XCOM 2 Mission Analysis: 'Golden Path'

I've alluded to this on and off throughout these posts, but the 'golden path' is the game's internal term for progression in the primary plot. For the purposes of this post I'm just covering the mission portion of this 'golden path', but internally it's slightly more broad than that: a UFO hunting for X-COM is triggered randomly somewhere in your progression down the 'golden path', for example, but it can do so in response to completing a Shadow Project, in addition to potentially triggering in response to completing one of these missions.

The 'golden path' missions don't share too many qualities, but they do share some. Let's talk about those.

First of all, at the Geoscape layer they're not timed or cyclical: so long as the Avatar Project doesn't time out, you can put them off indefinitely, and each one only generates once per game. Except you can't actually put off the final mission, because once it's available the game stops the clock entirely and won't let you do anything else...

Second, none of these missions has time pressure built in. The final portion of the final mission is something of an exception, but outside that one partial exception you can take them all as slow as you like: no timer, and no alternate source of time pressure.

Third, they're of course all gated by plot flags, where you can't launch the mission -with one exception, you can't even see the mission- until you've hit whatever flag the mission is locked behind.

Fourth, in War of the Chosen they can't generate with Sitreps, which is probably for the best even if it feels like a missed opportunity. Certainly, it would be pretty out of place for the final mission to allow Sitreps...

And... that's about it, really.

Oh, and as these are plot missions I'm obviously delving into major spoilers more directly than I've already done in prior posts. If you're not wanting to be spoiled, this is a post to come back to after you've beaten the game yourself.

What you might not be expecting is that I also casually spoil stuff from The Bureau: X-COM Declassified in this post. Like, Major Twist-type spoilers. So if you're, like, in the middle of playing The Bureau yourself and don't want to be spoiled, maybe put a pin in this and come back to it once you're done.

Now on to individual missions!

Investigate The ADVENT Blacksite

The Blacksite is normally going to be your first plot mission, though it's technically possible to be your second -but no later than second, as another plot mission is locked behind it and the final two are locked behind everything else.

Geoscape-wise, it always generates in one of the two territories immediately adjacent to your starting territory and is revealed by the Spokesman partway through your first month. This position mechanically matters, as you can't actually launch the Blacksite mission until you're in contact with its territory, so for one thing you have to actually complete the Resistance Radio Research to be able to do this mission. As I've covered before, in War of the Chosen its territory is also always controlled by whichever Chosen controls your starting territory, with that Chosen guaranteed to spawn in the mission itself. (Unless you take them out permanently first: this can be done, but it's not particularly recommended)

Completing it is also worth a completely fixed 125 Supplies, and will unlock Alien Encryption -the research to unlock the Shadow Chamber- if you haven't already unlocked it by Skulljacking an ADVENT Officer, and will also unlock a Shadow Project, though I'll be getting into that next mission. Note that you do not loot corpses in this mission, which is slightly unfortunate for a reason I'll point out later.

Tactically, Investigate The ADVENT Blacksite uses the Wilderness plot type and is able to use any biome, including Xenoform in War of the Chosen. (Xenoform Blacksites tend to look particularly great, though I'm also pretty fond of Tundra Blacksites) More broadly, the Blacksite actually has a procedurally-generated map, which is a big improvement over EU/EW having at most 2 maps for plot missions, making plot missions much less of a repetitive low point for people who do more than one or two runs.

It's still relatively predictable, mind: you always start in what I'm going to arbitrarily declare 'south', with this southern portion of the map being dominated by a pair of ADVENT complexes with road in between, then giving way to the area in front of the primary Blacksite building, followed by said Blacksite building, with the Blacksite building in particular having a completely fixed layout, followed by the northern end of the map being natural terrain with your Evac point placed in the area. (Usually, but not always, on high ground) Nonetheless, the exact placement of terrain elements varies to a notable extent outside the primary Blacksite building: you're not going to memorize That Perfect Spot To Plant Your Sharpshooter because the map isn't consistent enough for that to be a thing.

Also, the layout is actually more variable in War of the Chosen. In the base game, there is always a train south of the Blacksite, and approaching said train causes Bradford to put gameplay on pause so he can talk about the mysteries of ADVENT trains and get horrified and angry at the Ethereals abducting people still -the train is always loaded down with what I'm going to call coffins that are more or less exclusive to this mission, where said coffins visibly each contain a single person's body. (Morbid point: you are free to blow up these coffins, and absolutely nobody will react to this. Even in War of the Chosen, your soldiers won't suffer Will hits)

War of the Chosen is still willing to generate this train, but Bradford's dialogue in response to it is cut completely, and the train often doesn't generate in the first place, sometimes resulting in a very different middle portion of the map. It's one of War of the Chosen's stranger changes, even if I do appreciate it as part of the broader trend of Bradford not constantly putting gameplay on pause to talk.

Returning to the topic of your Evac, it should be noted this mission doesn't let you call in an Evac yourself, with an Evac zone instead placed at the opposite end of the map. Since this is a mission where you don't loot bodies, it's also a mission where you don't retrieve gear from dead soldiers left behind. This isn't a big deal in the base game unless you have Alien Hunters -and not necessarily then either- as there's really no reason to not hit the Blacksite ASAP, and you can hit it so fast it's easy for it to be the case none of your soldiers is carrying anything valuable anyway, but this can be a time-wasting nuisance in War of the Chosen if you get someone killed relatively early in the mission. After all, there's no time pressure, so unless you lose more than half the team so you can't carry the bodies, it's always possible to kill every enemy, run back to pick up the bodies, then run to the Evac point. And in War of the Chosen you have cause to put off the Blacksite and so hit it with a squad actually equipped with gear you care about...

Anyway, enemy generation is mostly pretty standard -if you wait long enough, it is possible to see Sectopods or Gatekeepers- but the actual inside of the Blacksite has a completely fixed pod of 1 basic ADVENT Mec and two basic ADVENT Troopers patrolling around inside. (Humorously, they largely patrol in a portion that should be physically impossible to move through until you trigger a specific cinema) The ADVENT Mec is really meant to be basically a 'boss' enemy, as if you hit the Blacksite the instant you can that'll be a Mec encounter much earlier than they can generate normally, but in War of the Chosen it's entirely possible the pod is a behind-the-times joke. This Mec is also why it's a little unfortunate you don't loot bodies -an early ADVENT Mec would be an incentive to hit the Blacksite early in War of the Chosen.

Turrets are normal on this mission, and in fact in the base game this will usually be where you first encounter Turrets. Their actual placement is random, with it possible for them to show up on the initial buildings, at the front corners of the primary Blacksite building, or watching the rear doors of the primary Blacksite building, but that's their full range: they can't show up at ground level, they can't show up on the train, and the primary Blacksite building has only four zones they can spawn in. This is actually one of the missions Turrets have the most opportunity to be dangerous: Turrets watching the rear entrance are easy to not expect (Or not remember) and end up walking someone right into their range, out of action points and flanked by the Turret, while Turrets at the front corners often generate in groups (I've seen up to three Turrets in one corner), and often end up complicating a fight with a pod in the front area. The primary Blacksite building is also tall enough it can be a struggle to get someone close enough to chuck a grenade at them -Rockets can trivialize them, but if you've gone straight to the Blacksite you shouldn't have a Rocket Launcher.

Anyway, your actual objective, revealed partway through the mission, is to grab the 'Blacksite Vial' and Evac with it. This is just a free interact action that can be performed by any of your units (Though note that if you're playing with really non-standard mod units, having such a unit grab the Vial can softlock the game: use regular human soldiers or SPARKs to grab the Vial), simple enough.

Note that grabbing the Vial immediately triggers a reinforcement flare to drop in somewhere behind the Blacksite building. A couple turns later, another reinforcement flare will drop in, though it's just those two. Further note that War of the Chosen slowing down reinforcement flares doesn't apply here: that first flare still spawns in your turn and drops in reinforcements at the next enemy turn.

As such, optimal play is to actually set your fastest (Or least combat-useful) soldier on a Blacksite Vial interaction point but not take it, and have everyone else scramble to near the Evac point. Once everyone's in position with full action points, grab the Vial, watch the resulting cinematic, then have most of your troops try to set up to catch the reinforcements with Overwatch while the Vial-holder just Dashes for the Evac zone. Then clean up the pod while the Vial-holder keeps running, and get started on Evaccing that turn or the next turn.

In the base game, it's best to also ambush that second pod. Free experience and all. In War of the Chosen, it's more debatable: more enemies means more opportunities for soldiers to become Tired or even Shaken, after all, and the benefits of leveling your current soldiers aren't so immediately significant. (Concrete example: say the entire squad levels, but also becomes Tired and misses your next two missions: the fact that they leveled doesn't help you in those next two missions. In the base game, this kind of thing just isn't a concern unless you're constantly getting people badly wounded but not dead. Somehow)

Oh, and of course in War of the Chosen the Chosen's presence has a pretty high impact on the mission. The Warlock and the Hunter pretty consistently skulk at the back of the primary Blacksite building, with the Warlock harrying you with Spectral Zombies throughout. The Assassin of course charges your squad in no time flat, pretty much always meeting your squad before they can get inside the building. That said, there's not a lot to say specifically about them in this mission, aside that they all have unique dialogue for it. (Have I mentioned yet they have a ludicrous amount of contextual dialogue?)

Narratively...

Well, I've covered most of the Blacksite's significant details before, actually.

That said, there's a few bits I haven't covered.

First of all, I should note that the Blacksite actually contains one of the more obvious bits of the base game having issues getting everything properly polished. When the game instructs you to get the Blacksite Vial, it takes the form of Bradford saying, "You heard the doctor," and telling the squad to grab the Vial... when Tygan at no point refers to the Vial at all. His dialogue is all about how many victims there are, the 'brutal efficiency' in how they've been 'processed', and speculating that maybe this is all to produce some kind of weapon, followed by Shen remarking it looks more like a refinery to her. I assume there's dialogue recorded that whoops wasn't set to actually fire, wherein Tygan would express an interest in the Blacksite Vial, but in actual play Bradford implies Tygan said something he absolutely did not, leaving you grabbing the Vial for no clear reason. Oops.

Second, the Vial itself is one of the more obvious bits of convenient narrative contrivance, as the game never offers any reason why the Vial is a thing that exists at all, let alone why it would be on display in a room in the back instead of being prepped for shipping elsewhere or... whatever would make sense to be doing with it. I'm largely willing to gloss over the part where it's on display as it makes it clearer to the player what the objective is, but the Vial itself is a major part of pure-plot sequences and we never get a suggestion as to what's with this singular canister of goo.

Third, the Blacksite mission being standalone comes across strangely. You can bridge this gap by interpreting the Avatar Project Facilities as more Blacksite-type facilities and waving off the need to hit this particular facility to get the Blacksite Vial as a pure game design thing (Which may genuinely be the intent), but that's only a partial solution -among other points, no explanation is offered for why we're leaving this Blacksite intact instead of trying to sabotage it (By which I mean blow it up), and similarly no explanation is provided for why we're not trying to rescue the people in the coffins. Are they supposed to already be dead? If they're not dead, wouldn't rescuing at least some of these people be an obvious goal to pursue? Even if we ignore ethical concerns, getting them out of ADVENT's hands can only be good from X-COM's perspective.

Fourth, Bradford's base-game-only dialogue about the trains is... pretty eyebrow-raising, enough so I've sometimes wondered if that's the real reason it got cut. He talks about ADVENT trains running constantly while no one knows what's inside them, which is both fundamentally a bit difficult to believe and gets downright farcical in conjunction with there being multiple mission types for hitting ADVENT trains. The base game does, admittedly, expect you to hit the Blacksite before a Supply Raid has a chance to spawn... but you're quite likely to have done two Guerrilla Ops before the Blacksite, and 2/9ths of all Guerrilla Ops involve hitting a train.

So yeah. The Blacksite's narrative elements are... janky. This is a bit of a recurring issue with the golden path missions, even more so than the regular missions. I'm focused enough on gameplay I don't mind this overall, but it is a bit surprising how much the plot missions mishandle plot elements, much more so than the regular missions that are, narratively, irrelevant filler.

