"While the atmosphere is important, the main objective is to concentrate on the pure gameplay; to build up on the successful elements of similar games in the past and to creatively evolve them in an up-to-date computer game."
Uh-huh... Yeah. This is bureaucratese for "we're gonna lobotomize it into a cheap Quake III clone." If I didn't understand the bureaucratic mindset so well, I'd be amazed how they've progressively stripped everything out of the X-Com series that made the game successful. The latest X-Com games in no way resemble the one that kept me up until the wee hours, but the boardroom types HAVE NEVER PLAYED THE GAME, so they simply do not understand-- and never will.
*sigh* It's so easy, really; if you want to make money, understand your business. As it is, the marketing and director execs spend too much time peering down their nose, across their martini, sneering at "silly children's games", and not enough time trying to understand the market. Capitalism is great, however, in that it will eventually weed these sort of parasites out of the system. If you don't understand your chosen market, you can't make money in it over the long haul. It just takes time. Sure, there'll be a resurgence of profiteering every once in a while, but it will be the exception, not the norm. Give the computer game industry another 15 years to mature, and we'll see much less of the copy-cat tripe that's clogging the shelves now. Just as in the movie industry, expensive advertising and "me-too" scripting can only get you so far; word of mouth about a good movie is something the studio execs can never buy-- much to their consternation.
If they make a "spiritual successor" to X-Com, it'll be known, and it'll sell very well. If not-- oh, well; wait for the next innovation. Somebody will do it; it's a law of capitalism.