Why does the victory ending have to be the canon one?

[DrOswald]

This is the problem with the stories of XCOM like games. Earth never stood the slightest chance. Destroying the temple ship might have bought us some time and it might have ensured that the aliens saw us as far to valuable to just eradicate. But it was never going to be enough to protect us from an actual invasion.

Not so. Logistics are a huge factor in any kind of space war. It's quite plausible that the aliens have a much better military than us, but are too far away to launch a full invasion. And the orbital bombardment thing would still need a decent number of ships, because we could afford to let a few cities get destroyed while we built lasers to shoot back with.

But we don't have the scanning tech to even see the ships or the laser tech to build an anti orbital weapon, let alone enough orbital weapons to protect the planet in days. A laser gun is very, very far from an anti orbital weapon, and we actually need salvaged alien tech to even create it, which we used up fighting the aliens in round 1.

I mean, consider a single alien ship with only 50 nukes. It could wipe out the capitol of every major military power in a matter of minutes and no one even knows where the nukes came from.

I am not talking about an armada. I am talking about sending a single temple ship, except this time load it with defensive fighters, occupation troops and a couple hundred nukes instead of science equipment. They were able to send a sizable force (including several battleships, dozens of scouts, many abduction ships, and a temple ship, and many of whatever those medium size ships were called) for a survey mission, it cannot be logistically impossible to send a few ships full of nukes for a conquering mission. Hell, two of their battleships would probably be enough, just load one full of bombs and one full of troops to install the puppet government.

Which is probably what they did leading up to XCOM 2. It makes sense from both a game play and narrative perspective, the aliens cannot spare many troops from the war going on with the other force we know they are out there fighting, so they could only send a small occupation force, hoping to recruit human enforcers after installing their puppet government. I mean, if there are only several hundred, maybe one thousand aliens on the outside XCOM might have a chance of doing something as a resistance movement.

 

[thethain]

Narrative and gameplay wise, this makes it easier. But I 100% understand from a player standpoint. Part of the fun of a sequel is seeing the progression of characters and the world.

That said, XCOM always had some GAPING holes in it. Like the fact the aliens were able to travel to Earth, but once they got there the tech was weak enough to be destroyed by Earth tech? Earth tech has difficulty moving throughout our solar system with limited payloads. These aliens were able to get from a planet light-years away to earth. At that level of tech conquering earth is just a matter of if you care the people on it survive.

This is how I will say the game could make sense. Earth did what you did in XCOM, was able to infiltrate and destroy an enemy ship. However then the aliens just started bombarding Earth from orbit until we surrendered. XCOM operatives were then considered terrorists and forced to adapt to irregular warfare.

 

[Redryhno]

Because some people are whiny kids who are like "Waaah, I want my victory to count!"

Dude, it DOES. At least, that's the way I'm seeing it (I won my first run of XCOM).

Just do what I do and see it as a "what-if scenario".

In any case, I like the idea. Makes us even MORE the underdogs. I'm hyped. For me, XCOM is not about the end result, it's about the blood sweat and tears required to get there.

If that's the case, then what is the point of all that blood,sweat, and tears? It really means nothing to win an impossible ironman run now in terms of outcome, because nothing changes if you ragequit of if you won against the Temple ship.

Gameplay wise, I'm fine with more(even if there was a lot of bullshit and almost barebones mechanics due to most research being effectively useless and Long War just being...well...even in short long war it's really damn long and tedious), but when you're told that all your choices and trials meant nothing, you can't help but feel a bit put off.

I've got nothing wrong with there being victory still meaning a bad end, but the way they showed it was that it was a HUGE victory, not much of a bittersweet one, or even that you still had another thirty temple ships appear out of nowhere, but that you WON.

 

[Bad Jim]

This is the problem with the stories of XCOM like games. Earth never stood the slightest chance. Destroying the temple ship might have bought us some time and it might have ensured that the aliens saw us as far to valuable to just eradicate. But it was never going to be enough to protect us from an actual invasion.