Investigate The ADVENT Forge

Investigate The ADVENT Forge requires you complete the Shadow Project for studying the Blacksite Vial before it can appear on the map. Like the Blacksite, the Forge is in a specific territory you need to get in contact with before you can launch the mission. Unlike the Blacksite, the Forge's placement is pretty unpredictable: it can't be in your starting territory, either territory immediately accessible to your starting territory (And by extension can't share a territory with the Blacksite), or share a territory with the Psi Gate, but otherwise can appear more or less anywhere.

Its placement is a bit more constricted in War of the Chosen, in that the Blacksite, Forge, and Psi Gate are divided among the Chosen, but this constriction isn't particularly important to the player. You don't get to see Chosen ownership of a territory unless you're already in contact with it, after all, so it's not like you can deliberately try to contact territories not controlled by your initial Chosen to maximize the odds of getting in contact with the Forge and Psi Gate regions even before you've revealed them with their Shadow Projects, or anything of that sort. It does mean that if you've only gotten into contact with two Chosen you definitely need at least one more region contacted, even if you're up to 8 regions contacted already, so that's an actual implication of use to a player.

Otherwise, its Geoscape functionality is much the same as the Blacksite's.

Tactically, there's more parallels: once again it uses the Wilderness plot type with every biome possible (Xenoform Forges once again tend to look amazing), and once again the map has a mix of rigid elements and procedural generation. You also don't get to loot corpses, just like the Blacksite.

One of the Forge's odder elements is the consideration of its Evac zone, as it has the extremely odd quality of starting your squad standing inside a pre-placed Evac zone... but unlike Rescue Stranded Resistance Agents the game doesn't actually expect you to run back to this Evac point. Instead, getting the objective on hand gets rid of this Evac zone and places a new one over in the general vicinity of your objective. It's very weird; did playtesting find the Forge gave people a lot of trouble, and they dumped this Evac zone at the beginning so players could easily run if things went wrong, and didn't feel a similar need with the Blacksite because it's so much easier? Whatever the motive, it has the annoying result of making it so you won't know where the (relevant) Evac zone is until it's time to run to it, making it harder to prep for a quick escape, as the final placement of the Evac point has a wide stretch of terrain it can be dropped into.

Anyway, the map itself is consistently divided into two distinct sections: the primary Forge compound, at the opposite end of the map from your squad's general starting location, and the secondary facilities closer to your squad. The primary compound is like the Blacksite main building in that the structure and its insides are completely fixed, while the immediately surrounding terrain is more variable, including stuff like partially-randomized vehicle placement. This compound and its immediate surroundings are separated from your side of the map by a bottomless canyon cutting from one side of the map to the other, with exactly two bridges, consistently both crowded a bit by at least one vehicle parked somewhere on each bridge.

Your side of the map is itself another two sections, as your squad actually always starts atop a stretch of high ground, with the ragged cliff marking the transition to actual ADVENT infrastructure and roads. There's never enemies in this high ground area, including that I've never seen an inactive pod patrol up onto it.

Oddly, while Turrets tend to occur, there's nowhere for them to spawn in the primary compound. They're restricted to spawning atop the buildings on your side of the map. This makes them a lot easier to just ignore than the Blacksite's Turrets -you might not even see any Turrets by virtue of just not wandering near most of their valid spawn locations- and they're also generally easier to trivialize with explosives. (Even discounting things like your squad being more likely to have better explosives, the Advanced Grenade Launcher, etc: Forge Turrets are just usually easier to get in position to blow them up in the first place)

Anyway, your end of the map is heavier on procedural generation than the compound side, including actual major divergences can occur, such as one run having a huge facility dominating the eastern side vs a different run having that area wilderness with a road passing through. You shouldn't make assumptions about what's where until you've spotted one of the bridges.

As I noted in the Sectopod post, this mission has a guaranteed solo Sectopod patrolling its grounds. The Sectopod in question usually starts on your side of the map, though it'll sometimes start in front of the primary Forge compound instead. Whichever side it starts on, its patrols won't change sides -it won't even walk onto the bridges while inactive.

If you take long enough to reach the Forge, regular Sectopod pods can generate on top of this Sectopod -or even Gatekeepers if you take forever- and these Sectopods can of course show up basically wherever, which is to say they're really prone to ending up spawning inside the primary Forge compound and ripping great chunks out of it before you even see the compound. Whoops! But my actual main point is that the loner Sectopod isn't necessarily the only Sectopod on the map, and in fact is in addition to standard enemy generation: it's possible to have three Sectopods in the Forge if you take long enough to launch it that regular missions have become willing to generate two Sectopods.

Anyway, the actual mission objective for the Forge is essentially a variation on Neutralize VIP, in the sense that you're making off with a body -the game actually won't let you launch the mission if none of the units you've assigned to it can carry bodies. (ie you can't do a mono-SPARK run) This is kind of funny since it makes zero in-universe sense -your starting goal is just to 'investigate' the Forge, with nobody actually expecting a need to carry a body- but an understandable break from reality so you don't end up with players spending 30+ minutes only to end up stymied, possibly with no idea why they can't complete the mission. And honestly, I'm impressed someone thought to even include this check in the first place, given standard play would never have it crop up: teams of six SPARKs are absurd, and it's only thanks to modding any other options exist for fielding troops who can't carry bodies. This is exactly the kind of situation I'm used to games overlooking a need to include a safety net for, often even when a safety net is a lot more likely to actually crop up. (That is, I would sooner have expected six-SPARK play being an easy thing to do and worth pursuing in its own right and then this 'need a body-carrier' check not existing, rather than the check existing while being highly unlikely to come up for the overwhelming majority of players)

The body itself is always found in a 'clean room' in the back of the Forge, specifically in a tube a soldier has to interact with to reveal there's a body inside, prompting a little cinematic of them carefully lowering the body to the floor. (I keep meaning to test what happens if you open it with a SPARK...) Opening the tube is a free action, so optimally you'll stop someone in position, end the turn, and next turn open the tube, grab the body, and run...

... because opening the tube is equivalent to grabbing the Blacksite Vial in that it triggers an immediate reinforcement flare, followed two turns later by another reinforcement flare. And by the time you have access to the Forge, reinforcements are liable to be relatively dangerous -Heavy Mecs very often lead both pods, and of course are a nuisance to catch with Overwatch fire and fairly durable and very dangerous to leave alive. So even in the base game, I tend to be more inclined to try to not kill both pods for free experience, unlike the Blacksite.

There's usually a pod patrolling in or nearby the clean room, it should be noted. Sometimes they just hang out inside the clean room perpetually, sometimes they patrol the whole back inside area including opening the doors, sometimes they're actually on the roof above the clean room, sometimes they're actually patrolling behind the building... but there's a pod somewhere in that back area, and you should be careful approaching the clean room, as it's easy to activate the pod when you're not ready. Among other points, there's windows into the clean room, and it's easy to make mistakes like not adequately accounting for step-out mechanics letting units see through the window when standing adjacent, or to peek into the room via the window, see no pod, and conclude it's safe to advance into the room with your last soldier and whoops actually the window doesn't provide sight on the whole room nor does either window let you see all the way through the other window and either way you've activated a pod while having nobody ready to attack it!

This is exacerbated by how easy it is to end up not encountering any Turrets that generated, as Turrets still cause the Alien Activity popup, making it difficult to be sure whether you're getting Alien Activity because there's still one pod left or because you missed all the (completely irrelevant) Turrets. So you can end up thinking it's the latter when it's actually the former and recklessly activate a pod when you're not ready for it... or end up crawling for turn after turn, sure it's the former while actually it's the latter. It's... not ideal design. This is basically unique of an issue to the Forge, as most missions have time pressure, and the ones that don't trend toward the mission ending the instant all non-Turrets are dead (ie if a Supply Raid of any kind is still ongoing, you should move carefully because yes there's a real pod wandering around somewhere), while the Blacksite it's easy to end up running into and destroying all the Turrets. (Plus, the Blacksite's final pod position doesn't have the terrain so ideal for you to draw a reasonable-but-incorrect conclusion and activate the pod when not ready)

For that matter, the bridge crossing is surprisingly unpleasant in the same way. This is one of the few missions with no time pressure where a Reaper is still a huge help on, as the bridges have the Forge-side area full of inconsistently-placed and not-visually-intuitive High Cover elements that are large enough to significantly block line of sight in an erratic, unclear way. It's entirely possible to get halfway down the bridge, spot no pod, and then have someone advancing toward the bridge activate a pod that was in a weird blind spot rather than by advancing that soldier too far. The chasm in turn makes it difficult to get flanks, smash Cover, get close enough for close-range accuracy bonuses... a Reaper can substantially ease the crossing, as well as make it easier to approach the clean room without a problematically-timed pod activation occurring.

Anyway, this of course is guarded by a Chosen in War of the Chosen. They actually spawn directly behind the clean room, and for the Warlock and Hunter they're really prone to lingering basically exactly where they started indefinitely. The Warlock doing this works out well enough for him -he harasses you with Spectral Zombies for ages and then very possibly fights you alongside the pod assigned to the clean room area- but when the Hunter does this it makes him almost irrelevant: I have never seen him use Tracking Shot from back there. (Even though he can glitchily angle it through solid walls sometimes) Fortunately he'll sometimes manage to advance to the front area of the Forge compound and start using Tracking Shot, and this can even be a moderate problem if you haven't crossed the bridge yet -the map is big enough his cone can get wide enough you have to Dash to escape it, and the bridges are of course not very wide in the first place.

The Assassin just does her usual thing of advancing aggressively, though oddly she seems to be less aggressive than usual. No matter how far back I break squad Concealment, I've never had her actually cross a bridge. I'm not sure if that's a bug, deliberate AI for this mission, or what, but I've most often ended up having her attack my squad after they've crossed a bridge, often with her attacking from inside the compound. It's weird, and I don't think it can be explained by suggesting I've just advanced aggressively myself -this is one of the missions I'm most prone to slow, cautious advances.

Overall, the non-Warlock Chosen tend to be pretty non-notable (Just the usual threat level for Chosen), and the Warlock usually just requires you deliberately pace your movement so you're not risking activating a pod close to him summoning Spectral Zombies.

The Forge as a mission is honestly too big in my book. It's often one of the longest missions of the game in terms of time spent to complete it, but the amount of content -time spent fighting and otherwise engaging with the fun portion of the game- isn't really scaled to that time amount. The need for constant, careful vigilance as you advance -particularly if you hit it late enough stuff like Andromedons is running around- exacerbates it, both pressuring you to take even longer than the sheer size of the map already calls for, and making for a tedious, exhausting mission, very much akin to Long War's worst parts, or to how the Alien Base of EU/EW dragged on and basically-randomly punished things that shouldn't have been mistakes because the lines of sight were bizarre and non-obvious.

It's honestly probably my least-favorite mission of the game. There's other missions with more unpleasant flaws, but part of the thing about the Forge is that it's also a fundamentally boring mission -stuff like how miserable it is to get jumped by an Alien Ruler in a City Center mission is awful, but at least Alien Rulers are broadly interesting fights and City Centers are broadly interesting maps/missions. The Forge being unpleasant, overly-lengthy, and boring is a unique combination in XCOM 2: I really hope XCOM 3 manages to sort out whatever is going on with Firaxis that keeps leading to them making plot-mandated missions that are unfun timesinks of this sort...

Oh, and beating the Forge always provides 175 Supplies. No narrative justification for why, and honestly I'm not sure what the point is from a game design perspective. I'd think an Intel payout would make more narrative sense, and give the Forge a stronger reason to prioritize accessing it and, in War of the Chosen, hitting it early. It's not a big deal, admittedly, but still a bit weird -the Blacksite providing Supplies is a helpful injection in the early game where your income is guaranteed to be inadequate for your demands. The Forge... might do that for some runs, but mostly it's just... there.

