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I liked it, sucks no one else can, the writing was bleh but I found it fun, but hey that new 2K launcher update after 3 years was pretty good right? they are taking great care of the xcom series :)
There was a tidbit of lore that it was either in the first game or Xcom 2, that the aliens were races controlled by the Ethereals, kind of like how the commander is seen in a cutscene being controlled by an Ethereal as well. (Aka the player though this Ethereal is against the others, but not explained fully.) So with the destruction in the second game or non cannon ending in the first game would mean the aliens here would have their mind control severed and snap out of their programing. If humans who most of which were living in blissful ignorance until the broadcast in the 2nd game about the gene clinic blacksites would have likely seen the mind control as the reasoning for the aliens atrocities more than them being evil in general. Now if the popular opinion/ for the sake of unity and ending the war everyone bought the Ethereals were the only bad aliens thing then maybe Chimera Squad cannon would be okay. Then Shrike would make sense as a smaller rebel faction as most accepted peace while some would only rest with antihalation. Realistically we know there is only one xcom alien race that would survive the human purges, and that is my beautiful snake ladies.
There's a mod for the OG dos xcom called x-pirates set hundreds of years after the game. Every mission there was a chance for every enemy to be replaced with chrysalids and zombies. Implying they rolled through, turned everyone before you got there. That's how I imagined post xcom earth. INFESTED with bands of random chrysalids
They are, and they're treated as a dangerous feral animal infestation post-war, too. Axiom notably got to skip some of the mandatory socialisation and empathy-building exercises Mutons have to pass to get released into civilian society because he straight up put his life on the line to save a bunch of human civilians during a major 'lid attack. As in, he literally went into a fistfight with one or more of the critters to save complete strangers.
Aliens nothing, they were nightmare fuel. They turned humans into incubation pods. Fuck, remember that dock mission from XCOM Enemy Within? Pure... Nightmare... Fuel.
The "hanging alien and hybrid heads as trophies on their walls" bit reminds me of how in Discworld, the non-humans and humans (and non-humans and other non-humans) were constantly at each other's throats, to the point where people would hang troll heads on the wall as a hunting trophy. They had a nice scene explaining how "thems were the old days," and how basically "sure, it was a shame your ancestors would've killed older, weaker trolls, pulled out their diamond teeth and replaced them with shiny glass to make it look scarier. But, you don't. And my ancestors used to eat people. But, I don't." It doesn't specifically explain how long ago "the old days" were, but it *sure wasn't 5 years ago.* I think if 5 years ago my dad was beheaded and had his head stuck on an alien's mantelpiece, I would be reluctant to join hands and sing about how wonderful and nice the world is.
Theirs an even closer parallel in Discworld; the goblins. When introduced, they have been hunted and killed for sport by humans so much that human bars have their heads hung on their walls as trophies. Them going from that to "accepted" by humanity as a real race took a ridiculous amount of pivotal events including: * Saving arguably one of the most influential men in the world, several times. * Said man having connections with nobility and pressuring them towards social change, including the leader of the world's economic hub city. * Goblins intrinsically being adept and useful to the human economy (being tiny mechanical geniuses when the world is undergoing an industrial revolution) * An entire scene where its established that human economic leaders are hiring them because they're cheap, expendable labor, thus exposing the other races to them and their cultures * Them playing a critical role in preventing the assassination of another race's leader, who then also starts putting on the political pressure for change And even with all that, they are still second class citizens to most of the other races and living in slums; and they weren't even at war with humanity before! They were just little guys who humanity subjugated because they could; literally one human is killed by them ever as far as we know!
@@joezebov5537 Yeah, thing is? In XCOM the pwoer dynamic actually the opposite. At the end of XCOM 2, humanity "wins" not by military superiority, but because the aliens don't wanna fight the people that just liberated them from the Elder's mind control. In terms of access to technology, infrastructure and military power, the aliens stranded on Earth still completely fucking outmatch humanity at the end of the war. Yes, humanity accepts them. Because the alternative is not having a realistic way to fix the apocalyptic mess Earth's turned into within an acceptable timeframe. And the possibility of a renewed war that humanity would be damn near guaranteed to LOSE.
@@magni5648 The aliens without support structures would collapse within days. Remember most of their forces are effectively meat puppets with next to no sentience. They would probably devolve into small pockets of resistance. Most of them rely entirely on external factors for reproduction. Without those factories and labs they could not sustain themselves. Without leadership they can’t coordinate to protect these lifelines. Humanity would snuff them out in a year.
@@magni5648 That might make sense for XCOM to do, because yeah, the Aliens still presumably have all the battleships from the last game in storage somewhere, but there's absolutely no way people would just nod and accept that. "This alien monster that gored your son has got a fusion lance so if we try to kill him he'll vaporize us" is a sound rational (if not moral) argument, but emotionally it's probably going to get you stabbed by a grieving mother. That's to say nothing of the fact that the aliens are not, and cannot be a united front after the events of the last game. They'd be factionalizing, selling one another out, and turning on one another about as soon as they were sure they were safe from the angry mobs as they have absolutely nothing to unite them anymore. I think that, if Chimera Squad was written competently by people who actually understood what the situation from the last game entailed going forwards and actually cared to explore it, it could have resulted in a very interesting story. Perhaps we could have the aliens mostly consist of a bunch of rebel-like factions operating out of the old remote Advent bases and armed to the teeth and with a variety of different agendas, with the majority of the Advent Cities being controlled by human militias, with surviving aliens being driven into hiding. Kind of a role-reversal of the last game. Maybe take it one step further and have alien enclaves hiding out in the pre-invasion cities that are still too infested with zombies for the humans to follow them there, at least then there would be *some* acknowledgement that that was a thing that happened The problem is that you, I, everyone who criticized this game, *and* everyone who defended it put far more effort into envisioning how this world would function than any of the actual writers did.
Why did some aliens get to be playable or seen in natural places in society. That answer is really simple Verac! They didn't want rule 34 of those other ones, especially the chryssalid because this team was trying to put spider waifus down and put snake waifus up. That the real reason this game exist.
They have to squeeze it between XCOM 2 and 3. Heavily implied it is something from the bottom of the ocean/sea with all of those cutscenes after beating XCOM 2. The whole premise is just... meh.
That's what they did for X-COM Apocalypse. Game takes place about 100 years after UFO Defense, and even then hybrids can only be recruited if you're on good terms with a certain hybrid rights organization, implying that they are heavily discriminated against. Having everyone on decent terms with full blown Aliens, to the point of giving them weapons, 5 years after THEY TRIED EXTERMINATING HUMANITY, makes no sense and shows a complete lack of understanding of basic human psychology.
I genuinely love the idea of a non-human whose a Uncle Ruckus for humans. Like a Khajiit who forces themselves to talk like a Human and shouts about how Skyrim belongs to Nords or a ayylium who somehow gaslit themselves into thinking the Man-Emperor of Mankind loves them.
Considering real life examples (non-white fans of fascists regimes that would either seek to destroy them or be despised by most fans of aforementioned regimes) - that's not surprising...