Not so. Logistics are a huge factor in any kind of space war. It's quite plausible that the aliens have a much better military than us, but are too far away to launch a full invasion. And the orbital bombardment thing would still need a decent number of ships, because we could afford to let a few cities get destroyed while we built lasers to shoot back with.

But we don't have the scanning tech to even see the ships or the laser tech to build an anti orbital weapon, let alone enough orbital weapons to protect the planet in days. A laser gun is very, very far from an anti orbital weapon, and we actually need salvaged alien tech to even create it, which we used up fighting the aliens in round 1.

We are currently tracking thousands of objects in orbit right now, a lot of them much smaller than any plausible spaceship. And real world lasers are things we can build right now without extraterrestrial technology in sufficient quantity that we could aim a few thousand at an orbital object and melt it. We were working on lasers to shoot down nuclear missiles in the 80s.

 

[Uliana]

I don't really know why a lot of people seem to have difficulty wrapping their heads around how XCOM 2's story can come about from Enemy Unknown without the Temple Ship victory.

Think of it in terms of route: Route A is the "Victory" route, where XCOM scrapes its knuckles, and defies overwhelming odds to obtain victory, ending with the sweet victory of the Temple Ship being destroyed.

Route B meanwhile is where XCOM wasn't quite up to par, and so only a couple of months or so later made enough countries lose faith for them to pull out and practically handing the aliens Earth on a silver platter. This is the "Defeat" route, and leads to XCOM 2.

Your win against the Temple Ship isn't invalidated, in the same way that in a game like say, Mass Effect, you going on a relationship with Liara doesn't suddenly invalidate a previous playthrough where you dated Ashley. It simply means that we're going with an alternate history with XCOM 2, which continues from our defeat rather than our victory.

Besides, it'll be even cheaper if XCOM 2 did go off our Temple Ship victory only for an offscreen invasion to take away our hard work, as if saying that your effort as a Commander in getting a win was a complete waste of time because you'll be defeated by a deus ex machina anyway. Better for the game to continue from the games where we were defeated early (which every XCOM player has experienced at least once, if not many times), where at least the player not being up to par during that playthrough is enough reason to believe the aliens could've won, instead of us being beaten down to the ground despite a victory earned by our competence "just because we can".

 

[Fieldy409_v1legacy]

To those questioning whether it IS canon that we lost in the first game. We did. You can find developer quotes on IGN saying XCOM never even managed to unlock the exotic tech. That's how they get us to start at level 1 again with chemical firearms as opposed to energy weapons.

I absolutely agree that perhaps they should have given us a "you won the battle but lost the war" scenario. We don't know the true might of the alien war machine off planet. But... If humanity knows how to make psionics and plasma guns that's Pandora's box and you can't really explain us unlearning how to.

 

[DrOswald]

This is the problem with the stories of XCOM like games. Earth never stood the slightest chance. Destroying the temple ship might have bought us some time and it might have ensured that the aliens saw us as far to valuable to just eradicate. But it was never going to be enough to protect us from an actual invasion.

Not so. Logistics are a huge factor in any kind of space war. It's quite plausible that the aliens have a much better military than us, but are too far away to launch a full invasion. And the orbital bombardment thing would still need a decent number of ships, because we could afford to let a few cities get destroyed while we built lasers to shoot back with.

But we don't have the scanning tech to even see the ships or the laser tech to build an anti orbital weapon, let alone enough orbital weapons to protect the planet in days. A laser gun is very, very far from an anti orbital weapon, and we actually need salvaged alien tech to even create it, which we used up fighting the aliens in round 1.

We are currently tracking thousands of objects in orbit right now, a lot of them much smaller than any plausible spaceship. And real world lasers are things we can build right now without extraterrestrial technology in sufficient quantity that we could aim a few thousand at an orbital object and melt it. We were working on lasers to shoot down nuclear missiles in the 80s.

