XCOM 2 Alien Analysis: Avatar

HP: 25/25/30/35
Armor: 0/2/3/4
Defense: 0/10/15/15
Dodge: 25
Aim: 85
Mobility: 15/15/16/16 (10/20 on Rookie/Regular, 10/21 on Commander/Legendary)
Damage: 9-10 (+3)
Shred: 0
Crit Chance: 10%/10%/20%/20%
Will: 150/200/200/200
Psi: 100/200/200/200

Say hello to XCOM 2's Ethereal-equivalent and the culmination of the Avatar Project: human bodies for the Ethereals to stuff their souls (I will not be even slightly surprised if XCOM 3 explicitly makes souls a thing in this setting) into and thus bypass that pesky 'dying horribly' issue they're trying to deal with.

They're also the final boss of the game: you get a sneak-peek fight against one when you Skulljack a Codex, and then the final stage of the final mission is centered around killing three Avatars to win the game.

Mental Fortress
The Avatar is immune to all forms of negative mental condition, such as Disorientation, Stun, and Mind Control.

Remember Mind Controlling Ethereals in the previous game? Yeah, that's not an option here.

To be honest, I'm not sure to what degree that's supposed to be in-universe representation. Every Avatar you encounter you must kill to complete the game: the first one in particular, it would be bad if the game let you Mind Control it and potentially have a mission end prematurely without you having killed it. So it's entirely possible this is purely for game design reasons.

Personally, I'm fine with circumventing the Mind Control The Mind Controller dynamic, as that's easily a swingy mechanic, and can raise all kinds of headaches when trying to think through the in-universe implications to boot.

Avatar Regeneration
The Avatar regenerates 5 HP at the start of its turn, every turn. This occurs before damage over time effects can trigger.

One nice touch is that the first Avatar you fight is missing a third of its HP, and so the game gets a chance to inform the player of this mechanic before the final mission. Notably, Tygan will always verbally react to the first time an Avatar regenerates, so even if you don't see it yourself, the game makes a decent effort to make sure you know. This can end up pretty silly, mind, as it's possible for the first Avatar to generate somewhere out of your squad's sight, resulting in Tygan knowing this is happening not making much sense...

In any event, this means it's best to kill Avatars quickly, rather than trying to wear them down over multiple turns. Fortunately, that's what you should be doing anyway, between how dangerous they are and how the three in the final mission are literally the only enemies that matter at that point, which, uh, actually makes it a bit moot.

If you have Alien Hunters, it's more meaningful, making it less effective to use the Frost Bomb as a 'pause' button on a wounded Avatar.

Mind Control
Attempts to temporarily take control of a single biological enemy: this takes the Avatar's Psi stat+50 and subtracts the target's Will to determine the chance to succeed. 1 turn cooldown, 1 turn duration.

Unless you're playing on Rookie difficulty, you might as well assume an Avatar will succeed in its Mind Control, barring effects like Solace or a Mindshield. 200 Psi backed by +50 to success means even in the realistic best-case scenario of a base-game Colonel who hit 100 Will naturally who you then slotted in a Superior Focus PCS to... that's 133 Will at most. The Avatar will still have a 117% chance of success.

In War of the Chosen it's technically possible to actually achieve the more than 150 Will necessary to have a chance of Avatar Mind Control failing, but it would require doing something like obsessively sending a soldier out on Will-boosting Covert Ops from the very beginning of the game, while getting lucky in actually being regularly provided such, and with the soldier not being Wounded by Covert Ops. (Or only Wounded under conditions where it doesn't end up interfering with the Will grinding)

But realistically, you should just treat this as 'target is Mind Controlled if it's not immune'.

Note that Avatars are immune to the usual ways to break Mind Control. This is a big part of why it's a good idea to bring a Psi Operative or two into the final mission: Solace and Stasis are both ways to break Mind Control that work on Avatars. The only other options are killing the Avatar, Freezing it (Requires Alien Hunters), or Stand By Me. (Not in the base game)

If you're playing the base game, don't have Alien Hunters, and didn't bring any Psi Operatives... it's really important to focus on killing Avatars, to avoid Mind Control presenting problems. Your Colonels are individually more dangerous than any non-Avatar that can be fought in the final battle!

Or you could have Shen's Last Gift and make a mono-SPARK team. That sidesteps this particular issue.

More seriously, giving everyone a Mind Shield is also functional. The loss of half your Item slots isn't ideal, but as usual Avatars don't 'see' Mind Shields, so this can notably reduce the pressure on you in the final battle. It also sidesteps the issue where Solace is buggy in the base game and often fails to negate Mind Control attempts.

Null Lance
Does 6-9 damage to all units in a line out to normal weapon range, ignoring Armor. 2 turn cooldown.

It's worth pointing out this is literally the damage your Psi Operatives do with a Null Lance with basic Psi Amps. I... don't really get why Ethereals are so much worse than trained humans at killing people with their mind...

Fortunately, it's surprisingly irrelevant, as Avatars don't actually like to use Null Lance. As in, across more than two dozen runs to make it to the endgame, I've only once seen an Avatar elect to use Null Lance; they far prefer to use Mind Control, their rifle, or Dimensional Rift.

I'd say 'be wary of it anyway', but there's not really anything you can do about it except try to kill Avatars as fast as possible.

Which you should be doing anyway, for better reasons, such as...

Dimensional Rift
Does 5-7 damage to all units in a large area, immediately, ignoring up to 3 points of Armor. At the start of the user's next turn, does 7-9 damage to all units in the same area, ignoring up to 3 points of Armor, and destroys all terrain elements that can be destroyed in that area. 3 turn local cooldown, 1 turn global cooldown.

... this.