I like the idea of having a main character whose perspective is so warped you have to disregard most of what they're saying, even if you kind of inwardly want to agree. You hear other perspectives and stories and go 'ohhh, they're just full of shit and hate.' I think the lesson works well when it's aliens.
Biggest questions: What the hell happened between 2035 and 2040? What the hell happened to the super soldiers created specifically to fight aliens? Did they disappear? Did they get an "off camera" death? Follow up to that question: What the hell happened to the skirmishers, reapers and templar? Did the templar and reapers disappear too? The same soldiers who hung up alien heads as trophies, who used the corpses of the rulers to make armor, and who also received genetic, cybernetic and psionic enhancements to fight aliens.
The Skirmishes probably integrated back into “society.” The Reapers… I could see torn between wanting to “come in from the cold” and “there are still f-ing aliens!!” The Templars… probably a mix between a public new “religion” focused around reclaiming the psychic power of humanity… and terrorist.
1. A revolution took down ADVENT after humanity revolted and most aliens got freed from the system. The world is most likely an anarchy very loosely unified under XCOM. 2. XCOM is still around. Chimera Squad is part of XCOM Reclamation Agency. The reason why Chimera Squad was formed was partly for propaganda purposes, and partly because the game acknowledges that sending in the XCOM2 veterans who did that shit into a majority alien city would be a really fucking bad idea. There are a few text conversations between Bradford and Kelly about this. 3. The XCOM 2 ending shows that the Reapers disbanded. Skirmishers and Templars are still around, they are brought up a few times, they just don't operate in City 31. Kelly explicitly rings the Templars up during the Progeny investigation to ask if they have any idea who Progeny's leader could be. 4. XCOM 2 soldiers didn't get any super soldiers enhancements? That was XCOM EW.
Weren't the cybernetic and genetic enhanced soldiers only in XCOM 1 though? After 25 years, especially during the 20 years of aliens rules, I could assume theses ones are not exactly here anymore. No excuses for the rest though.
Forget the "emotional" argument. If the people who were oppressing me until yesterday said they only did it because mind control after they lose, I wouldn't believe them, and even if I wanted to entertain the idea that this might be true, I'd still never again let them within shouting distance or touch so much as a butter knife.
half life did this way better with the vortigaunt, who wern't mind controlled but were slaves. but the literal instant they get the chance they ally up with humanity to try and get rid of the combine.
@@True_Terror_TalesNow that I think about it, even the Elites from Halo are more believable allies, even though thaay were earlier willing and enthusiastic participants in humanity's genocide. What makes an enemy becoming an ally believable is them making that decision on their own and putting visible effort into being good allies. To return to the Halo example, a lot of people wouldn't have forgiven the Elites, but I bet they trust them to be allies because they didn't switch side at gunpoint and they've been seen fighting the Covenant alongside UNSC troops.
XCOM humanity kinda had very little choice in the matter. Earth's fucked, billions are dead and a renewed war between humanity and the now liberated aliens stranded on it would just result in mutual extinction. Alien tech is needed to even seriously try to restart a working civilization, and the by far largest pool of individuals trained and educated in its use happens to be not the humans.
@@lucaballarati9694Yeah the elites were the strongest case of enemy of my enemy. I mean all throughout H3 there's an intense tension, up until the very end. Even lord Hoods final line is perfect. " I remember how this war started, what your kind did to mine. I can't forgive you, but you have my thanks..."
"You can accept dragons and wizards but not a 1990 Honda Accord?" That's such a good analogy argument that I'm definitely going to steal in the future.
Wild part is that the opening museum bit says the casualties at the start of the occupation were in the billions. Not Millions. Capital B Billions. That mean, at best, 1 in 7 people you know lost their lives during the war.... and that it only got worse from there. yeah, that is not getting patched up in 5 years. They could have just not mentioned it and let the audience think this is 100. 1000 years later. But no, they had to specify the time frame. I also have answers about the alien races as I (for some reason) read all the documentation. The sectoids have to submit to a psychic inhibitor to keep their powers in check. The faceless are suffering a kind of multiple personality disorder. Chrysalids are functionally animals and livestock. And the Andromeda are just jerks... I can only assume this is suppose to be a joke or jab, but that is literally their entire lore.
@@getfreur2458 Uh, luck and plot contrivances. The elders were dying and working on their final project to make new bodies for themselves. We stole said body and used it against them. And technically we won in 12 months, 5 years was just the mop up.
@@getfreur2458Basically the aliens had a funny mind control network for their troops, in the ending for xcom 2 it gets knocked down. I actually thought it was just their comms network, but apparently it literally just freed all aliens from mind control, which does actually make more sense. Unsuprisingly the no longer mind controlled aliens would rather *not* stay in the force that mind controlled them.
I specifically want to point to those unfortunate enough to witness and survive a chryssalid encounter. These people have witnessed their loved ones such as family members getting turned into a feeding bowl just for said bowl to explode into a stack of chryssalid babies coming out of them. These same people then decided that five years is enough to forget these lightly traumatic events. I want whatever therapist they got in this world pronto.
Notably chryssalids are still hunted because they are actually just non-sentient bioweapons (this was established long before chimera squad). So they absolutely wouldn't need to forgive chryssalids.
Let’s not forget The Lost and the cities of walking corpses. If an alien wants to earn the privilege of continued existence, they can clean up each of those cities or die trying. Otherwise, my commander would’ve fed them(aliens) to the reapers and called it a day.
@@shibasaurus322You're rather misunderstanding the power dynamic there. Mankind "won" against ADVENT and the Ethereals by breaking the mind control network the aliens were slaved into. By the end of the war, it was still those same aliens that held massive superiority militarily. They just weren't particularily inclined to keep fighting the people who just broke them out of enslavement. If humanity tried re-enslaving or genociding the aliesn after XCOM2? Then best case that results in a massive war of mutual annihilation. Nobody wins. Everybody dies. Game Over.
@@shibasaurus322 Not an option if you want human civilization to survive. At the end of XCOM 2 humanity flat out needs the aliens more than the aliens need humanity. ADVENT moved most of Earth's popualtion into their new city centers. And those new cities, they depend on alien technology and the alien workforce keeping it running for things as basic as keeping the lights on and food on the table. Oh and also those aliens might object to getting genocided, and they're still the ones with the fuckoff massive fleet of flying battleships by the time the war ends.
Humanity: Do you really think we'll accept you after all you did to use!? Aliens: but we're sorry :( also snitties. Humanity: UNDERSTANDABLE HERE IS YOUR CITIZENSHIP.
>Aliens: Also, btw, we have the infrastructure and trained workforce to start rebuilding civilization before millions of your people starve to death due to logistical collapse. Also, you have one ship and a guerilla movement. We have a fleet and an army. >Humanity: UNDERSTANDABLE HERE IS YOUR CITIZENSHIP. FTFY.
This gives me war flashbacks from the Xcom streams. So many deaths.. our blood is on your hands Verac. NEW GAMER SUPPS FLAVOR, THE BLOOD OF YOUR FALLEN COMRADES CONFIRMED?!?!?!