Narratively, I've covered most of the Forge's issues in prior posts -how bizarre it is that we don't try to destroy this facility, how 'ADVENT are vat-grown clones' is a much more problematic explanation than 'ADVENT are regular humans with Ethereal biological augments', etc- but it's also worth pointing out that it's pretty weird that there's a lone Avatar body sitting in the Forge, which is otherwise indicated to be for producing ADVENT soldiers. It's not irreconcilable -you can suggest Avatar production consumes so many resources only one is being produced at any given moment, for example- but there's not obvious implicit answers and your support staff don't acknowledge it at all. Among other points, there's shades of the Narrative Convenience problem presented by the Blacksite Vial, in that Avatar bodies are the single most valuable resource in Ethereal hands from an Ethereal perspective (Aside the Ethereals themselves, of course), and the Ethereals have not only total control of stellar travel but an undersea fortress only accessible via psionic portals that themselves cannot be casually traveled through by undesirables: why is the Forge's Stasis Suit/Avatar body in the relatively-human-accessible Forge, rather than aboard a spaceship or kept in the Alien Fortress?

(This is one reason I spent a long while misunderstanding the plot by thinking the Avatar that spawns when you Skulljack a Codex is the Avatar you then use when attacking the Alien Fortress: because that's a far more natural explanation for X-COM having an Avatar body for their use than the Forge. Nor is it like we even use the Forge's Stasis Suit:

No, we use the red one the Commander started the game in, where the Forge Stasis Suit is white, grey, and black for its colors.

Admittedly the Forge becomes completely unnecessary to success if we imagine X-COM isn't using its Avatar body or Stasis Suit, but that just underlines the Forge's narrative problems: it's conveniently-contrived on its own merits and then unclear how it's supposed to actually matter given you get an Avatar body from elsewhere, guaranteed. No explanation is provided for why we don't use that one: you can headcanon up explanations, like suggesting the complete body is too damaged for re-use, but 'the player has headcanon options' doesn't undermine 'the plot doesn't have an actual answer to a major question that actually does need to be answered')

Similarly, returning to the Blacksite Vial being narratively strained, we find the Forge by... running the Vial's contents through the Shadow Chamber's super-powered computer, which arbitrarily spits out the Forge's coordinates. Uh, why? The Vial's contents are human goo that retains enough DNA markers to connect them to what I'm just going to assume is an ADVENT DNA database (I doubt the devs had such in mind, but such a thing existing is what I'd expect given Gene Clinics), so our support staff can be horrified all over again at the sheer amount of human life being lost to make this canister that fits in one hand. That provides no coherent basis for fingering the Forge's coordinates.

It's annoying in part because the game already has good narrative justification for requiring the player collect the Blacksite Vial and do a Shadow Chamber Project: because its contents are somehow important to completing an Avatar, and the endgame requires we have a functioning Avatar body to access the Alien Fortress. The game is perfectly happy to have the Stasis Suit Shadow Project do absolutely nothing of mechanical significance: having the Blacksite Vial necessary to discover the Forge is just arbitrary.

Indeed, the Spokesman as Helpful ADVENT Insider makes this a confusing decision twice over: in the first place it's honestly difficult to believe the Spokesman has zero idea ADVENT troops aren't enhanced volunteers (Making the Forge as the Dramatic Reveal Of The Truth unbelievable on yet another layer), and in the second place he's also a much better justification for pointing us to the Forge, using his inside knowledge of troop movements or whatever to know that somehow soldiers keep marching out of a place in much greater numbers than enter it.

The Forge is also hit a lot harder than the Blacksite by the 'this seems to be the only example' issue, as Avatar Project Facilities are absolutely not meant to be 'additional facilities manufacturing ADVENT clones', and if the Forge is indeed the only example of its kind, this really makes it baffling we don't blow up this key military asset.

The Forge is also uniquely bad about an order-of-information disconnect, where the player knows they're going to a place called 'the Forge' the instant the mission is revealed, and this isn't due to in-character information but rather is due to the mission name directly including this information. ("Investigate The ADVENT Forge") This is another reason it's pretty weird the Blacksite Vial somehow giving us mystery coordinates is the explanation we got rather than, say, the Spokesman having enough insider info to know it's important, internal documents call it The Forge, and more troops come out than enter, but not enough to know exactly what's happening. I'm actually curious if something got changed late in development here -the Psi Gate doesn't repeat this error, instead having the mission name talk about investigating some coordinates. Maybe the Forge was originally revealed to you some other way, but the content in question got cut or overhauled and nobody noticed this mission's name suddenly being out of place?

On a different note, an interesting element of the Forge is that sometimes the Forge's primary compound has the map edges delineated by cliffs dropping off into ocean. It's only sometimes, but it's interesting primarily because the ocean gets so little representation in XCOM 2 -outside the Forge and the Alien Fortress, there's no base-game maps that will ever have ocean acting as a map edge or the like, and War of the Chosen per se didn't change this that I'm aware. The Tactical Legacy Pack adds in ocean elements, but it does so by having distinctive chunks of the Tactical Legacy mini-campaign maps able to be used by the game... and the oceanic cases are largely either not included or are particularly rigid. (There's a port town case where the entire map is basically fixed: the game can't drop this chunk of map down as a small part of an otherwise-normal procedurally-generated map) EU/EW by contrast have a fair few maps with significant bodies of water, suggesting that getting such to play nice with the procedural generation proved an issue.

Whatever the case, I kind of wish this ocean border was consistent on the Forge, as it implicitly provides an explanation for why your squad walks in through all this other ADVENT infrastructure, no possibility of approaching the primary Forge compound from behind and skipping 70% of the map. (Because they couldn't be dropped off behind the Forge in a sneaky way, at least not without specialized gear for swimming and then climbing up the cliffs without being dashed against the rocks by the tide) It's not a big deal, but still, it's a missed opportunity.

Investigate The Codex Brain Coordinates (Psi Gate)

Investigate The Codex Coordinates follows a broadly similar Geoscape format to the Forge: it's not visible until you complete a Shadow Project (The one directly unlocked by killing your first Codex), it spawns in some territory not readily accessible to your starting territory, in War of the Chosen its territorial placement is influenced by the need to break these three up across Chosen territories...

... indeed, on the Geoscape level it's basically exactly the same.

Tactically, there's still parallels, but overall they're more different than they are similar. They do share the Wilderness plot type and access to all biomes, but even there the differences are pretty big: this mission will never have any ADVENT modular structures, instead being largely just... wilderness. This mission also has its general framework more influenced by procedural generation, with only really one part of the map being strongly-consistent across runs. The map itself is always a corridor, and one of the less wide ones of the game, too.

Enemy composition is extremely unusual in this mission, with only one or two pods ever being randomized pods. The overwhelming majority of the map is Chryssalids -usually one regular pod near the opposite end of the map, a second regular pod more like halfway through the map, and then Burrowed Chryssalids scattered across the back half of the map. A lot of Burrowed Chryssalids: 6+ sort of thing.

Additionally, there's always a single Gatekeeper, though unlike the Forge's Sectopod this is not a semi-normal pod patrolling about. Instead, once you get close enough to the Psi Gate at the back of the map, you get a cinematic where your support staff react to the Psi Gate, and the Gatekeeper spawns in -it will then immediately activate, even if the soldier that approached the Psi Gate is Concealed and no non-Concealed soldiers are close enough to be visible to the Gatekeeper. So don't approach the Psi Gate until you're ready for a fight -especially since it's quite likely you'll pull one or more Chryssalids in the process, whether Burrowed ones attacking or the regular pod being in sight.

The Psi Gate's area is itself the one part of the map that's extremely consistent, and a larger portion of it is consistent than you might expect. In addition to the Psi Gate, the platform it's sitting atop, and the pathway of alien architecture leading up to it, there's a haphazard collection of little patches of high ground in a horseshoe shape around all that. You might expect these high ground patches to be randomized, but nope! The only random part is that Chryssalids are always Burrowed atop some of these high ground spots, and their exact placement is random.

The Psi Gate mission is itself unique among these plot missions in that mission success is achieved by killing everything on the map, with you looting all bodies. (Well, the 'kill everything' part is a little less unique in War of the Chosen, but that's for later in this post) Among other points, this means that, aside fiddly qualifiers like Domination, a run is guaranteed a Gatekeeper corpse and a number of Chryssalid corpses, which is unusual. (Too bad you need three Gatekeeper corpses for Gatekeeper corpses to be of any use...)

It similarly means that even though killing the Gatekeeper isn't a mission objective, it still functions as a boss enemy you must defeat. (Whereas the Forge's Sectopod can absolutely be avoided entirely) Note that you can't skip the Gatekeeper fight: you might think you could carefully kill everything on the map without spotting the Psi Gate to complete the mission without spawning the Gatekeeper, but no, the game won't declare the mission over until there's nothing alive on the map and you've gotten the Gatekeeper to spawn.

Overall, while the Gatekeeper has probably terrorized a lot of learning players, the trickiest issue on this mission is actually the huge number of Burrowed Chryssalids. Mind, the regular pods and the Gatekeeper exacerbate the threat posed by Burrowed Chryssalids: if the mission was just Burrowed Chryssalids, you could pass out Battle Scanners and Medikits to everyone to substantially solve the issues presented by Burrowed Chryssalids. With those other threats around, you really want to bring Shred tools for the Gatekeeper (An Acid Bomb, ideally) and/or big damage tools. (EMP Bombs and Bluescreen Rounds), and your soldiers have only so many equipment slots...

Similarly, an option I've seen recommended is having most of your squad Overwatch while one soldier advances in hopes that a Burrowed Chryssalid will lunge out and be shot to death. This... runs into the issue that regular pods are about, and you risk activating them with most of your squad unable to respond.

If you're playing War of the Chosen down on Regular, this is pretty simple: take out the Assassin, and have a Bladestorm Ranger act as your lead troop while carrying the Katana. Burrowed Chryssalids will usually jump out, charge your Ranger, and be instantly murdered. All you have to worry about is them glitchily targeting a different soldier -and even then, if they still pass near the Ranger, they're dead.

Outside that, though... Bladestorm is still nice, but you should honestly just bring Medikits and plan around people getting injured. Yes, Battle Scanners and Scanning Protocol can safely reveal Burrowed Chryssalids, but the game provides no tools for mapping out where you have and have not scanned, and the Burrowed Chryssalid positions are variable enough you can't memorize where to scan. Realistically, if nobody gets hurt by Burrowed Chryssalids, it's because you got lucky and they just kept missing.

That said, the Overwatch-and-then-advance trick is okay to do when you're closing in on the Psi Gate. Regular non-Chryssalid pods will never be in the Psi Gate's vicinity, and the one regular Chryssalid pod back there is always far enough back you usually can't spot it without triggering the Gatekeeper to spawn. As such, if you're careful to not get close enough to trigger the Gatekeeper, the Overwatch-and-then-advance trick is an okay tool for reducing the odds of people being slashed. Just keep in mind that whoever is baiting out Chryssalids needs to be able to finish the Chryssalid off reliably by theirself, just in case all the shots miss. (Or Graze and do nearly no damage)

It's too bad Burrow's mechanics are so busted, as the legion of Burrowed Chryssalids is a pretty distinctive experience... but Burrow being broken means this mission ends up frustrating to play through, and no amount of player skill can fully eliminate the issues with the mission. If Burrowed worked properly, this might easily be my favorite golden path mission. As-is, I dislike playing through it a lot. (Though still less than the Forge: this goes by quicker and is less boring)

On a less negative note, an unusual quality of this mission is that you're incentivized to put it off, much more so than with the Blacksite or Forge. After all, almost none of the enemies in the mission are influenced by Force Level: if you put off the Blacksite, yeah, the 'boss' pod with the early Mec will end up laughably obsolescent, but the majority of the enemies will step up. If you put off the Psi Gate for a couple of months, its composition will barely change, whereas your own forces can have gotten a lot more powerful. It's another way the mission is distinctive, particularly in the base game where you should largely just do missions as soon as they're available.

Also, beating this mission always provides 225 Supplies. This is basically purely there to cover the cost of installing the Psi Gate in the Shadow Chamber, which costs 200 Supplies: unlike the Blacksite and Forge, this isn't really a payday mission. It's kind of weird of the game.

Narratively, this mission is weird but has some intriguing elements. I've already been over this pretty heavily in the Chryssalid post, but the area immediately around the Psi Gate itself has bits and pieces of what appears to be alien flora, which in War of the Chosen goes on to be the basis of the Xenoform biome. The implication seems to be that this stuff is just naturally drifting in through the Psi Gate and taking root, in the same way that eg human shipping has led to assorted plants and animals ending up in parts of the world far removed from their original habitat.