This is pretty much singlehandedly why you should never let an Avatar get a second turn if you can avoid it: because generally if Mind Control is on cooldown (Or you brought nothing but SPARKs, unlikely as that is), then the Avatar is going to drop completely unavoidable pain on multiple people, and you'll be forced to scramble for safety from a massive zone to avoid being killed. Seriously, the area of effect on Dimensional Rift is large enough it's not unusual for a soldier to be forced to Dash to escape the blast radius, and 5-7+7-9 damage that is probably ignoring all your Armor (Unless you're SPARK-spamming...) is going to leave a full health soldier on the brink, or even kill them if they're unlucky on dice rolls and/or are one of the frailer classes. 

Avatars in the final mission also always come with buddies, so surviving the second stage is no guarantee of surviving the turn, especially given their Cover may have been flattened. Probably not -most of the Cover in the final part of the final mission is actually indestructible- but still a potential problem.

Especially since they're perfectly happy to catch multiple soldiers at once...

Oh, and this bypasses Parry, so don't think you can minimize the threat that way.

The one bit of good news is that the AI is, much like with Psionic Bomb, completely oblivious to the oncoming threat of the second stage, perfectly happy to wander into the swirling vortex of psionic death waiting to detonate. It's not enough compensation to make it acceptable to plan around letting them use Dimensional Rift, but it may be what minimizes the harm if things start going wrong, potentially letting you beat the game instead of suffering a squad wipe and game over.

Narratively, it's interesting to note the continuing trend of mass-damage psionic effects being framed as opening interdimensional doors. And unlike the Gatekeeper, Avatars don't have their name or anything obscuring the motive, suggesting it's supposed to be exactly what it sounds like. And then War of the Chosen expanding on psionics is consistent with all this.

Very interesting.

Reactive Teleport
The Avatar will reactively teleport when damaged, unless currently Frozen; this always transports them to a Cover position nearby one of your soldiers, usually in a flanking position, and can trigger an unlimited number of times per turn. This completely bypasses all reaction fire, including Bladestorm and Retribution.

The config files indicate this teleports Avatars 10-20 tiles at a time, but I'm not sure that's actually true. I'm pretty sure I've seen Avatars teleport too far for 20 tiles to be the actual upper limit.

Surprisingly, Avatars don't have the ability to Teleport of their own volition, in spite of using the exact same graphic as Codices use for Teleport. They can only Teleport in reaction to damage. This distinction is important given the third Avatar tends to arrive outside your squad's line of sight; if they could Teleport of their own volition, that would be very concerning a situation.

Anyway, Reactive Teleport is the reason you may struggle to kill an Avatar in a timely manner, as while they overall prefer to try to teleport nearby your forces, in a flanking position (Even though they virtually never use their firearm...), they're perfectly happy to teleport over to flanking your most separated squad member. Even if somebody can reach that position, this can easily result in them teleporting to flank that soldier, even further out from the rest of your squad. Thus, if you can't kill them in 1-2 attacks, you may be unable to kill them at all in a turn, particularly if you haven't brought Blaster Bombs.

This makes it very important to have and make use of tools that can pile a lot of damage on at once and/or to bring the Frost Bomb, preferably on a Grenadier with Heavy Ordnance so you can use it on two of the last three Avatars. In the base game, a Run And Gun Rapid Fire Ranger can handle the job practically single-handedly: Dash to a point-blank flank and then Rapid Fire for 11-13 damage, twice, with 1-2 crits adding 5 or 10 damage? That's potentially 36 damage before Ammo. Even a Legendary Avatar only has 35; with AP Rounds, you wouldn't even need to Shred them first, just get moderately lucky with crits and damage rolls.

War of the Chosen nerfing Hunter's Instincts and lowering Shotgun crit damage makes this noticeably less effective -you max out at 28 damage, which isn't enough to one-shot even a Commander Avatar- but also makes it trivial to add the skill combo onto one (Or more) of your Colonel Rangers even if you didn't originally develop them that way, and it's still a very effective way to follow-up on prior damage. Just remember that Rapid Fire has a 5-turn cooldown now; you won't be able to rapidly chain all three end-game Avatars with one Ranger doing this.

Blaster Launchers are a great pick to bring, of course, with tremendous range and precision making it effortless to blast an Avatar for high damage. You'll need to conserve them throughout the mission itself, mind, which can be a painful restriction to hold yourself too, but they really can help a lot with Avatars. The second and third Avatars also always come as part of a 5-enemy pod, and it's not unusual for them to have their post-arrival movement still leave them all in the blast radius of a Blaster Launcher. Bombarding them with a Blaster Launcher can make it a lot easier to avoid being overwhelmed by the hordes of enemies spawning in, and using it as an opening salvo on an Avatar that spawned in beyond most of your squad's reach can potentially cause them to teleport to somewhere more accessible to your squad. Blaster Launchers are, in fact, enough of a help that it can be worth putting off the final missions a bit if it will let you finish a Blaster Launcher. They're especially great if you're bringing a SPARK, particularly one with Rainmaker.

Chain Shot and Rupture both get a chance to shine here. Chain Shot can't do as well as Rapid Fire -Cannons have worse crits, and Grenadiers have no equivalent to Hunter's Instincts- but if an Avatar teleports within flanking distance of a Grenadier it can be worth breaking it out to try to tear through them. In War of the Chosen, you might want to buy Chain Shot on any Grenadiers going into the final mission, just in case, assuming you have the Ability Points to spare. Rupture can be an excellent setup for a lethal finisher with a multi-shot attack, so long as the Avatar doesn't teleport to an overly-problematic position -and it has the advantage that Rupture lingers forever, so it can potentially be okay to Rupture an Avatar, fail to kill it that turn, and then follow-up on the next turn. This is particularly appealing if you have a Fan Fire Sharpshooter along for the trip, since they'll get 9 damage out of Rupture; that's around as much as your stronger beam-tier weapons average on a hit, essentially shaving off a shooting action.

