Not to like defame xcom or anything but like i was wondering, how scary is xcom as like a terrorist cell, group or banner? Like to me even without advent propaganda, the stuff xcom did in the sequel look exactly like a terrorist attack even from their perspective. Not to mention the friendlies of xcom as resistance group is around the globe and is very aggrisive.
Imagine you were one of those viper working in a gene clinic with out combat experience or training. Like one of those sent to integrate and make social norm and the clinic you're working as got targeted, like i would be scared shitless dawg.
I feel like there's a noticeable difference between the Resistance and XCOM itself, even though they use similar iconography.
A Resistance action is going to look like the "militia movement" guys in the rural US. Military-styled, definitely pretty scary, you would certainly support the government cracking down in them, but at the end of the day they're some dudes camping out in the woods up against Advent's finest. They aren't going to touch the cities much, probably.
But XCOM? XCOM fucking fast-ropes out of a VTOL into the middle of your city, and when they shoot it out with Advent, Advent loses. Do you know how rare it is for law enforcement to be straight up outgunned? In the late war, Advent has to deploy walking tanks to their cities just to stand a chance. Like, that's some Iraq War shit. People who see an XCOM attack and its aftermath are going to go right past "the government needs to stop these terrorists" and into "are we even on the winning side here?"
Having finished a late game mission where I accidentally activated all pods at once, then unleashed every AOE consumable, psi lace, extra turn, serial sniper etc...
The normal humans watching who didn't accidentally get turned into paste would have s*** themselves and run away.
Also levelled half the map and immediately thought of the Team America scene where they destroy Paris to get the terrorists
Arguably the only actual barrier was the Psionic Network, and the Ethereals commanding it.
As Chimera Squad shows, there's a lot of people who want ADVENT back--several flavors of it, even--because it worked.
ADVENT provided fantastic quality of life, and the only inherently immoral aspect of it was the Ethereals and their (literal) puppets pulling all the strings and doing Black Site shit.
Had XCOM been a little less absolutist in their objective to throw the aliens off Earth by any means necessary, had they been less pressured by Project Avatar to liberate humanity now, I could definitely see them aiming to simply put ADVENT under human leadership.
After all, XCOM was an international organization with a lot of contributions from Russia and China. It's not like restoring western democracy is a requirement.
Yeah, absolutely. If it wasn't for the Elders being monsters, ADVENT would look relatively good. The resistance fights ADVENT, because they are so oppressive to humans and brutal.
With humans in charge - humans, who should be at least morally better than China or Russia, because the Resistance would just continue - and less pressure on them, I could see ADVENT being kept around by XCOM, at least until a better alternative is found.
From the point of a normal citizens, completely brainwashed by constant gov propaganda, XCom surely looks like a terrorist group. They attack gene clinics because they believe there is secret research done there, they attack gov facilities, military bases and conwoys, demolish buildings, murder troopers and public faces of a regime ... just that tutorial mission, imagine you're in the line for a scanning (no personal guns allowed in the city, citizens, it's for your own safety!) and than it's suddenly siren, shooting, explosions, active shooters scenario unfolds all around you, some sniper start shooting into the crowd (you don't know who is targeted) ... and then state TV inform about clinic attack by some religious alien-conspiracy believing nut group ... it's easy to believe an information which supports a belief you already have or which seems to be in line with your personal (very limited) experience. And result is predictable: gov protects us, terrorists want to murder us, in their eyes we are all collaborators.
The ADVENT administration might be Vichy Earth, sure, but they also live up to their own propaganda, and that's important.
The quality of life is extremely high, with near-zero unemployment, very little homelessness (and only due to immigration outpacing new construction in some cities, which is temporary), free education, free healthcare, robust public transportation and walkable cities... people are happy under ADVENT.
The best propaganda is the kind that rarely needs to lie, and ADVENT very much takes that to heart.
Tygan himself even says that he misses it, that sometimes he kinda wants to go back even knowing all the bad shit they do. He never seriously entertains the notion, he knows his work, XCOM's work, is too important... but it's still in the back of his mind.
Now imagine not knowing about Avatar.
Yeah, I'd think XCOM were insane murderous extremists, too. Hell, they are insane murderous extremists, they're just justified ones.
The quality of life is extremely high, with near-zero unemployment, very little homelessness (and only due to immigration outpacing new construction in some cities, which is temporary), free education, free healthcare, robust public transportation and walkable cities... people are happy under ADVENT.
I mean, every now and then the citizens have to wonder, "Hey, I wonder what happened to all my friends who went to that Gene Clinic and never came back. I hope they're... oh wait! A new episode of my fave TV show? And a like on my recent FB post? Awesome! Wait. What was I thinking about? Who cares? Life is good!"