A piece I didn't mention in the Chryssalid post is that the Psi Gate map has the unique quality of the whole area being saturated with purple particle effects -exactly the same kind of particle effects the game breaks out for psionic abilities like Solace. The implication seems to be that the Psi Gate, being a powerful bit of psionic technology, is just naturally leaking psionic energy into the area as a side effect of operating -in conjunction with how much purple gets used for the Xenoform elements, I've wondered if the Xenoform biome is meant to be showing us the original Ethereal ecology, with psionic power being so standard that it's an important element of plantlife being able to thrive.

If so, this makes all the stuff with the Chryssalids intriguingly suggestive, and it's worth pointing out that one of the Tactical Legacy Pack mini-campaigns involves Chryssalids being drawn from the ocean by a psionic signal. It's possible this is just generic tropes about psionic stuff being used to influence minds, but I have to wonder, in conjunction with all this other stuff, if Chryssalids are meant to be from the same place as Ethereals and naturally drawn to psionic energies in the same way a predator on Earth might follow the scent of blood. (In addition to or in place of my 'Earth's above-water atmosphere isn't great for them' theory)

Nonetheless, I call this mission 'weird' from a narrative perspective because the Psi Gate is never properly contextualized by the game. Why is there a Psi Gate sitting in the middle of wilderness, and not deep in a heavily-guarded ADVENT facility or somewhere else more intuitively obvious? What were the Ethereals using it for? There's a number of ways to potentially explain this -the xenoforming could be the point rather than a side effect, for example- but the game doesn't address the topic at all. I'm mostly okay with this -I'd be much more unhappy with Tygan spouting a random baseless theory that is of course objectively true, for example- as your support staff don't have the necessary context to determine what this is about and to a certain extent don't really have reason to care: for them, the important part is that it's opportunity to strike directly at the Ethereals, and what the Ethereals were doing with it is unimportant.

But it's still a little odd how completely the topic is ignored.

There's also the odd point that the Codex connection is almost a suggestion that the Psi Gate structure is somehow important to more direct teleports -you unlock the Psi Gate by studying a Codex Brain- to the point I spent a while just assuming the Psi Gate was meant to double as something like a cell phone tower for teleports (As in, Psi Gates letting Codices and Avatars and probably other beings teleport directly to points inside some radius centered on the Psi Gate, not just what's actually depicted of 'walk through one Psi Gate to come out another Psi Gate'), but... this isn't actually suggested by the game and at this point I suspect was never imagined by the devs at all. If it was, I'd honestly expect Tygan to ramble to that effect after completing the Psi Gate Shadow Project.

It feels like such an obvious connection to draw, but alas, I suspect XCOM 3 will unambiguously contradict any such explanation. Which would be unfortunate from a worldbuilding perspective: unconstrained point-to-point teleportation is a capability fiction is often quick to pass out to hostile characters just for pure creator convenience reasons ("I want the villain to show up and snatch the widget... um... they teleport into the scene!") but which is enormously destructive to suspension of disbelief if not used extremely carefully. ("Wait, if the villain can teleport anywhere they like, why do we stand the slightest chance of beating them?") Providing a technological requirement the dystopian police state can construct to enable planet-wide easy teleportation would be an elegant way to let XCOM 2 pass such out to Alien Rulers, Avatars, Codices, and the Chosen, while letting later games not have to deal with the narrative pressures produced by such. ("Wait, why didn't XCOM 3's Bad Guys just teleport in and decapitate our leadership and whatnot?" "We dismantled everything that would let them do that between games.")

I do hope time proves me wrong on this point... but I don't have high hopes.

Network Tower

The second-to-last mission of the game, not unlocked until you've completed every Shadow Project.

Unlike the prior golden path missions, you do not need contact with a specific territory to launch the mission. It will generate in a specific territory and I suspect at some point in development such a contact requirement existed, but in the actual final product you can launch it the very instant you finish the Avatar Autopsy Shadow Project. (Which itself requires all other Shadow Projects have been completed to be allowed to start on, in addition to needing the Avatar body) As far as I'm aware this territory assignment has no other implications, either: you can't be jumped by Chosen in this mission, for example, making their territorial element irrelevant to the point.

Also, launching this mission locks you into the endgame state, thankfully with Bradford giving you significant warning. Once you've completed the mission, you will be unable to pass time, and thus unable to wait for Proving Grounds Projects to complete, Research to finish, soldiers to heal up, etc. So don't launch this mission if you're wanting to get something strategic done before ending the game, like unlocking and purchasing a specific beam-tier weapon. You'll still be able to level people up, buy instant-purchases you have the resources for, and so on, but anything that requires time passing? No-go.

Notably, this of course includes an inability to let anyone injured (Or, in War of the Chosen, rendered Tired or Shaken) in this mission recover before launching the final mission. This is less impactful than it could be, as the final mission lets you take injured soldiers into it, but of course that means they'll be going in missing HP, which isn't ideal. As such, ideally you'll actually send a different squad into this mission from whoever you want in the final mission, so that if injuries (Or deaths!) result it doesn't hurt your chances in the final mission: it's much more important to have your squad at its best in the final mission than in this mission.

War of the Chosen's changes make this less inconvenient but a bit more meaningful. In the base game, it's an annoying last-second pressure to either play perfectly or have been raising a secondary squad this whole time, in a game where perfect play is very difficult to achieve due to bugs and questionable turn mechanic decisions and where the design otherwise really expects you to be fielding basically just a regular full squad with no real backups. In War of the Chosen, Fatigue forces you to work with a larger roster (And the game ensures you have this larger roster), making it easy to send a B team or C team here because of course you have several Majors or possibly Colonels you don't actually intend to bring into the final mission, but on the other hand the Training Center overhaul, introduction of Bonds, and existence of the Resistance classes means this is a noticeably harder decision and its impacts if you're thoughtless are more meaningful: sending in your Skirmisher and getting them maimed or killed doesn't usually result in you shrugging and sending another basically-identical Skirmisher into the final mission the way you would respond to a maimed or killed Ranger in the base game if you do have adequate backup troops.

Notably, the Shaken status is not something you get to ignore: if you send someone onto this mission and they come out Shaken, you don't shrug and blow a Medikit charge or two at the start of the next mission the way you would an injured soldier in the base game, you simply can't send that soldier. This isn't terribly likely to crop up -this isn't a mission dense in enemies, and it shies away from the majority of the mechanics that lead to more Will rot, like enemies that summon- but it's a very straightforward example of this mechanic being more meaningful in War of the Chosen.

This being another one of those War of the Chosen changes that's really impressed me -I intensely dislike this two-mission mini-gauntlet in the base game, but like it quite a bit in War of the Chosen, even though no (relevant) changes have been made to the mini-gauntlet itself. It's amazing, especially because so many fixes are being made at once, often via individual changes pulling off multiple such fixes.

Anyway, for whatever reason the Network Tower mission has a unique gimmick attached to it before launching, which I'm a little surprised didn't get reused in any War of the Chosen-added missions: when considering launching the mission, you'll see that there's four text lines you can enable for an Intel cost. The Intel cost is randomly anywhere from 25 to 50 Intel per each option -so if you want to be sure you can purchase it all you need 200 Intel in time for the endgame- and furthermore these options are randomly selected from a larger pool. (Of eight total, specifically, meaning it's possible for you to do two runs and have neither run share options)

I like the idea here, but in practice it's easy to have plenty of Intel such that you just buy everything, making the whole system a bit pointless in practice -there's nothing to spend Intel on once you launch this mission anyway.

Anyway, most of these are basically just reused security tower Hack rewards, tweaked to last for the whole mission instead of a handful of turns. Not all of them, but most. Specifically, they are...

Squad Concealment

Squad starts with squad Concealment.

If you don't spend any Intel, your squad will not start out Concealed in this mission. This purchase gives your squad the standard squad Concealment your forces start most missions with. If for some reason you have limited Intel, this should be one of your top priorities.

This is unique, as it's mutually exclusive with the next one, but one of the two will be offered, sitting at the top of the list. Unsurprisingly...

Individual Concealment

Squad all starts individually Concealed.

... the alternative is another variation on Concealment.

'Individually Concealed' means each soldier's Concealment is separate from every other soldier's Concealment. If one soldier throws a grenade, gets flanked and detected, fires a weapon, etc, that soldier in particular will lose Concealment, but the rest of the squad will still be Concealed. A useful way of thinking of it is to treat it as if every member of the squad has Phantom, as the mechanical outcome is essentially identical.

In practice, this is... less than ideal. In raw mechanics, it's glitchy, with the game panning to each soldier and announcing Concealment on each of them three times apiece. In terms of player learning curve, it's the final example of XCOM 2 increasingly making Overwatch ambushes a bit of a newbie trap, as it's impossible to perform an Overwatch ambush with this form of Concealment: your initiating soldier will attack, breaking their own Concealment, and the rest of the squad in Overwatch will sit there and do nothing unless an enemy happens to successfully flank them. (Which is unlikely and concerning if it does somehow happen)

In practice it's probably the superior form of Concealment once you understand it: newly-activated pods won't account for the still-Concealed soldiers as they run for Cover, potentially making it easy to get a close-range flank, individual Concealment lets every soldier ignore Dodge once instead of only the soldier firing the first shot, and if your soldiers are powerful enough to stomp a pod without requiring every soldier act you can then scout with whoever is still Concealed. That's all a lot more useful than getting to perform an Overwatch ambush, especially given the kinds of enemies common on this mission. (Archons, for one)

But it still probably shouldn't have been made one of these options.

Extra Soldier

You get to bring a fourth soldier.

That's right: you normally only get to bring three soldiers into this mission!

This is thus one of the more demanding missions of the game, as the enemy counts and strengths aren't actually weakened particularly to accommodate. You won't see Gatekeepers or Sectopods, but that's basically it, and the mission is also unwilling to generate a bunch of the weaker enemy types like Sectoids. It's mostly mid-to-high-tier alien enemies.

Adding a fourth soldier does a lot to ease the mission's difficulty, especially in War of the Chosen where it means you can send two Bondmate pairs.

Indeed, I feel it has too much impact, in conjunction with it being random whether it's offered or not: whether this one option appears or not can be the difference between a tense challenge vs a stomp in which you're never in real danger. (Or, if you're having trouble, the difference between a sudden immense difficulty spike you can't handle vs the mission being merely a tense challenge) It really ought to have either been guaranteed to be on offer the way a Concealment option is guaranteed, or not been a part of the pool at all.

Squad Targeting

Raises squad's Aim by 15 and crit by 25 for the mission.

This is honestly probably the best of the assorted possible bonuses, simply because it's a fairly direct boost to your squad's offensive capabilities. Notably, Archons are one of the most common enemies to encounter in this mission, and their innate 25 Defense is high enough you may struggle to ensure the entire squad can hit 100% accuracy against them, especially if you're trying to send a B-team so you can conserve your A-team for the Alien Fortress. Similarly, Codices are common in this mission, and the terrain can make it difficult to get flanks on them: 15 more Aim can be the difference between a perfectly accurate shot that thus can't Graze vs a shot with 87% accuracy that can miss or Graze and get Codices actually shooting your squad.

The crit chance boost is pretty nice, too.

Squad Reflexes

Raises squad's Dodge by 33 for the mission.

Ideal play doesn't involve enemies shooting you in the first place, and Dodge doesn't even work on, for example, an Andromedon hurling acid at your squad.

You might as well grab it if you've got the Intel to spare, but if you're launching the mission with inadequate Intel this is one of the first possibilities for dropping.

Squad Precision

Raises squad's crit by 33 for the mission.

Not as good as Squad Targeting, but crit chance is still nice. One of the better options, simply because you'll probably benefit from it without specifically going out of your way to try to benefit from it.

But also easy to justify dropping if you don't have enough Intel to go around.

Squad Integrated Comms
Squad gains Squadsight for the mission.

