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[Neonivek]

If you waited this long, you can wait for a sale.

[Aklyon]

I'd weigh in on the season pass thing, but considering its the only one I've ever gone for and I was pretty content with the results, it probably doesn't count statistically.

[nenjin]

I still haven't gotten TW: Warhammer due to the pricing and volume of DLC. I think I'm just going to wait until TW: Warhammer 2 comes out and buy it all at a nice, steep discount.

[Greenbane]

In the case of XCOM 2, no, it wasn't really worth it. Shen's Last Gift was pretty good and Alien Hunters was alright, but Anarchy's Children was a total dud.

When we're talking about three small DLC and a fairly low season pass vs. full price discount, you have a very small margin of error. One dud and it's entirely not worth it.

[Persus13]

This game is on sale over at Greenmangaming.

[Flying Dice]

For $25. Ain't bad at all.

[Neonivek]

In the case of XCOM 2, no, it wasn't really worth it. Shen's Last Gift was pretty good and Alien Hunters was alright, but Anarchy's Children was a total dud.

When we're talking about three small DLC and a fairly low season pass vs. full price discount, you have a very small margin of error. One dud and it's entirely not worth it.

I actually have a unpopular opinion that it was the Season Pass that made the DLC worse... because instead of being able to bunch it together... they had to do a lot of little less thought through DLC.

[Greenbane]

In the case of XCOM 2, no, it wasn't really worth it. Shen's Last Gift was pretty good and Alien Hunters was alright, but Anarchy's Children was a total dud.

When we're talking about three small DLC and a fairly low season pass vs. full price discount, you have a very small margin of error. One dud and it's entirely not worth it.

I actually have a unpopular opinion that it was the Season Pass that made the DLC worse... because instead of being able to bunch it together... they had to do a lot of little less thought through DLC.

I wouldn't necessarily call that unpopular, but I don't think that's the case. I don't think the Season Pass' approach precludes an Enemy Within-like expansion (relatively) soon.

Anyway, I'm watching Colony on Netflix. The premise is quite similar to XCOM 2's, but with more thought put into it, and more balls, too. The ADVENT analogue is a human organization, and that alone brings a number of conflicts into the picture, issues which are entirely absent in XCOM 2 thanks to its needlessly cartoonified opposition.

[Rolan7]

I can attest to Colony being a decent watch.  I feel the same about ADVENT...  I wanted them to be transformed EXALT or something, but maybe that would have been dumb and needlessly referential.  The truth was so much dumber.

[Neonivek]

I can attest to Colony being a decent watch.  I feel the same about ADVENT...  I wanted them to be transformed EXALT or something, but maybe that would have been dumb and needlessly referential.  The truth was so much dumber.

The truth is that the aliens were one banana peel away from a PR disaster.

[Chiefwaffles]

ADVENT, in my opinion, should have been a much more human organization. The leadership and grunts should all be decisively human, with alien components clearly there as the rare alien representative/watchdog and contributions to their military. They should be completely human. The top leadership could be mind-controlled, sure, but most of them would just be people who truly believe in ADVENT's supposed goal.
The aliens would be in a much different place - they should be their own entity "allied" with ADVENT. ADVENT has lots of aliens in its more high-security military, sure, but they still don't have the technology or the firepower of the aliens. The aliens would be flying around in the occasional UFO, secret bases, and the like. The alien base shown in XCOM2 should still be the top base on Earth, but maybe a little scaled-down. Instead (to avoid repeating XCOM1) the aliens would have a base on mars or something similar.

So basically, you fight ADVENT at first determined they're nothing but a mindless façade for the alien government, but then as you play through you start to realize ADVENT isn't the true enemy - the aliens are. They become more of a bigger threat as they start to take a larger role in hunting XCOM down instead of delegating it to ADVENT. As you fight ADVENT less and less, you start to feel sorry for them as you steamroll their attempts to stop you and the missions you still need to do in ADVENT territory make you start to wonder if fighting ADVENT is really the right thing to do.

[Rolan7]

That's exactly what I was hoping for, thanks for putting words to it.  We got a taste of that in Enemy Within, with Exalt being human (albeit evil).  It still felt a bit strange to gun them down with alien weaponry.  Why were they doing this?  They were people, they must have had some reason...  And then their rampant meld-usage, pretty well timed with the player's (or in my case, amputating wounded heroes into emotionless mecha) and you really start to wonder if Shen's silly "Oh nooo, what if we adopt too much alien technology"... was actually spot fuckin on...

