X-COM XCOM 2 + War of the Chosen Expansion Thread

[Zombra]

Well, even without the expansion content, the base game is being adjusted for "balance" so a vanilla campaign could still be interesting

Oh yeah? Big patch coming for the base game then? I wonder if that will break my mods.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Mazisky]

Well, even without the expansion content, the base game is being adjusted for "balance" so a vanilla campaign could still be interesting

Oh yeah? Big patch coming for the base game then? I wonder if that will break my mods.

No patch for the base game. Also, no optimization for the base game.

It seems awful, but they just confirmed on reddit.

 

[Fedora Master]

I didn't expect anything else from Firaxis at this point. Same shit with Civ, they only patch when they release DLC. No hotfixes either.

 

[Galdred]

Well, even without the expansion content, the base game is being adjusted for "balance" so a vanilla campaign could still be interesting

Oh yeah? Big patch coming for the base game then? I wonder if that will break my mods.

No patch for the base game. Also, no optimization for the base game.

It seems awful, but they just confirmed on reddit.

Link me a source pls?

https://twitter.com/FiraxisGames/status/9003838634778501133

War of the Chosen fixes aren't available for the base game. The XCOM 2 code base was rebuilt to implement new and update existing systems.

 

[Galdred]

Well, even without the expansion content, the base game is being adjusted for "balance" so a vanilla campaign could still be interesting

Oh yeah? Big patch coming for the base game then? I wonder if that will break my mods.

No patch for the base game. Also, no optimization for the base game.

It seems awful, but they just confirmed on reddit.

Link me a source pls?

https://twitter.com/FiraxisGames/status/9003838634778501133

War of the Chosen fixes aren't available for the base game. The XCOM 2 code base was rebuilt to implement new and update existing systems.

Tweet deleted?

Indeed, here is the "proof" original tweet. That said, we don't know whether it was deleted because it made them worse than Paradox and Creative Assembly or because they do plan to release one and the guy answering was wrong.

 

[Zombra]

Is this a calamity? The base game could be better optimized but runs OK.

 

[Galdred]

Maybe not, but Sparks are useless in the base game, and could use some help.

 

[Raghar]

Indeed, here is the "proof" original tweet. That said, we don't know whether it was deleted because it made them worse than Paradox and Creative Assembly or because they do plan to release one and the guy answering was wrong.

View attachment 8285

This said they rewrote source code for base game. Thus there are two different source codes, one for old XCOM2, and the new different version for expansion, which are incompatible between themselves.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-08-24-xcom-2-war-of-the-chosen-review

XCOM 2: War of the Chosen review
Welcome back (again), Commander.

War of the Chosen is a generous expansion that's bustling with brilliant new systems that's a must for anyone who's completed XCOM 2.


War of the Chosen's first mission plays out exactly the same as in the original XCOM 2, which caught me a little by surprise. After being treated to a brand new intro cinematic that partly rewrites how the Commander is rescued in the opening moments of XCOM 2, I was expecting something new, something flashy. But there I was, once again, leading four under equipped rookies into Operation Gatecrasher and wishing they'd brought a few more grenades.

I knew War of the Chosen would be an expansion that built upon the existing campaign (you'll need to start your playthrough from scratch, by the way), but at first it seems a bit too familiar. Disheartened, I got to throwing my grenades and missing 60 per cent shots. The mission ended, the monument fell, and I returned with my squad to the Avenger. And from that point onwards, almost everything I knew about XCOM 2 changed. A slow start perhaps, but once it gets going, this game never looks quite the same again.
Before you meet the expansion's new antagonists, or recruit any of the three hero classes, you'll first discover a feature called sitreps. These things are fantastic. They come into play during most of the standard mission types, adding some kind of variable for you to deal with on top of its initial objective. This can range from being forced to use a squad of lower-ranking soldiers, to fighting on a map inhabited by the Lost, the undead remnants of the humans first hit by the alien invasions.

Actually, let's talk about the Lost a little bit as they're easily my favourite enemy type introduced in War of the Chosen. First of all, there's a lot of them. When these guys turn up during an encounter, they arrive in huge numbers, surrounding your squad and any alien forces you may be dealing with. And that's an issue for both sides because the Lost are, interestingly, not part of the alien roster and will happily attack whatever they can swing their horrible arms at. As you'd hope, there were times during my playthrough in which this confusion played to my advantage, allowing my squad to escape as the aliens and the Lost focused their attention on one another.

Usually though, you'll need to deal with these guys before they overwhelm you. Explosive weaponry may seem tempting, but in most scenarios this only attracts further hordes of the undead and is a terrible, terrible idea. Instead you'll want to take advantage of a mechanic that's specific to this enemy type. After each successful Lost kill while using a ranged weapon, your soldiers receive an additional action. So the most efficient way to deal with a large group is to keep landing successful shots without missing or, as is often the case running out of ammunition. It's a completely different feeling to fighting against a group of aliens and certainly to begin with, there's a great sense that you're hanging on by the skin of your teeth as more and more of them show up.

Alongside the new maps and mission types that you'll encounter, it's these sitreps that ensure you very rarely feel like you're repeating the missions you've already played in XCOM 2. Well, apart from the very first one anyway.

Then there's the Chosen. Although the Avatar remains the final boss of the game, it's these three that provide the real challenge. Until you discover their hiding place on the world map and defeat them where they live (they can't be permanently killed until this point), these guys will frequently appear mid-mission to hunt down your squad. Just like with the Alien Rulers, they don't care if you're already engaged in a firefight and it feels like they have a real knack for turning up at the very worst moments. Even when they don't, the anticipation that they might is often enough to make you rush through encounters and make mistakes. I really like that.

And yes, if you don't track them down and defeat them before the finale, they'll show up in that mission too. You really, really don't want to fight more than one of them at a time.