Yeah, but we are also currently tracking tens of thousands of planes moving through the atmosphere, and only XCOM had the tech to even detect all the UFOs flying around. And it took better tech to find the overseer ships (and only then unreliably, and only then by intercepting communications and tracing them back to their source), and even better tech to see the temple ship. We can't reliably spot what amounts to a skyscraper floating 500 feet above the ocean if it is hidden by alien stealth tech. We only found that ship because we knew to look for it. The aliens in XCOM have excellent stealth tech.

And even if we could see the aliens reliably, we would need those few thousand anti orbital lasers built, which would take years. And even if we managed to build them, the aliens could move to the other side of the planet. We would need tens of thousands of laser platforms all over the planet (and the infrastructure to support them) to even have a hope of defending ourselves, and that is assuming that the armor of something like a temple ship can effectively damaged by such a laser, which I find unlikely considering how much abuse an alien supply barge can take.

And all that is assuming the aliens play fair and actually get into orbit to bombard us. The aliens could just sit behind the moon and lob nukes at us. We do not have the tech to reliably detect small incoming objects, and they could have a nuke entering our atmosphere every couple seconds, or several hundred entering all at once. The calculations are not hard, and a civilization with actual space ships would certainly be better at it than we are. They could destroy every capitol city on Earth before anyone realizes an attack is taking place.

Sometimes a technology gap simply cannot be overcome. The combined might of every navy on earth circa 1800 could not hope to take out even a single modern battle group, and I think we have a similar situation here.

 

[Scow2]

I'd say its just poor writing and a cheap way to raise the stakes.
"How can we make the sequel seem more important?"
"Just make it like Half Life or Resistance!"
"But the humans won in the first one. It's how the game ended!"
"Fuck 'em! They're too stupid to remember that!"

Yeah when I hear the new game assumes we lost when that wasn't a thing, thus negating the entirety of X-Com 1 and my 100+hrs of game play on hard mode without losing a single operative...well lets just say I won't be getting 2 until its on Steam Sale for a buck fifty.

As someone who only played through the Nod campaigns (Given that Kane is the primary protagonist of the series) in Command+Conquer, every game the 'victory' is ignored in favor of the defeat for the sequels, except Firestorm.

Same with... well, can anyone figure out the timeline and who won what in Red Alert?

And Warcraft II assumes the Humans lost the First War between Man and Orc.

 

[aegix drakan_v1legacy]

Again, why can't people see it as a "what-if" alternate universe scenario if they won most of their runs?

Alternative Universes are for DLCs where you play as the aliens conquering Earth, not for official stand alone games that usurp the plot of the first.

Sooo, what would be your alternative for a sequel, then?

Total reboot of the plot?

Even bigger badder aliens show up, and Plasma and power armor are now your base-level weapons against their even better weapons, risking taking the tech up to Dragon Ball Z levels of power creep?

Bigger badder aliens show up and go "BTW, we have an anti-tech ray that makes all your technology useless so you can't just easily fight back, and have to start over from regular guns"?

A Terror From the Deep emerges and for some dumb reason, alien weapons and all your tech are useless underwater and you can't waterproof anything?

YOU invade the aliens, making it less about defending Earth from an incredibly powerful foe, which is the core of the series?

There aren't many places a sequel could have gone. I when I heard that they were making a new one, I thought it would be a total reboot. The fact they tied it in to a "what if XCOM lost" plot makes it feel like less of a random reboot, and actually makes me more interested in it.

Finally, this isn't Mass Effect, man. This isn't a series where you've been meticulously building relationships, alliances, etc and suddenly all your choices are robbed from you. It's a tactical game about building up your tech (and getting unreasonably attached to your easily killed troops). They never promised that your choices in Enemy Unknown/Within would carry over into the sequel. Hell, I'm surprised we actually GOT a sequel!

It's really not that big a deal. The plot of Enemy Unknown was super barebones. The only reason it's so memorable is because of all the crazy moments that just "happen", like that time you sacrificed your sniper to a crysalid to have him manage to save your whole squad from a Sectopod, or whatever. It's a tactical sandbox with no promise of carrying anything over.

