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[Rince Wind]

That, or activate it for the weapons and never do the mission.
Pretty sure you can't upgrade the weapons unless you do the mission though.

[Chiefwaffles]

So, there are numerous videos released today of various people playing through the "Lost and Abandoned" narrative mission. This is the video uploaded on XCOM's youtube channel. Though there are more.

I don't really know much of the details since I'm not watching the actual video to avoid spoiling anything significant. But supposedly the video's showing a lot of new mechanics/features/etc.; it's a pretty solid gameplay video.


Also, since the official one is just ~4 minutes long, here's Eurogamer with 80 minutes of XCOM 2 War of the Chosen gameplay & Jake Solomon.

[Mephansteras]

Yeah, saw bits of stuff but have decided to hold off watching the various videos so as not to spoil things too much. Although the bit I saw did explain pretty well some of the mistrust between at least two of the factions.

[DolosusDoleus]

I've seen some of the stuff, though I skipped through a lot to avoid too many spoilers.

In short, my impression is that the strategy layer has much more depth and combat has a ton of stuff added to it, while the story elements aren't quite as good as I had hoped for. Which is fine, because I really play XCOM to kill xenos, not for the story.

[TheDarkStar]

In regards to annoying enemies from the Ruler's DLC, my approach with my current playthrough was to enable the DLC but only fight through the DLC mission after upgrading half my stuff and when I had some fairly skilled troops. That way, I could also get the Regicide achievement (and a flawless mission, too) and at least stop one annoying ruler from showing up on a VIP escort mission or something. I did Shen's Last Gift a while after that (when I had tier-3 armor and tier-2/3 weapons) and it was a breeze.

I've also learned a lot since my first playthrough. In addition to relying on grenades for a lot of the damage I do, I've also realized that the trick to getting flawless or excellent missions is never letting the enemy get a shot by killing them first, which usually involves using grenades and other lower-damage area-of-effect weapons that are guaranteed to hit. Flanking enemies also helps, as long as you can deal with the possibility of awakening another pod of aliens.

[Chiefwaffles]

Y'know, Firaxis' attitude regarding media coverage for upcoming content impresses me. The base game had extreme amounts of pre-launch media coverage. And it definitely seems like they aren't stopping with War of the Chosen. So.
Here's a short video from IGN
This one seemed pretty spoiler-free so I watched it, and by god it looks like they seriously improved the game.

First, they changed the timers to be a lot better.
In an assassination mission the timer only started when concealment was dropped. And the timer wasn't just "auto-lose" (I think). It was a timer until the assassination target was extracted from the area.

In Supply Raids, you now have to reach and secure supply containers before they're airlifted out by ADVENT.

ALSO FRIENDLY AI-CONTROLLED FORCES IN REATALLIATION MISSIONS HYPE
There are resistance fireteams protecting civilians! Of course, I'm sure they won't survive long on their own, but oh my god NPC allies.

Some minor stuff on the SITREP system. One Rescue mission only allowed three soldiers to be sent, but each soldier gained a single-charge ability to re-enter concealment.
Said mission also didn't have a timer, but a "security level" that increases based on your actions such as killing enemies. An increased security level leads to more reinforcements.

Then there's some stuff on the Faction soldiers and Chosen. I skipped most of this to avoid the more spoilery stuff, but from what I saw it looked good. The video specifically mentions them being less oppressive than the Alien Rulers.

The Lost are mentioned in the video, and it definitely seems like there's a lot of them. It is extremely easy to kill them - killing a Lost with a gun gives you that action back. Though I assume the challenge and gameplay comes with the interactions you see in a 3-way battle between Lost, the aliens, and XCOM.

Then the video covered Covert Actions, which seem cool as well. They're fairly similar to Covert Ops from Enemy Within and the like. Covert Actions give rewards, influence with factions, and you can send multiple personnel on these operations, with what looks like the potential to give individual permanent buffs to some of the participating soldiers. Appears to be a lot of actions to do and they take some time, so it's potentially less... "opportunistic", than Enemy Within.

Spoiler: Covert Actions UI (click to show/hide)

Apparently Covert Actions require the "Resistance Ring", a new facility, to be taken.

Resistance Orders is also a thing, and are harder to describe. I kind of want to say it seems almost card-based? From what I can tell of the UI, you have four slots - one for the Council/Resistance Spokesman and one for each faction, though the faction slots are locked until you meet their corresponding faction and gain enough influence with that faction.
It looks like you get a series of card-like (powerful) buffs/general actions. And each month you assign cards to different slots, and cards can only fit in certain slots (I think the Spokesman slot can fit any card). For that month, the card will give you some serious bonuses.

Spoiler: Resistance Orders UI (click to show/hide)

The video then covers already known stuff regarding Soldier Bonding and Research Breakthroughs. Soldiers bond based on static compatibility levels and actions together in the field and can gain bonuses when deployed together, such as single-use extra action abilities. Research Breakthroughs give bonuses to different research paths to encourage different order of research across new playthroughs.

The "Photobooth" is pretty funny though. It lets you choose soldiers, a background, the layout, effects, their poses, captions, and more to create a neat little picture of your guys.

Also apparently WotC has four voice actors from Star Trek: The Next Generation, if you care about that kind of thing.


So all-in-all, War of the Chosen is shaping up to be an awesome addition in my eyes. It definitely seems like they're focusing a lot on creating mechanics and systems to allow for new unplanned interactions to pop up in the game and to create large differences between individual playthroughs.

[EnigmaticHat]

Some minor stuff on the SITREP system. One Rescue mission only allowed three soldiers to be sent, but each soldier gained a single-charge ability to re-enter concealment.
Said mission also didn't have a timer, but a "security level" that increases based on your actions such as killing enemies. An increased security level leads to more reinforcements.

Did... did they just borrow a game mechanic from Invisible Inc.?

Well damn.  The clone becomes the cloned.  They're not actually that similar tho

[Neonivek]

Yeah NOW the features are starting to seem exciting.

ALSO WHOA THIS EXPANSION IS EXPENSIVE!!!

One of the few times I've seen where an expansion is more expensive than the game... maybe the Canadian price hasn't been adjusted.

[GiglameshDespair]

It is pretty pricy. Same price as xcom2 base on uk steam.
it better be good, at that price...

[Aklyon]

WotC is $40 here, basegame is $60.

[Sanctume]

WotC is $40 here, basegame is $60.

Green Man Gaming has is listed at ~ $35 (10%) for pre-order.

I'm tempted, but did not pre-order yet for that price.  Maybe Steam will lower it too.

[TheDarkStar]

I got the game + several DLCs for $25. Buying the new DLC would cost 150% of what I paid for the base game. I think I'll wait on this one.

[Mephansteras]

I got the game + several DLCs for $25. Buying the new DLC would cost 150% of what I paid for the base game. I think I'll wait on this one.

Such is the way of sales.

Only downside of this with XCOM2 is if you're heavily using mods, since a lot of them may require this expansion to work in the future.  But, of course, you can wait and see how it all shakes out.

[nenjin]

At the rate I'm getting through LW2, it will probably be a long, long time before I get WotC.

[Aklyon]

I got the game + several DLCs for $25. Buying the new DLC would cost 150% of what I paid for the base game. I think I'll wait on this one.

I got it for quite a bit more than that, but such is the way of buying things early.

Still, theres enough happening (and a massive amount of mod breakage) that I'll probably wait on getting this too.