Wanna know what's even funnier? Despite the clear intended message of "We should love and respect each other despite our differences", the game tries to present that while also redesigning the visuals and voices of any non-humans to be more human. Aliens dress in human clothes, no more garbled vocal filters on ex-advent, Verge has got an actual face, whatever the fuck it was they did to the Muton. So in practice, the message is really "We should love and respect each other despite our differences, but only if you change your differences to be more like us".
Weirdly enoug, they made the aliens and hybrids look a lot more disgusting when trying to make them more human like in appearence, compared to their designs in XCOM 2 and 1. I mean they did the Mutons so dirty with that human mouth.
Wait, I don’t wanna go like, full conspiracy or whatever, but this shit like actual cultural genocide. There’s no real mention as far as I can see of like, their cultural norms or dress or hell even language, the aliens were all human-washed
would the aliens even know much of their previous cultures before the elders took over? I'd assumed its been so long that they dont know where they're from and have to start fresh on Earth with everyone else.
Yeah, plus aren't the berserkers just Muton women? The game seems to treat berserkers as mindless beasts so I imagine they're not seen as citizens, in that case, are the mutons just cool with all the women of their species being treated like animals?
I dig the *premise* of Chimera Squad; after all, it seems like many of the aliens underwent the same thing humans on Earth did: get invaded, experimented on, and assimilated into the Elder's army. It makes sense that, once they were freed, there would be enough evidence to justify (among some humans) that the aliens are deserving of a fair chance to live. But 5 years is all it takes for things to be hunky-dory??? It feels like, at minimum, it should have been 20 or so years after XCOM 2.
actually five years is fine things should just be on a razors edge and everyone has to aknowlede it's humanities planet 5 years being treated correctly would be interesting slowing working up rapport within the squad and them getting to know and like eachother then again I also want only one human on the squad to start and he's got a taste for alien flesh
I do just want to point out that this is only a single city. Presumably, according to the game itself, the rest of the world is -in all likelihood- still very segregated at best, and still fighting the war at worst. The city is largely this "future ideal" that is more of an experiment to see if humanity and the aliens have the capacity to get along. Additionally, the choice of some of even the more hopeful humans to ally with the aliens might be more due to pragmatism, as opposed to idealism -perhaps a mix of both-. The world is scarred, all the old industries are long gone, and many had become dependent on advent in order to keep them alive. To launch straight into a full scale war, not just the guerilla war like in XCOM 2, would be disastrous for the planet and all of its inhabitants, human or otherwise. Even if the humans did win, it would be long and bloody. To top it all off, the skirmishers already set the precedent for the fact that the aliens, when broken free of the Elders' control, will indeed work with humanity.
@@instantautopsy7581if I remember corretly the exact words used were it' the most cooperative place but still the fact that none of the gangs seem to have an issue with other species is still a problem
@@marley7868 I wouldn't trust any aliens after the invasion honestly. Not even if they did civilian jobs away from guns, I definitely would throw a fit if they let em into military/key positions because I'd definitely think "advent's at it again with the subversion". Specially considering mindcontrol is real so for all I know the guy saying "no trust me guys they're okay" have been mindpuppeted.
I find the idea of an alien coming to Earth and becoming an Alex Jones-style conspiracy buff to be incredibly hilarious. Just Alex and the alien accusing each other of various globe-spanning plots in a feedback loop.
It's even funnier in that Floyd is actually a way better person than Alex Jones. He's literally doing the whole thing because he was part of the Elders' whole infiltration and mind control plot and he now wants to teach people to be sceptical and think for themselves so it can't happen again, as a sort of personal repentance. It's pretty notable that if you get a random snippets from his show on the map table during the Sacred Coil investigation, he utterly shittalks Sacred Coils' propaganda broadcasts and tears down how they're plain ADVENT propaganda with the serials filed off. Dude genuinely fucking hates what he was part of.
19:26 Chrysallids are explicitly violent animals that even the Elders didn't have full control over (hence why they were primarily used in terror missions). And the Vipers used to be the Thin Men. Otherwise, yeah. Kinda weird. I could see this sort of city rising like 40 years after the invasion, but not FIVE.
Technically the Thin Men used to be Vipers, and after infiltration was no longer necessary for the Elders they stopped genetically modifying them to be so. Besides the Speaker who still has the trademark Thin Man spots on the back of his neck.
My main complaint is the character design, torque and the humans are fine, but the new "friendly" designs of some of the aliens are uncanny, why did they give them more human appearances? aren't they supposed to be aliens? Why do only the rebel aliens retain their original appearance? Why does Verge the Sectoid have lips? *Why does Verge not wear any footwear?* EDIT: Wait weren't the lost also a problem? what happened to them as well? It would have been more interesting for them to be the main enemy, in fact if the lost was the main problem it could have been a better reason as to why the aliens and humans teamed-up in the span of 5 years.
Not sure about the lost, but I think they're still out there. City 31 is just one place and is likely considered a lost-free zone, but the vast majority of the world is probably still overrun by the creatures, they just happen to be an out of context problem. As for some of the more "friendly" designs, that could be some form of gene manipulation done by XCOM. That's a bit of a stretch though and I'm making assumptions here. Idrk about the rebel aliens, but if we're going with the gene modding theory, they just didn't bother with it.
@@gumebe4349 I don't really see the purpose of XCOM performing gene manipulation, if the aliens made peace by choice why modify them? It's still odd that they make no mention of the lost, again, so much potential lost (pun intended). Instead of fighting aliens again, have them defend the city against hordes of lost that have breached city sectors.
I remember reading an XCOM fanfiction ages ago, made when XCOM 2 wasn't even out yet. It was a crossover with Mass Effect, a hundred years after the liberation of Earth humanity was expanding through the stars and the moment the humans met the kind, diplomatically inclined people of the council a war started, because the humans were like "those are aliens, open fire". Completely believable and a nice twist of the first contact war. But yeah, sure, 5 years is long enough to forgive the occupation, rebuild the cities, build new political entities and create whole ass governments that in chimera seems to now be in control of the planet. Surely, in a scant 5 years everything will be ok, 70% of countries won't still be in the hands of warlords as people and factions turns themselves more tribal in order to find food that apparently was already a hot commodity while advent turning people in soylent green. There is not gonna be mass starvation at all. They wanted to make a small scale game, then why isn't city 31 just "the city". Just one city that unlike everywhere else is a refuge for people that don't want to kill the aliens and aliens that realize they have done horrible, horrible things and are trying now to live with the guilt (if their race is even capable of feeling such an emotion). Hell, you can do so much cool shit with such a premise, how cool would it be to find a sectoid commander that years after the fall of advent, having seen exactly what he has done decides to become a monk and take up preaching christianity and running a soup kitchen because praying to this alien god who supposedly forgives people is the only way he can figure out how to live with himself and hope he can somehow fix his mistakes? What about a deathcult of people that get themselves killed by chryssalid because they think it will make them "be reborn as a better being" or some shit like that? That would have been interesting, hell, you could make an isometric RPG in this setting, since this is XCOM after all. But no, we get the sweatshop squishamallows squad instead. I pirated this game and i still felt like i got scammed.
