For those who experienced the tense, rewarding combat of 2012’s XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the concept of replaying through the campaign and fighting through the same familiar city squares and back alleys was an unavoidable reality. While the game’s roster of handcrafted maps was expansive, dedicated commanders would eventually see them repeat. This reality was a compromise born from a difficult, pivotal decision made early in that game’s development. The ambition to include the procedurally generated maps of the original 1994 X-COM was there, but the team at Firaxis ultimately had to admit it was a bridge too far for their reboot. The story of XCOM’s maps is not one of abandoning a grand idea, but of learning from its initial failure, incubating the concept through an expansion, and finally delivering on that original promise with the critically acclaimed sequel, XCOM 2.
A Fateful Meeting and the Decision to Go Handcrafted
Garth DeAngelis found himself in a high-stakes meeting early in the development of XCOM: Enemy Unknown. The team, led by creative director Jake Solomon and art director Greg Foertsch, was deeply divided on the issue of level generation. Solomon championed the potential of procedural generation, arguing that it would provide immense player value and ensure no two missions were ever the same. Foertsch, concerned with visual quality and artistic coherence, argued passionately for a bank of meticulously handcrafted maps. The early experiments with procedural tech had produced chaotic results: trash cans placed in the middle of wheat fields, cover objects positioned with no tactical logic, and levels that felt neither believable nor fun to play. The challenge of creating a robust ruleset for the algorithm, while also building every other system in the complex game, seemed insurmountable at the time.
After the two directors made their cases, Solomon turned to the then-junior DeAngelis. DeAngelis recalls, “He’s like, ‘Hey, you over there, kid from New Jersey, what do you think?'” Despite his personal desire for the dynamism of procedural maps, DeAngelis had to be pragmatic. He voiced his assessment based on the timeline, the lack of mature tools, and the subpar quality of the procedural output. He told the room he believed they had to commit to a handcrafted approach. DeAngelis is quick to downplay his influence, calling himself “basically an intern” at the time, but shortly after this meeting, the decision was made. Firaxis would create a massive library of over 70 unique maps for urban, suburban, and rural environments, aiming to ensure two full playthroughs without repetition. This choice, while securing a high-quality baseline, planted the seed for a future challenge.
Greg Foertsch later reflected on the team’s mindset, stating, “One of the things that Garth, Jake and I have in common is we like to swing big… Go big or go home.” The decision to drop procedural generation, even though he had advocated for it, never sat right with him. It represented an unresolved creative problem. When the greenlight was given for a sequel, XCOM 2, the team had a clear, unified goal: they would crack the code of procedural generation. This was not merely a technical challenge; it was a core design philosophy. As DeAngelis put it, “We wanted to surprise the player, and we knew too that the XCOM audience would eat up procedural maps if we could nail it and make it feel right.”
The Incubation Period and Prototyping for XCOM 2
The development of the Enemy Within expansion in 2013 provided a crucial incubation period. While the majority of the team worked on the expansion, a small strike team led by DeAngelis, Solomon, and Foertsch split off to begin dedicated prototyping for XCOM 2. This parallel development track was essential. It allowed them to apply the hard lessons learned from Enemy Unknown’s failure in a dedicated, low-pressure environment. Foertsch summarized the value of this time, saying, “Having that time between XCOM and XCOM 2 to just sit through what we had learned by doing it the wrong way the first time was useful… I felt like I knew how to do it now.”
The core challenge was defining a universal ruleset. The algorithm needed to intelligently place rooms, objects, and cover to create spaces that were both tactically engaging and visually coherent across three distinct biomes. An object like a bus stop could be perfect cover in an urban setting but would be nonsensical in a rural one. The system needed to understand these context-sensitive equivalents. Foertsch and his small team spent long days constructing this foundational logic, figuring out “how could we make a ruleset that spanned all of those three very different visual spaces and still make sense.”
A major complication was XCOM’s signature destructible environments. The ability to blow holes in walls and shred cover was non-negotiable for the sequel. However, this created a new problem for a procedural system: what if the algorithm placed two buildings directly back-to-back? Destroying a wall in one would logically affect the other, creating potential gameplay and visual chaos. The team needed a structural solution that preserved gameplay freedom while maintaining procedural integrity. This led to the innovative “plot and parcel” system that would become the backbone of XCOM 2’s levels.
