More positive than: "Hey guys we have to make this first and foremost for the Xbox360 so throw all that strategy garbage out the window k? Make it an FPS as ALL gamers love an FPS and hey we can re-use the Bioshock 2 engine which saves money and means we can kick it out the door as quickly as possible! WIN!"

LOL, they had the ability to make 3-D shooters back then too. You might have heard of games like DOOM? Immensely popular, vastly more so than X-COM ever was. Isometric overhead view was a design and gameplay choice, not something done because of technological limitations.
I, for one, welcome our new Ant Overlords.
Ugh, please stop.

Lol.

Hey, I don't need to knock it. There are a loads of folk who are ready to put the boot in, I'm of the opinion that the game might just turn out to be ok though, that's all, who knows for certain? :P

C'mon look at most of remakes of old games out there, especially games that change genre like that. Don't hold any hope for this.

Hey as someone who played X-Com and TFTD waaay to much back in the day I can tell you that an FPS just will not hold any of the spirit of X-Com. No matter how they dress it up it might as well be Blacksite or any FPS where the enemy is revealed to be an invading alien force. X-Com itself was a homage to an old Gerry Anderson TV show called UFO, hence the Euro name of UFO: Enemy Unknown. The series just like the game is all about reacting to and researching ways to combat the alien menace. What this new direction does is rob X-Com of what makes it X-Com. There will be no more grand strategy and no more understanding how and why the aliens tick. Probably just some MW2 style briefings that update you on the progress of the invasion and any new technologies and abilities you may now have access to.
People didn't like Fallout 3 because it was not the same as Fallout but at least Bethesda tried to keep the spirit of Fallout and at it's heart it was still an RPG (albiet a very badly scripted one). People didn't like Deus Ex: IW because they dumbed down the exploration and RPG elements but IW was still set in the same world of DE.
What XCOM is, is a total reboot which means it's no longer X-Com. It's a whole new world and a whole new storyline with whole new game mechanics. If this was called X-Com: Modern Warfare we would not be complaining as loudly. It's not it's a whole new game thats being badged as XCOM which to many of us is just insulting.
It's very like what EA did with C&C: Generals. It's a fine and enjoyable game but it's no bloody Command & Conquer thats for sure.

Nothing beats seeing 3 Chrysalids pop out of nowhere in front of you. Damn those Chrysalids, they're my definition of stress.
That is until MC came along hehe.

Well we can finally discuss this without the need to berate each other I suppose. And if it gets you all bothered, I admit all the rage in my initial post was uncalled for (hence the "I apologize"). In any case, there's more to just producing a game that's put on the line here. It's true that people can create whatever they want given they have the resources to do so, but it all goes back to a situation of "why bother with the license" when they actually change the genre that made the game such a cult classic in the first place.
Would reactions have been different if XCOM was a first person right from the beginning? I don't know, though likely not. But for people who loved the game, which brings back some good memories, it's more than just bringing another form of entertainment to the table. It's also about the namesake, as people before me have already brought up. It's not about being a "nerd", because I can assure you my life out there's pretty awesome when school's closed.
At the end of the day, it's just disappointing to see that they are creating a game called XCOM (though thankfully the UFO title is more or less associated with Altar) and then fans realizing that it's not the game that we've been holding out for. It could be a good game, but it will likely not be the game we all enjoyed. Give me a turn based strategy game, there are enough first person shooters already as it is, though as well arguably none in the XCOM setting. I'll eat my words though if the final product manages to somehow make me feel otherwise.
On to the hypothetical part, which is purely assumptive on my part just to clarify, there's also the track record of 2K, and the host of other similar games whose genres were changed. Not a good sign, but like I said this is on a gut level basis.

Ok, this is something that has been bugging me with today's fans of games:
Back in 1999, a game that was in development, called Dreamland Chronicles: Freedom Ridge, was cancelled. It was a spiritual successor of X-COM, and, wouldn't you know it, it had first person shooter sequences, as well as third person strategy gameplay too IIRC. This game was extremely well received and many people were upset when it was cancelled.
Fast forward to 2010. Practically the exact same thing gets announced, just with an X-COM name, and fans go apeshit, saying this is ruining the franchise, blah blah blah, when the same goddamn game was announced over 10 years ago and was highly anticipated.

1. Dreamland Chronicles was positioned as a strategy-based RPG that promised to play like X-COM. I haven't seen a similar promise from 2K.
2. In 2001, XCOM: Enforcer happened.

It was also just announced and we haven't seen ANYTHING from it, besides putting the combat from a first person perspective, which I don't mind, but then, I HATED the combat in X-COM, and I've played through and enjoyed the JA series and Fallout.
If they just keep it FPS, I'll pass on it since the base building and research was the most fun, but if it has both features, I don't think it'll be a problem. If it was like Dreamland with both the strategy and first person view, I think it would be awesome.
EDIT: Speaking of which, whatever happened to JA3? New Jagged Union was rather disappointing.

Maybe my memory's faulty, but I remember dying a lot in SS1 (can't speak for SS2, never managed to play it), from assassins, from that damn 3rd level, from the cyberspace stuff.
On the other hand I didn't die even once when I played Bioshock on normal, and I'm usually not good at FPSs. In fact, that was one of my major gripes about the game.
So unless there's a huge spike in difficulty between normal and hard, my personal experience is that the Bioshock devs went out of their way to remove the challenge from the game.
And from what I read Bioshock 2 was even easier (the guy who tested the game for PC Gamer FR even complained that it was too easy). As I said, that doesn't make me hopeful for a similar level of challenge to X-COM.

Hmm, if we're talking about normal, difficulty is probly pretty much the same. You might have been dying in SS1 because of struggling with interface, problem which lots of people seem to have (...And yet, I don't, 'cause I'm magic!). If you were leaning around the corners and using proper ammo and implants, it really wasn't a hard game.

As I said, I usually suck at FPS, which is why i never play them on a difficulty level higher than normal. I probably should have raised the difficulty, but frankly the game itself didn't keep me interested enough to want to do that. By the time I realised it was too easy, I just wanted to get it over with.
I guess that was more my fault than the game's, but still I remember System Shock as
*hard*.
It was the first FPS I ever played though, so maybe I sucked even worse back then...