Pretty sure City 31 is called City 31 because it was the 31st city made by ADVENT. It's not the 31st city to integrate aliens into society, that's just what the city is called.
I know my XCOM vets wouldn't be singing kumbaya with no xeno scum. It would've been an interesting direction to go however, if the Commander was the BBEG for this game instead of just some PMC.
Maybe not the commander since it's supposed to be the player and therefore we shouldn't know if it's a male or female or whatever, but i could absolutely see bradford or the speaker masterminding this stuff (with very limited alien presence in the ranks, at most a few skirmishers), and i'd sign up to shrike immediately btw.
@@bonogiamboni4830 The Bureau, XCOM Declassified implied that the commander of the XCOM project is actually possessed by a psychic alien ghost. This ghost is the real player character, the commander is just a vessel.
@@bonogiamboni4830Yeah, uh, none of these people strike me as short-sighted zealots of that kind. Let's be real for a second here: Humanity "wins" the war because the aliens don't wanna fight anymore after being freed from the Elder's mind control, not because they're beaten militarily. At the end of XCOM 2, the aliens still hold massive military superiority over humanity. Oh, and a large majority of human civilization at that point is literally dependent on alien technology and infrastructure that requires the aliens' know-how and trained workforce to keep running. Trying to start a race war is a really fucking stupid thing to do when you're blatantly going to lose and when even you winning by some miracle would all but guarantee the collapse of your civilization and risk extinction anyway. The Commander, Bradford and the Speaker all strike me as smarter than that.
@@magni5648 ehh half and half there C&C is broken and civilian uprisings are decimating there occupation forces meanwhile xcom and it's resistance movement is exploding in growth the aliens have no leadership no momentum and no reinforcements coming so quite frankly they lose but I'd see the skirmishers actually showing empathy and trying to help them though yeah the hungry hungry reapers should probably be treated as major boss monster terrorists but that's the problem humanity wins the skirmishers should be granted like two cities and you play in one that has some humans in it cause well they were running out of room and some people showed up out of empathy but everyone should still be angry hell the viper chick actually has a good point "I've never eaten anyone but you guys did employ people who did" that's fair honestly imagine if your starting squad was mostly aliens with one human and he's treated like a slasher villain full on ranger class nightmare and maybe have him admit the flesh of his enemies is the only food he likes know but he's trying not be a monster hence why he the chryalists mostly that could be interesting
Fun details Verac didn't mention about the game: A lot of the game's systems are VERY BAD, such as: >Godmother's Close Quarters Specialists activating when a corpse is near her, leading to shooting it and wasting your ammo >dot effects not stacking (you can't burn AND have acid on you, silly) >Androids are either better than normal oepratives or outright useless (they don't deploy when a teammate gets KO'd, they show up after you deal with the current encounter which sucks big dick and makes them incredibly underutilized) >resource management is broken, you have nothing to spend intel or supplies on besides districts, equipment or black market (which itself is very dry in options), leading to a surplus of resources with nothing to spend then on >there is no other way to research faster, besides doing Ops (this ties in with the previous point, you can't spend your cash if getting a new thing takes you 10 days, approximately 5 fucking missions for a shotgun upgrade that costs 150 supplies, while i have 2000) >Operator wound debuffs are minimal at best >you can't train or send multiple people on sep ops (there's some research that increases the number, but i already finished the game before i got to it) >skill trees got gutted, only getting yo choose between offensive and defensive abilities >you don't get all of the operators in a single playthrough >the game is set in a limited small area and yet it throws enemy numbers like Xcom 2 >the enemy variety is boring, they're either recycled assets or reskinned enemies (even the bosses aren't unique, they are simply a boss version of a basic enemy, unlike XCOM 2's Alien Leaders) >a severe nerf to operator inventory size >Verac mentions how some aliens are bad and some are good, but forgets that the Gatekeeper was literally stuck in transit, which explains why it's an Advent asshole, while the chrysalids were described bt the Elders as disappointing animals that just kill, eat and reproduce (not defending Chimera Squad, it sucks but it's good to know all the details) >speaking of the Gatekeeper, the dialogue implies that the psi zombies are hostile to the Advent simps, but they still attack you as if they're friends with Sacred Coil (which in itself is a shitty detail) >Thin Men apparently don't exist anymore, including several Xcom 1 aliens >Faceless don't disguise, they just come at you out in the open (a missed opportunity, even if it would lead to recycling Xcom 2's Faceless mechanic) >Cherub being a clone of thr Sacred Coil Leader, but has zero interactions with him >shit ending, insert super secret enemy that has totally won despite us knocking out 4 rebel groups >the entire city is on the brink of civil war, but there's no actual army, they just send the Xcom version of Rainbow from R6S I'll post more if i find anything, but Xcom Chimera squad fucking sucks and playing it was a pain.
@@daniel-w9n9f They were still around. The Advent propagandist from the X-COM 2 cutscenes was a thin man, if you look at his neck. I liked that touch. Even the quislings were alien plants, there really was no way to just roll over and please the occupiers.
You know, with how quickly humanity forgot the war and all the atrocities, I am not fully convinced that mind control ever stopped. It just expanded onto humanity.
They forgot it so quickly, the tutorial literally starts with a bunch of human extremists blowing up the mayor because they're angry about XCOM being too soft on the aliens. All because XCOM decided that getting human civilization back from the brink was to be the priority after the war, rather than getting millions to billions more killed for the sake of mindless revenge.
I will say it : Shrike should have been just left over of Xcom and their leader should have been Bradford while Chimera is just claiming the heritage of former Xcom. Could you imagine ? Going against the organisation you basically built in the previous game and having a face against your most trusted ally ? I would have gone bananas
Yeah no you can’t dislike this game with a bloody Halo 4 profile picture. As a “muh evil apologist” is never excuse writing with external media. Pieces of lord are given at the end of every missions. I guess he just didn’t read those…
@@jakespacepiratee3740 I didn't say anything about story. I'm saying the game sucked but it at least looked cool... except the elites, look how they massacred my boys.
In most X-Com lore the aliens are messed up genetically. Living weapons, heavily cloned, genetic dead ends, dependent on alien feeding schemes to the point of having organs removed or replaced with machinery. Basically only the Ethereals have real agency and they see humanity as a tasty buffet of fresh genetic material. It's a really grim and well, alien culture for the antagonists. All prior enemies are conquered slave races and a big mystery in early X-Com games is figuring out just how to ID and attack the leadership. The biggest exception is probably snake women, who seem to be a functional species. Mutons are likely closest to their former state as a natural species and then something like Sectoids are by design expendable and shouldn't reproduce. Chryssalids are walking zombie plagues, so imagine living next to one and he gets fired and goes on a rampage. They're the poster boy terror weapons for a reason. All that to say I guess in Chimera Squad everybody just ran around banging aliens as fast as possible to produce hybrids? In 5 years. Or more likely the writers looked at the old lore and said "nah fam I ain't reading all that nerd shit."
