. It might not be as good as the original. That game was damn close to perfect, so wanting it to be just as good is probably expecting way too much. "True to the original" is also open to interpretation. I doubt its going to be as true to the original as a lot of people would like. Its looking to be way closer than anything else currently out there though. Xenonaughts has the potential to end up nailing that better than the new XCOM, but Xenonuaghts isn't out yet. Even if its not as good as the original, and even if its not totally true to it, this is the type of game that I like to play. Im thrilled about it.

I'm probably sounding bitter by now (though I'm really not, I'm just focusing on the negatives here because apparently they haven't been mentioned yet, while pretty much sitting onb the fence myself), but mod friendliness is another sad issue. Modding for Civ5 is severely limited compared to its predecessors. Supposedly the DLL SDK is going to give the modders some much needed freedom, but it still hasn't arrived. In July, producer Dennis Shirk (one of the guys who still _is_ at Firaxis) said that it was "on it's way" and "almost ready for beta", only to rescind on that in December, saying now that it's "still many months away". Many Civ5 modders have lost hope by now and quit. After all, Civ5 was released 16 months ago. Add the "still many months away" on top of that, compare it to the 6 months that the SDK release took for Civ4, and you know how much Firaxis currently cares about modders ...

I agree with the rest of your post though, apart from not having played the new Pirates! or XCOM: Apocalypse yet. :)