XCOM 2 Aside: Cut Chosen Content

In addition to the Assassin and Warlock straight-up having disabled abilities they have full voice acting for, there's also a bevy of Strengths, Weaknesses, and less-easily-categorized Chosen-related stuff exposed right in the config files that are unused in the actual final product. Presumably due to the omnipresent problem that is War of the Chosen Was Rushed.

This mod restores most of the cut Strengths and Weaknesses. Specifically, the Strengths it restores are 'agile', 'HoloTarget', 'ImmuneEnvironmental', and ImmunePsi', while for Weaknesses it restores 'WeakPsi', 'Nearsighted', 'Oblivious', 'Impatient', and the Fire/Poison/Acid Weakness set as one Weakness. (Which is probably accurate to the original intent, honestly) So if you wanna see exactly why these were justified in being cut, you can try 'em out for yourself!

Let's start with the ones the mod implements.

Mentally Sound

This Chosen is immune to psionic damage.

Bizarrely, at least in the mod's implementation, this includes immunity to Rend...'s base damage. But not the damage Focus adds to Rend.

That itself is a good clue for why the Strength isn't implemented in the final game -it's not actually complete- but honestly I wouldn't be at all surprised if it got cut for being so limited. Only the Templar and Psi Operative have psionic damage, and in the Psi Operative's case only Soulfire, Void Rift, Schism, and Null Lance actually do psionic damage. For Templar, if it didn't provide immunity to Rend it would barely matter as, like Psi Operatives, Templar don't actually have that many ways to do psionic damage (Volt, Ionic Storm, and Arc Wave), whereas if it did provide immunity to Rend... for runs that didn't go for Psi Operatives, it would be like Immune to Melee, only even more class-targeted, which would be janky.

So I'm fine with this Strength not being in the final product.

Beyond Earth

This Chosen cannot be set on fire, Poisoned, or afflicted with Acid.

So basically Fortress, except the explosive immunity component is a separate Strength. (Blast Shield)

I don't miss this at all. If it were still in the game, it would be very limited in its actual impact, Chosen already shrug off Burn's major distinguishing effect, and preventing the damage would barely matter. The main point of Acid Grenades is their high Shred, and once again ignoring the follow-up damage would barely matter. Poison immunity would consistently benefit the Hunter -assuming the player rolled Poison gear, keep in mind- but the Warlock rarely uses his rifle as-is and is often perfectly happy to hold still, making Poison's stat penalties of limited relevance anyway, and the Assassin's preferred mode of attack ignores Aim, leaving only the Mobility penalty reasonably meaningful.

It would also be one more strike against Flamethrowers and Hellfire Projectors, when they're already frustratingly bad, even with War of the Chosen making efforts to improve their relevance.

As such, I like the idea of this being part of the Chosen toolkit, abstractly, but am quite glad it didn't make the cut in practice. XCOM 2 would've needed to approach elemental damage differently for this to be distinctive and interesting -maybe if a viable flamethrower-based class had been a thing, for example, where it would be comparable to Melee Immunity taking away a key part of the Ranger's toolkit. (Ideally said flamethrower class would, like Rangers, not be completely shut down by such an immunity)

Agile

This Chosen makes a 1-action-point move each time they are attacked, attempting to move to new Cover.

It's Planewalker, but minus the teleportation.

It's not terribly surprising Agile didn't make the cut, given that competition. Like yes the Chosen can't share Strengths so similar-but-not-the-same Strengths matter from allowing multiple Chosen to have a given behavior, but that cuts a bit into the point of forbidding Chosen from sharing Strengths and Weaknesses. Not even getting into the fact that it would either stack strangely with Planewalker or require code for preventing them from being rolled together, and the more limitations you stack on to such a system the easier it is to mess up and break it without noticing. (ie imagine if all the Strengths except Agile got passed out, and then the final Chosen hit tier 4... and was the one that had Planewalker. What, do they just not gain a Strength?)