Each Chosen falls into a different archetype. The Assassin relies heavily on stealth and melee attacks, the Hunter is an excellent sniper that has you scrambling for cover long before you're in range of firing back, and the Warlock is said to have psionic powers almost equal to that of the Elders. They do, however, have a number of strengths and weakness that are unique to your campaign. If you're familiar with the Nemesis system in Shadow of Mordor you'll have an idea of how it works - and what a delight it is to see that idea finally picked up elsewhere.

Defeating the Chosen ahead of the final mission isn't a strict requirement, but most players will want to do that. Not only does it ensure they won't turn up during the final moments of your campaign at max strength, if you defeat them beforehand, you'll also gain access to their unique weapons. Unsurprisingly, they're better than anything else you can manufacture and offer a huge advantage to the soldiers wielding them. The Assassin's blade, for example, does more damage than any other melee weapon in-game and can't miss an attack. Yeah, it's a huge upgrade once you get your hands on this stuff.

This does lead to one unusual side effect, however. If you defeat the Chosen ahead of the final mission, it really does feel like you've dealt with the final boss of the of the game ahead of its final mission. This, again, reminds me of the Alien Rulers DLC to some extent. You'll be turning up to fight the Avatar with the best gear the game has to offer and, as a result, it feels like victory is almost guaranteed.

Speaking of feeling powerful, wow, are the new hero units great. To combat the substantial threat posed by the Chosen, XCOM is able to build relationships with three factions that have been resisting alien control during the Commander's absence. The Reapers specialise in stealth, the Templars offer psionic-powered melee attacks and my personal favourites, the Skirmishers, are a group of Advent soldiers that have now rebelled against their former masters. Should you convince them to work alongside you (which isn't especially difficult), you then gain access to each of their unique hero units.

These hero units level up differently to normal soldiers, using a resource called ability points to unlock, essentially, as many skills as you can afford. Ability points are earned with each promotion, but there's also a shared pool you can tap into that's increased based on how well you play the game. Smart tactical decisions like flanking an enemy, attacking from concealment, or gaining a height advantage can all add more points to your total. If you have access to the correct building type, you can also use these ability points to unlock additional abilities for your other soldiers too. So if you want a Specialist that can use both Aid Protocol and Combat Protocol (which is a great idea, by the way), you can totally do that here. This all sounds more complicated than it really is, but at its core this system rewards you for playing especially well during missions. I also really like this idea because it offers yet another way for players to invest even more resources into soldiers that can potentially be lost forever. That's what XCOM is really about.

You do need to be reasonably careful about investing too heavily into just a single squad of soldiers, however, as War of the Chosen also introduces a new mechanic called Fatigue. You'll likely want to take your new hero classes with you on every mission, but instead you'll be encouraged to give them a break after every few missions as they grow tired. Taking fatigued soldiers out on missions isn't prohibited and sometimes you'll probably have to just that, but it does mean they'll be more susceptible to panic and can also pick up negative traits that will stay with them until you build an Infirmary. These negative traits are never game-breaking, but can be fairly inconvenient. A soldier may grow obsessed with having their weapon fully loaded at all times or become particularly worried about fighting Sectoids (which is entirely understandable).

Outside of the missions themselves, you'll also be encouraged to send soldiers out on Covert Ops on the strategy layer. This usually has you sending between 2-3 soldiers out on a mission outside of your control, to gain resources, improve relationships with one of the factions, or locate the hiding place of one of the Chosen. There's always a risk that these soldiers will run into trouble and pick up injuries, or even fight off an enemy ambush (at this stage you'll need to step in and take control). And this has two quite interesting effects on your campaign, I think. Soldiers can gain experience while out on Covert Ops, which offers another way to ensure lower ranked operative are getting into shape. Which is useful, because alongside the fatigue system, relying on Covert Ops means that you won't always have access to the soldiers you want to use. More than ever, War of the Chosen encourages XCOM 2 players to manage a larger roster of troops, rather than a single squad.

This review is based on the PC version of the game and we're yet to see how it plays on the consoles, but here at least the performance seems to have seen a decent boost. Loading times, in particular, are a fraction of what they were first time around and the tactical gameplay is noticeably smoother. I did experience a couple of hard crashes during my 30 something hours of playtime, which was disappointing given the issues some players had at launch, but in both cases a quick reload seemed to do the trick.

I also haven't been able to play around with the game's Challenge Mode, which won't be activated until launch. This promises to offer bespoke missions, outside of your campaign, with an accompanying leaderboard to see how you compare to other players around the world. This sounds brilliant and if they're regularly updated, I can see myself really diving into the challenges, but we're yet to see them for ourselves.

But really, this expansion is all about the photobooth. I have so much time for this feature. After missions, or promotions, or soldier deaths, you're encouraged to commemorate the moment with a photo of the XCOM operatives involved. You can spend a lot of time here, changing their poses, adding filters and writing captions, and it offers absolutely no gameplay advantage whatsoever. I love it. These posters will then show up during missions as resistance propaganda and I can't tell you how satisfying it is to see them plastered against a wall, offering a potentially fourth thematically-inconsistent backdrop to the firefight you're having.

Gosh, I feel like I've barely scratched the surface here. War of the Chosen proves once again that Firaxis really know how to handle an expansion. There's just so many new systems being introduced here, that it's hard not to be impressed that they didn't hold onto all of this stuff for an inevitable sequel. Don't let the first mission fool you, this is a wildly different beast to the core XCOM 2 experience. So much so, that I really wouldn't advise playing War of the Chosen without having already completed the original game - I think you'd find it too overwhelming, too busy. However, if you have defeated the Avatar Project before now, there's now a fantastic reason to do it once again.

If you enjoyed what Enemy Within added to the previous title, you're in for a treat. War of the Chosen makes the last game's expansion seem meager by comparison. And I bloody loved Enemy Within.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/08/24/xcom-2-war-of-the-chosen-review/

Wot I Think – XCOM 2: War Of The Chosen
Alec Meer on August 24th, 2017 at 3:00 pm.