Don't forget Holo Targeting! Avatars having unusually high innate Defense and perpetually teleporting to Cover makes Aim boosts especially appreciated, doubly so if it pushes you to 100% accuracy so you get to ignore their Dodge rating.

Sharpshooters tend to underwhelm a little in the base game at this step. Lightning Hands and Quickdraw, both normally very good skills, are weak hits that provoke more teleports; they may be actively reducing your damage potential to take advantage of. Avatars having innate Armor means you need to Shred them before the Pistol skills can be all that good anyway, and Avatars don't have a convenient Bluescreen Rounds weakness. If you can set up the Rupture-into-Fan-Fire combo, great! Otherwise, ehhh. To their credit, the room has a series of excellent sniping perches, giving Sniper Rifle-oriented Sharpshooters more of a chance to shine, and Serial can help clear out the hordes teleporting in, so Sharpshooters aren't worthless or anything in the base game, but they're probably the least helpful at helping kill an Avatar after Specialists.

In War of the Chosen, things radically change, assuming you took out the Hunter. The Darkclaw means Shred is no longer necessary to get in a full-power Fan Fire and also adds another point of damage to each shot, and the Darklance makes it much smoother to leverage the sniper perches -you can even have a Sharpshooter get flanked by teleporting reinforcements, and shrug and just get to a different part of the perch before firing. And of course the Death From Above as spontaneous Serial trick remains very relevant. A Sharpshooter equipped with the Chosen Hunter's gear is one of the best contributors in the final part of the final mission.

As I alluded to, Specialists tend to struggle to contribute in the final stage in offensive terms, and even their medical suite isn't all that hot, honestly. (It's not like Avatars mass-inflict statuses alongside damage to make Second Wind all that great) It can be worth bringing one to make it easier to get to that stage, but they tend to be little more than another (slightly weak) gun once you're in the final fight. That said, don't forget that Combat Protocol operates at Squadsight ranges and ignores Armor -it can be used to finish off a badly-injured Avatar that teleported to an inconvenient location, or used on a healthier Avatar in an awkward position to deliberately provoke a teleport in hopes that their new position is more accessible to your squad.

And of course as I've alluded to many times Psi Operatives are great to pull out of the closet for the final mission. Even with Solace being buggy in the base game, having it around makes it effortless to undo Mind Control, freeing up the target to help kill the Avatar, all three of the Psi Operative's damaging psi skills are thoroughly unimpressed with the Avatar's teleporting shenanigans and strong defensive profile (Though keep in mind you're very unlikely to get a Rupture out of Void Rift), Domination is useless against the Avatars themselves but great on their many minions... Psi Operatives help a lot in the final mission, quite consistently.

SPARKs are kind of awkward. Overdrive letting you shoot three times isn't so great when the target is going to teleport to Cover after each hit, and SPARKs don't have stellar Aim. In the base game especially, you're just throwing dice if you're trying to Overdrive an Avatar. Strike is badly impaired by the Avatar's unusually high Defense -a Champion SPARK trying to Strike an Avatar will have only a 90% chance to hit, and of course will be at high risk of a Graze happening. Intimidate is worthless against Avatars and Wrecking Ball isn't much help given the environment is relatively light on destructible Cover. Hunter Protocol is surprisingly bad in this final fight, because the enemies teleporting in automatically activate upon arrival even if nobody in your squad can see them. SPARKs can still help decently; Bombard is a way to roll that teleport die if an Avatar ends up in an awkward position, SPARKs having innate Shred makes them a good choice for that initial shot clearing the way for other classes to get in damage, and of course they're a great platform for Blaster Launchers.

But a lot of their usually-great tools are unhelpful or actively counterproductive in the final fight, making it easy for a learning player to make mistakes in SPARK usage, and making their potential overall poorer than you might expect even if such mistakes aren't a concern.

War of the Chosen slightly props up SPARKs thanks to Weapon Attachment access, but the core elements I just laid out remain true: you can't prop up a SPARK's internal Aim stat to make Strike fully reliable, for example.

Speaking of War of the Chosen; the new classes!

This final mission is honestly the primary reason I do always take Banish on Reapers. Reapers in Shadow are ignored by teleportation, which means if you have your Reaper range far ahead of the group they're quite likely to be able to do a point-blank flank after you've triggered a teleport, as the Avatar won't 'see' that its position is endangered by the Reaper, making it easy to get a fully reliable Banish on a pre-Shredded Avatar. With a Superior Expanded Magazine, even a Temnotic Rifle Banish (Backed by Blood Trail, of course) is already 29-35 damage; that will virtually always kill a Commander Avatar if we ignore Armor, such as because you have AP Rounds. If backed by Shredder, a Reaper doesn't even need AP Rounds or Shred support to do egregious harm, allowing a Tactical Rigging Reaper to carry Venom Rounds or Dragon Rounds for that bit of extra damage per shot. While these numbers don't produce reliable one-action-kills, they're deliberately conservative: add 5 to all numbers if you actually unlocked and bought Shadow Lances, and also add 5 for each Improved Vektor Rifles Breakthrough you have or relevant tier-improving Breakthrough. Also raise the damage if you have Inside Knowledge bolstering the Expanded Magazine's effectiveness. A moderately lucky run can end up with a Reaper expecting to handily overkill even a Legendary Avatar, singlehandedly.

I personally prefer to save Banish for the final Avatar. It's very normal for me to find I'm able to very safely stay atop the situation through the first two Avatars, while by the time the third Avatar pops in often there's a distressingly large number of active enemies from further-away teleports, potentially accumulated damage on my squad, and a lot of powerful tools are used up (eg Blaster Launchers) or on cooldown. (eg Rapid Fire) Having an invisible soldier able to end the mission more or less on their own at that point is fantastic, and has allowed multiple runs to clear the final mission with no casualties where otherwise at least one soldier probably would've died, and one run was in serious danger of coming completely apart.

