XCOM 2 is What Happens When You Lose Enemy Unknown
- Thread starter Encaen
- Start date
I was never under the impression that the game was set in a world where we failed to fend off the invaders, the trailers coupled with the plot of Enemy Unknown/Within seems more in line with the idea that we did win, but whatever the Etherials where running away from and preparing us to fight was what took over (a lot of people don't seem to understand what happened at the end of the game).
To put it simply it makes people feel like their effort was pointless because canonically they lose anyway, and it feels futile to play the previous game again or for anyone that picks the game up in the future. To go with one of your analogies it would be like if every football season you won every game but next season every time everybody claimed you lost badly instead, at some point you'd feel like not bothering to try anymore and those victories wouldn't seem so great anymore. I'm not saying it's particularly rational, but that's how some players will feel. They should have just gone with something like Zontar's suggestion and have new aliens or reinforcements move in instead, it would have made more sense and kept everybody happy and it would have felt like an actual continuation instead of a retcon as it seems like now.MarsAtlas said:
Personally, I got the same sort of feeling when I played the Fatal Frame games because despite having multiple endings each and every successive game in the series went with the bad one. I mean, why bother working my butt off to get any other ending when it's not even going to carry into the next game?
Other than that, I'm interested in this concealment mechanic. I'm guessing this means that we will no longer have aliens strike the same old dramatic poses when a soldier gets a good look at them over and over again like we did with Enemy Unknown.
"Something in the past can't be ruined by something in the present or future" is a claim I've heard by people just looking to dismiss the claims of others that have had just that happen as irrelevant, childish, whatever, and every time it is false. The fact is it can be and has happened to everyone, including you, whether you remember it or not, just because you have a high tolerance for this kind of thing doesn't mean it doesn't happen to you. New things making someone think differently of what they have seen and done happens all the time, and if that makes them think negatively then it is "ruined", even more so if it keeps other people that haven't yet experienced those things from doing so. Everybody has something they once enjoyed and activities they once loved that they no longer like for whatever reason, or something stupid they once did that they liked doing at the time but realize was stupid and thus don't look back on it fondly anymore, that's what "ruined" is. You might love potato chips for instance but eat a bad batch of potato chips and get sick badly enough for a while and you'll probably involuntarily feel a little sick whenever you think of potato chips for a long while if not for the rest of your life even if you get past it and eat them anyway, that's the way the human mind works.MarsAtlas said:
This is what the direction that XCOM 2 is taking is doing, it's making some people feel like they shouldn't have bothered to save the world last time because that's not what the end result for future games was, and this has tainted their memories of playing the previous game and will probably color what they think of XCOM 2 whether they are consciously aware of it or not. It's even worse because doing that was completely unnecessary and thus "ruining" could have been avoided.
Maybe I missed it, but what reason was given for the sequel assuming you failed the first game? All I saw was a bunch of stuff about level design.
Most people lost there first games and most games are lost in comparison to people winning the war so they used that as a way to play on the next game.008Zulu said:
I wont my first game but im not really bothered by it. Alt world where my forces failed in the final battle is fine by me xD
Until told otherwise I will continue to assume my theory stated above that the occupation in XCOM 2 is by the malevolent forces the Etherials where running away from and the reason we where being turned into their living weapons, and that canonically we still won the war and that it's a Half Life like situation where we won the initial conflict, but the one right after was so overwhelming we lost it.Veldie said:
I honestly don't care about the premise being predicated on losing the first X-COM game and I frankly don't get the minds of people who seem to care about this. It's not like you're bringing anything material forward between games, just your imagination - so like, use it and have fun.
I am bothered by it. On the same level I was bothered by the ending for the Mass Effect series; What's the point of putting the time and effort in to getting the best gear, getting the squad up to their maximum if in the end, none of it matters?Veldie said:
immortalfrieza said:
... this logic makes me weep for all of fiction, be it video-games or literature.
Zontar said:
It's been explained multiple times by the devs in various previous interviews that you can think of XCOM 2's as going off your losses rather than your wins, which is even mentioned in the article: If you won, and defeated the Temple Ship, then congratulations, that's the end of that story. If you lost XCOM Enemy Unknown however, then the story continues into XCOM 2.
008Zulu said:
One should also keep in mind that the "suggested" way to play Enemy Unknown was on Classic Iron Man, a difficulty level that meant some bad RNG in one mission could cost you the entire campaign. I've won a few Classic Iron Man campaign and I bet most hardcore players have, but I also know that I have at least a dozen abandoned games where I realized that I wouldn't be able to win, no matter what I did and started over. Statistically, this holds true for pretty much everyone but the absolute most hard of the hardcore crowd. As such, XCOM 2 simply runs with one of your many, many failed attempts as the canon, instead of one of your victories, which is statistically the minority.Uliana said:
So why would they have us save the world in the first game if what we did, never actually matters? It doesn't make sense.Uliana said:
You didn't save the world, the vast majority of your playthroughs ended in failure. Every reload = failure, every abandoned save = failure, playing on anything other than Classic Ironman = failure (deal with it!). Your few victories are insignificant compared to your many failures and XCOM 2 just reflects that.008Zulu said:
I was super interested before, but I'm sold now. Just put that overwatch fix in the forefront of the ads and watch the money come busting through your comp. XD I'm not worried about the game being based on you failing, I mean I have yet to play Enemy Within but so what if you won? You think an alien race would just give up if one invasion force was routed? No, you send in thousands for every one you lost and stomp your enemies into the ground.
You're wrong. If that were the case, there would only be one difficulty setting, the game would end on any one failure and the option to reload wouldn't be there.Cartographer said:
And yet, the Dev's have spoken and made the game as if it were so.008Zulu said:
What you believe doesn't matter in the slightest, if you don't want to play the game, feel free not to. If you can't handle being told your achievements in a game's fictional universe were all for naught, well, that speaks of some fundamental issues I would suggest you need to seek help for.
Capcha: None of them are "math" as "math" isn't a thing. Perhaps you mean "mathematics" or "maths"?
It's like this Xcom2 is an alternate time line from the victory condition of Xcom Enemy****.
This means if you saved the world congratulations however there are numerous alternate timelines that were also saved and others that failed So XCom2 goes with n alternate timeline from "your" victory and continues the alien attack into defeat the Xcom forces before they can even advance there weaponry. The key issue I think a lot of us are having here is the shrouded idea that this isn't our victory play through. The main issue being this kind of storyline shift isn't common in games Comics and Movies have room to explain beforehand that the following events are not the "true" timeline or "Original" but to me?
This just means I can save another Earth!.
This means if you saved the world congratulations however there are numerous alternate timelines that were also saved and others that failed So XCom2 goes with n alternate timeline from "your" victory and continues the alien attack into defeat the Xcom forces before they can even advance there weaponry. The key issue I think a lot of us are having here is the shrouded idea that this isn't our victory play through. The main issue being this kind of storyline shift isn't common in games Comics and Movies have room to explain beforehand that the following events are not the "true" timeline or "Original" but to me?
This just means I can save another Earth!.