XCOM 2

Several streamers gotten early review copies of the expansion.

TB is starting a run now



EDIT: There are now several advanced settings available when starting your game, and one of them doubles the turn timer. So will probably also let you do that on PS4 now if you're playing on that since you needed mods before. Several of them looked like turning your game into long war without the mod.

Droigan said:

There are now several advanced settings available when starting your game, and one of them doubles the turn timer. So will probably also let you do that on PS4 now if you're playing on that since you needed mods before. Several of them looked like turning your game into long war without the mod.

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Intredasting. I hope there is also an option to make both sides less deadly, I did not enjoy the arms race between 1 and 2.

Image of the advanced options when starting a game.

Finally finished this. Was a real un-fun slog at the start but once my guys finally started not to suck was kinda surprised how fast I reached the last mission. 24 hours played to finish it on normal.

Anyway, if anyone picks this up I highly recommend downloading the mods that either increase or remove most of the mission timers.

Shmoopy said:

Anyway, if anyone picks this up I highly recommend downloading the mods that either increase or remove most of the mission timers.

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I think that's one of the most complained about design decisions in the game. Wasn't surprised at the multiple mods that came out to address it. It's even worse with LW2 running - 8 rounds to hack a computer with 5 3+ mob pods between you and the computer. Hah!

They talked about this on Dropped Frames last night. Had a streamer there that had access for a while (JP got it a few days ago, and only played it for 25ihs hours). The streamer (Richard Hammer) there did a five day run with a friend where they took 12 hour shifts in turn (separate games). I think all he does is play xcom (long war Ironman on legendary).

Some things that came up (trying to keep them non spoilerish and comparable to official info)

- Game is now more like xcom "chess". With all the lost, the classes, chosen, etc, it is far more tactical than before. Especially considering you gain action points for things like flanking, killing from a higher position and the likes. Far more rare to do the overwatch crawl.

- You need to focus on base layout more than before.

- You need more than one "good" team due to the tired stat. You need to rotate and build your entire squad. If you do use tired people, they can get traits similarly to the "negative quirks" from Darkest Dungeon. They can apparently be really bad. Supposedly also added a "positive" that can trigger on stress/panic, but neither JP or Richard had seen that happen in their games.

- Timer for the Avatar project is there, but have more events in game that can manage it. JP said that in 16 hours in he only had done one mission for it. To offset that making the game easier, the chosen that are like minibosses that are added to your game, also have timers for them for things to happen. You need to do covert missions for those.

- Covert missions can level up stats. JP said he had sent a squaddie out to constant +hp covert missions and never used him in battle yet. So he is still low rank, but with 17 hp.

- Covert missions can end with you having to do real missions. IE: things went bad, need to go rescue that person.

- There are more "random" events in nearly every regard now. From missions, things that happen in missions, things that happen in base, level ups, research, etc. No longer do you know your "path" before even starting it.

- The "elite faction" enemies or friends both have skills that randomize differently for each game. Both your elites and the enemy elites can get sets of skills than make them OP/extremely dangerous.

- If you skip the tutorial (apparently NOT recommended for the first time since they introduce all the new things in the tutorial as well, not the same one you've done before), you can randomize which faction you start with an elite of. If you do the tutorial, you always start with the same. Richard said that skipping the tutorial makes the initial 3 missions really hard, and their outcome can snowball your entire game towards a fail or win. (He said he has restarted 20++ times, and still not beaten the game).

- The previous DLC missions are in game, but been rebalanced around the new content.

- It is very well optimized. "Fixes" the game. Loadtimes are basically not there and the game is overall more fluid. They did not talk about it, but hopefully that optimization also carries over to the PS4. Loadtimes there are crazy long.

TL;DR conclusion from them gushing over it for 45 minutes.
The expansion makes it Xcom 2.5. It makes the game better in every regard and worse at none. It is a high price for a "DLC", but would be worth it for every xcom fan. For someone who doesn't have it though, the $100 entry point (full game + expansion on Steam), is a bit steep, so might want to look to other places for the game (humble bundle had the base game for $20 not long ago) until Steam does a sale or a version with all the DLC is released.

I've been watching lollash on stream for the past couple'a days as he's been playing this. It looks good.

Droigan said:

They talked about this on Dropped Frames last night. Had a streamer there that had access for a while (JP got it a few days ago, and only played it for 25ihs hours). The streamer (Richard Hammer) there did a five day run with a friend where they took 12 hour shifts in turn (separate games). I think all he does is play xcom (long war Ironman on legendary).