Templar are more generally great against Avatars. Ionic Storm and Volt both get bonus damage against Avatars (And with Aftershock, Volt will make it easier for other soldiers to follow up), Templar are extremely capable of running down an Avatar wherever it teleports and don't care about the innate Defense and Dodge for most of their actions, and can even use their position-switching skills to good effect if you've taken them. Parry also makes it unusually safe for them to chase down Avatars into awkward positions, even though it's little protection against the Avatars themselves. Also noteworthy is that Void Conduit works on Avatars and shuts off their reactive teleport; there's a fair argument to be made that even if you don't lik Void Conduit you should still grab it if you take a Templar into the final mission amnd have Ability Points lying around.

Skirmishers, meanwhile, are almost as bad as Specialists against Avatars. Justice technically works on Avatars, but they'll just teleport away after being hit so it can't actually be used to set up for other attacks. Skirmishers being oriented toward spamming shots up-close isn't so hot when your target teleports away after each hit. None of their more esoteric tools stands out against Avatars.

That said, the final encounter is one of the best possible situations for Battlelord to actually shine in, as you get large numbers of enemies uncontrollably active all at once, allowing for potentially quite a few triggers if you get the Skirmisher positioned well. (And nothing happens like getting Tongue Pulled...) So if you like Battlelord and want to see it shine, maybe give it a try in this fight.

You will encounter Avatars exactly twice in the campaign. The first time occurs when you Skulljack a Codex; this causes an Avatar to spawn in, exactly as a Codex did when you Skulljacked an ADVENT Officer. (Except this first Avatar is missing a third of its HP, as noted earlier)  This is the game going easy on you, though obviously you should be careful to try to get the Skulljacking done when your squad is ready to fight the resulting Avatar rather than jumping onto it opportunistically in the middle of a firefight. If you have Alien Hunters, you should ideally plan around bringing the Frost Bomb to ensure it can't reactively teleport to some extremely inconvenient location.

The other time you will encounter Avatars is in the final mission of the game. (And if you're playing War of the Chosen, very specifically the second part of it) You'll end up in a large room where enemies keep being teleported in, with this including intermittently adding in an Avatar; in total, there's three of them in this final fight, and once all three are dead you win regardless of everything else. Note that killing an Avatar before the next one spawns in is possible, and indeed desirable, but that the mission doesn't end just because there's no Avatars currently in the battle; you have to kill all three of them.

The Avatar itself is fairly intimidating to look at its statline and whatnot. HP comparable to a Gatekeeper, alarmingly high Armor for a Cover-using humanoid, a 25% chance for attacks to do halved damage if you can't get perfect accuracy (Which is hard to do), higher crit chance than normal, their gun has damage only slightly worse than a Sectopod's when that is very much not the primary point of an Avatar, huge passive regeneration, high Mobility, Codex-style reactive teleportation making it extremely difficult to properly focus-fire on it the way you want to...

Fortunately, they're not as menacing as they first seem. They strongly prefer to go for the Mind Control, which of course can be broken trivially by a Solace Psi Operative, Bondmate moving adjacent, or lobbing a Frost Bomb, instantly giving them back to you (With their full turn if you're in War of the Chosen, even), so if you're quick to pile on the damage they generally won't do any actual damage to you.

Of course, in true XCOM 2 fashion, once you start throwing in other enemies to complicate things, they can be an unholy terror that squadwipes you. Which, uh, the final mission makes sure to pile on a bunch of other enemies onto you. So have fun with that!

On the plus side, you get your own Avatar in the final mission, so you get not only a 7-strong squad but the seventh member is kind of ridiculously powerful. Note that the player Avatar is not completely identical to the enemy Avatar: your Mind Control is less spammable (4 turn cooldown) but lasts longer. (3 turn duration) Your Psi Lance does 8-11 damage instead of 6-9. Your Dimensional Rift does 7-9 damage and then 9-11 damage instead of 5-7 and then 7-9. (Interestingly, there's code for your Avatar to have Void Rift, with it doing 9-11 damage with +2 from crits, but you have no such ability in the actual game) Your Avatar also has base 100 Aim (Instead of 85), so against 0-Defense enemies in the open it can't miss or Graze. However, your Avatar only has 18 HP no matter the difficulty, 150 Will no matter the difficulty, and 0 Armor and 0 Defense no matter the difficulty, so your Avatar is a lot more vulnerable than AI Avatars, particularly on higher difficulties.

Still, it can be good to try to let your Avatar soak some damage since it heals every turn for free. Just keep in mind you fail the mission if they die!

In War of the Chosen, an irrelevant mechanics detail is that your Avatar doesn't suffer Will rot from seeing enemies. Since they're immune to all Will-test effects thanks to Mental Fortress, this doesn't actually matter, but is mildly interesting to notice.


As one of the more blatant signs that even base XCOM 2 wasn't really fully finished when it got released, the Commander's Avatar... well, you can see here that it has a rather different color scheme from enemy Avatars, with primarily white armor and blue highlights, most blatantly with the faceplate being blue instead of purple. Meanwhile...


... mid-mission, it's the same as any enemy Avatar, suggesting they didn't manage to make an in-engine version of the Commander's Avatar design.

Surprisingly, even War of the Chosen didn't fix this.