I can’t help but think of a sausage. A huge, fat, glistening sausage, bulging with meat (or the nearest vegetarian equivalent) to the point that the innards have burst through the skin, forming deliciously fatty globules on the surface. There is surely no room for more, but nonetheless even more has been stuffed inside it. It clearly shouldn’t work. It’s almost obscene. It looks like it will fall apart or even explode if even the slightest pressure is applied. It is sausage-based madness. The sausage is XCOM 2: War of the Chosen [official site], and it is as delectable and satisfying as it absolutely bloody insane.

My first few hours with War Of The Chosen, an enormous add-on for which the meagre-sounding term ‘DLC’ is desperately inappropriate, I spent convinced that certain aspects of it were severely misjudged. Its strategy map side – i.e. all the time spent outside of its turn-based missions – was a cacophony of interruptions, confusingly overlapping concepts and dubious internal logic.

That map, and the drawn-out base building associated with it, was always the weakest element of XCOM 2 pre-expansion – this cludgey attempt to view XCOM/X-COM’s longstanding global crisis management through a new lens that entailed far too much schlepping about and being dragged this way and that. The long grind to expand both base and territory while trying to keep the Avatar doomclock in check, all the while peppered with must-do missions, is why I haven’t returned to the XCOM 2 well anything like as frequently as I did with XCOM the first. I dug the intricacy of chaining together skills to survive missions, and I even enjoyed the divisive tension of turn timers, but the strategy map was a drag.

Initially, War Of The Chosen doubled down on this stuff, and I felt the bile rising. Its headline additions (but there are many, many more, both obvious and subtle) involve three recurring boss aliens that haunt you and threaten a game over scenario across the early and middle stages of a new campaign, and three new friendly factions who will provide you with extra units and resources if you meet their objectives. What this means is a half dozen new voices clamouring for your attention, which in XCOM 2 parlance means being constantly nagged to go here, do that, listen to this, work through this mission and this mission and this mission and worry about three new doomclocks.

A single in-game day can often be interrupted by events as many as three times, most of which involve hauling your flying base off to the opposite end of the Earth. So, for example, the simple act of collecting a box of supplies from Chile might take two real-time hours and involve your base inefficiently crossing back and forth across continents a couple of times, while you suffer dire warnings that one of your new enemies is on the cusp of destroying you and, the quintessential XCOM risk, see your soldiers’ ranks severely diminish by the time that box finally gets hauled onboard.

At first, this was exhausting – the noise of all these interruptions while I was trying to get something, anything built or researched. I still have the original X-COM in my blood, which means I’m accustomed to long, lonely minutes of waiting for something, anything to happen, and this is the absolute inversion of that. However, as the game wore on, it became apparent that rather than exacerbating XCOM 2’s problems, WOTC was solving them.

What seems like a mad cacophony is in actual fact the expert spinning of innumerable plates. Yes, there is a lot of noise, and I still miss the peace of waiting, but the additions don’t just bring interruptions – they bring rewards that provide new ways of solving the strategy map’s two key objectives, those being delaying the Avatar countdown and expanding your network of Resistance contacts so you can gain funding and invade key alien bases.

Where once you pretty much had to plough through this stuff in one direction and have your base-building plans defined by the need for communication arrays, or face doom, now completing Covert Actions (auto-resolved, unseen missions that play out over a few in-game days – your guys can’t die in these, but they can be wounded or captured, the latter prompting a full, turn-based rescue mission later) might snag you additional Resistance contacts without having to add any new rooms or engineers to your base, an ability to make new contacts instantly if you can afford them, or knock the Avatar counter back a couple of places.

Meanwhile, sufficiently pleasing one of the new factions might grant you a card that reduces costs, brings bonus soldiers on missions or boosts Intel, and optional scanning objectives that pop up on the strategy map can, for instance, grant extra power to your Avenger, while flying to a faction base can speed up construction or casualty recuperation times.

I did not find myself repeating the same old grind to expand the resistance network and instead kept the Avatar bobbins in check with a cats’ cradle of various actions from various sources with unpredictable outcomes and bonuses. Next time I play, it will not happen the same way, nor will the time after that.

I still think that there’s a conceptual misfire in the idea of hauling your whole base across the skies to grab a few boxes when we already know it’s supposed to have dropships, and this is only exacerbated by these new Covert Actions which frequently have just a few of your team go elsewhere to grab something useful without your base having to move an inch. But, even though it still doesn’t make sense, the new option to approach the strategy layer’s key challenges from a number of different angles definitely makes it work. War of the Chosen gives it options and variety.

This is the expansion pack’s philosophy throughout, a clear and very successful attempt to save XCOM 2 from being a straight stomp from A to B in which metagame and squad structure alike always take on broadly the same form.

Where once XCOM’s arms race had specific weapon/armour tech requirements needed to reach or survive certain elements, now it’s a freeform dash in multiple directions, to the point that each and every soldier on your roster is materially different in ability to all the others. A Ranger is not a ranger is not a ranger, no two snipers are quite the same and, again, there are all these skills and items I’ve not even had the chance to research or use. I didn’t unlock plasma rifles until 26 hours into the campaign, because I was already able to tackle high-level foes with a combination of new and complementary soldier skills and special weapons unlocked by defeating the Chosen bosses and new research upgrades.

In my next campaign, I’ll probably fold in a few psychics and SPARK mechs or equip everyone with weird and wonderful stuff built in the Proving Grounds. Where once my XCOM 2 squads always ended up taking roughly the same shape, next time they’ll be dramatically different to the guys I’m fielding now.

I’ve got guys who drag enemies towards them with grappling hooks, I’ve got snipers who live in perpetual stealth, I’ve got a new class of warrior/psychic hybrids who dance around the map with psionic blades and can swap places with friends or foes, I’ve got swordsmen who cannot miss, I’ve got medics with rifles that never seem to run out of ammo, I’ve got people who can make cars explode remotely, I’ve got weapons with more upgrade slots than I could possibly fill, I’ve got, basically, the Power Rangers. (No robo-animal vehicles yet, admittedly, but it feels like just a matter of time at this point).