Personally, I think Agile would've been the better choice to keep in, as it animates faster (Surprisingly), with less glitchy animation behavior and less of a toxic effect on gameplay, but I wouldn't be surprised if the devs were more confident in Planewalker behaving properly, given it's just a variation on Codex and Avatar reactive teleportation and those function just fine. Or maybe they just felt Planewalker was flashier and cooler, or felt it made more sense as a Strength the Chosen have to cultivate, where Agile might feel like it should be a standard part of the toolkit. (If the Assassin had gotten the Agile behavior built in, I wouldn't have batted an eye. Probably been frustrated by the gameplay... but that's a different consideration)

I'm a little disappointed no mod exists to swap out Planewalker for Agile actually. There's a mod that activates it and gives it better behavior, but not one that disables Planewalker at the same time. Alas.

Mark

Chosen attacks mark the victim, providing an Aim bonus against the target.

The key problem here is that Chosen go last in the turn.

If they'd gone first, this could've been an okay enough Strength, letting the Chosen designate a soldier for death and having it reliably followed up on if any other enemies are alive and active. As-is, even if the effect lasted multiple turns it would be pretty limited in its actual implications.

I wouldn't be surprised if 'Chosen go last' was a comparatively late decision, and directly led to this being cut. It's not missed, in any event, even if I'd like for the Chosen to have leadership-themed Strengths.

Impatient

This Chosen takes 50% more damage from reaction fire, including eg Bladestorm.

I sort of like the concept of this Weakness, but I'm honestly glad it isn't in the final game: by default reaction effects are prone to missing and can't crit, so Impatient would've both encouraged putting your fate in the RNG's hands and would also have risked often being not worth pursuing because of crits existing. Why do an all-or-nothing gamble for 50% more damage when, for example, a Conventional Shotgun fired from point-blank is instead a guaranteed 4-6 damage with a 50% chance to do +3 damage? (ie 50% of a high damage roll)

If it had also disabled the reaction fire penalties against the Chosen, so Overwatch had full accuracy and could crit against the Impatient Chosen, I'd be a lot more positive on it -not to mention actually want Covering Fire! There'd still be some jank -among other points, you'd have to be careful to avoid your Overwatch getting eaten by reinforcements- but it would've been interesting enough I'd honestly rather have it than, say, Groundling.

Alas.

Oblivious

This Chosen takes 50% more damage from attacks initiated from Concealment.

It's worth pointing out that patch notes indicate that the Chosen originally appeared first turn, not first turn after squad Concealment is broken. So if this had existed on release, you wouldn't have needed a Reaper, Ranger, or a soldier happening to get Phantom as a bonus skill, to be able to pick on this Weakness. (Or the one-time Spectre Item, I suppose)

Even so, I'm very glad this didn't make the cut. The Chosen waiting until squad Concealment is broken is much better design, and even if it weren't and the old behavior had been kept that would've easily lead to encouraging janky behavior, particularly in conjunction with Resistance Orders like Infiltrate: it would've been awful to feel obligated to sneak up to the Oblivious Hunter because I happened to have Infiltrate and therefore could take forever to reach him, for example. This isn't even touching on stuff like how the Warlock's Spectral Zombies make it extremely difficult to retain non-Shadow Concealment on someone, where Oblivious on the Warlock would be very close to just a second Weakness to Reapers, only even more limited in your ability to exploit.

If War of the Chosen had significantly overhauled the Concealment system this might've been a neat Weakness, but it didn't, so... I don't miss this at all.

Environment Sensitive

This Chosen takes doubled damage from Fire, Poison, and Acid.

I like the idea of this, but it would've violated the rule that non-Adversary Weaknesses are supposed to be doable right away with potentially any soldier, and furthermore it would've required a non-standard implementation to behave sensibly.