Chrysallids are literally dumb animals that evne the Elders were abrely able to control (which is why they were onyl used as terror weapons) and there's an active campaign to wipe them out during Chimera Squad. They just happen to be resilient buggers and have so far managed to be a persistent problem for everyone despite the effort to exterminate them. There's loads of lore in the game about how various alien species are coping (or not) with what the Elders did to them and how it's shaping society and how they're essentially trying to find an actual culture of their own etc. It#s jsut not in easy to find encyclopedia-style entries, but scattered across random conversations, blurbs and background details.
If by "hybrids" you mean the ADVENT-manufactured hybrids, then it actually one of the more sensible parts. ADVENT was pretty large organisation, and with collapse of its control network and, as a result, a large influx of newly-awoken hybrid soldiers that Skirmishers would receive, it makes sense to have a lot of hybrids around.
I think that the devs forgotten how Vallen used to "interrogate" aliens and how Tygan made a Skulljack, which kills it's victim after *redacted*. Did they forget how outside the cities there are literal zombies, a disputedly living legacy of what the aliens did humans which inhabit ruins of cities some of which still contain remnents of past lives of resistance members? Like, wtf. A better Chimera Squad would explore the events immediately after liberation of earth it so blatantly avoids. I WANTED a vharacter focused game that explores those events. Instead, we got this... shitshow.
I liked the idea of Chimera Squad but was straight up disgusted by the horrible execution. I wanted a XCOM game set after the war with Advent where you had the option (I repeat, the OPTION) to fight alongside the ayyliums against the Elders to liberate their homeworlds. As well as the option to go full "fuck it, we Imperium of Man ballin" and kill em' all. That would have been sweet. Also Vipers did nothing wrong and deserve love and respect. They just want to hug humans.
That just isn't an option with how XCOM 2 ended. Humanity wins the war in XCOM 2 because the aliens don't wanna fight them after being freed from the Elders control network. At that point the aliens still hold massive military superiority, and the vast majority of the human population remains dependent on the aliens' technology, infrastructure and trained workforce for their basic survival needs. If humanity tried to go all Imperium of Man, humanity would LOSE. Not only that, but the situation is so bad that even humanity winning by some miracle would result in civilization collapsing wholesale and a good chance of outright extinction.
Excellent video Verac, you've made many excellent points that I doubt any could refute. Unfortunately for you however, Chimera Squad is the only game to have snake women in office lady attire, making it the best XCOM game by default. I'm sorry, I don't make the rules.
Its more like "imagine if after half-life people just forgave THE VORTIGAUNTS", which they did The vorts were a slave race, and every single alien you fight in XCOM, with the exception of the Ethereals/Elders are a slave race, you literally see sectoids in shackles in XCOM 1, this is a consistent theme of the franchise
@@joseaca1010 That's a little different, because the only people who know of the Vorts first hostility were the scientist and military at Black mesa, when it got nuked, most anyone who encountered the Vorts as the slave race, were mostly dead. The combine is a different faction to the Vorts, they are not even the faction that enslaved the Vorts originally, that was the Nihilanth, killed by freeman freeing them completely. Notice how we never encounter the Grunts in HL2, that because they were all killed by the combine, most likely after their leader, the Nihilanth, died. The combine were probably unable to enslave them due to their strenth and loyalty to their previous leader, and the Vorts were re-appropriated from warrior-slave, to labor slave, which is the form of the Vorts that most of humanity encountered for the first time. That is why Vorts living amongst the humans in 2 is believable, they never fought humanity proper so humanity has no grudge on them.
@@sladeswanson1013 even if we were to accept this argument, EVERYONE who was at black mesa is OK with the vorts, Eli, Kleiner, Barney, etc Is that not unrealistic? The only dialogue even hinting at animosity, comes from Gman and the secret vortigaunt, and even then it describes animosity FROM THE VORTIGAUNTS towards Freeman
@@joseaca1010 well Eli and crew are scientists, they would absolutely see reason and accept the Vorts, being smart enough to understand their situation before, Barney is a resistance fighter, and even if he dislikes the vortigaunts, he would keep it to himself to ensure the revolution and overthrow of the combine is successful. we don't get much time to interact with these characters mind you, so we cant truly know their feelings. Vort feelings on freeman are irrelevant, they were technically the invading force at Mesa, where freeman was the invading force when he killed the Nihilanth, they have every right to dislike him. But my entire points still stands, most of humanity only ever encountered the Vorts as combine slaves, not Nihilanth battle slaves.
Something I hate that chimera squad completely glossed over is alien cultures intersecting with ours. Even if you take that massive leap and logic and have everyone live together peacefully. The aliens culture is never brought up at all. They just completely merge with the humans. No culture shock, or clash, nothing. No culture to even begin with. Even the things chimera squad wants to do it can't even be bothered to give 2 seconds of thought to.
Tbh that can be handwaved as the alien being mind controlled drones with no autonomy, so other than the ethereals who got purged none of them had any culture of their own.
@@keqet12This. There's a big undercurrent throughout the game that the aliens are trying to actually find a culture or cultures of their own, now that they actually have the ability to do so. Some do by trying to merge into human society. Some (like the Andromedons) are being isolationist assholes. Archons are apparently so completely traumatised that they're permanently confining themselves to a shared cyberspace and are essentially getting panic attacks if people so much as try to talk with them. One of the reasons that this whole co-existence thing isn't falling apart instantly is that it's quite blatantly obvious that the aliens were *victims* in this whole damn thing, too. And if at all, it's arugably fucked them up even more than humanity.
@@keqet12 Even while mind controlled Mutons ritualistically scarred themselves for tribal honour, definitely the case in EU/EW but I am pretty sure they still do it in 2 judging by their appearance. They showed signs of culture. The Gatekeepers are described as having ornate symbols inside their shell, why would a creature have that if it wasn't some kind of belief or some semblance of sapience?
Even though i would like to see a grey alien just doing human stuff like waiting for a bus or just getting groceries in the background… yeah where’s the culture shock? Where’s the argument caused by greeting an alien of a different species wrong? I mean.. shit 5 years and everything runs smoothly like a greased up gears? No no… they just cobbled this together and hoped for the best
@@gamejunky3040 City 31 is hardly running smoothly, and it's doing better than most of the planet. Culture shock isn't really the issue, it's more that most of the aliens are struggling to even define or find or build a culture of their own after all the Elders did to them.
Gameplay wise Chimera is pretty fun for a spin-off. Fast-paced missions, breach mechanic, etc. and for a price of average kebab. Its even better when characters DONT TALK. That where cringe-fest begins.
I don’t even think all the characters are that bad. The problem is two of the best performing ones (Cherub with his shield and Terminal with her medkits and extra turns) who you’ll generally want at least one of to keep people healthy, are the two most annoying to listen to.
@@nerdyvids1 > all the characters are that bad. Again, only when they stay silent, because rainbow-reich narrative school in its finest. Concept- and gameplay-wise some of them are not so bad, i agree.
