When I asked Foertsch what some of the inspirations for Enemy Unknown's art style were (apart from the obvious XCOM-related trappings), he immediately compared the character designs to classic action figure designs. In his words:
"When we did this pre-vis [an early video Firaxis showed to 2K before the project was greenlit], we basically used most of the company as a focus group, so they didn't know what I was working on. No one knew. So we showed them the pre-vis, like I had these meetings with the whole company for two days. Like people could just come in for 15 minutes, sit down, and just let me have it. Rip me apart. So they came in, and one of the guys...because I think there was a little bit of confusion with people, he was like, 'So, wait, you're making soldiers like Call of Duty?' And I was like, "No..." And his response was, 'Well, you know, they sort of look like action figures.' And that was it. 'You're right. You're absolutely right.' And while I'd been working on this for several months, I had not actually articulated that. And at that moment, I was like, 'That's what they are.' That was that moment that set us down this path."
It went a step further when Firaxis actually hired a few new employees with a deep-seated love of miniatures. The idea of your characters effectively becoming your toys that you play with might sound childish to some, but in truth, any video game character is really just a toy that you play with--some just have stronger narratives than others. In this case, the idea is to give you these fully customizable toys that can create varying types of explosive alien death. Kind of hard to find much fault with that.