"We did what we had to do! For Earth! An entire alien invasion obliterated, and the Ethereals! We had no choice. The long war... It's finished."

And then we're teased a game where everything is sooooo much worse.  The situation is beyond FUBAR.  Even humanity itself is against us.  Only our tiny faction of extremists, the remnant of a failed project, insist... beyond all evidence... that the aliens have some malicious plan.  They MUST, don't you SEE??

And of course they do, but we have no idea what it is.  But we know they do, and we have to stop it...  No matter who stands in our way.


So it was kinda disappointing that xenos were so common (I was expecting 1-3 a mission as minibosses, not for them to become more common than Advent).  Advent's nature was even more disappointing.  But it was also disappointing that public opinion wasn't a thing at all.
I guess I wanted a Liberal Crime Squad against Xenos...
Come on, surely there's some mod that addresses these things?  They hyped the game on this general idea, and it's supposedly so moddable.

Edit: I think I failed to summarize my point:  XCOM as renegades should have gone much farther, and darker, to save Earth than in Enemy Within.  Because the situation is almost ridiculously worse...  Plus, they're already completely vilified in the public eye.
Basically, we should have become EXALT.  But to save the world... right?

[Mephansteras]

From what I've seen with various mods that is certainly doable. Don't think anyone has done it, though. I like the idea!

[Neonivek]

I expected Xenos, but I suspected that MOST came in two categories

1) Xenos dressed up to be appealing to humans. The Archons for example are altered Floaters. To admit their appearance feels a bit too... clearly untrustworthy... but the idea is there.
2) Military / Desperate waves

What I didn't know is that the exact opposite occurred.

Believe it or not half the extra material for Xcom 2 is just excuses and justifications for JUST this one giant plothole. In fact even the ending had to have some amount or retconning because otherwise it wouldn't have made sense within the patching they did.

Extra material that explains things that didn't need explaining is fine. The extra information on how the aliens keep control of the Snakemen was interesting (albeit a TINY bit problematic). But the explanation after explanation JUST to explain how the Grunts even make a lick of sense...

[Greenbane]

ADVENT, in my opinion, should have been a much more human organization. The leadership and grunts should all be decisively human, with alien components clearly there as the rare alien representative/watchdog and contributions to their military. They should be completely human. The top leadership could be mind-controlled, sure, but most of them would just be people who truly believe in ADVENT's supposed goal.

While there would be believers in the alien BS, you don't strictly need a throng of zealots. Humans are very well capable of being selfish assholes if given wealth and/or power. Add coercion into the picture and it's a no-brainer for more than a few. And I'm grabbing from Colony here, but it's not like these are complex concepts.

In the shadow of an overwhelmingly superior enemy which very quickly defeated the combined global defenses, if you're presented the alternative between serving in exchange of a comfy, luxurious life, and being shipped off to the alien gulag, what would you pick? And what can the fledgling, hopelessly outclassed resistance do against such a powerful conqueror?

These are simple but powerful rationales for the collaborators, and it's the anti-alien (a.k.a. "pro-freedom") cause which has a hard time gathering meaningful support, thanks to the immense implicit suppression the fear for the overlords produces. The situation's FUBAR, the aliens are invincible, might as well look out for myself and my family. As a high-ranking collaborator simply puts it in the show, "it's what any sane person would do".

I'm only three episodes in, so the series is largely setting the stage. But I'm sure some human antagonists will commit plenty of excesses and then in the face of the Truth or more widespread resistance still carry on to preserve themselves and/or their lifestyle. And eventually when all is lost for the aliens try and claim they were "only following orders" or that they "had no choice". Some will even keep going until the bitter end, due to just being too far gone.

And then you have the other perspective within the oppressive machine: good guys who have no choice but to cooperate, who try to keep things remotely reasonable, and whose principles are increasingly at odds with what they're forced to do. Their situation's bound to become intolerable at some point, and they'll have to choose which side to commit to. Whatever they choose, if they survive they'll have to deal with guilt (perhaps not surviving that).

It's all Humans and Totalitarianism 101, something XCOM 2 could've drawn from, but they chose to go with a simplistic black and white story: you're the inarguably good guys, the evil propaganda is obviously wrong, and on the other side you have unquestionably evil aliens and evil mutated mind-controlled hybrid drones at best. It's 100% morally acceptable to kill them all, and you're guaranteed to sleep like a baby afterwards.