Coupled with additions from the previous DLC and the now further-expanded tech offerings from the Proving Ground room in the base, the range of loadout options is vast, and that means we’re long past the point where a soldier was just a class. Certain fundamentals remain – a sniper has a sniper rifle, a grenadier is the only type who can use a cannon and so forth – but everyone’s their own specialist now. Not just in terms of equipped gear (which you can in any case move between soldiers), but abilities too, with a new type of experience point introduced that enables you to buy bonus skills for your dudes in addition to the standard rank-up options, and some of which can come from other classes. These points are gained not from straight kills, but tricksier stuff such as ambushes, fatalities that result from flanking, taking out boss-ish foes and so forth.

There are these three new classes introduced too, tied into the concept of three new rebel factions you can convince to join you in the war against advent. Each is to some extent a hybrid of other classes – the hooded, stealthy Reapers fuse sharpshooters’ sniping with Grenadiers’ explosive-fu, Skirmishers remix Rangers’ melee prowess with Specialists’ mid-range firepower and Templars create psychic weaponry as opposed to using mind-manipulation. They mix things up very well, although the apple has fallen far from XCOM 2’s guerilla warfare tree – we’re way off in superhero territory now.

All three classes seem initially overpowered compared to a standard squaddie, and while it’s true that WOTC ensures you can’t realistically have more than a couple of each new’un on your staff, it’s not long before the various new gear and skill options have the heaviest-hitters of your standard inventory catching up and even overtaking. I’ve got a Ranger – one Graham ‘Bandit’ Smith, no less – on staff right now who can very realistically tackle missions on his own, equipped as he is with the snake suit from the Alien Hunters DLC, an enormously powerful one-off alien rifle and pair of katanas gained from taking down a Chosen and most of the skills from both the sword and stealth branches of the Ranger skill tree. A couple of other soldiers – heavily-armoured Specialist Alice ‘Breaker’ O’Connor and exotic explosive-spamming Grenadier Alec ‘Sad Sack’ Meer – should soon attain similar superhuman status too. Again: all this long before I researched Plasma rifles. Those are almost incidental now.

Getting my team to this point was not straightforward, I should stress. Many died, many more had long spells in hospital, I’ve been getting close to triple figures of missions and been interrupted by assorted crises more times than I could begin to count. WOTC is clearly conscious that you ultimately get to make your own Avengers, and it’s not shy about throwing everything at you as you strive to do so, both on the strategy map and in missions.

In the latter, you’ve got the constant risk of one of the three immortal Chosen – each with unique and devastating powers – showing up to hound you in addition to standard enemies. If you’ve got the Alien Hunters DLC then they have their own three randomly-appearing bosses too, and now there’s a whole new enemy faction, a zombie swarm known as The Lost, and who will spawn constantly in huge numbers on any map they appear in. These guys will attack XCOM and Advent alike, which means they can sometimes be turned to your advantage, but in the main what they introduce is a need for frantic crowd control in addition to the usual tactical challenges of the alien soldiers. (I’ll mention also that The Lost pick up a forgotten thread from XCOM 1’s very first mission, wherein the aliens drop a chemical weapon into a city, transforming all its residents into creepy ash-statues, something that was never hitherto referenced again).

Whatever the fiction, The Lost are zombies, and yeah boring zombies yawn etc, but it does a really good job with them. Their movement is eerily floppy, their cracked, ashen texture is sinister, and their lack of any self-preservation instinct makes them distinctly different to other XCOM foes. I wouldn’t want a whole game about fighting these guys but, whether in their own missions or as an extra complication in Advent ones, they’re fantastic at mixing things up and sparing an XCOM 2 campaign from being a grind through too many similar battles.

As part of WOTC’s general commitment to being more Marvel movie than gritty alien resistance saga, facing The Lost grants a new squad-wide ability whereby killing one shambler with a single shot allows your soldier to immediately take another shot rather than end the turn, and this can continue indefinitely until you miss/run out of ammo/target a different sort of baddie. With the right weapons and add-ons (the free reloads gun upgrade is killer here), the headcount within a single turn can become astronomical.

While one might argue this approach is not true-blue XCOM, the sheer number of these respawning blighters prevents it from being an outright power fantasy, and instead it’s these intense Alamo moments. Gunfire and especially explosions will summon even more Lost, so trying to balance subtlety with the need to murder everything is delightfully tricky.

Adding to that sense of new variety is a wider rethink of missions, and the addition of a fair few new environment types into the mix, some of which (such as Lost-blighted conurbations, playgrounds and gas stations) are extremely effective at restoring the menace lost when XCOM moved from contemporary-ish alien invasion to gleaming white future-society. The much-maligned mission timers have been dialled down significantly too – I always found that they did a good job of forcing me to engage rather than being excessively cautious, but they proved too stressful to less obsessive XCOM players and now only make occasional appearances – thus, like The Lost, adding variety rather than being the norm.

In their place, WOTC does more in terms of making the situation tougher as it wears on or making missions partially rather than necessarily completely failable, as well as throwing a few new mission types into the mix. Oh, and some civilian rescue missions now feature Resistance fighters as an AI-controlled AI faction, which enables bigger and more spectacular fights than before.

The net result is that missions are far less predictable and far more varied than before – and I’m not sure I’d even finger XCOM 2 as feeling particularly predictable or samey in that regard anyway, so WOTC makes for an extremely generous strategy game.

Also battling rinse and repeat is a new raft of psychological conditions your soldiers can suffer from, from simple tiredness to fully-fledged phobias of certain enemies. The former means you can still take ’em on missions but they’ll be sub-par, the latter is an evolution of the panic system (i.e. a soldier might cower or randomly move or shoot) but which can trigger at any point, rather than only because a team-mate bought the farm, and more importantly they last across missions.

