#Xcom 2 war of the chosen spark series

What they’re really supposed to do is modify how you approach that Chosen, and then they change because they pick up a new strength.” Notably, those traits are exposed to you, so you’re never going to find out the hard way that the characters you brought aren’t going to be effective against the potential Chosen threat.

So now you have to be like ‘Oh, I shouldn’t take any low-percentage shots against this one.’ Or, when their turn ends, they go into Overwatch immediately. “One of the interesting ones is that if you miss a shot against them they have a chance to return fire immediately. They might acquire Shadow Step, making them immune to reaction fire, or be able to spot any concealed unit in their line of sight, or a weakness to psionics or start taking double damage from explosives.

#Xcom 2 war of the chosen spark series

The way Solomon describes those stronghold raid missions sounds a lot like the alien base missions in XCOM: Enemy Unknown, where you fight through a linear series of chambers to reach a boss fight at the end.Īllowed to run free, the Chosen will level up over time, gaining randomly selected strengths and weaknesses as they go. Each one controls their own territory and has their own knowledge meter, so those factors will influence which ones you attempt to track down and kill in their stronghold (they’ll teleport out if you defeat them on a normal mission). (It doesn’t replace the existing one where you’re shot down by a UFO and have to defend - it’s a whole new threat on top of that.)īut, importantly, the three Chosen characters are not working together - they’re in competition, racing to be the one to defeat XCOM and thus be left in control of Earth by the Elders. Eventually, they’ll attack the Avenger in their own special mission type that involves huge cannons trying to destroy the ship on the ground. But if they gather enough Knowledge they’ll begin sabotaging the Avenger, and they can start interfering with your Covert Actions (more on those in a moment), potentially resulting in your agents being captured. At first, they’ll just attack the regions you control, damaging your income and gaining Knowledge. The Chosen are also active on the strategic world map. (Rescuing a captured soldier requires that you send your troops on a stealth mission.) So many of their attacks don’t even do damage, but instead inflicts a new “dazed” status that leaves XCOM soldiers temporarily vulnerable to interrogation - or worse, capture - if the Chosen can reach them before a teammate can move adjacent to them and snap them out of it. Unlike the Rulers, the Chosen’s goal isn’t to kill soldiers - they’re trying to disable your troops and interrogate them in order to gain a resource called Knowledge, which will eventually lead them to the Avenger. This makes the Chosen effectively map modifiers, forcing you out of the rut of playing the same way every time even before you engage them in direct combat. Solomon says that in the case of the Hunter you’ll be warned when you’re targeted and it’ll be easy to get out of his line of fire, but that and the Warlock’s summoning will force you to move and change up the way you’d have played otherwise. The examples given were the Hunter, who can snipe you from across the map, and the Warlock, who can summon spectral enemies out of the ground.

(It’s not actually random - they each have an agenda behind the scenes.) The Hunter, the Assassin, and the Warlock each have what Solomon calls map behaviors, which means that as soon as you make contact with an enemy on a mission they’ll teleport in on the far side of the map and do their best to throw a wrench in your plans.

The role of showing up in random missions to ruin your day is now occupied by The Chosen, a trio of blue-skinned, white-haired alien siblings created by the Elders.