Thankfully, if it really bothers you, there's now a mod for addressing this, bringing the in-mission graphic in line with the pre-rendered cinema graphic. (It has some minor side effects, like making the Commander's Avatar do ADVENT chatter stuff, but eh. Also note this is a War of the Chosen-specific mod; base-game runs still have to suffer)

Anyway, the final mission itself is liable to be approached very differently in War of the Chosen than in the base game. In the base game, two Psi Operatives of a high level is an extremely good idea to bring to the table, between their general utility and access to Solace to turn Mind Control attempts into wasted turns on the AI's part. In War of the Chosen, this is technically still workable but it's generally inefficient compared to having made sure to build up three Level 3 Bonds and bringing them into the final mission; Bondmates can cleanse each other's mind while getting a bunch of other benefits, and the easy path to high-level Psi Operatives (Stuff them into a closet and don't use them in missions until they're more or less done training) leaves them a bit behind the power curve due to not getting Bonds. In conjunction with the Training Center overhaul making all the core classes stronger than in the base game relative to Psi Operatives... last-minute double Psi Operatives is honestly a bit underwhelming in War of the Chosen.

Either way, if you have Alien Hunters the Frost Bomb is great to bring into the final mission so you can shut down an Avatar in a key moment. Mind Shields on key personnel are also useful, or even your entire team given Avatars don't 'see' immunity to Mind Control when considering a course of action. Ideally try to save some explosives for the Avatar fight instead of blowing them on the fights leading up to the Avatars; having powerful area-of-effect attacks will make it easier to keep dishing out damage to the Avatars simultaneous to dealing with their minions, instead of being forced to choose between killing non-Avatars so they're not a threat vs killing Avatars to advance your objective, and you'll usually want to Shred the Avatars anyway.

Also, a reminder that each time an enemy group is teleported into the final fight they immediately activate even if none of your squad members can see them. Don't be worrying about movement activating pods, and don't operate as if 'I haven't seen it yet, so it can't possibly come in and immediately hurt someone' is true, because it isn't. This by itself is one of the reasons the final-mission Avatars are dangerous: you can easily have one reinforce in far from your squad, and a turn or two later wander into sight and immediately take action against your squad.


The Avatar is unique among enemies, in that it has an Autopsy cinematic even though this is a Shadow Project rather than a regular research, and also even though your 'reward' for completing it is to be allowed to complete the game rather than eg a fourth-tier Psi Amp.

It also deviates from the Autopsy standard format. In a normal Autopsy cinematic Tygan plays a cyclical cutting animation at the body, with the body jerking roughly appropriately to the motion, and the camera cuts between three different viewpoints, hitting each one twice, regardless of how long Tygan actually talks and no matter what's being cut up, and that's it. The Avatar Shadow Project starts out that way, but then...


... something oozes out of the body.


An Ethereal's soul (Or whatever you want to call it), to be relatively exact, which even speaks, commenting that 'we had such hope for you'.

So that's different.

Particularly interesting is that it uses the same voice as the Angelus Ethereal. I highly doubt this is meant to be the Angelus Ethereal escaping the Avatar body, or the like; it seems more likely that the Angelus Ethereal voice is meant to simply be how all Ethereals sound, or how all Ethereals can choose to sound, or something in that vicinity, which is interesting since the Angelus Ethereal's voice is a fairly radical departure from the Uber Ethereal's voice.

In any event, the 'reward' for completing this Shadow Project is, of course, the ability to launch the final missions. It also has the unusual quality that you're forced to complete all other Shadow Projects before being allowed to start it. Design-wise I get why this is so, but it's one of the more obvious examples of how base XCOM 2's late game is a bit unpolished: from an in-universe standpoint, this is an arbitrary restriction. If the game had had a bit more time, it seems likely some attempt would've been made to excuse this, or to restructure things so the arbitrariness wasn't necessary.

I don't really mind that this is arbitrary, overall, as it's pretty obvious it serves the dual purposes of cleanly gating gameplay stuff and also ensuring you get the major plot revelations in roughly the right order even though you're not trapped on a completely linear plot mission order. In conjunction with how the late game clearly wasn't fully polished... whatever, it's a nitpick.

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One bit of narrative strangeness to XCOM 2 is that in the prior game, it was 100% necessary to research psionics and get yourself a psionically adept soldier to be allowed to complete the game...

... but in XCOM 2, psionics is still a research avenue, but now it's wholly optional.

This is strange because it really ought to be the other way around. In Enemy Unknown/Within, the need for a psionic soldier is wholly arbitrary: the Gollop Chamber is a magic chamber of no known purpose constructed by your team for no reason which you send a psionic soldier into because Vahlen has a good feeling about it, which triggers the Temple Ship to appear for no particular reason, and then the only reason the Volunteer matters in the endgame is that they can arbitrarily teleport the entire Temple Ship, which itself only matters because the Uber Ethereal was arbitrarily a load-bearing boss, where defeating it inexplicably causes the Temple Ship to come apart at the seams in a way that will doom the Earth. At every step of the endgame, your team's decisions serve no in-character purpose, and from an external perspective it's just one arbitrary thing after another: the plot could've been resolved in any number of equally arbitrary ways without demanding the player research psionics, or even better have ended in some actually organic way that would inevitably have not needed psionics to be researched because kicking the aliens off our planet cannot possibly require psionic powers.

In XCOM 2, meanwhile, the final solution to the endgame involves using a psionically controlled, psionically adept body to trick Ethereal security systems into letting your team through because your psychic puppet has the right DNA and psi markers to pass the check, and while the process of your team arriving at this conclusion is a bit shaky the basic idea is sound... and yet psionics is now an optional research. Somehow.