First of all, damage over time is a minority of damage unless you expect a target to survive several turns; if you shoot an enemy with a Cannon backed by Venom Rounds, that's 5-7 immediate damage, followed by... 1-3 damage on their turn. 2-6 with this Weakness. And it only gets worse as you tech up; a Mag Cannon backed by Venom Rounds will be 7-9 immediate damage, while the damage ticking on the next turn would still be 2-6.

Second, damage over time is too swingy if you do a straightforward multiplier; if you made this multiply the damage four times so it's more substantial of a Weakness, you'd get 4, 8, or 12 damage, because Weaknesses take whatever damage number got rolled and then multiply it. That would make RNG way too influential on this Weakness' effectiveness! 

Third, this Weakness stacks awkwardly. One soldier with Venom Rounds or a Gas Grenade adds 1-3 extra damage per turn. Two soldiers with Poison tools still only provides 1-3 extra damage per turn. By contrast, if you chuck one Frag Grenade at a Shell-Shocked Chosen, you get 3-4 extra damage, which rises to 6-8 if another soldier chucks another Frag Grenade, and this principle holds true up until you've done so much damage the Chosen is dead. You specifically have to stack the three different kinds of damage over time to have the squad pick on the Weakness harder than just having the one soldier able to trigger it. That's weird and janky.

Fourth of all, it's a Weakness that doesn't scale properly; aside Groundling, all the Weaknesses that made it into the game get to rise in damage with your technology and so on; how well they do so varies a notable amount, but they do scale. Damage over time effects don't scale with your technology; if we imagine this instead caused damage over time effects to do a flat 4 extra damage per trigger, that would be an amazing boost to damage in the early game and fall off in effectiveness as Chosen HP rose while the damage stayed the same. You can argue gaining access to all three types of damage over time effects is a form of scaling, in the sense that you'd start out only picking on it with one damage type at a time (After completing your first Experimental Grenade, or your first Experimental Ammo to give out Venom or Dragon Rounds) and ultimately be able to stack all three, but that would be janky on numerous levels. Among other points, it would be entirely possible for a player to fight the Chosen with this Weakness, then perform Experimental Projects three times before encountering said Chosen again, and so have jumped straight from not being able to pick on the Weakness at all to being able to do so as much as they'll ever be able to.

So while I would've liked more Weaknesses, I'm not actually that sad this didn't make the cut, whatever the actual reason was; it would've been a very problematic Weakness to have in the game.

Weak Willed

This Chosen takes 50% more damage from psionic attacks.

This is another Weakness I sort of like the idea of, but which I'm not terribly bothered by it being cut.

First of all, only Psi Operatives and Templar provide class-based sources of psionic damage, and non-class-based sources barely exist -I'm not sure there's any outside Feedback, which only the Warlock would even be able to trigger. That makes it a bit narrow for a non-Adversary Weakness.

Second, Psi Operatives are locked behind technology and take a fair amount of time to get to, while a run that doesn't start with Templar can end up with them 'distant' and so have to wait until at least their first Sergeant to get a Templar. It would be entirely possible for a run to clash with a Weak Willed Chosen two or three times, utterly unable to pick on this Weakness!

Third, while it would actually scale with technology, the progression would be janky; Soulfire only gains 1 damage per tier, Schism's damage is flat, and Void Rift and Null Lance both have very poor gains from advancing to their second tier. Similarly, on Templar Volt only gains 1 damage per tech improvement; only Arc Wave and Psionic Storm end up progressing noticeably with technology, out of what few Templar abilities even do psionic damage in the first place. (Even Rend doesn't actually scale that much with technology)

Furthermore, Psi Operative psi damage progression is doubly janky because just unlocking them at all lets you buy Advanced Psi Amps, and then Gatekeepers take forever to show up and you need to loot three of their corpses to be able to actually get Alien Psi Amps. It's very normal for a run to have Psi Operative abilities be completely 'flat', where they never actually change because you functionally start from their second tier and never actually move on to their third tier.

So the Psi Operative end of things would be almost as bad as Environment Sensitive about not scaling properly.