To cure ’em, you’ll need to stick ’em in a special slot in the Infirmary, which – like injuries and tiredness and a new training system whereby two soldiers can buddy up and gain bonus abilities – takes ’em out of action for a few days. In other words, the days of depending on one team of six hot shit war vets are gone, and you absolutely require a large, revolving pool of heroes.

With soldiers more distinct from each other than ever before, losing a big wig also hurts more than ever (plus some of the better toys are lost forever if they’re carrying them when they die), but the good news is that, because everyone ends up with some kind of X factor before too long, replacing the fallen is no longer a matter of slowly grinding your way back up the class skill tree.

War of the Chosen is the biggest and most varied XCOM has ever been, in other words. I hesitate a little about saying it’s the best XCOM has ever been, because I think there’s a certain purity and clarity to Firaxis’ first bite of this peach that’s been increasingly lost since, and WOTC really is going to be totally impenetrable to anyone who doesn’t know the series very well. It’s not great at explaining all its mechanics, the incessant nagging of the strategy map and range of options and objectives is initially overwhelming even for veterans and, if you’ve got the previous, smaller DLC installed, the concept of being dogged by reappearing boss monsters with one-off gear rewards and a climactic fortress incursion is confusingly similar to what Alien Hunters does.

WOTC’s tone and aesthetic are all over the place too, with the original XCOM 2 concept of a resistance cell trying to bring down alien overlords in Appletropolis struggling to breathe underneath a superhero vs supervillain layer, a zombie horror layer and even an addition like creating ‘propaganda’ posters featuring your troops pulling action hero poses after a successful mission. Lots and lots of fun thematic ideas for sure, but any overarching coherence to its worldbuilding (already flimsy in XCOM 2) has all but vanished.

It feels as if a few things died on the vine during development too. For instance, two of the new resistance factions feature characters voiced charmingly by Star Trek: The Next Generation alumni (Worf as businesslike human/alien hybrid Skirmisher Nox is perfect, and we get Riker, Troi and Yar too), and fancy introduction missions and sequences, while the third (the zenlike Templars), pretty much arrives silently from off-camera. Would I be wrong to speculate that there might be a Brent Spiner or Gates McFadden-shaped hole there?

Similarly, after all the hullabaloo the game makes about them, including assorted cinematics and in-mission patter, there’s no real pay-off to taking out all three Chosen, and it’s oddly jarring to just find yourself back in trad. XCOM 2 plot afterwards. For the time that they are around, two of the Chosen are a bit too Saturday morning cartoon in their performances to leave much impression, but the third has a nice line in both world-weariness and running commentary on your actions that makes me realise that character baddies who give you someone to strive against in the long term are an extremely effective addition to a game series in which the monsters rarely speak.

A fair few niggles and quibbles there, but I’ll close with this tale:

I was called away mid-mission to meet a friend. I walked approximately 200 metres down the road to the pub we were due to rendezvous in, and the sensation that there was a taut piece of elastic stretching that distance between my brain and the computer in my house was almost physical. On that computer: an XCOM 2: War of The Chosen mission, which would remain agonisingly unresolved for the next two hours. In my brain: a cat’s cradle of thoughts and worries about what I would do on the next turn, how I could ensure my team of soldiers survived the six Advent soldiers currently targeting them, about how quickly I could wrap the mission up so I could return to trying to locate the final Chosen fortress, and most of all a sense that the earthly demands of conversation and sustenance seemed so inconsequential in the face of all this.

This is XCOM writ so damn large, so wide and wild and all-consuming, that it gets the same intractable hooks into me that XCOM games always have while also taking me to new places, occupying even more parts of my obsessive brain. It’s true that it’s this ridiculous carnival of ideas and not necessarily complementary themes, and that it would have been better to have a root and branch rethink of the strategy map rather than make it a frenzy of nagging, but despite – maybe even because – of all that, this is the first time than an XCOM or X-COM game can be truly described as an epic.

Where XCOM 2’s campaign could feel like the drawn-out prelude to the foregone conclusion of the climactic fight, this feels like, if you’ll excuse the term, a long war. It’s a hard-fought bringing together of a rag-tag army of vengeance, with landmark battles and true heroes emerging from the miasma of skirmishes. Sometimes, I shake my head at its absurdity and its noise, but I really cannot get enough of it.

There’s a raft of smaller, more under-the-hood changes I’ve not even mentioned, but all of which further serve to ensure your campaign does not stomp down the same path every time. It’s even cranked the graphicsosity dial up a little too, with improved lighting making everything pop that much more.

I said right back at the start that ‘DLC’ desperately undersells War Of The Chosen, this fat and bursting sausage of turn-based splendour. I think I might have found ‘XCOM 3’ a mite more appropriate.

XCOM 2: War Of The Chosen is due for release on August 29 for Windows PC, via Steam, for £34.99/$39.99/€39,99.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamesn.com/xcom-2/xcom-2-war-of-the-chosen-review

XCOM 2: War of the Chosen PC review

I’m designing a poster. It’s not much like the striking USSR-style propaganda made by my enemies in ADVENT, but I’m hoping it’ll do the same for our side. Instead of Russian constructivism, I'm harnessing the power of Michael Jackson.

This specific work of art is made to commemorate the new battle bond between two XCOM rookies, Shin & McIntyre. They have the ring of an ‘80s pop duo about them - Simon & Garfunkel, Hall & Oates - so I’ve plumped for a background of exposed brickwork, in the style of Jackson’s Off the Wall. The pair stand back to back, just as they did in their first fight: a mission to recover an ADVENT power converter from the back of a truck.

“I certainly hope our propaganda effort is not funded from my research budget,” research head Dr. Tygan grumbles.

“I think we need more dead aliens to get the effect we’re going for,” a more constructive Chief Engineer Shen suggests.

Poster-making isn’t the most significant feature to come to XCOM 2 in War of the Chosen. But it is representative of a philosophical shift in the far-reaching new expansion. Where the vanilla XCOM 2 pushed its commanders towards cold, calculating utilitarianism, this version of the game is about the individual.