This is one reason why I don't get why Psi Operatives weren't just straight-up made a basic Rookie promotion class. The core plot thread is centered on your team having a fairly strong grasp on psionic technologies: it really ought to be the case that you're either forced to unlock psionics as part of advancing the main plot -the first Codex Shadow Project could've automatically unlocked the Psi Lab, for example- or that a minimum familiarity with psionic technology is just built into your forces, where the plot doesn't need to explain how your team figures this stuff out because you literally start the game with Psi Amps and Psi Operatives and all. Starting with Psi Operative access would've additionally been a logical extension of the general scenario where the Ethereals' ostensibly-benevolent rule has been shaping Earth, and honestly Psi Operative design would've benefited a lot from them being made a core class instead of this off to the side class you have to seriously invest to unlock and that's only kind of a superclass in the base game. Emphasis more on 'kind of' than on 'superclass'.

Hopefully XCOM 3 will finally integrate psionics from the start, instead of repeating this issue.

Getting to broader narrative notes... let's start with the blindingly obvious Codex connection.

The Avatar and Codex have the same reactive teleport behavior, up to and including the same animation for teleporting. (Avatars just don't get the 'leave behind a clone' part, which... yeah, of course) Indeed, they share several animations beyond the reactive teleport. They both have a psionic attack that has an immediate effect when used and then on the following turn nukes the targeted area. (There's a lot of shared visual elements there, too) They both first show up in response to Skulljacking something the Ethereals don't want you to Skulljack. They carry their guns the same way and in fact have the same gun graphic aside coloration (Though the visuals and audio for firing are very different), and there's a bunch of aesthetic similarities that are sufficiently ambiguous I normally wouldn't count them but on top of everything else yes they are relevant, such as how the Codex has floaty 'hair' smoke and the Avatar has floaty hair, or how the Codex is blatantly designed to look like a human woman while the Avatar is... more androgynous, but overall slanted female in design.

So yeah. I'm pretty sure the Codex is an Ethereal projection in the base game. War of the Chosen seems to change this concept, with eg the Assassin and Warlock talking about the Codex like it's a separate being, and Chimera Squad at minimum demands Codices aren't inextricably intertwined with Ethereals in particular, but the base game is very consistent about setting things up so the Codex seems to be an Ethereal projection.

Normally, I'd wonder if this was intended to indicate that Tygan was wrong about something before Spectres came along for him to be wrong about and Codex aren't projections from another dimension, but XCOM 2's ending heavily implies that Ethereals are not aliens from outer space, but in actuality are aliens from another dimension. It's entirely possible the core concept for Codices was that Ethereals based in another dimension were doing the puppeting, for example.

Anyway, it's interesting how this seems to be setting up for XCOM 3 being some kind of parallel to X-COM: Apocalypse (What with the Ethereals indicating they were on the run from some other threat that comes from the same dimension they did), especially in conjunction with how XCOM 2 actually has some low-key parallels to Terror From The Deep. Most relevantly is that the final mission turns out to take place in a literal undersea fortress; I tend to call the final mission location T'leth, because if that's not a deliberate reference to T'leth I will metaphorically eat my hat.

It's also interesting to note here that Spectres have a lot in common with Codices and are heavily implied to be some manner of Void demon. That doesn't have to imply that Ethereals are Void demons themselves, but it's certainly consistent with such a possibility, and tends to imply some fundamental similarities as a class of being.

Then there's the Psi Operative connection. Avatars use Psi Amps just like Psi Operatives do, and have white hair like Psi Operatives do. We never get to see an Avatar's eyes per se, but the purple face-plate is clearly analogous to having the eyes glow from within with a purple light. This is all neat and suggests that going forward there's liable to be a more coherent set of visual cues for psionically active enemies.

But let's back up to the Codex connection, because there's several interesting sub-elements to that when combined with other elements.

See, the Ethereal that talks to the player has a voice actress (ie female), and gets the Angelus name which... I have no idea why but for some reason people like to use that as a female name for angel figures, and while XCOM 2 has reworked Ethereal presentation it's still treating them as having strong shades of Space Angels. In conjunction with the Codex being blatantly female (While being a projection of an Ethereal mind), there's a rather strong implication that we're meant to take Avatars as female or feminine. This is further supported by the fact that the config files consistently refer to the Avatar as a 'Psi Witch', where 'witch' is a female-coded term by default.

This is particularly interesting when combined with the plot-point of the Commander -ie the player- being plugged into the 'borrowed' Avatar body to personally participate in the final mission. XCOM 2 is, in most respects, exactly the kind of game that normally comports itself as if it expects 100% of its players to be teen-to-twenty-something males, and specifically the kind that are insecure about their gender identity and can't tolerate any possibility of being perceived as -or feeling like they are- unmasculine.

And then it has the player take on a form that is strongly implied to be female, and certainly isn't clearly masculine.

That's extremely atypical, and in conjunction with the Angelus itself being handled as female places the plot as being closer to a 'female protagonist and female antagonist' story than anything else. Which is really unusual for triple-A 'graphics are quoteunquote realistic and the plot is quoteunquote dark-and-gritty' games. Like, I have literally never even heard of such a game, let alone played it myself, prior to XCOM 2.

I'm not sure what to actually make of it, but it's definitely intriguing.

On the topic of the Commander...

... this is one of the things I have seriously mixed feelings about.

On the one hand, I think the game is, for the most part, reasonably competent in how it executes the concept. While the precise reason the Ethereals have an interest in the Commander is never explicitly spelled out, the overall handling of events is fairly logical for justifying why the player is the Special Individual Who Has To Do The Special Thing Necessary To Saving The World. This is a huge, huge improvement on the previous game's Volunteer being a thing we do because This Is A Video Game And That's How The Devs Decided You'd Kick Off The Endgame And So Thou Must.

It's also actually fairly clever of the game to use the explanation of 'you were experiencing simulated versions of the original invasion'. This makes your experiences -every single run you played- of the previous game canonical, while being compatible with XCOM 2 operating on the premise of X-COM's defeat in the prior game. It's neat!