Fourth, for runs that didn't bother to unlock Psi Operatives, this would effectively be a second, more limited version of Adversary: Templar!

If Psi Operatives were straight-up a core class you could get examples of from the very beginning of the game, or something very similar (Maybe retain the current training model, but shove the slots onto Tygan's research area), this would still have been a bit janky, but could've been a nice Weakness to add  in. In such a case, I'd rather have this than Groundling, certainly.

But with the Psi Operative model XCOM 2 actually uses, it's probably for the best this didn't make it.

Nearsighted

This Chosen takes 50% more damage from Squadsight-range attacks.

Yet another case of 'I'm glad this didn't make the cut', as Squadsight-range effects are pretty limited. In theory it would've been nice as an attempt to make Squadsight-abusing Sharpshooters more relevant, but in practice it probably would've just emphasized the utility of Combat Protocol, or if stuff like Rocket Launchers could trigger it by being fired from beyond line of sight then probably those would've been emphasized instead... or worst of all, if it actually just triggered off of 'the Chosen couldn't see the attacker' rather than Squadsight ranges per se, then it would've emphasized tossing grenades from behind trucks and whatnot!

In any event, it probably wouldn't have helped sniping Sharpshooters that much, and in general would likely have been janky in any number of ways. Among other points, like Oblivious it would somewhat encourage taking unnecessarily risky shots in hopes of big damage, which would be... not great Weakness design.

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So how about the stuff that mod didn't implement?

;ChosenStrengths="ChosenIncreaseCrit"

;ChosenStrengths="ChosenIncreaseMobility"
;ChosenStrengths="ChosenIncreaseArmor"
;ChosenStrengths="ChosenIncreaseHP"
;ChosenStrengths="ChosenIncreaseDodge"

Lots of unimplemented stat boosts in the Strength list.

The stat boost details are coded up in the SoldierSkills config file. HP would've been +50% HP, Armor would've actually given up 2 HP in exchange for 2 Armor, and the others would've been +33% to their respective stats.

Armor might've been interesting, as +2 Armor is pretty substantial in a moderately interesting way, but overall I'm not terribly bothered by these not making the cut simply because they'd have been boring even if they were meaningful.

And that 'even if they were meaningful' qualifier is a pretty big one; the Strength boosting Mobility would very likely have largely had nearly no effect in actual play, and the effects it'd be liable to have would've been probably bad. The Assassin, for example, already has plenty of Mobility for how she behaves; likely the only thing you'd really notice is that she'd be a lot more likely to Bending Reed to completely out of reach of your squad, which would be... not great design. Similarly, the Warlock is very fond of holding still, so he'd get nearly no use out of Mobility... up until he tried to flee to Spectral Army, at which point it would be frustrating, not interesting.

So yeah, these don't bother me at all, aside maybe Armor being cut.

But wait, that's cut Strengths. How about cut Weaknesses?

; Second Tier
;ChosenWeaknesses="ChosenWeakFire"
;ChosenWeaknesses="ChosenWeakPoison"
;ChosenWeaknesses="ChosenWeakAcid"

; Third Tier
;ChosenWeaknesses="ChosenWeakPsi"
;ChosenWeaknesses="ChosenWeakMelee"
;ChosenWeaknesses="ChosenOblivious"
;ChosenWeaknesses="ChosenImpatient"
;ChosenWeaknesses="ChosenNearsighted"
;ChosenWeaknesses="ChosenAchilles"

Notice the second-tier/third-tier concept. That's interesting to me, indicating that Weaknesses were supposed to be a bit more involved than 'roll 2 at the beginning of the game and then stop'. I'm not sure what the devs might've been thinking in that regard, but still.