This can be abused if you either get the squad all individually Concealed or bring a Phantom or Reaper, but if you're not exploiting it... sure, whatever? Squadsight does have silly edge cases where a soldier with Squadsight can hit a target inside standard range while one without Squadsight can't, so that might come up, and similarly you might have someone only able to move to a position with line of fire thanks to Squadsight, but if you're not going out of your way to abuse it then it's pretty unlikely to matter.

You'd really think this would be a cool gamechanger, but nope...

Squad Video Feed
Raises squad vision by 2 tiles for the mission.

This has two things going on: first of all, XCOM 2 defaults to maximum firing range being defined by line of sight directly, so this actually adds 2 tiles of firing distance to your squad. Second, as is illustrated by Concealment, just because you can see a pod doesn't mean it activates: it needs to see one of your soldiers. So sometimes you'll get the jump on a pod because they patrol just barely into your squad's enhanced line of sight, or because you stopped someone so they just barely gained sight of the pod.

It's... not anything to really plan around, and it's easy to end up confused and making a mistake because the game's base setup is liable to have gotten you thinking of the mechanics differently from how they actually work, so it's not particularly great that this exists as a choice... but it has a chance of helping, and the Network Tower mission is pretty tough. So. Might as well if you've got the Intel.

-----------------------------------------

Anyway, the actual mission itself.

Well, first of all, there's the odd point that the mission preview icon doesn't actually line up with any Network Tower layout I've actually seen generate, which is a little odd. Most mission preview images look to be screenshots taken right out of the game, where you'll see the exact chunk of terrain they're depicting at some point.

Second, while it's pretty clear the Network Tower mission is conceptually occurring in a City Center, it should be noted it's not actually using a standard plot type at all. Unlike most missions I can say that about, it nonetheless is a very procedurally-generated map -I've yet to see the exact same layout twice. It always has the transmitter sitting in front of a building area that contains your objective, but even that building is surprisingly variable; this is not like the Blacksite, Forge, and Psi Gate missions having a noticeable chunk of the map be 100% consistent.

Instead, the Network Tower mission takes place way up top of a building (How did you get here unnoticed, anyway?), with much of the map only passable to flying enemies. You at least don't have to worry about instant-death falls, as XCOM 2 continues to treat significant height differences as impenetrable barriers for knockback purposes, but it's a tricky element of the mission, and uniquely so in the base game -in War of the Chosen it's not that different from some sections of Sewer maps. Among other points, melee is unreliable here, as you may be activating a pod with nothing but air between you and them, where it'll take multiple turns of running to even reach them if you want to fight in close combat. (So another reason to not bring Templar or, to a much lesser extent, Skirmishers into this mission)

In general, while you won't always end up fighting at range, it's pretty likely. Among other points, your destination has a broad window providing visibility to inside where said window is always facing the transmitter object and thus a bunch of empty air: in conjunction with the complete inability to circle around behind, if a pod is in that area it's basically impossible to avoid activating them and ending up with a long-range shoot-out. It's also worth pointing out that the Cover on this map is pretty consistently very smashable; Grenadiers can help quite a bit here, especially since the structure that's your destination usually has Turrets guarding the entrance, and specifically has them placed on very destructible high ground. In conjunction with the aforementioned window, long-range smashing is desirable so you can avoid pulling a pod with less than the entire squad at the ready. (Mind, you should have Heavy Weapons and indeed Powered Heavy Weapons, so Grenadiers shouldn't actually be uniquely competent here, but the small squad size makes efficient packing of explosives beneficial)

The actual objective in the building is to Hack a workstation, and unusually that will instantly end the mission. If you're not confident in your ability to handle the forces in the building, you can cut the mission short by Hacking the terminal. For that matter, a Reaper can often essentially skip this mission -it doesn't matter that the Hack will reveal them if the mission ends right afterward, after all, making this the only mission in the entire game you can legitimately just stealth through if you like. You won't even be missing out on loot: you don't loot corpses in this mission, and I've never seen an enemy drop timed loot. So unless an Alien Ruler is hanging around, you're not missing out on anything by doing this. (Also, even if an Alien Ruler is hanging around, you're not missing out on anything in truth, since you wouldn't be able to use their body due to the clock-stopping issue)

Outside such abuses, this tends to be a tense mission, especially if you're playing the base game and haven't gone out of your way to get a broader team. The default squad size of three soldiers is able to wipe out individual pods without them getting a turn, thanks to high-level soldiers and high-end gear, but it's easy to slightly mismanage a turn or pull two pods or pull one pod when you're not actually ready and end up with an Andromedon shearing off most of someone's HP. And of course if any of your soldiers go down, it's a lot more immediately impactful a cut in effectiveness than in other missions where you're fielding a larger squad.

If you're lucky enough to get the extra soldier Intel option, that significantly reduces the pressure on you to be consistently careful, but it's still easy to have a slight slip-up get people maimed. Don't get careless just because you have a fourth soldier.

Then of course the fact that you're forced to launch the next mission immediately means that injuries and deaths here carries an impact into the final mission. This isn't too bad in War of the Chosen -just send the best troops you're not intending to send into the final mission- but in the base game it's entirely possible to reach this point with six Colonels plus three soldiers who are all below Captain. In that case, sending your next-best is a substantial drop in performance, while sending some of your best is risking you getting one of them injured or killed and substantially hurting your prospects in the final mission, where you really want to bring your A-game.

(This is one more reason Psi Operatives are a good idea to build up in the base game: making it so you can send Colonels into this mission and still send a maxed-out squad into the next mission even if this mission goes less-than-perfectly)

These factors mean that even though in some sense this is a fairly straightforward mission, it's still one of the game's more notable challenges.

Narratively, this mission is in a strange place. At a glance it seems sensible enough -the network tower is key to ADVENT soldiers being controlled, and is apparently also a mainstay of the Ethereal propaganda engine, so of course we went to deal with it- but looking back once you've beaten the game it's pretty confusing. Why are we attacking the network tower now, and not any sooner? No part of the game explains why X-COM was unwilling or unable to target it before but is able and willing to do so now, and it's not intuitive that this would somehow be preparation for the attack on the Ethereal HQ.

Meanwhile, from a more abstract position of narrative purposefulness, it seems a bit redundant. The function of this mission is a decapitation strike that will rip away the Ethereal regime's military foundations and sabotage their stranglehold on public perception in one fell swoop, essentially winning the war in one operation. Then the next mission is killing the Ethereals: realistically, these are both necessary, but in terms of storytelling they both fit into the box of assuring the audience that everything after this victory is basically a formality, where rolling credits afterward is appropriate. It's a little strange to have both.

Then there's the consideration of what the cinematics depict after you have beaten the game:

The ADVENT regime doing its best to carry on as if everything is business as usual.

I actually like this, as that's exactly what I'd expect ADVENT to do, and it gives the franchise flexibility; a common issue with video game series (Or anything with a similar format of releasing a complete, self-contained story and possibly following up with a sequel designed to still be basically a complete, self-contained story, repeat ad infinitum) is that individual entries often want to clean up every single loose end, and in the process often force later entries into incredibly bad positions. If Entry A declares that All The Bad Guys Are Gone Forever, does Entry B disrespect that and say 'well no, that ending is non-canon' so it can use those bad guys itself? That's not going to go over well if Entry A is beloved, which hopefully it is. Okay, but maybe Entry B can just... make up a whole new set of bad guys to fight? Well, sure, but if the identity of the first entry is heavily tied up in the unique, interesting foes you were fighting, that's a problem. And if you just say 'here's a new set of bad guys who are completely identical to the old ones, but Legally Distinct We Swear' that's not going to go over well either, pretty much no matter what.

So XCOM 2 leaving the door open, where we can get later entries either spending more time having fisticuffs with the dastardly evil ADVENT remnants or can fast-forward to past that problem being more-or-less resolved, is very nice.

But it does make this mission feel strange, undercutting the vibe of this mission and its accompanying cinematic: great! We ripped the veil away and ADVENT can't hide the awful truth any longer! Except actually apparently they kind of can? Similarly: awesome! We've disabled the entire hybrid military by freeing them from the network tower's control! Except apparently there's still plenty of ADVENT soldiers working to enforce the regime's status quo. 

So... what did we accomplish with this mission? Why am I, the player, supposed to feel accomplished in having done this Special Important Plot Mission that... doesn't seem to have actually had the effects it initially purports to have had?

I don't mind, exactly. In some ways the ending feels a bit like Reality Ensuing, where this mission is an important step but not a clean, complete victory as so often happens in pop culture. If later entries build on that tone, I'll probably quite like it, honestly.

But here and now it feels like something was dropped or mishandled.

I do have to wonder if the collaboration with Pavonis is relevant to this mission's issues. Long War 2 repurposes the network tower stuff in a way that is more clearly purposeful. It's easy to imagine it thus being lost in the shuffle whether the mission was terribly purposeful in XCOM 2 proper.

Alien Fortress

The Truly Final Last Mission With Nothing After It.

I personally call it T'leth since it's a pretty obvious callback to Terror From the Deep's undersea alien base, but as far as I'm aware the game itself just calls it the Alien Fortress. Or Operation Leviathan, if we're talking the mission codename; I'm not really sure why that's the codename the devs went with. I guess because the mythological leviathan was a sea creature?

In any event, there's a subtly neat touch with the Alien Fortress, in that the game kind of has it hidden in plain sight for the majority of a run. Once the Avatar Project bar is revealed, you'll get an Ethereal statue symbol on the Geoscape, which will have pips underneath it for any parts of the bar not assigned to Avatar Project Facilities: it's easy to notice this and then stop thinking any further on the icon.

However, the icon in question can be clicked on anytime after it's appeared, and if you do so you'll get a mission popup about the Alien Fortress, just as when clicking on any other mission icon. You have absolutely no reason to do this and I imagine most players never think to try, but it works. Even better, the icon in question always appears out in the Pacific Ocean: it's easy to interpret this as being purely so this Obviously Purely Informational Icon isn't placed on any land tiles, but is actually an in-your-face depiction of the actual physical location of the Alien Fortress: out in the ocean!

This is an amazing bit of sneakiness, and I have to wonder how many people have played the game multiple times without ever noticing it.

Anyway, aside spoiling yourself by clicking it, you can't meaningfully interact with it. Prior to completing the Network Tower mission, it's a locked mission, same as most missions that are in a territory you haven't gotten in contact with. Once you have completed the Network Tower mission, clicking into the Geoscape will force you into the 'launch this mission yes/no?' prompt as if you'd clicked an unlocked mission, and refusing will kick you right out of the Geoscape and back to the Avenger: this is how the game enforces an inability to pass time, since of course the game pauses when you're contemplating launching into a mission and doesn't pass time when poking around the Avenger.

So not a lot to say there, especially since I covered a lot of it in talking about the Network Tower mission.

Tactically, I've already covered this mission some in the Avatar post, but I mostly focused on the end bit there, which is actually only a relatively small portion of the mission.

Right away, it should be noted you do not have squad Concealment in this mission. Phantoms and Reapers will still start Concealed, but the squad as a whole is revealed by default. Which makes narrative sense -Bradford starts out talking about how hopefully you haven't been detected yet, and the Angelus Ethereal actually interrupts him to talk to X-COM. So yeah, they know you're here.

On the other hand, there's no time pressure to start: you can take this mission slowly and patiently if you like... and if you haven't brought a Phantom or Reaper, you should be taking the mission slowly, as a big part of what defines this mission is that it's filled with super-sized pods not seen anywhere else in the game. Examples include:

-A pod of two Heavy Mecs backed by six basic Mecs.

-A pod of two Gatekeepers backed by six Chryssalids.

-A pod of two Sectopods backed by four Heavy Mecs.

-A pod of eight Faceless.

-A pod of four Berserkers.

I've yet to deliberately catalogue the full range, but broadly speaking most pods are around equivalent to two regular pods stitched together, including the implication of stuffing pod leader types together in pairs. 'Broadly speaking' because it also violates standard pod rules in terms of combining enemies that normally can't share pods at all, like the Chryssalids-backing-Gatekeepers pod.

Interestingly, the range is almost exclusively alien troops plus mobile robots. No Turrets, which isn't too surprising, but also no ADVENT Troopers, Officers, Shieldbearers, Purifiers... the only standard ADVENT humanoid troops allowed to generate are Stun Lancers and, in War of the Chosen, Priests -and Priests won't be part of these super-sized pods, actually, but I'll come back to them later.