Like, would it sting you less if they said "Hey, it's a reboot of the plot, where XCOM was only formed AFTER the invasion"? Does a sequel HAVE to follow the same plot? I don't believe they have to. I'm fine with mechanical/improvement sequels instead of Plot sequels if they're handled well.

But why bother having a plot if it's literally meaningless?
Why bother with characters, archs, personalities and any of it if it's all subject to meaningless change between games?

Oh my GOD, this explains why so many characters in virtually all final fantasy games (which mostly have nothing to do with each other plotwise at all) have no character, personality, character arcs, etc!

Kain was never a backstabbing son-of-a-***** with jealously issues, Terra never wrestled with her dual nature, Tidus never confronted his own mortality, Aeris never sacrificed herself for humanity, and all that shit between Ramza and Delita in FFTactics never existed! Wow...

Yeah, ok, I'm being a little facetious here, my apologies.

I just really think some people are making way too big a deal out of this.

 

[aegix drakan_v1legacy]

If that's the case, then what is the point of all that blood,sweat, and tears? It really means nothing to win an impossible ironman run now in terms of outcome, because nothing changes if you ragequit of if you won against the Temple ship.

Well, what is the point of choosing to side with the stormcloaks over the imperials when that plot point is probably never going to be brought up in the Elder Scrolls series again because the next game will be another few hundred years in the future, as always?

Hell, if they make another Mass Effect sequel in the same world, they're probably going to say that the Red ending is the Canon one, because it has the most potential for wide-open sequel material. Does this change the fact that in my game, Shepard went for the Blue Ending, sacrificing EVERYTHING to save the Geth that he'd just spend all that effort making peace with? No, it doesn't.

What matters is that you KNOW you won against the aliens. YOU did it. It doesn't matter what the sequel's plot says happened. In your run, you succeeded.

The fact that the developers choose to take the plot in a different direction doesn't take away from my achievements. Because I know that they happened. And in the end, that's the only thing that matters.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

SNIP

As someone who only played through the Nod campaigns (Given that Kane is the primary protagonist of the series) in Command+Conquer, every game the 'victory' is ignored in favor of the defeat for the sequels, except Firestorm.

Same with... well, can anyone figure out the timeline and who won what in Red Alert?

And Warcraft II assumes the Humans lost the First War between Man and Orc.

I'd actually say its a little different. Warcraft, Command and Conquer, Red Alert, whatever. They all have different canon endings depending on what faction you play and what difficulty you play on. That's all well and good and I'm okay with a dev declaring one to be canon, as long as its achievable. Like the Dawn of War games have a different victory ending for each game depending on the faction.
But if they took like...Dawn of War Soulstorm(Space Marines, Chaos, Ork, Eldar, Dark Eldar, Imp Guard, Sisters of Battle, Necron and Tau) and just declared in the next game the Tyranids came in and killed them all, and it was soooo epic and its such a shame you never saw it!
...well you'd be pretty cheesed.
Just like in Warcraft 1, instead of saying the Humans lost, what if they suddenly threw in the Scourge retroactively and said the Scourge actually beat the Orks and Humans and it was just so amazingly brutal and epic and cool and shame you never saw it...

Understand where I'm coming from?

If there is an in-game victory ending they want to declare the canon ending, that's fine. But to make up one that's literally the opposite of the only ending in the game...see, that's just lazy and cheap and we shouldn't reward such behavior.

 

[Redryhno]

If that's the case, then what is the point of all that blood,sweat, and tears? It really means nothing to win an impossible ironman run now in terms of outcome, because nothing changes if you ragequit of if you won against the Temple ship.

Well, what is the point of choosing to side with the stormcloaks over the imperials when that plot point is probably never going to be brought up in the Elder Scrolls series again because the next game will be another few hundred years in the future, as always?