It starts with Shin & McIntyre, and the new bonds system. Like most of XCOM’s squad progression, bonds work in the background to begin with, granting every possible pair of soldiers in your barracks a random compatibility rating that determines whether they’ll be able to buddy up in the future.

It sounds a bit like dating app maths, but feels authentic: Shin & McIntyre just click, knowing they’re destined to sing falsetto together, while other soldiers are unlikely to ever foster more than a respectful tolerance for each other. That is, unless they suffer through something that binds them despite their differences.

A few missions after forging that first bond, during a botched attempt to destroy an ADVENT research post, I order a grenadier to throw an unconscious squaddie over his shoulder and airlift them to safety. In the moment it’s merely a practical decision made in a desperate situation, but War of the Chosen recognises this as a cracking piece of emergent storytelling. Though that injured soldier has yet to leave the infirmary, they now share a new level of compatibility with the heavy who saved their life.

It’s not all surface - these are friends with gameplay benefits. McIntyre has been known to pull an extra action out of Shin simply by egging him on. And later, bonded soldiers gain extra wellbeing simply by standing on adjacent tiles, justifying the emotional instinct to keep the two close.

These quiet marriages of theme and mechanics can be powerful. If you send one soldier over to slap some sense into their partner in a moment of panic, that’s a little story to remember long after the map’s objectives are met.

While Firaxis are wise to double down on their capacity for systemic storytelling, I’m a little less sold on War of the Chosen’s expanded cast of scripted characters. Joining the beloved Bradford, Shen, and Tygan are three rebel faction commanders, plus another three bigshot aliens - the Chosen of the title. It's an approach that lumbers the very early part of the game with an excess of dialogue that doesn’t play to the studio’s strengths. The introduction of the Chosen in particular feels one dimensional - three snarling characters defined by their chosen weapon, a barely repressed desire to murder each other, and not much else.

Thankfully, these thinly drawn characters are the faces of some elaborate new ideas that weave directly into XCOM 2’s existing campaign. The Chosen, as you've probably heard by now, are Shadow of Mordor-inspired recurring bosses with unique powers and weaknesses that develop over the course of a campaign. I can confirm they have a habit of kidnapping your best soldiers and gloating over comms on the world map (seriously, who gave them the ship’s number?).

The rebel factions, meanwhile, change the game much more quickly. The idea is that each have independently learned how to live rough in an ADVENT-ruled world, and developed specialised skillsets as a result. Curry enough favour with the state-harried Reapers and you can recruit a crack sniper with unrivaled concealment abilities, for instance. Befriend the Skirmishers, former ADVENT soldiers who’ve abandoned their posts, and you’ll feel the benefit of one of their highly-mobile shock troopers.

You can exploit these new connections to plough further down your favoured play styles than ever before in XCOM. But far more interesting, I think, is the possibility of playing with a top-drawer fighter in a class you’ve mostly missed out on.

One unfortunate side effect of XCOM 2’s natural-selection-by-permadeath is that it tends to close off the classes you’re weaker with. I’ve never been much good at keeping Rangers alive long enough to bring their swords to bear, and always wind up with at least a couple of marksmen in my final squad.

With the help of the Skirmishers, though, I can shotgun with the best - grappling my way around the battlefield with hero unit Mox in a way I haven’t enjoyed since Just Cause. In short, the factions enable a tactical flexibility that’s new and immediately different to the base game.

That newfound strategic variety is compounded by a new breed of enemies: the Lost. These ashen creatures are what remains of the human populace in urban centres devastated during the invasion. They’re a pain in ADVENT’s arse as well as ours: zombie-like in behaviour, they act as the catalysts for turning some of XCOM’s most fundamental rules upside-down.

The Lost don’t shoot salvos of plasma fire - instead closing to melee distance in numbers previously reserved only for XCOM 2’s higher difficulty settings. Firaxis balance the threat with a free-shot rule: every time you down one of the crumbly buggers, you get another go, potentially chaining a series of kills in a single soldier’s turn.

The consequences, in Lost-focused battles, are significant: there’s no sense in clinging to cover when it affords no bonus against melee. Instead you learn to position your troops out in the open, with line-of-sight to as many mutants as possible. It makes sense to cluster your soldiers together, ready to cover for each other when a shot doesn’t quite come off. Ammo conservation and reloading suddenly become the most important issues on your plate. It’s gratifying to see Firaxis flip the familiar givens of their game, seemingly just to find out how far it can be pushed.

From a technical perspective, there’s still a vague sense that XCOM 2 struggles under its own weight. Playing on a GTX 1060, there have been moments between turns when War of the Chosen slows uncomfortably, long seconds passing as the game presumably wrestles with unseen calculations.

On the plus side, this expansion sees the sequel’s more ambitious art style come into its own. In the cities of the Lost, you’ll find statuesque bodies frozen at the point of death, arms raised in vain like the citizens of Herculaneum. Firaxis dress these ghoulish mannequins in green fairy lights for maximum eeriness - and, in an inspired touch, cause them to collapse into dust as your squaddies brush past. We’ve come a long way from the sometimes incohesive look of Enemy Unknown.

Back to Shin & McIntyre, however: I can’t tell you how their story ends, but I can tell you that their relationship is under new strain.

Lately, Shin has been suffering from phobophobia - a fear of panic with the whiff of Darkest Dungeon about it. Lead designer Jake Solomon would say it has something to do with the fact that I’ve repeatedly sent him onto the battlefield while fatigued. I’d suggest it has everything to do with the fact that McIntyre took a potshot at him in a state of sectoid-induced temporary madness.

But hey, we’re still printing those posters. I see them sometimes, pasted to the side of ruined buildings outside ADVENT’s urban jurisdiction. Two heroes who, any day now, might become martyrs.

In its new expansion, XCOM 2 makes people of its soldiers and turns its aliens into personalities. It cares about the individual. But that’s only so you feel the loss of your bonds more keenly, and hate the enemy more personally. In War of the Chosen, Firaxis are being kind to be cruel.