It should also be noted that I've never seen duplicate pods in this mission: I've never seen anything like two instances of the huge ADVENT Mec pod. Related is the Sectopod and Gatekeeper superpods -they both come in a few variations (eg two Gatekeepers supported by Andromedons instead of Chryssalids), but you'll never see two Gatekeeper superpods or two Sectopod superpods. On the other hand, every run I've done has had both a Gatekeeper superpod and a Sectopod superpod, so plan around needing to deal with this outstanding number of boss enemies.

Regardless, such massively oversized pods heavily encourages advancing carefully. You can, to a certain extent, blast them with splash damage, but outside Psi Operatives and the Commander's Avatar your area-of-effect options are largely not renewable. (Templar bring in Arc Wave, Ionic Storm, and Volt, but Volt and Ionic Storm still can't be spammed, and enemies rarely cluster to maximize Arc Wave's effectiveness, so War of the Chosen doesn't substantially change this) As the mission is long and the end portion involves plenty of enemies too, you don't want to be carelessly throwing around explosives to resolve the issues: ideally you'll arrange for your entire squad to be ready and kill enemies with a minimum of resources expended. The Commander's Avatar is a decent panic button, but their immediate damage isn't high enough to wipe out most of these groups immediately, so you still need to use the rest of the squad efficiently.

This is another case where bringing a Reaper is a huge relief. The map's lines of sight are awkward such that it's easy to activate a pod unexpectedly even with very careful movement, the pods being so huge makes this much more punishing than in other missions, and while the mission clearly tries to space out the pods most runs will have at least one case of a pair of pods close enough together it's easy to end up activating them both together. A Reaper can scout ahead swiftly and safely and keep contributing to combat via Silent Killer kills or to a more limited extent Claymore usage, which is important given you really can't afford to have a squad member just not contribute to combat directly. You can get through the mission without a Reaper, but it's a lot more frustrating -without a Concealed scout, this mission hearkens strongly back to the EU/EW problem of optimal play being an incredibly slow crawl with constant Overwatch, which remains Not Exactly Fun.

It's pretty clear this isn't the intention, as the mission has a fair amount of dialogue in the base game that moves forward a little bit per turn, and it's tuned so that if you advance fairly aggressively it'll run out right as you're reaching the final room. Fortunately, your squad should also be powerful enough you can get away with some slipups, so it isn't strictly necessary... but it's still a bit unfortunate. Hopefully XCOM 3 will more fully escape this issue -there's some promising signs from War of the Chosen's new content, at least.

Unsurprisingly, this undersea fortress doesn't use a standard plot type. Slightly more surprising is that its map is completely fixed -most of the enemies are randomized in both position and type, but the physical layout of the map is always the same across runs. It's probably for the best, but it's still a bit surprising considering the rest of the golden path missions have only partially fixed map generation routines. It's also mildly unfortunate in that sniping Sharpshooters don't really get opportunities to shine for most of it -the map rarely provides clear lines of fire over more than short distances, and while high ground is common throughout the mission most of it is poorly-placed for sniping. (The end area being a notable exception)

Also surprising is that this is one of the most directly changed base-game missions by War of the Chosen, and I'm not talking about the part where you can fight the Chosen here.

The big thing first:

This statue and the cinema panning over it marks a significant division in the mission that is handled differently between the base game and War of the Chosen, in a manner that impacts the entire mission.

In the base game, this mission is one map, and this cinema with the statue is triggered by walking a bit past a door that divides the map into two major gameplay sections.

In War of the Chosen, this mission is two maps, and this cinema occurs after the game loads you into the second map, which itself is accomplished by killing everything.

In some sense, this isn't really a change -it's clear the base game is expecting the player to have killed everything on the side of the door you start in before passing through it, and inactive pods are forbidden from patrolling past the door. Nonetheless, in practice this is a pretty big change with several effects.

Firstly, it's a pretty notable hit to the appeal of stuffing Psi Operatives into the closet and breaking them out just in time for this mission. In the base game, you can Dominate a Gatekeeper, Andromedon, or whatever you personally like that's valid, and then walk them in to have additional bodies for the final fight of the game. In War of the Chosen, the loading screen transition won't bring Dominated units along for the ride, and so that's no longer an option. This is pretty significant given Gatekeepers are one of the most notable Domination targets around, and they don't spawn in the final fight arena; this isn't 'oh, well, you'll have to conserve your Dominate', this is 'you just plain can't bring a Gatekeeper in to fight the Avatars'.

Secondly, it forces you to be thorough. In the base game, it's possible to end up walking around a pod and never activating it before you reach the door, in which case you get to just leave it behind, and that's actually optimal to do: you don't care about experience, enemy corpses, etc, since this is the final mission. Fighting a pod at this point is just an unnecessary risk and possibly wasting some of your limited resources. In War of the Chosen, though, if you get to the door having killed every pod you spotted, and the loading screen doesn't kick in... that means you need to turn around and find whatever pod you managed to circumvent.

Third, it takes away a slightly abusive option: in the base game, if you're unsure of your ability to adequately protect the Commander's Avatar in the final fight, you can just have them stay behind to avoid a sudden game over from losing a single unit. In War of the Chosen, the Commander's Avatar is locked into the last room with the rest of your squad -it's a pretty big room, to be fair, but it still means there's no fairly thoughtless place to stash the Commander's Avatar for maximum safety.

Fourth, status effects aren't carried across loading screens, which can create notably different outcomes when eg fighting an Andromedon. In the base game, if it splashes Acid on four of your soldiers, you're going to have to either burn healing resources or just accept the full amount of damage occurring before it times out on its own, possibly killing people. In War of the Chosen, if you immediately kill the remaining enemies on the map, your affected soldiers will only take the one turn of Acid damage and then it will magically vanish.

Overall it's a pretty big improvement to the design; it takes multiple turns to haul your squad through the door and that's a painful bit of tedium in the base game that I very much appreciate skipping right past in War of the Chosen. This mission's sheer size and quantity of enemies also leads to things like long wait times during the Alien Activity turn, more pressure on your computer, and so on, and War of the Chosen breaking it up helps with those issues some. Honestly, the mission probably should've been handled this way in the first place.

Even if it is a little unfortunate that Dominate's best opportunity to shine has been gutted.

Then there's the narrative bits, as I implied earlier. In War of the Chosen, you only really get three chunks of dialogue if the Chosen aren't around: the beginning of the mission, the beginning of the second part, and when you finally spot the first Avatar. In the base game, you additionally get multiple turns of dialogue between the Angelus Ethereal and your support staff throughout the first part, and even more such dialogue in the final part. I'll be coming back to this in more detail in a bit, but the short version is that War of the Chosen cut out absolutely unbelievable actions: I very much approve, even if it leaves the first part a bit quiet. (This mission has a unique tune that plays outside combat all the way until you've spotted your first Avatar, and in-game it's not so much ominous as it is so quiet I spent a while unsure if this mission was playing music at all)

And of course the enemy component has been adjusted, with the Chosen allowed to spawn and some of the new enemies allowed to spawn as well.

Chosen-wise, I've unfortunately not gotten around to experimenting much with what different combinations of living/dead Chosen result in within the mission. I'll hopefully actually get to that and adjust this space accordingly. The two extremes are straightforward enough, in any event: if they're all dead, none of them shows up and they don't matter. If they're all three alive, though, what happens is that the Chosen Assassin will spawn first, not long after you've left the initial area (It's based on crossing an invisible line), while the Hunter will spawn later but still in the first part, after crossing another invisible line. (I haven't tested if it's possible for both of them to be on the field. I suspect it's not, but I don't actually know)

The Warlock will then show up in the second part of the mission, past the loading screen. More precisely, he will be part of the first wave of reinforcements... which requires I talk about that whole thing, so let's.

The post-door/loading screen portion of the mission does not have scattered inactive pods patrolling in the darkness. It has exactly one pod: an Avatar flanked by two Archons, standing on a high ground chunk in what amounts to the center of this area of the map, refusing to move until activated. Nothing of interest happens until you activate this pod: you are free to wander around, getting people set up and scouting with Concealed troops, and so long as the Avatar's pod isn't attacked and doesn't spot your soldiers nothing will happen.

Once you do activate the pod, this triggers the Angelus Ethereal talking -plus, rather oddly, the Speaker, but I'll come back to that- and basically informing you that they're done playing nice.

More importantly, it sets into motion the primary gimmick of this mission: the left and right sides of the map are flanked by Psi Gates set atop high ground, three per side, and once the Avatar's pod activates enemy reinforcements arrive in the form of a four-unit pod appearing from a Psi Gate. One pods spawns after your turn ends, the other spawns once the enemy turn ends: thankfully, neither gets to take a real turn without you having a chance to react.

Nonetheless, that is a lot of enemies to fight, and you'll never see a given Psi Gate spit out reinforcements twice in a row, so they get spread out: you can't just go wild with massive area of effect attacks to clean up a given pair of reinforcement batches. They also, as usual with reinforcements, automatically activate even if no member can see your squad, allowing for enemies to generate in the shadows and on a later turn pop out and attack someone.

This is where the bit about the Warlock comes into play: he'll be added to one of the first of these four-soldier reinforcements -and I do mean added, as in he doesn't replace a pod or even an individual within the pod.

The actual objective at this step is to kill three Avatars to win the game: nothing else actually matters -which has the funny implication that the Warlock is the only Chosen you don't have to kill in this mission- with the later two each spawning in alongside a reinforcement wave on later turns. Once again, this is in addition to the four enemies already arriving.

The reinforcements themselves are very non-standard, even aside the part where they're pods of four enemies. Instead of being limited to ADVENT units, they're limited almost exclusively to aliens -the base game includes Heavy Mecs, and War of the Chosen adds Priests; I've personally only ever seen Priests appear alongside the third Avatar, but it's possible that's just a luck of the draw thing.

Almost any alien is possible: Gatekeepers are the only alien unit excluded from this pool (And Sectopods if you want to count them as alien units), making this basically opposite-land to standard reinforcements. Most batches are mono-pods, which unfortunately ends up a bit swingy in conjunction with the game picking reinforcements somewhat randomly: a batch of Sectoids, Vipers, or Faceless is unlikely to threaten your squad at all. A batch of Mutons, Elite Spectres, or Chryssalids is a lot more likely to be a notable hurdle. I've had runs where the endgame was a bit of a joke because too many of the pods were out-of-date aliens, while other runs saw nothing but deadly elites like Andromedons and struggled to win at all.

Which Psi Gates get picked seems to be partially randomized, partially dictated by your own actions. My own experience is that the game prefers to alternate left/right sides, and 'walks' the reinforcements away from your squad: I've never seen the third Avatar spawn from closer than one of the back-most Psi Gates, and it always picks whichever of those two doesn't have anyone nearby, regardless of whether I advance my squad on the left or on the right. But otherwise I've gotten inconsistent results that don't seem to correlate to my decisions, such as sometimes the game refusing to use the closest Psi Gate past the first reinforcement batch and other times using it three turns in a row.

This unpredictability unfortunately puts Proximity Mines in an awkward position here. In principle, they're a great tool, able to catch 4 enemies at once for devastating damage and significant Shred, and letting you basically pay forward a spare soldier-turn. (ie you wipe out all enemies currently around, find you have a soldier still has a turn, and shrug and toss their Proximity Mine onto a Psi Gate) In practice they're frustratingly unreliable, where you might get a ton of free damage on a tough batch of enemies like Elite Spectres, or you might pick a Psi Gate that never drops in reinforcements before you win, or you might kind of waste the Proximity Mine on vaporizing some Sectoids or Vipers your Katana Bladestorm Ranger could've taken out trivially for free.

On that note, Bladestorm abuse is also less reliable than you might hope, as part of the game's routine seems to be pretty heavily prioritizing staying away from Psi Gates you have someone right on top of: usually a Bladestormer standing in position to murder an arriving pod will instead find a pod arriving from the Psi Gate next door such that they need to get to Cover and so on, or have reinforcements arrive from the other end of the map and when you sigh and send them charging to help then a pod arrives where they'd been standing. I've had a couple occasions where Bladestorm worked out, but usually doing stuff like charging ahead and using a Grapple to get ahead of the Psi Gate 'walking' effect just results in the reinforcements arriving elsewhere.