Hell, if they make another Mass Effect sequel in the same world, they're probably going to say that the Red ending is the Canon one, because it has the most potential for wide-open sequel material. Does this change the fact that in my game, Shepard went for the Blue Ending, sacrificing EVERYTHING to save the Geth that he'd just spend all that effort making peace with? No, it doesn't.

What matters is that you KNOW you won against the aliens. YOU did it. It doesn't matter what the sequel's plot says happened. In your run, you succeeded.

The fact that the developers choose to take the plot in a different direction doesn't take away from my achievements. Because I know that they happened. And in the end, that's the only thing that matters.

Here's the thing though, Stormcloaks and Imperials don't matter because the Dominion will probably step in at some point, everyone is aware of that and it won't matter, it's been alluded to that the only thing keeping them out of Skyrim is the Imperials saying they can handle the Talos worshippers multiple times throughout the game. And like you said, it'll probably take place at least a century in the future, to where another event upends the Empire and Dominion. ES is a pretty thought out world and there's always been a canon to it, it's always been like that.

ME, sorta the same, but it's not like your choice really made any difference at the end of 3 to begin with, since it was "kill em" "let em live" or "yadda yadda yaddda yadda ayyayaydyadyaaadyadaddadada (insert more exposition here) be literally jesus". If you can't see what the canon ending is going to be, I'm going to give you a hint, it's the one given the most time to overexplain. And it's not like ME3 really did any choice well in the first place that people were satisfied with. The Rachnai are still in it whether or not you kill the Queen in 1, Cerberus is still run by a crazy indoctrinated Sheen that wants you dead no matter if you sided with Cerberus in 2 or not, and Udina is still turned into a piece of shit again after two games of somewhat good character development considering his role in the story. Nobody expects much from the next ME, Bioware sorta made sure of that when they turned a Star Trek-type game into a YA novel with an overabundance of religious symbolism. It wasn't deep and meaningful thirty years ago with Eva, and it's not deep and meaningful now. I'm not even going to get started with the ME2 DLC that makes the start of ME3 make any sort of sense.

And sure, you can say that that's all that matters, doesn't help that those achievements mean nothing to the game world that you worked your ass off to save. There weren't multiple endings to Xcom, at least not officially, and yet here we have the official ending being changed to suit their narrative needs(which I have very little problem with because it gives me more Xcom and hopefully a reason to actually research anything but a handful of things)

 

[Bad Jim]

Sometimes a technology gap simply cannot be overcome. The combined might of every navy on earth circa 1800 could not hope to take out even a single modern battle group, and I think we have a similar situation here.

How much ammo does a modern battle group carry? Similarly, nukes are necessarily heavy, so it is still plausible that a small alien force might not be able to bring enough to decisively beat Earth. What do they do when a thousand cities are gone but there are still hundreds of thousands of small towns? Do they have enough troops to fight the small towns? Or would the billion or so remaining humans actually reproduce faster than the aliens could kill them?

 

[Zontar]

I dunno, I actually really like it, starting your XCOM game with psionic super soldiers equipped with Jetpack armour, plasma guns and self-directing handheld artillery... well...

Where DO you upgrade from there?!

To be honest, it's because of this thinking that I thought the second Xcom would be a remake of the second original Xcom much as Enemy Unknown was a remake of the original one. If that had happened there would be a logical explination for the need to develop new technology and having the short end of the stick: if the Aquatoids had been the invaders, there's nothing that fancy plasma or mind-controlling psionics can do ten clicks under the ocean against aliens who have electronic enhanced brains. We'd need to develop new armours just to do missions that aren't saving coastal settlements, and new weapons that work underwater, and new transports and fighters that can go below the waves and keep up with the enemy.

I'm honestly surprised they didn't do that given how the concept is already there and the potential both narratively and gameplay wise are ones fans of the first game would be jumping at the chance to go through.

 

[Wuvlycuddles]

Weren't we fighting failures the entire time, including the Ethereals?

Whose failures were they exactly?