@@Verac_VGThis video is literally just “I draw you as the soyjak so I’ve won!!” Vipers are not Animals, Crysalids are. Vahlen in XCOM: EW says Thin Men are “highly intelligent” in autopsy. Tygan in XCOM 2 days Vipers are “highly intelligent” they just look like snakes. Their deafult mindset is cunning and intelligence. Crysalids had no chance at citizenship because they are fucking animals. Why would Faceless have to wear clothes when they can just transform into Humans? Andromedons already wear clothes, it’s their Exosuits. Archons are under a lot of physical pain because Cybernetics so they put their minds into a Matrix where they can feel at peace. Due to decades to being mind-controlled, the aliens don’t remember their culture. So it makes perfect sense Torque doesn’t talk like a Snake, the Voice Actor literally said it was a good move. You took her out of context. They explain this all in the game in end-mission Lore excerpts. You never needed a book. People aren’t gonna change their minds when you act this arrogant.
"I'm sorry I turned your grandma into dog food but it was like, an order from my boss. also sorry bout unaliving your parents and your adopted parents. can we be buddies now?" "Haha, yeah! never change buddy! :D" are we sure this game isnt just a fever dream of an xcom member being mind controlled? xD
I truly hadn't realized just how many people think vidictiveness is a virtue until Chimera Squad was announced... or how many people just don't understand the concept of mind control.
We didn't exterminate all Germans after nazism... because we had another enemy at that time (Stalinist Russia)... XCOM is the same. Yeah, we could exterminate all aliens as they did to us by putting us into tubs... but hermmm... aren't we forgetting something ? Oh yeah, the Elders... Maybe some alien tech could help against them, too bad we already genocided them... Oh and also, remember Berlin ? That's literally City 31. Normally, aliens and humans don't live together, they are segregated. Why ? Well, to avoid humans beating the shit out of 'em for revenge, or to avoid your sectoid neighbor to blow off your head or steal your credit card code... Anyways. Cool video. Cool energy. But feels like you didn't read enough between missions about the "Reclamation agency", literally made by cadre executives of XCOM (Bradford and Kelly) to associate strength of humanity and aliens to fight against Elder brainwashing...
@@diegogonzalez9877 It's called being human. Doesn't matter if said group is mind controlled if the events were so horrific, it makes WW2 look like a playground activity after recess. "controlled" and "just following orders" doesn't matter to a human who lost everything. The tribal mentality burns strong, and it's part of what makes humanity strong. It also comes with consequences, as it makes people reckless. They seek justice, but the perpetrators died without them even realizing (the elders being defeated in XCOM 2) and thus seek it out to the closest thing that is tied to said Elders: the aliens. Can humans be compassionate? Yes, of course, but we're also extremely vindictive, and after 5 years from finally ripping the control off their homeworld, without a doubt that rage is still fresh and boiling hot. The aliens will have to show far more than 5 years they're supportive of humans and wish to be redeemed in the massive population's eyes, and it's going to be a brutal climb. Not saying it's a pure virtue, just understanding where it comes from, and why it be like that. Even the mess of Chimera Squad does hint that City 31 is the best city of human-alien integration, and as you saw, it's a goddamn mess, we're just seeing the 'nice' side of it all. We're not seeing the cities that brutally executed the aliens in cold blood or chased them out and thus rebuilt the cities as fully human and resettling with farms and local wildlife.
@@diegogonzalez9877buddy there was at least a billion casualties minimum if your entire family was killed by a group of invading aliens are you really going to care if they were mind-controlled after the fact no going to be out for blood
Under the descriptions for most alien characters, it states that they spent time in basically a re-education camp to see if they were good to re-enter society. torque, who clearly isn't good to re enter society, was only let out if she joined chimera squad.
I remember Chimera Squad, because for the first two weeks the Xcom subreddit was flooded with Torque fanarts, to the point of having all fanarts banned by the moderators 😂
I think we're all agreed, that It would be more fun with a little more group discourse. Maybe one human hate the sectiod guy cause she's see her family killed by one. Have a group distrust sectoid in general cause they can read mind, and build relationships from that. Expand the "live with alien" thing, like what non combatants Andromedon suit look like. Also the T-shirt thing, if they want alien to wear thing and don't look dumb. Just make them wear cool armor similar to what Mass Effect did. Man, imagine if chryssalid are like Vorcha, can hold gun and act as a merc group that we fought with.
The game is made with pre-established characters but does not create any kind of relationship or conflict between them. In many aspects this game simply seems poorly planned.
Ngl, most of stuff I see about Xcom:CS give me full of feeling I got with many "Modern day Correct Politic Moral" writing. Like the "STONK WAMAN" "Just misunderstood criminal" "Old thing is bad, new better" "Haha my joke is funny" Also while I don't play/read more Xcom stuff, I gonna guess/give them a slack about "Why these aliens are always on enemies side", I guess that most are always have been Generically Created as Mindless Puppets, so when there's no control, they become wild beasts.
Replaying XCOM 2 and utilizing the Skimmishers does indicate that we can have aliens working with humans in the games. If they do make a 3rd game, I kinda want to see them include more aliens as special classes. Like Vipers would be amazing supports debugging enemies and binding a target you don’t want to deal with.
To be honest I agreed with some of your points. For examples, there are many examples of different groups of people that moved to far away locations and stayed away for at least 100 to almost 1,000 years before coming back to coexist with their former enemies, oppressors, victims.
YOu cant even say its 'Only Been 5 Years' because it takes a lot of time to set up a city like this. It takes a long time to create an organization like shrike. So it had to have been way less time for them to get to this point. Bro i still get mad at people dont pay me back borrowed money in that amount of time.
I know the SECRET TRUTH about the lore in this game, Verac. The mind control never ended, they just shifted to make humans treat their alien invaders as friends.
chimera squad has the same problem destiny 2: lightfall had. They expected that thin veneer 80 action movie would mean that they don’t have to make an actual plot. Think of all the time and effort they saved. Well money, money and effort they saved. Except whoever was involved with making the snake woman. Based on the snake model and the various… other items scattered around the game those were people of culture and they did some good work.
CS does have a story, heck id say its pretty good, but its hidden in special character interactions, debriefings, radio chatter, etc Honestly every time people say CS doesnt make sense because X or Y, i usually can recall a piece of dialogue in game that perfectly explains X or Y
@@joseaca1010 it has like half of a story, it’s all set pieces, and exposition no real interaction. Sure all of the characters have a background and action movie quips or background chatter but they don’t grow or accomplish anything personally. You could use the robot replacements and the “story” would unfold in exactly the same way. It’s so inoffensively edgy and bland I wanted to care so I played it twice but there are just better stories out there.
