With new classes and a Rainbow Six-style fatigue system for your squad, you’re encouraged to build more strength in depth. Besides making it much harder, it lengthens the campaign by adding new techs and enabling aliens to keep pace with your advancements.
XCOM 2 LONG WAR 2 MOD
Long War is a free mod that radically changes the way XCOM plays. They will use Kickstarter to help fund it, but are not yet ready to make their pitch. The first of these will be called Terra Invicta, and it’s “a grand strategy game in which the player leads the defence of Earth during an alien invasion”, so Pavonis are sticking with what they know for now. According to their design lead John Lumpkin, the change is intended to indicate that the team will go beyond modding and work on independent, original titles. Long War Studios (the people behind the mod, in case that wasn’t obvious) have also rebranded as Pavonis Interactive and set up a new site. The announcement was made by 2K Games on the XCOM 2 website, and promises more information “in the coming weeks”. Original story January 5, 2017:In predictable but nonetheless very exciting news for strategy fans, the team behind The Long War – a popular mod for XCOM: Enemy Unknown – have confirmed that they are working with Firaxis on a new version for XCOM 2. Lumpkin was unable to give a release date, but promises it’s “coming soon”. And make no mistake, the higher difficulties are still things even experienced players should very much lose.” “Those difficulties probably still harder than the unmodded game in the sense that we’ve added a bunch of mechanics for the player to figure out and master, but the gameplay is set up to be more forgiving to players as they learn the ropes. “The strategy layer is also quite a bit more involved than XCOM 2 players may be used to.”Īnother change is the decision to “broaden our appeal by keeping the lower difficulty levels of Long War 2 more accessible to casual players who would still like to take part in an extended campaign experience. Pavonis’s testers have finished campaigns “in roughly 100 to 120 missions.” This isn’t quite as long as the original Long War typically was, “but we feel like we’ve hit a good number where every mission matters and moves things forward but without it becoming a grind,” says Lumpkin. And as with the original Long War, we added lots more problems for the players and also lots of new tools to solve them, but this time they are heavily influenced by the game’s guerrilla war theme.” “Taking the game in the direction we took XCOM: Enemy Unknown – going for an extended campaign that keeps you on the knife’s edge between victory and defeat for the duration. “In the most general terms, our goal is to tell the XCOM 2 story in our own way,” he says.
Speaking to Eurogamer, Lumpkin discussed Pavonis’s goals for Long War 2.