Also, wasn't the whole point of their little invasion to find a "superior" race they can uplift to fight some vague threat?

It's been a while since I done the temple ship, but I think thats what it was about.

 

[Broderick]

Weren't we fighting failures the entire time, including the Ethereals?

Whose failures were they exactly?

Also, wasn't the whole point of their little invasion to find a "superior" race they can uplift to fight some vague threat?

It's been a while since I done the temple ship, but I think thats what it was about.

Yeah, I said something similar earlier on in the thread. I know the story is hardly there, but man do some people seem to not pay attention to it at all. It is still possible for us to win the last game, and still end up with this result. The aliens did not go all out for a reason.

 

[Zetatrain]

I'd say its just poor writing and a cheap way to raise the stakes.
"How can we make the sequel seem more important?"
"Just make it like Half Life or Resistance!"
"But the humans won in the first one. It's how the game ended!"
"Fuck 'em! They're too stupid to remember that!"

Yeah when I hear the new game assumes we lost when that wasn't a thing, thus negating the entirety of X-Com 1 and my 100+hrs of game play on hard mode without losing a single operative...well lets just say I won't be getting 2 until its on Steam Sale for a buck fifty.

As someone who only played through the Nod campaigns (Given that Kane is the primary protagonist of the series) in Command+Conquer, every game the 'victory' is ignored in favor of the defeat for the sequels, except Firestorm.

Same with... well, can anyone figure out the timeline and who won what in Red Alert?

Well its pretty clear from the Red Alert sequels that the Allies always win. In Red Alert 2 there is a prologue that summarizes the events of Red Alert 1 in which the Allies beat Stalin.

The Allies win in Red Alert 2 because in Yuri's Revenge both campaigns start with the Allies having won the war from RA2. The Allies then win In Yuri's Revenge, because in Red Alert 3 the Russians build a time machine to go back and assassinate Einstein, something they would not have done if they won in YR. At the moment I don't think there is a canon ending for RA3 since we don't have a sequel to it yet.

 

[Lucane]

Whelp my theory's shot to hell...
http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/06/02/xcom-2-welcoming-our-new-alien-overlords
But he didn't say Xcom last exactly either...

 

[LordLundar]

Well its pretty clear from the Red Alert sequels that the Allies always win. In Red Alert 2 there is a prologue that summarizes the events of Red Alert 1 in which the Allies beat Stalin.

The Allies win in Red Alert 2 because in Yuri's Revenge both campaigns start with the Allies having won the war from RA2. The Allies then win In Yuri's Revenge, because in Red Alert 3 the Russians build a time machine to go back and assassinate Einstein, something they would not have done if they won in YR. At the moment I don't think there is a canon ending for RA3 since we don't have a sequel to it yet.

Uprising covered that. Allies won but the Soviets and Empire were not totally subdued. Then the Futuretech company went rogue and the Allied and Soviet forces worked together to destroy them. The current ending is the Empire is irrelevant, the Allies trust the Soviests (sort of) and the Soviets are utilizing the naivete to make another attempt at destroying the Allies.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

SNIP

Imagine if FF7, instead of being about Cloud, was a whole new cast set in the same decade of FF6. Except Kefka won, Terra, Edgar, Gau, Sabin, all of them are dead.
You think you'd be feeling totally happy and pleased and rainbows? Or would you be a little pissed off that they're taking this basically unrelated story about a post-apocalypse world and tacking on "Oh yeah, you fucked up in FF6! Didn't you know that?!" Escentially renaming the final boss Kefka, and because they didn't write in Terra or Edgar, just saying they're all dead.
Its kinda' like saying Iron Man takes place in the same universe of Dark Knight Rises, except Bane managed to detonate his bomb, Gotham and Batman are dead, and so lets move on with the completely un-related Iron Man plot(we just wanted to throw that little monkey-wrench into everything!)

Either keep the canon from the first game or call it a reboot. No point in saying the first game is technically canon, but nothing that happened in it is. Basically the devs are assuming we lost every single mission.