This is also where Blaster Launchers really pay off, giving you much more ability to respond to reinforcements quickly and efficiently thanks to their bonkers range and generous targeting behavior. It's especially great to catch the Avatar-including waves with them, especially on the higher difficulties where it lets you Shred the Avatars right away while still devastating their buddies. Nothing can really match Blaster Launchers here -except maybe getting lucky with a Void Rift's secondary triggers.

Reaper-the-skill also has a decent chance of getting to strut its stuff here, or for that matter in the earlier parts; you're facing unusually large numbers of enemies, Avatars have a non-trivial chunk of innate Defense (Making the assured hit on that first strike useful), and the situation overall encourages using area-of-effect attacks but not just throwing them out thoughtlessly: blasting a group with an explosive to soften them up and then finishing them with Reaper-the-skill can ensure you still have another explosive shot for the next oversized group you need every member of dead now. In the base game this unfortunately runs into competing with Rapid Fire -which is one of your best tools for picking off Avatars- while in War of the Chosen the auto-hit on the initial strike tends to be moot (Templar auto-hit anyway, and you did pick up the Katana, right?), but the Training Center overhaul certainly makes it easier to grab it as a just-in-case. (Not to mention Rapid Fire is no longer so amazingly good)

Also, if you have Alien Hunters, the Icarus Armor's teleport is actually pretty good to keep in mind here. I wouldn't trust it in a base-game Ironman run, and in a non-Ironman run you should absolutely drop a save before trying given how prone it is to crashing in the base game, but those qualifiers aside a unit being able to jump wherever you need at a key moment is pretty amazing. War of the Chosen makes its peak potential even higher; teleporting next to an Avatar and then Rapid Firing with the Disruptor Rifle for assured crits can let you abruptly wipe out an awkwardly-positioned Avatar. Given that this can win the mission if it's the last Avatar, that's potentially very useful!

As noted earlier, it's not terribly realistic to stay on top of the waves indefinitely, or indeed at all if the game sticks to the high end of the range of reinforcements it can pull from, so it's actually pretty important to have the ability to take out the third Avatar with a minimum investment of squad effort. Being able to take it out with just one or two soldiers can be what lets you win at all if the squad is getting bogged down by enemies or has even taken casualties. By a similar token, you ideally hold onto such tools until that final Avatar -having your Reaper blow Banish on the second Avatar can be what gets you a game over instead of a victory.

Speaking of victory, completion of this mission of course results in assorted plot cinemas, a nebulous comparison of your performance to the rest of the world (I'm extremely skeptical of some of the reported values for 'the world', but am unsure if that's a product of mods, buggy reporting, or what), and the credits rolling. So moving on to the more narrative elements...

Well, first of all, I should return to the topic of the base game/War of the Chosen contrast in more detail.

As I noted earlier, the main distinction here is cut dialogue; in the base game, there's a much lengthier period of the Angelus Ethereal attempting to talk your crew into standing down by asserting that the Ethereals have nothing but good intentions for Earth. I'm of mixed feelings that War of the Chosen cut much of this particular dialogue; in addition to the quietness issue I noted earlier, the dialogue itself works well with what we see of the Chosen/Ethereal interactions, where the Angelus Ethereal talks about compassion and love and so on alongside abusing them for failing to think exactly correctly and giving minor lip. I suspect the actual reason this dialogue got cut is to accommodate the Chosen showing up -they actually have custom dialogue for exactly this mission.

More important is the dialogue once you trigger the Avatar fight: in War of the Chosen, you get a brief speech from the Angelus Ethereal -and a guest appearance by the Speaker, even though he apparently died??- where they make one last, more threatening attempt to convince you to back off, and the dialogue is done afterward until you've killed your last Avatar. This is a huge improvement over the base game (Aside a niggling detail that they accidentally caused the Angelus Ethereal to repeat a chunk of dialogue with the new setup, whoops), as in the base game we instead have the following turns involve Bradford screaming in your ear about how ADVENT is Murdering All The Civilians, Hurry Up And Kill All The Ethereals!!!

This bit from the base game is probably the most egregious, in-your-face example of the writing being sufficiently focused on convincing you the Ethereals are evil that other concerns are lost -concerns like making sure the writing makes the slightest bit of sense. There's several issues here: I've touched on how dubious it is for the Ethereals to initiate rapid genocide in response to some soldiers in their base on the level that they need humans alive to harvest, but what I haven't touched on is that even if we accept that the Ethereals doing this makes character sense -War of the Chosen's illustration of Ethereal personality arguably makes this piece plausible, after all- there's too many other problems with it.

First of all, Bradford pushing the player to finish the Ethereals faster is nonsense. They're not personally crushing humanity's minds with their immense psychic powers: Bradford is telling us that ADVENT is killing civilians en mass, and such an order wouldn't be magically revoked by killing the Ethereals. Indeed, as I noted earlier the end cinematics show the ADVENT regime continues on in the absence of the Ethereals; there are narratives that nonsensically treat killing the leadership of an evil regime as instantly ending the regime's evilness, but XCOM 2 isn't, so even by its own internal logic this is nonsense.

Second, as a result of this immediately prior point, if you try to take it at all seriously the narrative is effectively negating the value of the X-COM victory: if the Ethereals did indeed issue such an order and get listened to and it was as effective as Bradford makes it sound, then humanity is largely wiped out regardless of how fast the Commander's squad kills the Ethereals. That's not a deliberate implication of the game: the ending cinematics are largely presenting things as 'there's a lot of work to be done, but the future is looking good for humanity'. So this is straight-up an error.

Third, the mechanical plausibility of this scenario is nil. Right away we have the issue that the network tower was sabotaged/hijacked and is ostensibly key to the Ethereal global command system; how are they issuing this genocide order so swiftly? But whatever, let's pretend that's not an issue: it's still the case that things take time. There will be a delay between the Ethereals issuing the genocide order and it being executed (Even if their minions don't hesitate to literally commit genocide!), and there's going to be a delay between the murders starting and the Avenger having any chance to hear about it, especially since the civilians the ADVENT forces have easiest access to are the city centers the Avenger isn't in close contact with rather than the resistance camps hidden in the wilderness X-COM is in ready contact with. (Exacerbated by XCOM 2's bizarre insistence that X-COM is improbably ignorant of what's going on in city centers and so on) Bradford hearing about this stuff so fast to then scream at you to go faster is pretty much completely unbelievable right there: it's fake drama.

There's ways to technically address some of the points I'm raising here, but only by invoking explanations completely at odds with what the game is depicting and that worsen other issues: certainly, the Ethereals could just order their orbital assets to start bombarding the Earth. That would be swiftly obvious to the Avenger no matter where they were, after all... but you're not hearing about orbital bombardment. If it was happening, likely what would actually happen is that the Avenger would go down, caught by this indiscriminate orbital fire, the Commander would die and/or have their psychic connection to their Avatar break, and the player would get a big game over screen. So that's a non-starter of an explanation.

Thankfully, War of the Chosen cuts this nonsense entirely. I'm curious if the dev team actually did sit back and go 'wow, this is dumb and needs to be removed' or if it got removed for some completely unrelated reason, but whatever the case it's a huge improvement in the narrative of the endgame.

Unfortunately, the endgame's narrative is... still less-than-ideal. It's a significant step up over the prior game's ending, especially in War of the Chosen, but it still has a lot of problems, many of which are just... baffling to me.

Right away, we once again have Load-Bearing Boss Syndrome: once you kill all the Avatars, the Alien Fortress starts collapsing for literally no reason. This is at least easier to handwave than the Uber Ethereal's death triggering the Temple Ship's collapse, in that this is an underwater fortress where a bunch of high-power weaponry was fired about: one could pretend the fortress is collapsing because the fighting did enough damage to let the ocean's pressure do the rest. I don't believe for a second anyone working on the ending ever meant for that to be the explanation, mind, but you at least can headcanon something here, unlike with the Temple Ship.

Second, and tied directly to the first issue, is that as part of this dubious drama your crew run to a Psi Gate (A specific one in the very back that is only used for this endgame cinema) only for it to close right in front of them followed by the Commander's Avatar forcing the Psi Gate to stay open. This bit of drama doesn't strictly depend on the Alien Fortress collapsing to be effectual -your squad being trapped beneath the ocean would be a death sentence regardless- but it is relying on the collapse to lend urgency to the scene, where we can't just have Tygan and Shen frown and start fiddling with the Psi Gate to try to get it working again while the squad is bored but doesn't necessarily have reason to be concerned.

But even ignoring how dubious the base's arbitrary collapse is, this is still a pretty baffling scene. Why was the Psi Gate at the back of the fortress connected to the Avenger's Psi Gate in the first place? Why does it abruptly cut out? Why can the Commander's Avatar will it to work again? Sure, yes, it's broadly a piece of psionic technology, but Tygan and Shen could get their Psi Gate operational without any psionic powers backing the attempt: clearly, it's not that a Psi Gate runs on psionic energy that is normally provided by the Ethereals, or anything similar that would more-or-less justify the Commander's Avatar being able to just spray psionic energy at the Psi Gate to get it working again.

The actual explanation is that this is a scene to contrive for the Commander's Avatar to be left behind, as the following scenes are built on the Commander's Avatar being alone, but not only is the contrivance layers of dubious but more importantly that goal has serious issues all by itself.

Once the squad is through, now the Ethereals in coffins scattered throughout the Avatar fight arena decide to initiate Stock Evil Laughter Clip and attack the Commander through the Commander's Avatar. What? Why?? Whatever their exact motivation here, shouldn't they want to catch the entire squad up in their spiteful taking-you-with-me? The Commander heroically saving their squad shouldn't happen: it should be interrupted, or never have a chance to happen, the Ethereals marshaling themselves to zap the Commander's Avatar before the escape, not after.

Furthermore, one has to wonder why walking the Commander's Avatar through the Psi Gate they were maintaining was ever the intention: it seems intuitively implausible that the Commander's Avatar can maintain the portal from inside of it, so you'd think they'd just write off the body and disconnect the Commander before the Ethereals even get to their bizarrely-delayed zapping. You can't even argue such a disconnect is meant to be somehow undesirable to do in its own right, like suggesting a disconnect needs to be done slowly and carefully or whatever...

... because we get Bradford ordering a severing of said connection to stop the attack on the Commander, and Tygan's response is to say that's a bad idea because of the ongoing attack, implying such a disconnect would be fine if only the Ethereals weren't in the middle of frying the Commander's brain.

So why didn't the Commander disconnect right after the rest of the squad got through the portal?

(Because this is a Dramatic Scene, that's why, but that's an utterly atrocious answer: a dramatic scene should make sense to happen on its own merits to strengthen the drama. If realistically thinking about the scene makes the drama unbelievable, that's a bad scene)

All this then leads into a Kamehameha-off where the Commander's Avatar wins in a psi-off with all the Ethereal shades at once.

Excuse me, what?

The plot so far hinges pretty heavily on the idea that the Ethereals, though physically dying, are not really diminished in psionic ability by this: the psionic network is indicated to be directly powered by them. The base game heavily implies Codices are some manner of Ethereal projection using a technological foundation to 'anchor' their projection. This very scene involves the Ethereals psionically assaulting someone even though their bodies are so wasted they're sitting in coffins that are almost certainly meant to be life-support chambers. Yes, they die without a body, as evidenced by Avatars having the Ethereal shade explode when the Avatar is destroyed -but even there, the Avatar Autopsy involves an Ethereal shade escaping the body and talking, implying that it's not quite as clean-cut as 'physical death=Ethereal immediately gone forever'.