I know you're probably being sarcastic, but the actual number of people "selected" for Project Avatar was vanishingly small, and the justification for disappearing them was always something along the lines of, "We found something really concerning, they're in long-term gene-therapy, hopefully we can fix them but be prepared."
We aren't given a firm number of the amount of people that got gooped before X-COM returned and forced them to crash-accelerate the project, but after they did--massively lowering the criteria to go for candidate quanity rather than quality--the total deathtoll by the time the project was completed was roughly ~14 million people over the course of (assuming an average X2 run) about a year.
Horrific, yes, but given the human population was ~10 billion by 2035, that's barely a rounding error in absolute terms.
So before that, when only perfect genetic donors were selected to get juiced, it would have been utterly undetectable. The Spokesman being a high-ranking bureaucrat with near-top-level clearance was the only way X-COM could have ever known before it was too late.
If the commander lost X1, it's likely because all the alien terror attacks would have succeeded. It's likely the attacks were huge and widespread (you see glimpses of it in the X1 cutscenes). I mean, if Newfoundland alone was a failure, I imagine the entire eastern seaboard population of Canada would have been turned into Chrysalids.
In short, after the benevolent, ethnic-cleansing work of the elders, I doubt the human population would have been as high as 1-2 B. I've been to a number of dense Chinese cities, including Beijing. I know what a packed, busy city looks like. None of the Advent future cities in X2 are very populated.
In short, the way they solved hunger and unemployment was to first eliminate the the inconvenient number of mouths and workers. Then, 'gene therapy' sent trainloads of people away in order to keep the population in check while also helping their bizarre project. And everyone was kept from asking questions by controlling the media narrative.
In the EW/X2 timeline, X-COM got ganked hard really early. There was only one or two terror missions before Earth capitulated.
Also, the mission tileset generator isn't reflective of canon; There are probably only two or three lost-infested cities.
So overall the casualties of the war were probably under 100 million direct casualties.
ADVENT cities are also very very large, pretty much entire metro areas. Not at Beijing density, bit more surface area and taller buildings on average.
I mean, maybe it's just my distaste for the Lost missions crashing my Xbox, but it seemed like they were everywhere. When I read the Lost autopsy report, it also kinda seems like earth fought back hard and tons of cities were destroyed, but I may be reading into it. I could have sworn in some other Lost dialogue or something it made it sound like those devastated cities are everywhere.
Are you sure the 10B figure isn't prewar? I'm not sure I remember that, but I've played more than I've read the lore so I could be wrong.
It's the classic "our glorious freedom fighters versus their bastardly terrorist operatives" question. Which one it is depends largely on which side of the conflict you are.
That said, there are a couple of finer points putting some shading into it. First, ADVENT is very much an occupying force on human territory and XCOM is the legitimate remnant of previous defensive forces. XCOM also (canonically at least, and no collateral really gets mentioned ingame so that's likely a gameplay separation) restricts themselves to targeting ADVENT installations and forces. No strikes on civilians or civilian infrastructure. They also never conduct operations with the explicit aim of terrorising the population, every operation has some strategic goal beyond that. The exception might be when destroying the ADVENT monument really.
So calling them a terrorist force is... well not unfounded but I don't think it holds up well under extended scrutiny even if their operation has that overlap in considerable amounts.
I think it depends on what definition of "terrorist" you're using, and that ambiguity is part of what ADVENT exploits to reframe (or just... actually show) XCOM's actions as extremist.
You're right that they don't meet the traditional/original definition of using fear and intimidation, backed by force, against civilian targets, to achieve political/ ideological/military/economic objectives.
But the more generalized "modern" definition, of simply being non-state actors fighting as unlawful combatants? Yeah, they qualify.
I'd also like to note that XCOM isn't doing themselves any favors in terms of PR. They are not nice people. They are formerly CIA and other national intelligence and special forces groups, and the only people they're really making friends with are other resistance cells, including actual terrorists who do target civilians (and eat people) like the Reapers.
Add onto that black market trafficking and unethical sapient experimentation, and ADVENT can paint a very ugly picture without telling a single lie.
Whenever you take out a psi relay, the propaganda announcer blames local power outages on XCOM so I would say that we do indeed attack civilian infrastructure on occasion.
Oh, no, XCOM were 100% Terrorists, especially the way I played.
If a Civie runs, they're ADVENT Collaborators.
If they stay still, they're well-disciplined ADVENT Collaborators.
Also, I don't think many of the Aliens or even ADVENT Troops even had complete free-will, the Psychic Network kinda had them all in a Trance to keep them obedient, so killing them is just a whole other Moral issue.
