Accessibility is kind of a dirty word: Firaxis on difficulty levels, multiculturalism, and more XCOM: Enemy Unknown, a re-imagining of the 1993 PC classic XCOM: UFO Defence (or UFO: Enemy Unknown, depending on where you live), is set for release on October 12 in Australia. We sat down with Lead Designer Jake Solomon to chat about accessibility, multiculturalism, and toy boxes. GON: Could you talk about, say, areas in the game where you've dealt with the balance between accessibility and the satisfying complexity of the original? Jake: Accessibility is kind of a dirty word, and I think it's the sort of thing where accessibility is taken as a byword for simplifying or dumbing something down, which was never anything close to our intention with this game. I always believed that the magic that existed in the original game would still work today without any kind of modification to how complex it was, or the ways that the systems interacted. But I knew that obviously, 20 years on, it had to be made more accessible in the sense that people have to be fully introduced to all these new concepts. I mean, as games go, this is right up there in terms of complexity. In order to do that, then, you really have to look at your design and say: 'how can we introduce this to the player in such a way that they're not overwhelmed, so that they don't say "I don't know what I'm doing"... I mean, did you