Most of these I've actually been over because the mod implemented them without bothering to be faithful to whatever this 'tier' concept is about (And I'm only listing them here so you can see which tier they're assigned to), but Achilles is a notable exception. The config files indicate that all attacks against an Achilles Chosen would've had their accuracy reduced to 80% of their final value, but then done 50% more damage in exchange. That's sort of an interesting idea, but even aside my own dislike of gambler mechanics it's out of place with the Strength/Weakness framework, where Strengths are supposed to be pure advantage and Weaknesses pure disadvantage. It would've needed to be one of a set of traits operating on different rules, like if every Chosen had one trait that gave an advantage in exchange for a disadvantage.

But wait, there's yet more!

Disabled/removed mechanics:

; disabled chosen traits - only used with activation system

;ChosenStrengths="ChosenCornered"
;ChosenStrengths="ChosenZoneOfControl"
;ChosenWeaknesses="ChosenSlow"

This seems to suggest the Chosen were intended to have something like temporary Strengths/Weaknesses occur in response to battlefield conditions. If so, either the concept was dropped fairly quickly -the above four lines seem unlikely to have been meant to be the entire possible range- or it was imagined as something fairly limited and then dropped for being a bit pointless, something like that.

Zone of Control has lines in the SoldierSkills config file indicating it would've been an automatic retaliation against units moving in whatever was the Chosen's 'zone of control', like Enemy Within Close Combat Specialist. Probably 12 tiles, looking in the config files. I've no idea what 'Cornered' might have been, and while 'Slow' has some obvious guesses I'm not entirely sure how it would fit into this 'activation system'. (In part because it's not exactly clear what 'activation system' means in this context)

With how limited the available info is it's hard to say how meaningful or interesting these might've been. Honestly, I'm mostly mentioning them to emphasize what I've said many times -that War of the Chosen was hugely ambitious and flagrantly rushed, where even a relative layperson can just poke in the config files (Which are literally plain text files you can open in Notepad) and find mounds of unused content.

But wait, there's still more!

NumStrengthsWhenFavored=2
NumWeaknessesWhenFavored=1

FavoredKnowledgeGainScalar=1.5f

This seems to suggest that an additional component of randomization intended with the Chosen is that one of them would've been 'favored' by the Ethereals, and as a result would've been more threatening than the others: one less Weakness than normal, and gaining Knowledge 50% faster than normal. In the actual release this functionality is basically organically existent from the Contact system; whichever Chosen is your initial Chosen tends to end up well ahead of the other Chosen simply from having more months to build Knowledge in, after all.

The Strength/Weakness count admittedly would've actually mattered, but honestly, War of the Chosen would've needed to work very different for that to not be problematic somehow or another; say your starting Chosen was always 'favored' and so got a reduced number of Weaknesses. Suddenly we're saying your initial Chosen is by definition the hardest? That's clearly contrary to the game's overall attempts to ease you into things!

Saying it's an unrelated random roll instead would also be bad, as suddenly a run would have roughly a 1-in-3 chance of being screwed over by having its initial Chosen be 'favored'. And if instead you say the 'favored' Chosen has to be one of the two not controlling the player's initial region... that would be more or less functional, I guess, but have a notable 'but why?' element to it.

So while it's abstractly interesting to me this was ever intended to be a thing, I'm not exactly broken up by the fact that it didn't get implemented.

But wait, there's even more!

Personalities="ChosenPersonality_Psychotic"
Personalities="ChosenPersonality_Honorable"
Personalities="ChosenPersonality_Superior"

Personalities="ChosenPersonality_Reverent"

I have no clue what this might've been for mechanically, but it seems to suggest the Chosen were intended at some point to even have a randomized personality mechanic.

Alternatively, they weren't intended to be random and were just meant to be moddable, but regardless notice that there's four personalities even though there's only three Chosen. It's easy to connect Psychotic or Reverent to the Warlock, Psychotic or Superior to the Hunter, and Honorable or Superior to the Assassin, but whatever your personal interpretation that still leaves a trait unused, consistent with other hints there was meant to be another Chosen.

