XCom 2 War of The Chosen - Abandoned Cities

The idea for abandoned cities spawned from a conversation lamenting the cost of building interiors. Building interiors are the most expensive, custom part of any XCom map and took the longest time to create.However, the game encourages players to travel via rooftop in order to gain aiming bonuses against units on the ground and fewer chances of being surprised by the more open lines of sight on the rooftops.

I postulated that we could address this problem without changing the gameplay mechanics or the art. What if we built a city without any roofs? Obviously, the buildings themselves had to have roofs, but they didn’t have to be accessible to the player. “We’ll make them go inside, by golly!”

Exploring this idea led to the discovery that it was tough to make a believable dense, urban environment out of standalone buildings that were all 16×16, 16×32, and 32×32. The buildings felt like they needed to be larger but the best gameplay coming out of the plot type was the fighting into and out of buildings. I wanted to proceduralize our buildings but all of our visibility and other technical markup required the entire building to exist within a single map file. We wrote some tech to allow a single building to span multiple parcels. This way, we could have buildings the size and shape that we needed without losing the visual and gameplay variety of the procedural system.

Armed with our previous conclusion that we could make this system out of fewer maps, the entire block building system is only sixteen pieces. There are four each of building endcaps, corners, straights, and T-intersections. Because each plot has a differently sized and shaped block building, no two buildings feel the same.