On the other hand, I'm fundamentally not a fan of the Special Chosen One Of Destiny Because Reasons trope, particularly in video games, particularly in cases where the player is playing as this Special Chosen One Of Destiny Because Reasons.

There's the narrative laziness aspect: why do you accomplish whatever thing you accomplish, as opposed to any number of better-qualified and better-positioned people who have every reason to want to get the thing accomplished? Uuuuuh, you're special shut up.

Wow, what a compelling answer.

There's how I don't like the method of achieving the implicit goal: propping up people's poor abused egos so they feel less like complete losers (Or whatever) is a vaguely understandable goal, but doing so by constructing a narrative in which they're Special And Important for reasons entirely outside their control that obligate them to do a thing is... ugly. At best, it's guilt-tripping them into digging for whatever talent they have and trying to use it to become a Productive Member Of Society. At worst, it's feeding them an illusion that they can wait for lightning to strike and make them special and then everything will be better and they have no need to learn how to be a competent human being. Either way, I'm uncomfortable with this kind of thing, and especially with how normal it is in the gaming industry.

Then there's how it's really contrary to this particular game's conceits and is consistent with stuff I don't like about broader Firaxis trends. Fundamentally, the XCOM series is about teams of people cooperating in the face of external threats that induce (justified) paranoia about internal threats, where something you might call friendship ultimately triumphs. Teamwork, trust, cooperation; these are what win the day. (Also, overwhelming firepower, but shhh I'm going somewhere with this) Firaxis games have a bad habit of making things centered around Great And Talented individuals; the previous game was awful about treating Shen and Vahlen like their personal skills were what Got Things Done, the dozens of Engineers and Scientists you brought in being almost entirely discounted, and a disturbing share of the dialogue was 'good job Commander', not 'the team did good work today'. XCOM 2, while overall less guilty of this (Among other points by mechanically providing concrete utility to individual Engineers, but also less guilty in dialogue), is still maintaining the part of placing the player character as Special And Important And Extra-Competent, even though it's deeply out of place. And while I'd rather not spend the time to cover every individual case here... yes, every other Firaxis game I've seen has these same conceits, and they're usually just as out of place, if not more so.

So yeah. The execution is more competent than in the previous game, as far as this Special And Important Player Character thing goes, but I don't see why the game is doing it in the first place and in fact have multiple reasons why it's a bad, contrary-to-the-game's-conceits idea.

Also, 'more competent execution' comes with the caveat that there's... still some of the problems I laid out before, and blatant choreography fails to boot.

Exactly how is a first-person view of people removing a chip from the back of my head supposed to result in me seeing anything of relevance?

Same for the flashback of a Thin Man installing the chip in the first place.

So overall I'm really hoping XCOM 3 finally has the team come to their collective senses and drop the Commander-As-Player conceit. It's fundamentally a concerning trope, it's a particularly poor fit to the X-COM series, and Firaxis consistently doesn't even execute it all that well.

(Potentially promising: Chimera Squad doesn't try to replicate this at all, suggesting Firaxis has become less stuck on this meme as a company)

Completely different topic: let's talk about the Avatar Project as more of a narrative thing!

The Avatar Project is this weird intersection of good writing and broken writing. On the plus side, it's not a nonsensical deus ex machina coming out of nowhere with zero connection to anything like the previous game's ending was on multiple levels. In fact, the plot does a pretty good job of achieving the Good Writing feat of 'this makes more sense in retrospect'; finding the Forge, Skulljacking a Codex to get an Avatar body, and getting the Psi Gate are all things that are necessary to kick off the endgame mission (You need the Forge's suit to stuff the Commander into for... admittedly unclear reasons given the Commander was originally found in such a suit... plus the Avatar body in the suit so you have an Avatar, and you need the Psi Gate so you can teleport into T'leth), but each one at the time is, from an in-character standpoint, just X-COM poking at things the Ethereals don't want poked at. The plot thus avoids blatantly signaling where it's going, manages to have events make reasonably organic sense as they're occurring, and yet still make sense to need to jump through each individual hoop to be allowed to kick off the final mission. And it has the bonus of allowing the gameplay to be less rigid than the previous game!

Unfortunately, there's still fairly serious problems. The Avatar Project is probably the entire reason why the game insists on making ADVENT troops into artificial soldiers; to act as foreshadowing that the Ethereals can make bodies from 'nothing' (In the sense that they don't need existing people to use as hosts), as they do with Avatars... and I've already been over how impossible it is for the narrative to function under that premise. The Psi Gate's issues I already went over in the Gatekeeper's post. These are both serious problems, and the ADVENT troops one in particular is difficult to excuse since there's a vastly superior way of handling things that is, in fact, exactly what the plot first claims to be going on.

But wait, then there's the problems with the Avatar Project itself!

Why are the Ethereals making medical slushies out of humans? Because they have some kind of degenerative muscle condition that's killing their species, and so they need replacement bodies. Okay, that sounds... vaguely logical? Except... there's not really any way to parse their actions that's internally consistent on a motivational and mechanical level. If it's not necessary for them to grind humans into soylent green to produce a given Avatar, then why the heck are they doing it at all? That's just creating problems for themselves, no benefit to be seen.

On the other hand, if they do need to grind human bodies up to produce each Avatar, then they should be treating us like cattle. Retaliation missions shouldn't be them rolling in and killing people en mass; it should be them abducting people to feed the overlords' needs for human bodies. Nor does their endgame response of trying to genocide humanity to make X-COM back off make much sense; it could maybe be explained through spite ("If I'm going down, I'm taking you with me"), but the narrative doesn't frame it that way at all. What is the Angelus Ethereal supposed to think is going to happen if they wipe out humanity, given they need us for their own survival as a species?