Some things that came up (trying to keep them non spoilerish and comparable to official info)

- Game is now more like xcom "chess". With all the lost, the classes, chosen, etc, it is far more tactical than before. Especially considering you gain action points for things like flanking, killing from a higher position and the likes. Far more rare to do the overwatch crawl.

- You need to focus on base layout more than before.

- You need more than one "good" team due to the tired stat. You need to rotate and build your entire squad. If you do use tired people, they can get traits similarly to the "negative quirks" from Darkest Dungeon. They can apparently be really bad. Supposedly also added a "positive" that can trigger on stress/panic, but neither JP or Richard had seen that happen in their games.

- Timer for the Avatar project is there, but have more events in game that can manage it. JP said that in 16 hours in he only had done one mission for it. To offset that making the game easier, the chosen that are like minibosses that are added to your game, also have timers for them for things to happen. You need to do covert missions for those.

- Covert missions can level up stats. JP said he had sent a squaddie out to constant +hp covert missions and never used him in battle yet. So he is still low rank, but with 17 hp.

- Covert missions can end with you having to do real missions. IE: things went bad, need to go rescue that person.

- There are more "random" events in nearly every regard now. From missions, things that happen in missions, things that happen in base, level ups, research, etc. No longer do you know your "path" before even starting it.

- The "elite faction" enemies or friends both have skills that randomize differently for each game. Both your elites and the enemy elites can get sets of skills than make them OP/extremely dangerous.

- If you skip the tutorial (apparently NOT recommended for the first time since they introduce all the new things in the tutorial as well, not the same one you've done before), you can randomize which faction you start with an elite of. If you do the tutorial, you always start with the same. Richard said that skipping the tutorial makes the initial 3 missions really hard, and their outcome can snowball your entire game towards a fail or win. (He said he has restarted 20++ times, and still not beaten the game).

- The previous DLC missions are in game, but been rebalanced around the new content.

- It is very well optimized. "Fixes" the game. Loadtimes are basically not there and the game is overall more fluid. They did not talk about it, but hopefully that optimization also carries over to the PS4. Loadtimes there are crazy long.

TL;DR conclusion from them gushing over it for 45 minutes.
The expansion makes it Xcom 2.5. It makes the game better in every regard and worse at none. It is a high price for a "DLC", but would be worth it for every xcom fan. For someone who doesn't have it though, the $100 entry point (full game + expansion on Steam), is a bit steep, so might want to look to other places for the game (humble bundle had the base game for $20 not long ago) until Steam does a sale or a version with all the DLC is released.

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My only gripe, for all the mods they implemented into the expansion, it doesn't appear they took the coolest features of the modding community - Longwars Infiltration / Multiple Teams. Those two mods right there make the game infinitely better thematically and mechanically and would play right into the team rotation/tiredness scale.

Sulrn said:

My only gripe, for all the mods they implemented into the expansion, it doesn't appear they took the coolest features of the modding community - Longwars Infiltration / Multiple Teams. Those two mods right there make the game infinitely better thematically and mechanically and would play right into the team rotation/tiredness scale.

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Think they stated that mods should come back to it pretty quickly though didn't they?

I swore I'd seen some statement that mods would require little if any adjustment to work with the update.

Vaclav said:

Think they stated that mods should come back to it pretty quickly though didn't they?

I swore I'd seen some statement that mods would require little if any adjustment to work with the update.

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It's not a concern at all about the turnaround time to patch any broken mods.

Just stating for all the great things they are doing, they ignored one thing that would instantly make everything even better. Besides turn timers, one of the more common gripes is that you're still limited to only one active mission at a time. This should improve with the expansion, but it still doesn't make sense that you're not running multiple ops at the same time a la Longwar's infiltration system.

Sulrn said:

It's not a concern at all about the turnaround time to patch any broken mods.

Just stating for all the great things they are doing, they ignored one thing that would instantly make everything even better. Besides turn timers, one of the more common gripes is that you're still limited to only one active mission at a time. This should improve with the expansion, but it still doesn't make sense that you're not running multiple ops at the same time a la Longwar's infiltration system.

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I've not done longwar - but the "covert missions" sound like they've got a similar flare to me, they clearly won't be delaying other missions while active and can result in a real mission afterwards.... so it might scratch a similar itch for example.

Mods that significantly affect gameplay should take a while to be updated, but that's more because of design issues rather than technical ones. More a matter of 'how do I ensure my mod flows smoothly with the new stuff' rather than difficulty of making the code compatible.

I always like to do my first run of new stuff without much in the way of mods anyway. Will probably even roll without true concealment for the first time in ages.

