TACTICAL BREACH WIZARDS

Breaking rules and windows - with spellcasting specialists

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Suspicious Developments’ current project started as a joke. When he worked for PC Gamer, Tom Francis remembers, he’d laugh about self-serious military games with the other members of the team. “It was somebody’s idea that it’d be funny if they were all wizards,” he recalls. “Everything else is the same: they still have military tactical equipment, and they’re still breaching these hostile situations full of people with guns, but they’re just wizards.”

Cut to 2017, when Francis found himself getting frustrated with XCOM 2. “I love XCOM,” he says, “but I just have a million problems with it, in terms of the nitty-gritty, technical things, like ‘Can I shoot that guy or not?’ or ‘If I move here, will I be able to use that ability or can I not use that ability?’ And I was just desperate to scale that down and strip out all the complexity and make it as simple and focused as possible.” Francis envisaged a game where XCOM