The answer is, of course, that the dev team wasn't trying to think up anything coherent for what the Ethereals are doing and why they're doing it. The narrative function of Ethereals kidnapping people en mass and grinding them into medical slushies is to make their apparent-utopia a clear dystopia, no thought given as to what would cause the Ethereals to actually want to handle things this way.

It's frustrating, because the writing has certainly improved, but there's still a fundamental failure to think about why the people within the universe would elect to behave the way they do, which is... fundamental to writing, no matter what kind of story you might want to tell.

Fortunately, War of the Chosen actually does a lot to fix this!

First of all, the stuff about the Ethereals initiating a purge of humanity to try to get you to back off? I've never seen those lines trigger in War of the Chosen. It seems to have been retconned out entirely; if later games confirm that retcon, fantastic!

Second, the Chosen are used to better communicate Ethereal ideology and personality. I'll be going over this in more detail in Chosen-connected posts themselves, but broadly speaking the Chosen-Ethereal interactions convey that the Ethereals present themselves as peaceful, idealistic pacifists who just want us all to get along...

...while habitually turning to extreme cruelty over minor slights, passing blame to others for things that are to all appearances 100% their own fault, setting up even their most favored servants with clear pressures to behave certain ways and then rebuking them when they behave exactly as they were pressured to behave...

... all of which makes what we see a lot more believable as in-character. Constructing a seeming utopia while grinding your latest servant race into medical slushies is dumb and awful, but it's exactly the kind of dumb and awful we see the Angelus Ethereal engaging in at a more personal scale, and the way the Chosen react makes it clear the handful of scenes we get are representative. These are habitual for at least the Angelus Ethereal, and likely for the Ethereals as a whole: it's easy to believe they didn't so much plan the society we see as they just did what they always do, and the dystopia organically grew out of their unthinking decisions.

Among other points, this makes Retaliation missions actually believable: incredibly stupid of the Ethereals, yes, but we see them punishing their favored servants with extreme pain over mild disrespect and failure to have the exact right emotional response to certain situations. Throwing a tantrum and sending their forces out to murder the humans they need for their medical slushies in an attempt to punish resistance forces is just a society-scale version of how we see them interact with their Chosen. Incredibly stupid of them, but in-character stupid.

This makes it a lot more plausible to me that XCOM 3 will finally get the plot roughly coherent on initial release, and so is one of the reasons I'm looking forward to XCOM 3.


On a more aesthetic note, I actually like basically everything about the Avatar's design. The 'my hair is underwater' effect is a nice way of conveying that their psionic power has unearthly effects, the Ethereal ghost floating behind the Avatar is a nice touch, particularly how it explodes when the Avatar dies (I have mixed feelings about how this explosion doesn't do anything, but that's a slightly different topic), and it's just all-around a pretty solid design for how it connects up to other parts of the narrative to tell the audience things of meaning.


Also interesting to note is the aforementioned Ethereal floating behind the Avatar point. In and of itself, this seems a bit of an odd aesthetic choice: the Ethereal graphic actually spends most of its time invisible, only intermittently flowing into visibility temporarily. That's exactly the sort of visual effect where I'd expect it to be layered over the Avatar's body to represent the possession aspect.

However, this is actually consistent with how the Bureau visualizes Ethereal possession! Not completely, since the Bureau's representation of an Ethereal soul-or-whatever-you-want-to-call-it looked very different from XCOM 2 just taking the regular Ethereal graphic and making it purple and transparent, but I still have to wonder if that's a deliberate nod to the Bureau. XCOM 2 has enough callbacks to prior games that it's completely believable, and it would be a nice touch, especially since the Bureau's representation of Ethereals was fairly consistent with War of the Chosen depicting Ethereals as presenting themselves as Good People while actually being quite awful.

The one aesthetic issue I have is another base-game-exclusive issue: that Avatar Psi Amps being so similar to your own Psi Amps -they're literally a reskinning of your Alien Psi Amp design- doesn't make any sense in the base game. Your team apparently developed Psi Amps ex nihilo, after all, and Avatars have been in development for years: even convergent evolution is pretty eyebrow-raising an attempt to explain the similarities. (Indeed, this is another layer to why I'm baffled the base game didn't make Psi Operatives a core class you have right away)

War of the Chosen adding ADVENT Priests does a lot to address this. It would be even better if Psionics had been made unlocked by Autopsying Priests instead of Sectoids, but War of the Chosen was clearly reluctant to mess with established gameplay, and there's good reasons for such a reluctance. I'm willing to essentially pretend that in 'reality' X-COM jumpstarts their Psionics program by studying Priests and gameplay doesn't reflect that to avoid unexpected design problems -Psi Operatives were already effectively nerfed by War of the Chosen, it would be even worse if you had to wait even longer to be able to get started on unlocking them at all!

And honestly, Priests show up quickly enough you're not liable to have Psionics completed before it happens.

Either way, this makes the similarities a lot easier to buy: the Avatar Psi Amp is similar to the Priest Psi Amp because they're designed by the same people with the same knowledge base and technology. Your Psi Amps then resemble Avatar Psi Amps because your crew studied Priest Psi Amps, which resemble Avatar Psi Amps. Tada!

There's still narrative jank I could complain about, but honestly, I'm genuinely impressed War of the Chosen very quietly closed this plot hole at all. It's exactly the kind of plot hole that normally goes completely unrecognized for years, because creator and audience alike are coming from a perspective that obscures how little in-universe sense the detail makes, and War of the Chosen did this on top of the gameplay design benefits Priests bring to the table. That's an impressive trick, and exactly the kind of thing that makes me look forward to XCOM 3.

As for the ending itself... that's going to be delved in more some other time, as there's quite a lot to get into.

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Now, you might expect me to move on to the Chosen at this point, but we're going to make a detour to cover the DLC enemies to stall for time starting with the Derelict Mecs of Shen's Last Gift.

See you then.