Verdict: 8/10

 

[Zep Zepo]

Is there a point to all this copy and paste shit? I'm just not getting it.

Are you really at that point where you just phone it in to fill up page space?

Time to cash in and do something else.

Zep--

 

[vdweller]

But really, this expansion is all about the photobooth. I have so much time for this feature. After missions, or promotions, or soldier deaths, you're encouraged to commemorate the moment with a photo of the XCOM operatives involved. You can spend a lot of time here, changing their poses, adding filters and writing captions, and it offers absolutely no gameplay advantage whatsoever. I love it.

Spoiler

 

[Raghar]

This is better image than any XCOM2 photobooth can capture, and she's better fighter than XCOM2 soldiers.

 

[Anthedon]

Well, even without the expansion content, the base game is being adjusted for "balance" so a vanilla campaign could still be interesting

Oh yeah? Big patch coming for the base game then? I wonder if that will break my mods.

No patch for the base game. Also, no optimization for the base game.

It seems awful, but they just confirmed on reddit.

Link me a source pls?

https://twitter.com/FiraxisGames/status/9003838634778501133

War of the Chosen fixes aren't available for the base game. The XCOM 2 code base was rebuilt to implement new and update existing systems.

That's retarded even by industry standards, holy shit.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Joined on the 4th of July]

The base game is free for this weekend and I decided to try it. Seems like a pretty cool game, maybe they'll trick me into buying it. I haven't tried any Firaxis XCOM's before this.

RIP team leader Hans Grüber who died after being shot in the back twice by the same woman who managed to get mindcontrolled twice.

 

[Mazisky]

The base game is free for this weekend and I decided to try it. Seems like a pretty cool game, maybe they'll trick me into buying it. I haven't tried any Firaxis XCOM's before this.

RIP team leader Hans Grüber who died after being shot in the back twice by the same woman who managed to get mindcontrolled twice.

The game is pretty good and fun if you are not blinded by prejudices versus big producer games like a retard.

 

[Fedora Master]

The base game is free for this weekend and I decided to try it. Seems like a pretty cool game, maybe they'll trick me into buying it. I haven't tried any Firaxis XCOM's before this.

RIP team leader Hans Grüber who died after being shot in the back twice by the same woman who managed to get mindcontrolled twice.

Enemy Unknown with Enemy Within is better in pretty much every regard.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

XCOM 2 is the Michael Bay version of X-COM.

It's also utterly boring, unbalanced, buggy and lacks atmosphere. Perhaps the WotC expansion can salvage it, but I wouldn't hold by breath.

 

[Mazisky]

The base game is free for this weekend and I decided to try it. Seems like a pretty cool game, maybe they'll trick me into buying it. I haven't tried any Firaxis XCOM's before this.

RIP team leader Hans Grüber who died after being shot in the back twice by the same woman who managed to get mindcontrolled twice.

Enemy Unknown with Enemy Within is better in pretty much every regard.

Tbh after 300 hours in Xcom 2 i tried going back to EW but it felt so old and clunky in comparison.

Boring geoscape, fixed maps, boring classes. LEL

I like Xcom 2 more.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.gamebanshee.com/news/119533-xcom-2-war-of-the-chosen-reviews.html

IGN - 8.8/10:

Most of these classes’ innate skills, like the Skirmisher firing two shots per turn and free use of a grappling hook or the Templar’s retreat move after a melee strike feel like having a captain-level soldier (without the beefed up health and stats) in your squad from the start. I found that rather than unbalancing things, having some access to those abilities allows for more advanced tactics in the early game, while most soldiers were still learning the ropes of their classes. They’re highly useful and versatile without being absolutely essential, plus they are somewhat limited by their inability to equip heavy armor – and Reapers and Templars have only one utility slot. They’re also limited in aesthetic options, with only two slightly different textures for their armor sets and two voices per class.

The exception to that respect for balance is the Reaper’s super-stealth, which reduces the enemy detection range to just one tile and practically lets them walk up and poke an alien in the eye without being spotted. In fact, they have a 50 percent chance of doing almost exactly that – firing their rifles from concealment rolls the dice on whether they’ll be spotted, and later they can get a skill called Sting that guarantees they stay hidden for one shot. True, they don’t do as much damage as a regular Sharpshooter, but that’s still a huge advantage. Their Claymore mine is also an absurdly effective means of striking without risking retaliation, though because you have to shoot it to detonate it it’s mostly only good for stationary targets until it’s upgraded to a sticky bomb at a high rank. But the Reaper’s stealth was a real unbalancing factor in search-and-destroy missions like assassinations and even the Avenger Defense, where I was able to walk up, spot the disruptor for snipers across the map, and make an escape without taking a hit, all within five turns. Don’t get me wrong, I felt clever the first time I pulled it off, but henceforth there’s no challenge to what used to be a tough mission.

[...]

The Verdict

War of the Chosen is a wide and deep expansion for XCOM 2 that improves variety in mission objectives, tactical options, threats, and strategic map activities. The Chosen are worthy adversaries who advance along with you to put up great fights without feeling cheap, and the new elite soldier classes add opportunities for interesting gameplay earlier in the campaign. Some significant balance issues show up, but especially for the first two-thirds of a campaign War of the Chosen restores the fear of the unknown to a game I know well.

GameInformer - 9.25/10:

The new aliens add a few wrinkles to XCOM’s combat. Fortunately, War of the Chosen gives you access to several new soldier classes that expand your strategic options to compensate for these new threats. These new classes come from three new resistance groups you can befriend and share resources with. Each class has its own strengths and weaknesses. Reapers are incredibly stealthy marksman who have a chance to attack without revealing themselves to enemies, Templars are psionic powerhouses who grow stronger after each kill, and Skirmishers are alien/human hybrids who specialize in close-quarters combat. All three units are wildly different from XCOM’s other classes, and each is so useful that I wanted to bring them on every mission. Unfortunately, you can only recruit new units by running missions with their faction leader, which makes them hard to replace if you lose one in battle.