Permanent dark events... I can just imagine a hostage rescue map where all 18 fuckers are mimics. Those look awesome and like hell

I had a super jazzed up playthrough where my soldier power was through the roof so I added tons of shit to increase the difficulty too and one of them was a mod that added nastier dark events, some of which were permanent if you let them trigger, and then I did my best to let every dark event that didn't increase avatar progress trigger.

Imagine a month of an extra 3 sectopods and 4 berserkers on every mission, every mission having a 50/50 chance to spawn a ufo, and a permanent extra 2 faceless on every mission, when base enemy squad size is already jacked up to 6-10.

Vaclav said:

I've not done longwar - but the "covert missions" sound like they've got a similar flare to me, they clearly won't be delaying other missions while active and can result in a real mission afterwards.... so it might scratch a similar itch for example.

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If it's anything like Enemy Within (which it heavily sounds like they are), they won't - no. You're going to be sending a solo character to act as a precursor to a follow on mission. Positive / Negative event - bam, you have a mission involving your agent.

In Longwar, as targets arise you send teams to infiltrate the area in an allotted window of time. If you infiltrate before the window closes, the mission is generally easier. If you're not fully infiltrated before the window closes you abort or fight a harder mission based on degree of infiltration. You generally have several different infiltrations occurring simultaneously for the different targets of opportunity . All the while your HQ is still able to scan the map as needed until the sky ranger is needed to exfiltrate or insert a new team somewhere.

Sulrn said:

If it's anything like Enemy Within (which it heavily sounds like they are), they won't - no. You're going to be sending a solo character to act as a precursor to a follow on mission. Positive / Negative event - bam, you have a mission involving your agent.

In Longwar, as targets arise you send teams to infiltrate the area in an allotted window of time. If you infiltrate before the window closes, the mission is generally easier. If you're not fully infiltrated before the window closes you abort or fight a harder mission based on degree of infiltration. You generally have several different infiltrations occurring simultaneously for the different targets of opportunity . All the while your HQ is still able to scan the map as needed until the sky ranger is needed to exfiltrate or insert a new team somewhere.

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I didn't mean that they weren't different in the details - just that they'd fulfill a similar role to "something happening between missions and adding in extra missions/etc"

Similar != same

Sulrn said:

If it's anything like Enemy Within (which it heavily sounds like they are), they won't - no. You're going to be sending a solo character to act as a precursor to a follow on mission. Positive / Negative event - bam, you have a mission involving your agent.

In Longwar, as targets arise you send teams to infiltrate the area in an allotted window of time. If you infiltrate before the window closes, the mission is generally easier. If you're not fully infiltrated before the window closes you abort or fight a harder mission based on degree of infiltration. You generally have several different infiltrations occurring simultaneously for the different targets of opportunity . All the while your HQ is still able to scan the map as needed until the sky ranger is needed to exfiltrate or insert a new team somewhere.

Click to expand...

Covert ops can be done all the time (I think after you get a building, might be advanced war centre). They are added for the faction system and also tied to the elite enemies in your game. IE: One of the elites targeting you send covert ops on your base, and if you ignore it you can lose items, be raided, and so on. They are done by choosing 1-2 members from your roster.

The rewards of the mission bare based on the type you select. Similar to the rewards of a guerilla op. Anything from countering avatar progress, counter the elite, dark events, items, supplies, and so on. They take X amount of days (lower with engineer) and when you go on one, the timer for it starts ticking down as you do other stuff similarly to research/proving grounds project. Not something you need to actively scan I think, just placed in your queue.

Not entirely sure, but think that the only times they lead to actual missions is when you select that as a reward (IE: you find the elite base) or you fail them and then have to do the rescue missions similarly to Enemy Within.

Vaclav said:

Similar != same

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Droigan said:

Covert ops can be done all the time (I think after you get a building, might be advanced war centre). They are added for the faction system and also tied to the elite enemies in your game. IE: One of the elites targeting you send covert ops on your base, and if you ignore it you can lose items, be raided, and so on. They are done by choosing 1-2 members from your roster.

The rewards of the mission bare based on the type you select. Similar to the rewards of a guerilla op. Anything from countering avatar progress, counter the elite, dark events, items, supplies, and so on. They take X amount of days (lower with engineer) and when you go on one, the timer for it starts ticking down as you do other stuff similarly to research/proving grounds project. Not something you need to actively scan I think, just placed in your queue.

Not entirely sure, but think that the only times they lead to actual missions is when you select that as a reward (IE: you find the elite base) or you fail them and then have to do the rescue missions similarly to Enemy Within.

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I think you're right. Based on the TB-gushing video, that's pretty much how it sounded - an upgraded version of the EW "covert ops", but wasn't clear if you always had a follow on mission or only when things go sideways/target discovery.