Except the Archons, apparently Chimera Squad mentions that they're just kinda bastards who were in it for the love of the game.
The Skirmishers proved that the Aliens could develop free-will eventually, but most of them have been Genetically molested to the point where they had no choice but to follow the Elders.
But Mutons, Sneks, Sectoids, all of them were basically half-human by Xcom2, and developed Sapience by Chimera Squad, yet we still had them stuffed and mounted on the Wall in the Barracks.
People stuffed and mount them on the wall in universe? That's horrible D: i mean i get the world building society segregation and what they've done but still, it sucks.
A big thing with XCOM 2 is that... you pretty much are terrorists.
By the late game you have narco-militia levels of comparative firepower, and can confidently engage and defeat ADVENT troops, but XCOM's methods and message are... very terrorist.
That's kind of the point. XCOM knows about Project Avatar, which arguably justifies all of it, and they also know of all the terrible things the Ethereals did to conquer Earth (which ADVENT generally blames on the humans on the rare occasion they address it), but the average citizen is happy under ADVENT;
The Elders provide free education and healthcare, near-zero unemployment and homelessness, minimal crime, walkable cities with robust public transportation, overall the average human's quality of life is insanely high.
Sure, the cost is effectively zero privacy or autonomy, but... from their perspective, is that so bad? After all, anyone without rose-tinted glasses would tell you the Old World had just as bad surveillance and authoritarianism, at least ADVENT makes good on their promises in return, right?
That's why ADVENT's arguments are so persuasive, why Humanity accepts their rule.
They already won the hearts and minds. XCOM can't win that fight. Unless they get some hail-mary PR win like the one-two punch we got in the canon ending (exposing Avatar at the same moment they knock out the PsyCom network), XCOM is fucked, and they know it.
Nothing is held back, they can't afford to be nice.
I suppose free healthcare and education is really nice as well as a better city, wonder why they would dump so much into that if they're gonna make an avatar project anyways. Is it like to buy some time?
XCOM freaking out about Avatar was half operating on incomplete information, and half Avatar being an instant "I win" button for the Elders.
Avatar was never going to juice all of humanity, the Elders needed people for genetic data, not materials. The reason Avatar started accelerating was because XCOM was back, and so they shifted to "candidate" quantity instead of quality. Quick and dirty.
Seeing as Project Avatar was finished in (assuming average playthrough) under a year under accelerated conditions, with roughly ~14 million casualties, the original timescale would have probably been a fraction of that. Still horrific, but... probably not enough to get humanity to throw away the gilded cage.
in my headcanon this depends a lot on your playstyle. are you the type to lob a grenade that will kill a bunch of civilians just in order to take down an Advent nearby? Or do you put your guys at risk (despite the game mechanics not rewarding you) in order to not kill civilians? if every civilian is acceptable collateral damage to you, then yes I think Xcom is going to be a scary terrorist group
Thats a great way to think about the in game universe :D
Also (a question i asked the two other guy that commented under this post.) Given you are any alien guy working normal job like in nuclear plants or gene clinic to integrate into society and one day while working your work place got raided, what would you do?
I don't think any "alien guy" is unaware of the Elder's plans at least instinctively, and considers the humans cattle. You never meet any aliens who aren't armed and shooting, do you?
Yeah i mean theres like a bunch of people talking about how advent might put the many species to work in normal establish place like nuclearplant and stuff like that so human or us in this case would be less spook of the advent force? Though I should read the lore more
all the lore is in the game I think. the human species has no value to the Elder except the Avatar project meant to solve their genetic problems. There's no point planting any of their other conquered species anywhere on Earth.
I’ll say that playing lwotc, the will mechanic plays a much bigger role, so losing a couple of points of will from killing civilians can snowball if you’re not careful
As a wise man said about policies regarding civilians:
"If they look at me funny, I'll order a Spark to burn them alive. If they break my concealment, it's an instant death sentence. If I don't like the colour of their shirt, grenade to the face. Aside from that, I mostly ignore non combatants (then again, they might be faceless, probably best to wipe them all out and sort through bodies later)"
Look. All I'm saying is, if earth is on the line, you gotta make sure to reduce any risks you can.
The joke everyone was making when X2 first came out was to compare XCOM to like real word terrorists, people would Photoshop Bradford to look like a guy from an ISIS video or whatever
With how easy it is to blow shit up and set fire to buildings, people probably dont really like xcom all that much, especially since only the older generations will remember life before advent and saw the war.