@@Ruggedtoaster how is it inoffensive? I mean for starters City 31 is pretty much the only city like it, and its barely functioning, most other cities resisted XCOM, City 31 surrendered peacefully, thats part of the reason why aliens and humans live together, and even then society is clearly tailored in favor of humans in several ways, for instance aliens are kept in detention centers until they are deemed "socially acceptable" something one of the faction leaders you fight describes as "until they are human enough", psychic individuals, which includes ALL SECTOIDS have a psyonic dampener chip implanted on em, this chip seems to be very painful in atleast some individuals, oh, and the whole reason Chimera Squad exists, is for XCOM to test how effective it would be to use alien/human units in combat against the Elders, which you know, is kind of what the Elders were doing You can criticize CS storytelling all you want, and i wont disagree some things are clumsily told, but the picture it paints is that of a society barely hanging on, that doesnt seem inoffensive to me
@@joseaca1010 simple it failed to paint that picture. Every story beat is broken up so you can pick and choose what faction to focus on it doesn’t resolve any of the problems that this system has and instead of having any impact on the story your squad and the gameplay is just a time sink between the game stopping you to tell you the “interesting” bits in motion comics. And those “interesting” bits are just so generic but it breaks them up to spread out some sort of implied mystery. It’s lazy writing just like it’s lazy gameplay backed up on a lazy backstory. Thank goodness it was only $20.
@@Ruggedtoaster how did i manage to describe a picture that was not painted then? Everything i said i backed by ingame dialogue, i didnt make anything of that up, you dont have to read any books or external material, its all ingame, maybe its not PRESENTED in the best way, but its there As for "lazy gameplay", i suppose it would be too much for me to expect you to elaborate,i suppose changing up how the game plays almost in its entirety compared to XCOM 1 and XCOM 2 is lazy, but XCOM 2 copying most of its mechanics from XCOM 1 isnt lazy
I didn't think about it too much but you do raise a good point about how the game should have explored and explained what happened after the aliens were freed. That would have been really cool.
yea where i would be fine if they retcon everything EXCEPT the snake girl brothels. where if there isn't any snake girl brothels in Xcom 3 then i am review bombing the fuck outta that NEVER FORGET WHAT THEY TAKEN FROM US.
The obvious thing that they could've done is have the Chimera squad be the first time humans and aliens worked together in a meaningful way, so you'd have to manage public opinion and inter-squad conflicts in addition to hunting the enemy cells, like I want alien slurs being used and squad mates refusing to help other squads because "I ain't touching no scally bastard", give me Jagged Alliance 2 levels of "Fuck that guy I'm out"
Yeah, uh, this is the War of the Chosen timeline. The Skirmishers were a thing back in the war already, so that first time's been quite a while ago. And reading the teams bios, the members were pretty obviously picked not only for their skills, but also their ability to get along well enough. As you'd expect when you think about it.
Man I loved the new Xcom games, the fact we got this instead of the Terror from the deep expansion/sequel they teased at the end of 2 just makes my blood boil
i had the game since launch and barely remember the story.. what I do remember was that the game became more bearable, if I roleplayed a *achem* more accurate police force and surrounded perps with 4 characters all melee-ing them and yelling "stop resisting!"
There is sadly a certain mentality some humans have where they hate their own tribe and deify the outsiders. It's not even xenophilia really because a xenophile can still have a sense of civic and national pride it's more that they hate their own tribe so much that they project goodness onto everything not of their tribe especially if it's adversarial. So yeah unfortunately I can totally buy that humans made this I'd even say real alien propaganda would be less ridiculous.
What if the canon for Chimera squad's existence was a massive brain wave hallucination of alien propaganda in an attempt to subconsciously convince humanity not to skin them alive.
Why is there such a weird trend of game writers seemingly just not knowing what time is? 5 years is not long enough to squash the beef with the aliens. 200 years is way too long for the towns in fallout games to look like the bombs dropped fucking yesterday. Why are there so many prequels to games where the technology is somehow better than it was in what would eventually be the modern day in universe?
As somewhat of a chimera apologist myself (who didn’t even know a book existed, so that doesn’t inform this at all), I will make a few points I feel are worth considering regarding humanity forgiving aliens. 1. The big one is that ADVENT had control for like twenty years, and there were plenty of people who didn’t particularly hate them. Heck, that’s a whole generation that was born and raised under their rule. Whether they bought into propaganda about the Elders being benevolent, or just had solid enough lives that they never concerned themselves with or believed the stories of atrocities being done, it’s not hard for me to imagine a good chunk of people being predisposed to feel sympathetic to the aliens upon finding out about the truth. Heck, there’s plenty of people today who will defend one tyrannical regime or another because they think one or two things they did were pretty cool. Imagine how many people would still have goodwill towards a brutal regime that also eradicated most diseases because of alien medical tech. Sure you had a chance to get wheeled off to a backroom where they’d turn you into goop, but that was worth it, right? 2. From general in-game chatter, this type of situation is very much not the norm. City 31 is one of the only major population center where species co-exist on the planet. It’s very much a testing ground to see if this kind of thing is even possible long term. That’s a big part of why so many people are so devoted to seeing it succeed or fail. If it does, it’ll be proving someone’s point either way. 3. Some of the maps clearly show that in the time between liberation and chimera squad, someone started setting up snake strip clubs. I feel like that would have convinced a solid 20% of the populace on its own. I can totally get not caring for the game’s story, tone, or gameplay, even if I do quite like aspects of them myself. It’s a very weird tone shift from the other two games, and even as someone who likes it, I can say it’s not executed super well. Also holy shit, I barely encountered any bugs when I played it. What kind of cursed copy do you have?
Thank you for your polite disagreement. I agree that the game is not executed super well. There would certainly be a small amount of people still stuck on ADVENT's propaganda. Would there be enough of them to maintain a city, and defend it from all the other humans who, if they didn't know they were being oppressed already, are starting to realize they've been lied to and that their friends and family were all turned into slop so that the aliens could bolster their DNA? This majority of people would certainly all react - in a giant, emotionally-charged way. Much of the debate surrounding this game's story relies on us, as the audience, doing the writer's jobs for them. We speculate on what must've happened, and how we think things would've went, because we don't have much to go on. That is an enormous writing problem that precedes anything else. It's why I focused on "assumptions" in the video - I could be fine with these things if they were appropriately established, but they're not. I'm willing to believe there would be people sympathetic to their ex-ADVENT overlords - but the game does not set up a believable situation where there would be enough of those people to make City 31 work as a premise in this game's world. The writers dropped the ball, and now we, as the audience, have to attempt to make sense of things. What I'm saying is, they needed more snake strip clubs. In fact, just make the game based around managing your empire of snake strip clubs. Then I will be ADVENT's strongest soldier.
Yeah, pretty much every city on earth was under ADVENT's pristine law and order, benefiting from their tech, etc. The vast majority of humanity was probably more or less on board with them. And same, I also didn't encounter any bugs. Verac's game must have heard him talking shit.
@Himomo3 People react very negatively to regimes of "pristine law and order" when it disappears their friends and family in the night and turns them into soylent.
@@Verac_VG Or how no one on earth knew the advent soldiers were horrible mutated alien freaks until Xcom showed video of taking their helmets off at the end of the second game. "My son joined the police force and they lobotomized him and made him not a human any more, so now no grandkids" would not be accepted.
Frankly, it feels like the main issue is that it's just 5 years. If you just increase that and still add some animosity between aliens and humans, it'd be fine. I do remember trying (read: pirating) this game a while back and dropped it after an hour of playing but it did strike me as odd that everyone just works together now.