More ambiguously but still relevantly, I've brought up the subtle callbacks to The Bureau. In that game, the two Ethereals we meet don't have physical bodies of their own at all, and can survive a separation from host bodies in some capacity for quite some time: the player Ethereal starts the game locked up in a suitcase with no apparent host, apparently in some form of hibernation until the suitcase is opened and they latch onto Carter, and the other Ethereal indicates that it's standard modus operandi for Ethereals to be in hibernation for centuries or millennia until it's time for them to wake up and do whatever it is they're supposed to do. It's distinctly possible XCOM 2 intends for the Ethereals we're seeing to operate on the same general basis, where their real self is entirely a psionic construct and the physical bodies we see aren't strictly necessary to their functionality as psionic beings. Notably, XCOM 2 plays up the Ethereal mastery of organic manipulation; it's left ambiguous whether any of their servants are manufactured whole-cloth (In the sense of 'no, there is no Faceless proto-species the Ethereals just tweaked a bit'), but the plot hinges directly on them constructing bodies. (The Avatars, and secondarily the larger ADVENT hybrid population... and then the Chosen, in War of the Chosen!)

Which is to say it's entirely possible XCOM 2 is intending for the Ethereal physical bodies we see to be, themselves, a manufactured species that exists solely to be a vehicle for the Ethereal psionic shade that is the only 'natural' part of them as a species. Certainly, this would neatly contextualize the Uber Ethereal rambling about 'the gift' -in this context, 'the gift' would basically be a term for how good of hosts a species is: weak in the gift? Terrible host, 0/10, would not possess again. Strong in the gift? Awesome, let's replace our current bodies with these guys.

Even if none of this The Bureau-connected stuff is the intent, we still have the core point that XCOM 2 pretty unambiguously intends for the Ethereals to be psionically powerful, ancient and thus experienced practitioners (It's ambiguous, but some of the dialogue in relation to the Ethereals seems to suggest that individual Ethereals have been alive for centuries -much like The Bureau's Ethereals, I should emphasize), and strongly implies that the condition of their body is ultimately a secondary factor to all this.

So why is the Commander's Avatar able to 'outmuscle' not just one such being, but somewhere over a dozen?

Seriously, you can see six of them in this one shot, and that's not all the ones depicted.

This is the psionic version of having one completely inexperienced, untrained individual go challenge an entire team of experienced professionals at whatever sport you care to name and then single-handedly winning against all of them at once. ie obviously nonsense if you're not going to put any effort into setting up an explanation for how this could possibly happen. Why did this make it into the final game? No, seriously, why?

As the baffling cherry on top of our baffling sundae, none of this matters. The fortress is already collapsing for no good reason, the Ethereals are already going to be buried and almost certainly have their physical bodies die, there's no narrative functionality served by having the Commander win a psi-off. If this psi-off had been used to justify the fortress collapsing, I'd have sighed but at least understood why any of this is happening, as then it would be finishing off the Ethereals in a manner that sidestepped the unpleasant morass of having X-COM deliberately commit genocide.

In practice, the only function this entire sequence of events serves is give the Ethereals an opportunity to allude to the idea that some other threat is out there, setting up for XCOM 3 without strongly pre-committing to an overly-specific scenario.

Which is actually a pretty smart thing to do, mind; too many series suffer from dangling a clear, specific sequel idea at the end of one entry, with the actual next entry then not wanting to run with that exact follow-up (Possibly because further thought has revealed it would be an awful sequel, for example), and I do think more series should be willing to go with vaguer sequel hooks than is the general norm.

But delivering this info absolutely does not require any of this utterly bizarre nonsense. The stinger of psi energy leaking from the ocean floor is already a pretty strong hint, and the dialogue portion could easily have happening during the combat -have each Avatar killed lead to the Ethereals getting more desperate in tone, with only one Avatar standing then prompting all this dialogue about how they can't fail because the universe is doomed if they fail.

On the plus side, XCOM 2 already proved willing to quietly retcon Enemy Unknown/Within rather than sticking to its guns no matter how nonsensical said guns might be. I'm hopeful that if XCOM 3 touches on this endscene in any capacity it will do so in a manner that avoids implying the nonsense parts remain canon. It would've been nice for this game to not do the nonsense in the first place, but I have a lot more tolerance for a series that is clearly able to have second thoughts about itself producing dubious moments than I do a series that refuses to back down from established canon no matter how impossible the established canon might be. The former can work toward a more coherent narrative in spite of stumbles. The latter is just going to keep digging itself deeper.

Fortunately, the rest of the ending holds up better, even if there's bits I can -and have- picked at before.

The basic idea presented by the rest of the ending is that the network tower hack X-COM did hijacked the propaganda system to get a lot more people doubting, which has led to more people jumping ship. This makes sense at a glance, and nicely enough the cinema acknowledges that the broader resistance doesn't have infinite resources -it's in the 'everything is great anyway' manner of saying that the resistance is 'barely keeping up' with the flow of refugees, but still, that's appreciated; too often fiction treats it as if all difficulties vanish once The Bad Guys are defeated, which is not only horribly unrealistic but tends to be bad on a more pure storytelling level too. Among other points, it's poor planning for the future: a sequel following up has to either spit on the prior ending by saying that it was simply false, or has to jump through really ridiculous hoops to invent some new problem to be overcome.

By a similar token, it's made clear that fighting is still ongoing. The presentation is that ADVENT is now pretty clearly losing, of course, but there's plenty of room here for a sequel or side game to decide this period would be good to explore, in addition to it making realistic sense that a major victory isn't an instant, total victory.

(I still think a The Bureau-style game set in the XCOM 2 timeframe could be amazing)

I particularly like how you actually can see the tower guards are being snuck up on in this sequence. The first time I beat the game, I basically rolled my eyes at this sequence because I'd taken it as the cheating form of 'sneaking' where the story simply doesn't show the sneaking folks at all until it's time for them to spring their ambush or whatever, but no, you absolutely can see them before they strike. It's nice!

Mind, this is the sequence I've picked at before, as our fellow in front grabs one of the Trooper's rifle and is apparently ready to use it immediately, flagrantly contradicting the attempted justification for why we don't just steal and use ADVENT weapons. I'm really sad I've yet to see a mod for a loot-based progression system -there's mods that do things like add player-usable ADVENT weaponry, but as far as I'm aware the only mod to do a weapon-looting system of any sort is the A Better series, where Supply Raids in specific will let you loot ADVENT-aesthetic weaponry with non-standard mechanics. (But you still progress your weapons technology exclusively by developing and building it yourself)

A similar issue or oddity is that the endgame is focused pretty exclusively on the ADVENT end of things: not a single (non-hybrid) alien is depicted, which seems pretty strange given the ADVENT administration is inextricably tied up in the alien overlords. The picture being painted of the ADVENT administration carrying on as best it can would logically imply there'd still be Sectoids, Archons, Andromedons, etc, still participating, but we don't see them and don't get a suggestion for why we don't see them. (ie we don't hear about the aliens taking their spaceships and leaving, for example)

We also don't ever -at any point in the entire game- have the consideration of orbital assets addressed. There's still UFOs zipping about: it's not like the Ethereals dismantled their space fleet. This raises a bunch of problematic questions and puts some unfortunate pressure on the uplifting tone of the ending: it seems highly likely that there's still tons of aliens living in who-knows-how-many spaceships, and if they all decide they're not happy with the Earth situation and would rather bomb it into the stone age there doesn't seem to be much room for the Earth to actually fight back.

There's a number of ways these kinds of concerns could be sidestepped, and it's possible later games will pick one of them -for example, it could be that most of these spaceships carried on with the Ethereal agenda of seeking out more species to enslave, and if they left Earth more than a decade ago that would directly imply that turning around to attack the Earth would take more than a decade- but it's honestly pretty strange XCOM 2 never does touch on this topic at all, and the overall handling of things makes me doubt that the devs have a good explanation in mind and just forgot to explicate it to the audience. (Even considering how many tidbits I've dug up where the game does fail to convey an apparently-intended more-or-less-reasonable explanation)

Notably, Chimera Squad continues to dodge the issue even while making a spaceport a notable plot beat. To be fair, Chimera Squad is clearly being careful to avoid stepping on XCOM 3's toes, so this isn't necessarily all that telling, but it certainly emphasizes the probability that no, XCOM 2 doesn't have a sensible-but-unfortunately-unmentioned explanation in mind. If the devs failed to mention it because it was too obvious to them or the like, Chimera Squad would have no reason to so completely dodge this topic.

Even so, I think these bits of the endgame work fairly well as a sketch of the start of the ADVENT government coming to pieces, where X-COM has struck a decisive blow and the audience can be assured that ADVENT isn't going to just force things back to the status quo after some brutal crackdowns.

It helps that they're decent bits of cinematography in their own right.

War of the Chosen of course expands on things a bit, adding a Reaper Ending, a Skirmisher Ending, and a Templar Ending.

The Reaper one I'm not sure what to make of it. It's just Volk talking about how it's finally time to 'come home', with a bunch of Reapers then marching on a burning city center. I guess it's supposed to be representative of humans taking back their own cities from the alien overlords? Maybe? I basically feel it's there to fill a mandate of giving each Resistance faction a piece in the ending, rather than actually adding anything in particular.

The Skirmisher piece is clearer in function, and I very much appreciate it, as it makes it clear that ADVENT's breakdown includes that more hybrids are ceasing to be loyal -this addresses one of the issues I had with the ending in the context of the base game, where The Evil Government Collapsing carries an implied oncoming complete genocide of the ADVENT slave-soldiers for daring to have... been born psychically-controlled slaves?

This bit helps a lot by suggesting that, yes, there are still loyal 'peacekeepers' and yeah they're probably going to be killed, but that it's actually a valid option for them to have second thoughts about fighting for their evil government and bail. Nicely, Chimera Squad follows through on this, with there still being a relative minority of ADVENT-loyalists who are of course Bad Guys we're going to kill but the majority of hybrids we see are not that.

It's really the bit that first got me thinking of the Skirmishers as a huge improvement to the moral dimension of XCOM 2. It's only after seeing this that I started looking back on stuff like Double Agent in a similar light.

The Templar ending is redundant and weird, just re-emphasizing the stinger about there being another threat on the horizon, but with Geist... apparently having expected this? For some reason?

It also makes the psionic energy leaking from the ocean floor into something much more violent as part of making it visible from the surface, which is sort of understandable but still janky, especially since it seems unlikely XCOM 3 will follow that closely on XCOM 2 in timeframe. And I don't even mean the part where Chimera Squad is set a few years later, I mean the part where if XCOM 3 decides to sideline ADVENT entirely in favor of The New Threat (Which seems likely) then it would need a few years for it to be plausible to mop up ADVENT, re-establish human-controlled governance, repair battle damage, and otherwise get settled into a situation plausibly able to fight off a new invasion.

Among other points, I doubt XCOM 3 is going to start us off with this initial entry portal surrounded entirely by fortifications, artillery batteries, warships at the ready, etc, that splatter the first wave of invaders the second they come through. That would be funny... but, well, that's part of why I doubt it's going to happen: these are not games that are big on humor. Anyway, point being if it's so incredibly obvious, that's a problem if XCOM 3 wants the world to be caught off guard by this latest invasion. So: janky.

Overall, XCOM 2's endgame plot is very weak, riddled with weird issues, but it should be emphasized that it's still a marked improvement over Enemy Unknown's endgame plot, and furthermore endings are often one of the weakest parts of any piece of fiction: a good ending is hard, and video games in particular seem to have more difficulty than other art forms with endings. (Among other points, it's pretty obvious that the need for an Ultimate Challenge often ends up distorting narratives that don't naturally lend themselves to such: think of how often video games end up making the primary antagonist into a supercombatant, even when their narrative presence is more about things like political power)

And given how much evidence there is that the game changed major concepts and was rushed... it's kind of amazing the ending holds up as well as it does.

On a possibly-related note, this icon in the files is labeled as if it's a mission image icon, but is unused and doesn't correlate properly to anything in the final game. I suspect this was at some point the Alien Fortress mission image, but if so the concept of what the Alien Fortress would look like and how it would be invaded changed pretty heavily: you can see a chain of Psi Gates in the lower-left that appear to be arcing psionic energy between each other and the sphere in the upper right, which itself seems likely to be a portal, so that would suggest a psionic portal into the Fortress was long the idea, but... quite different in details.

It's labeled 'Alert_Gateway', for reference; the Alert_Name format is used mostly, but not exclusively, for mission image names.

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Next time, we move on to miscellaneous missions that don't share a clear connection with any of these categories, starting with the base game examples.

See you then.