We’ve been digging into every piece of news that we can get on the three-year old XCOM shooter and now we have our first official confirmation that the XCOM shooter isn’t dead.

After hearing about changes to the game’s genre (from first-person to third-person shooter) and name (from XCOM to The Bureau), 2K Marin finally gave us some idea as to what we should expect in a blog post. The first line of their post is “The XCOM universe is expanding.” Well, we know what franchise it belongs to, even if we’ve been led to believe that it will launch under a different name.

2K Marin refers to their upcoming game as a squad-based tactical shooter. That sounds like they swapped out “strategy game” for “shooter.” Hopefully that means that we can get some of the same character customization, permadeath, panic meters and base mechanics of Enemy Unknown in the shooter.

Maybe I’m a pessimist, but I don’t think that we’ll have that much in the way of those RPG/strategy mechanics from Enemy Unknown. I get the distinct feeling that tactics will be limited to controlling your squad that you’ll find reminiscent of the first Mass Effect (as opposed to the simplified setups in ME2 and ME3).

Fortunately, it sounds like we’re going to hear a lot more about the XCOM shooter in the coming days.

Source: 2K Games Blog