Cracking the Code: The “Plot and Parcel” System Explained
The plot and parcel system was Firaxis’s elegant solution to the problems of coherence and destruction. Instead of generating a map tile-by-tile, the system divided each map into a grid of larger “plots”. These plots were then filled with “parcels”—pre-assembled chunks of geometry like a specific house, a gas station, or a park. The critical innovation was the deliberate inclusion of a buffer zone, a thin space, between each parcel. Foertsch likened it to a tic-tac-toe board: “If you add thickness to the lines that draw the board, it gives you a buffer between one cell to the next cell.”
This buffer solved multiple issues. It prevented buildings from being placed in illogical, direct contact, eliminating the back-to-back wall problem. Destructible walls only existed within a parcel, so destruction was always contained and predictable. Perhaps most importantly, these gaps were not left empty. The system used blending assets—curbs, sidewalks, fences, foliage—that were intelligently selected based on the parcels in adjacent plots. This created the illusion of a seamless, handcrafted environment. A residential house parcel next to a road parcel would automatically generate a connecting driveway and a mailbox; an urban alley between two building parcels would be littered with appropriate dumpsters and fire escapes.
To avoid a monotonous grid-like feel, the system utilized plots of varied sizes: 16×16, 16×32, and 32×32 tiles (where one tile represented 1.5 meters, a standard XCOM unit of movement). This allowed for organic-feeling city blocks where a large 32×32 plot could hold a sprawling factory, flanked by 16×32 plots containing narrow row houses, all connected by a network of roads and alleys occupying the interstitial spaces. The system’s power was in its flexibility. As Foertsch noted, the level designers, once handed the tool, “started adding procedural chunks everywhere inside of the plots, too… Everything ended up dialing up times 1000 at that point.”
From Prototype to Polished Product: The Team’s Execution
The transition from a promising prototype to the final, polished system in XCOM 2 was driven by key personnel. Foertsch specifically highlighted the contributions of lead level designer Brian Hess, who joined during Enemy Within. Hess was instrumental in taking the foundational plot and parcel system and expanding its complexity. He authored the intricate rules that governed object placement, cover density, line-of-sight blockers, and mission-specific logic. In a 2018 GDC talk, Hess revealed the staggering depth of these rules, which considered everything from ensuring high ground had a strategic purpose to preventing awkwardly isolated single pieces of cover.
This rigorous, rules-based approach is what separated XCOM 2’s system from lesser implementations. As Foertsch heard from the team at Splash Damage working on Gears Tactics, lacking a buffer system like the plot and parcel method created significant problems in seamlessly stitching environments together. Firaxis’s solution proved so effective that it became a core part of their tactical game pipeline, later being adapted for use in Marvel’s Midnight Suns. The goal was never just random generation; it was curated generation—creating spaces that felt designed, even though they were assembled by an algorithm.
The Moment of Belief for the Original Skeptic
For Garth DeAngelis, the producer who had voiced his cautious skepticism in that fateful Enemy Unknown meeting, the payoff was profoundly personal. As part of his role, he made a habit of playing the latest builds late into the night to provide feedback. He recalls one such session, long after hours. The moment wasn’t marked by a flashy new enemy or ability, but by the quiet realization that the procedural system had finally achieved its ambition. “It’s 1am in the morning… and I’m playing this thing,” DeAngelis remembers. “I remember looking at the level before me and thinking ‘Damn, this city centre procedural map… I’m a believer.'”
This moment underscored the entire journey: a failed ambition in 2012 had been analyzed, deconstructed, and patiently rebuilt over years. The procedural maps in XCOM 2 were not a gimmick; they were the culmination of a core design promise finally fulfilled. They ensured that every mission felt unique, keeping veteran commanders constantly on their toes and directly contributing to the game’s exceptional replayability. The system successfully delivered on Jake Solomon’s original vision of maximizing player value while also meeting Greg Foertsch’s exacting standards for environmental quality and coherence.
The evolution from XCOM: Enemy Unknown to XCOM 2 provides a masterclass in iterative game development. It demonstrates how a feature deemed technically and artistically unfeasible can become a defining strength in a sequel, provided the team has the time to learn from its mistakes, the resources to prototype solutions, and the talent to execute a complex vision. The procedural map system stands as a testament to Firaxis’s willingness to “swing big,” learning from an initial setback to deliver an experience that fundamentally enhanced the tactical DNA of the XCOM franchise and set a new standard for replayability in the genre.
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