Either way, as far as I'm aware this doesn't matter in the final game, but it's interesting they wanted to do something with the personality stuff. It's one of the things that really makes me think War of the Chosen is in part prototyping Apocalypse-style mechanics; having multiple factions with diverse goals and values really does call for something resembling personality influencing the types of decisions being made, after all. (Indeed, a common failing of, for example, the 4x genre is how often factions get clearly-defined personalities narratively, but mechanically they all share basically the same AI, so your pacifist faction breaks out nukes on a moment's notice, your eco-friendly faction strips the land and burns the forests as fast as anyone else, and so on and so forth)

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Returning to the topic of a likely cut fourth (Or more) Chosen, it's worth pointing out a few tidbits of how the final product behaves that function just fine as-is but fit quite well to such a theory.

First of all, it's worth pointing out that the Chosen, while they jabber a lot and have things to say about each other, they never cross-compare or have conversations with each other. That is, the Hunter will remark on how crazy the Warlock is, or allude to the Assassin when responding to Sword usage, but the Hunter will never say anything that alludes to the Warlock and Assassin simultaneously. There's some edge cases like the Assassin saying 'my brothers' at one point in her Stronghold speech, but if there was only intended to be one more Chosen and they would've been male, this would function regardless. (Or if there were supposed to be even more, but still all male)

This isn't jarringly out of place in the final product or anything, but it's easy to imagine the devs plotting out a framework of partially-randomized Chosen (Whether the insanely ambitious possibility I've outlined before of 8 Chosen, or a still overly-ambitious-but-less-so of 'pick three out of four Chosen to exist in a run'), and setting rules for themselves in regards to Chosen dialogue to avoid experiences like 'the Hunter refers to the Assassin and Warlock in a run that has no Warlock'. What we got makes a lot of sense as being a framework designed for randomized Chosen.

One might feel this is at odds with things like the cinema that plays the first time you encounter a Chosen, the one where the Assassin, Hunter, and Warlock all show up to be harangued by the Angelus Ethereal. After all, prerendered cinemas tend to require a lot of forward planning, because they take a lot of time to make and all, to the point that games often have inconsistencies between prerendered cinematics and everything else. (For example, in Starcraft's final cinematic, Mutalisks can be seen spitting acid -which they did in gameplay in development, and only later switched to launching 'glaive wurms') It would be reasonable to assert this prerendered cinematic suggests the Chosen lineup we got is the only one that was ever intended.

However, it's worth pointing out here that base XCOM 2 has the rather unusual quality of having a lot of pre-rendered cinematics that only play in a run that has the Tutorial enabled, and Tutorial runs function rather differently in the early game from non-Tutorial runs, with Lost And Abandoned extending this further. (That is, there are multiple cinematics exclusive to Lost And Abandoned runs, and significant deviations in how the early game functions) I actually wouldn't be at all surprised if that first-Chosen-encountered cinematic was originally constructed specifically for Lost And Abandoned runs, with such runs having been planned to disable randomization of which Chosen exist in the run, or something of the sort.

Among other points, it's worth pointing out here that the events you only see with the Tutorial enabled -and the events you only see with Lost And Abandoned enabled- are still broadly 'canon' even if your run didn't do them. Most blatant is the consideration of the chip in the Commander's head; you only see where this came from and get an explanation of what it's about in runs with the Tutorial enabled, but it's always a research you have to perform! Indeed, the first Tutorial mission is effectively treated as 'canon' alongside the first non-Tutorial mission; if you pay attention, it's clear that non-Tutorial Gatecrasher's outcome is supposed to be the explosion that pulls away ADVENT troops from the Gene Therapy Clinic holding the Commander's body!

So a less-rushed War of the Chosen locking a bunch of important Chosen info behind Lost And Abandoned and expecting players to understand what's going on anyway wouldn't be at all out of character, is the point.

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Next time, we shuffle on to more broadly strategic concerns, starting with the Avenger and its Facilities.

See you then.