XCOM: 10 Things The Next Game Must Have

7. Better Equipment System

For the most part, XCOM:EU€™s equipment system is an improvement on the original€™s in terms of overall efficiency. While that might irritate old school fans, even Julian Gollop himself admitted that the game€™s grid based inventory led to too much micromanagement. But there€™s still plenty of room for improvement for Firaxis. First, there need to be more slots. Why? Well, before you manage to get any of the more advanced armor, your soldiers have a terrible survival rate if you don€™t use nano-fiber vests to boost their hit points. This is especially true on Classic and Impossible difficulty, where you can get hit by huge swarms of enemies, and Thin Men get absurd aim and critical hit bonuses that make it possible for them to one hit kill people behind full cover. Then there€™s a bug that allows aliens to materialize near or literally on top of your team, sometimes without triggering Overwatch (Firaxis is working on fixing it, but haven€™t succeeded so far). All these things mean that there is one right choice; even adding one slot, like in the screenshot above, means that you have room to experiment with different loadouts, even if you keep a nano-fiber vest on a soldier. Second, stop shoving everything into the equipment category. There€™s no need to make the Arch Thrower, XCOM€™s alien taser, a piece of equipment €“ it functions like gun, so put it in the pistol slot. In fact, you can do that if you mod the game (it€™s a bit buggy though €“ if you have to restart a mission where you just used an Arc Thrower in the previous turn, the character can€™t go back to their primary weapon). Scopes also don€™t really need to be equipment, at least in the sense that XCOM:EU uses them. Why not have a Mass Effect 3 style gun customization system? Just having three attachment slots per gun would do a wonders for the customizing soldiers and adding some variety to combat. Third, a larger selection of equipment would definitely be welcome. Even you don€™t mod the game, there really isn€™t a whole of equipment available: 2 types of body armor enhancements, two types of grenades, scopes, Arc Throwers, and medkits. Having more options, even if they€™re just more grenade types or simple items like proximity mines, would add a bit more variety to combat.