might be spoiled going into multiplayer. GON: Multiplayer kind of demands you treat your soldiers differently in comparison to singleplayer -- they're more disposable, they don't play into the metagame -- was this intentional? Is this a kind of skirmish game setting to experiment in XCOM, where you can play around with field units that you'd have to work towards in singleplayer? Jake: Yes, that's very true. There are two things at work there -- one is that we didn't want to pull away from the singleplayer experience. A real focus with this game was the singleplayer experience; multiplayer was meant to be a solid mode, but we didn't want to overshadow the singleplayer experience. So XCOM multiplayer is like -- opening up the toy chest. We give the player these action figures and we want to let them make whatever crazy combinations they can. We thought about putting in some kind of multiplayer metagame where you level up and advance squad members but we just decided against it for this mode and decided instead to let them play it like a big toy chest where they can play it however they want.