Good evening. We're listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host, Rob Zagney.

Joining me today are two of our old friends. First, we have freelance writer, Rowan Kaiser. Rowan, welcome to the show. Hello, thanks for having me back. And we also welcome back our friend, game designer, David Heron. Dave. Hi, it's been too long. Glad to be back. It has. And the reason we got you back is you sounded like

you had a lot you wanted to say about the new ex-com expansion Enemy Within, which came out,

boy, this has been about two weeks now, right? I think something like that. Maybe less than that.

Maybe only a week. Yeah. So we've had a couple weeks to play around with it, although I only got around to it earlier this week, so I've not played nearly as much as Rowan or Dave. But, yeah, there's a lot of new stuff in this expansion, and I thought we just sort of dive right into it. And, Dave, I wanted to start with something you said to me over I am the other day,

which is just that you said you kind of felt like the expansion, while interesting, was also

sort of putting its finger on some original issues with the game design that hadn't really

been so pronounced in the original, but Enemy Within

kind of exaggerates them.

Am I butchering what you're saying there?

Could you paraphrase what you're driving at?

No, I hate to start off with a negative, and it is negative.

I just want to start off that, like, I really wanted to be on this podcast because, like,

you know, the original Xcom is one of the reasons why I got in the game design.

I was on the original Enemy Unknown podcast and like I've put in well over 100 hours into this

game and not the expansion, the regular.

And I and I absolutely love it.

So I just like all these like nitpicky things aside, it is I totally respect and really appreciate everything that they've done.

So with that and that caveat in mind, if we go back to that original recording, I think one of the issues that a lot of us had was that there was twofold.

It was one.

We thought the strategic game, the strategic game was a little bit a little bit weak and that the

character customization I know both myself and John Schaefer on that podcast

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