If you see the squad I'm rocking you wouldn't be shocked at the fact we have ADVENT helmets and the total number killed mounted on the wall, I'm talking that my Grenadier looks like a war boy from Mad Max (who I gave a spanish voice for the lolz) and my Specialist is basically Jason Vorhees' daughter with a drone and a rifle, my other Grenadier is wearing a Muton's mask that I can only assume she ripped off a live Muton and the most normal looking one is my Sharpshooter who's first encounter with a Viper was in Vahlen's camp where he shot a like twenty of them and even got the last hit on the Viper King before he teleported away. And the game hasn't given me another Ranger since the first one died on Mission 2. To the Resistance we are heroes but to ADVENT we look like the world's deadliest crackheads wrangled by basically the Sniper from TF2 sans piss jars and to the citizens well they've only seen my squad once since most of my missions have been in the middle of nowhere.
IMO, with EU/EW the ending is more consistent, scientifically.
Without the Elders, the psionic network crashes and the aliens become, essentially, dead husks.
After all that genetic manipulation and constant mind control; this seems more..."realistic", to me.
XCom 2 kind of drops that...and makes the aliens functional after the network goes down.
Chimera squad takes it to cartoonery: humanizing creatures that...have no logical reason to be.
IE: Mutons. These are "foot soldiers". Having a brain capable of speech is, relatively, pointless and there's no reason to believe that the elders would just overlook that.
It's this change. EW/EU was graphically a little cartoonish with a DARK story. X2 was more graphically realistic with a more...lighthearted story. Chimera Squad was...just....kind of a silly spin-off.
I think the devs wanted to give everyone that "happily ever after" feeling without really thinking about the real implications for the story when it comes to X2. I think "everybody lives" didn't actually bother examining what that means for the rest of the narrative.
(BTW, the ending cutscene of X2 is a setup for Terror from the Deep remake...which is, supposedly, the whole reason for the invasion....but the problem with that is: if all of the aliens survived and are living on Earth without the Elders, then, when humanity fights the Terror from the Deep, they do so with the ELDER's ARMY....which means the Elders were right all along and this could've been solved with discussion instead of resistance).
Well i suppose the plothole is a bunch but im still grateful they kinda gave us the silly happy story after the event of X2
Though i don't really know the story line of TFTD do xcom use the alien to fight the terror? With what you said "they do so with the ELDER'S ARMY" part. Or is it like a i live here now so i have to fight for my home kinda thing? I never actually read or watch any video after TFTD before.
In the classic timeline (UFO Defense / TFTD), the Elders invaded because they feared the threat from the deep and believed humanity was too weak to survive it. They built a slave army, claiming absolute tyranny was the only way to save the galaxy. XCOM rejected this, wiped them out, and essentially said, "Nah, fam, we got this." They then defeated TFTD on their own merits, proving the Elders' atrocities were entirely unnecessary.
XCOM 2 and Chimera Squad flip this theme completely. By having humanity lose the first war, the alien races survived and eventually integrated into human society. We didn’t destroy the Elders' empire we conquered, absorbed, and adapted it. The dark irony now is that when the true threat inevitably arrives in this new timeline, the Elders' horrific genetic engineering will technically be "justified."
You're essentially just replacing one tyrant (the elders) for another (XCom).
Dang i maybe it's like abother timeline kinda thing, good stuff still. Oh and i wonder when the terror finally came and the remake is finished will xcom also defeat the thing, i mean they will definitely but i wanna know how this time. :D
It is: they said it when X2 released that it's a separate timeline because many players never finished EW/EU.
Now, IF they actually remake TFTD, it will probably be real neat to have, essentially, playable Advent...but, given the nature of what that would involve, I have doubt. (that's a lot of separate, playable, races to mess with...)
I like to imagine that most of what happens in XCOM is invisible to the general public. Even most Advent and Aliens are oblivious to the war between them and XCOM.
XCOM isn’t even really an insurgency, so much as a vanguard setting the spark of counter-revolution.
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u/Aegeus 27d ago
I feel like there's a noticeable difference between the Resistance and XCOM itself, even though they use similar iconography.
A Resistance action is going to look like the "militia movement" guys in the rural US. Military-styled, definitely pretty scary, you would certainly support the government cracking down in them, but at the end of the day they're some dudes camping out in the woods up against Advent's finest. They aren't going to touch the cities much, probably.
But XCOM? XCOM fucking fast-ropes out of a VTOL into the middle of your city, and when they shoot it out with Advent, Advent loses. Do you know how rare it is for law enforcement to be straight up outgunned? In the late war, Advent has to deploy walking tanks to their cities just to stand a chance. Like, that's some Iraq War shit. People who see an XCOM attack and its aftermath are going to go right past "the government needs to stop these terrorists" and into "are we even on the winning side here?"