War of the Chosen contains so much new content that it could almost have been called XCOM 3. Every mission dishes out a new enemy, mission type, or environment, which allows the game to remain fresh for several dozen hours. War of the Chosen’s wealth of interwoven systems might overwhelm newcomers, but strategy nerds willing to master the nuances will be treated to one of the most rewarding strategy games in years. I don’t know how Firaxis could make a more complex yet gratifying strategy game, but I can’t wait to see them try.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun - Recommended:

Where XCOM 2’s campaign could feel like the drawn-out prelude to the foregone conclusion of the climactic fight, this feels like, if you’ll excuse the term, a long war. It’s a hard-fought bringing together of a rag-tag army of vengeance, with landmark battles and true heroes emerging from the miasma of skirmishes. Sometimes, I shake my head at its absurdity and its noise, but I really cannot get enough of it.

There’s a raft of smaller, more under-the-hood changes I’ve not even mentioned, but all of which further serve to ensure your campaign does not stomp down the same path every time. It’s even cranked the graphicsosity dial up a little too, with improved lighting making everything pop that much more.

I said right back at the start that ‘DLC’ desperately undersells War Of The Chosen, this fat and bursting sausage of turn-based splendour. I think I might have found ‘XCOM 3’ a mite more appropriate.

Eurogamer - Recommended:

War of the Chosen proves once again that Firaxis really know how to handle an expansion. There's just so many new systems being introduced here, that it's hard not to be impressed that they didn't hold onto all of this stuff for an inevitable sequel. Don't let the first mission fool you, this is a wildly different beast to the core XCOM 2 experience. So much so, that I really wouldn't advise playing War of the Chosen without having already completed the original game - I think you'd find it too overwhelming, too busy. However, if you have defeated the Avatar Project before now, there's now a fantastic reason to do it once again.

If you enjoyed what Enemy Within added to the previous title, you're in for a treat. War of the Chosen makes the last game's expansion seem meager by comparison. And I bloody loved Enemy Within.

PCGamesN - 8/10:

The Lost don’t shoot salvos of plasma fire - instead closing to melee distance in numbers previously reserved only for XCOM 2’s higher difficulty settings. Firaxis balance the threat with a free-shot rule: every time you down one of the crumbly buggers, you get another go, potentially chaining a series of kills in a single soldier’s turn.

The consequences, in Lost-focused battles, are significant: there’s no sense in clinging to cover when it affords no bonus against melee. Instead you learn to position your troops out in the open, with line-of-sight to as many mutants as possible. It makes sense to cluster your soldiers together, ready to cover for each other when a shot doesn’t quite come off. Ammo conservation and reloading suddenly become the most important issues on your plate. It’s gratifying to see Firaxis flip the familiar givens of their game, seemingly just to find out how far it can be pushed.

From a technical perspective, there’s still a vague sense that XCOM 2 struggles under its own weight. Playing on a GTX 1060, there have been moments between turns when War of the Chosen slows uncomfortably, long seconds passing as the game presumably wrestles with unseen calculations.

On the plus side, this expansion sees the sequel’s more ambitious art style come into its own. In the cities of the Lost, you’ll find statuesque bodies frozen at the point of death, arms raised in vain like the citizens of Herculaneum. Firaxis dress these ghoulish mannequins in green fairy lights for maximum eeriness - and, in an inspired touch, cause them to collapse into dust as your squaddies brush past. We’ve come a long way from the sometimes incohesive look of Enemy Unknown.

Gameplanet - 8/10:

War for the Chosen adds a huge amount of content and a number of new mechanics to an already brimming game. It's a generous package that ought to please and frustrate (in a good way!) XCOM devotees.

The Chosen and Hero units shake up the game nicely. A lot of added variety, and randomness keeps things fresh. Bug fixes and optimizations bring it all together. More to love – a lot more.

The Lost weaken the combat experience. The world map is too busy, and loves to interrupt you. If you’re not already sold on XCOM, this won’t change that.

 

[ArchAngel]

The base game is free for this weekend and I decided to try it. Seems like a pretty cool game, maybe they'll trick me into buying it. I haven't tried any Firaxis XCOM's before this.

RIP team leader Hans Grüber who died after being shot in the back twice by the same woman who managed to get mindcontrolled twice.

Enemy Unknown with Enemy Within is better in pretty much every regard.

Enemy Within ruined Enemy Unknown by making the game even easier and totally unbalanced while also giving us those irritating exalt missions.

Xcom 2 vanilla is miles better than Xcom EU. Long War 1 and Long War 2 are miles better than Xcom 2.

From what I seen from this Xcom 2 expansion they are going to destroy whatever fun Xcom 2 had by completely unbalancing the game in player favor while introducing enemy hero units as only true challenge. That is terrible and boring design for a Xcom game.

 

[Mazisky]

The base game is free for this weekend and I decided to try it. Seems like a pretty cool game, maybe they'll trick me into buying it. I haven't tried any Firaxis XCOM's before this.

RIP team leader Hans Grüber who died after being shot in the back twice by the same woman who managed to get mindcontrolled twice.

Enemy Unknown with Enemy Within is better in pretty much every regard.

Enemy Within ruined Enemy Unknown by making the game even easier and totally unbalanced while also giving us those irritating exalt missions.

Xcom 2 vanilla is miles better than Xcom EU. Long War 1 and Long War 2 are miles better than Xcom 2.

From what I seen from this Xcom 2 expansion they are going to destroy whatever fun Xcom 2 had by completely unbalancing the game in player favor while introducing enemy hero units as only true challenge. That is terrible and boring design for a Xcom game.

I am afraid the end game will be even easier, considering they have introduced no new late enemies. Such a missed chance.
the game needed some sort of super late powerful unit, much powerful than the sectopod. they could have done with this xpack :/