I think the game has the same meta problem other games/media like this have nowadays. Most contemporary fantasy and scifi writers in Western video games, TTRPGs, etc. seem to be really uncomfortable and unwilling to write stories involving bigotry, that aren't just "Bigotry/Xenophobia bad". I find a lot of formerly darker settings have had their bigotry removed, not because it made sense within the setting, but because it simple outght not to be. DnD , Pathfinder, WoD, Dragon Age, XCOM and countless other settings have followed this trajectory. Will it be profitable for the XCOM brand? Don't ask me. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
Well its obviously because it's a hot button topic now and unless you want twitter freaks attacking you and anyone wanting to play the game(which would be kinda be a good way to make loads of money) it has to be black and white
Chimera Squad was by all accounts a moderate success. Then 2K made the mistake that was partnering with Marvel. Also, the game very much drives it home that things are far from simple in City 31, let alone anywhere else. The peace is what it is largely for simple pragmatic reasons, chiefly that it ended with the aliens still holding the military advantage when they asked for peace and that after 20 years of ADVENT a large majority of humanity just outright depends on the infrastructure built and maintained by the aliens for basic survival. It's a lot easier to be forgiving when you literally need the other guy's help to not starve. And Chimera Squad aren't exactly a good yardstick for how well aliens and humans get along in general society. They're literally handpicked volunteers, specifically selected to make the team work.
When we talk about disaster spinoffs of Xcom I thought you were going to talk about The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, the third person xcom shooter they made after xcom's reboot that is both extremely jank and extremely boring.
Your choices are forgiving the aliens or extinction through mass famine, civilizational collapse and the Lost and Chrysallids eating anyone left after that.
@@TheGamernews1 Yeah, well, too bad for them that the aliens still held the upper hand militarily once the war was over, and the average one is quite able to defend themselves from random idiots trying to do a hate crime. While the actual people in charge are thankfully more competent and less suicidally inclined than that.
@@magni5648 I guess. Doesn’t make it any less stupid for everyone to be all holding hands and singing kumbaya when they Killed hundreds of thousands of innocents only a couple years ago.
Very well said and nuanced. People don't understand how people work, far too hopeful and naïve. Which would be fine if not stacked on top of being resiliently Unchanging. Just like this game, it doesn't understand itself or where it came from. or why, it just wants to be and force fans of the series to deal with it, on a foundation of excuses.
i think that 5 year gap is meant for xcom 3 considering the ocean hell portal is open the day the game ends, so no matter what the cannon is from this it won't really affect xcom 3 or that's my guess at least
Here's a thought for an alternative take (5 years is still too soon but let's say we can't change that, grumble). Say that when the mind control releases, a number of public service officers/aliens turn themselves in and get locked up while the officials in city 31 work on figuring out what all they did thanks to immaculately kept Advent records. Further, let's assume that there was a big ol' purge across the planet, but City 31 was the most mild of them. Tensions run high between the humans and the aliens left in the city (the humans because of the invasion and the aliens because of the purges), but after the (human) mayor is killed, Chimera Squad decides to go over the records of those public service officers and see who they can let out to potentially combat this new threat. So instead of having the main "upgrade" loop be about armor and guns, you instead get to unlock new super units with unique backstories as the game goes on. Maybe even bring back permadeath for each of them, add their heroic actions into their records alongside what they did under Advent. Also I found it really weird that the former advent hybrid didn't talk like the Skirmishers from WotC.
Yeah, uh, you kinda misunderstand the power dynamics here. The Elders' mind control network going down didn't mean that humanity suddenly held the military advantage. The war ended because the aliens offered peace after being freed, not because they were beaten. Big ol' purge doesn't really work when the people you want to purge are both the ones with the guns and the ones who are keeping civilization itself running. The war ended in an uneasy negotiated peace, not a one-sided capitulation. Basically, humanity is in charge because the aliens agreed to that, and both sides need each other in different ways at this point.
@@HalfTangibleReally,? Where, exactly? A couple rioteers overrunning a checkpoint doesn't actually amount to much in the grand scheme of things. It certainly doesn't magic away the freakin' spaceship fleet that in itself represents more military power than everything else in the solar system combined, just to point out the most obvious thing.
It's such wasted story potential in terms of a story yeah. Imagine if they'd gone the route of 'yeah humans *absolutely* tried to exterminate the aliens and we created chimera squad to try and stop vigilantes killing aliens in ghettos (which they have to live in because nobody wants them around) who legally did nothing wrong but are still hated because y'know many year occcupation and war crimes'. It's a genuine shame because that kind of story could still have provided a really good vehicle for the 'forgive and forget' message by showing you just how badly the aliens were and are being treated and the reprisals they have to suffer through. You could have recruited aliens into the task force and have your human members actually work through their own traumas through that process and become much better people and build genuine friendships. On top of that, you could then still have the three extremist groups who target different alien species for different reasons and in different ways and also the big bad 4th group as the old XCOM guys funding all of that hatred because war and suffering was all they ever knew thanks to the aliens and they vehemently believe that said aliens need to go. If only.
The problem with mass reprisals against the aliens is that that would end badly for the humans. People fail to understand that humanity didn't win the war by beating the aliens on the battlefield, it won because the aliens decided to stop fighting and offered peace after being freed form the Elders control network, at a point where said aliens still very much had the means to literally wipe humanity out wholesale. Hell, at a point where the aliens *just going away* would have resulted in the collapse of human civilization and the deaths of billions of humans, simply because the entire system was running on alien technology and know-how at that point and the aliens' workforce was needed to keep all of that maintained and running. And casting XCOM as the villains would have been a massive disservice. Throughout the series, XCOM as an organisation and its characters were always about protecting humanity, not killing aliens for the sake of it. Unthinking zealotry to the point of risking humanity's extinction for the sake of revenge would be the absolute opposite of what XCOM stands for.
"You could have recruited aliens into the task force and have your human members actually work through their own traumas through that process" Actually I'd call that *BAD* storytelling. Chimera Squad in-story is a proof of concept essentially. It absolutely makes sense that when handpicking personnel for that they'd ensure that it's people who will get along with each other decently well right from the start. You don't want people dangerously hung up on personal trauma in that kind of position.
The thin men from XCOM 1 literally turned into the snake people in XCOM 2. I don't see why they couldn't talk in chimera squad. Though the game could have had a lot more racism. City (whatever i forgot the number) the only one where aliens and humans are living together. Show the dysfunction, we need to relate to the literal xenophobia that is going to be present in such a setting.
Weren't the Aliens in Xcom 2 specifically mentioned to be bred to be warriors, with the ADVENT Troopers standing out? Seems like they would intregrate poorly in an organized society. I don't see the Sectoids filling out a tax form. Guess that's what the Chimera Squad is for.
They were essentially mind-controlled slaves, with no real culture or society beyond their function within the Elder's war machine. It is a pretty big point in the background that the various aliens are now trying to essentially find a culture of their own or otherwise fit in, with varying outcomes and degrees of success. Like, one of the reasons the whole co-existence thing is even able to work somewhat is because the more you learn about it, the more clear it is that the aliens were *victims* in all of this every bit as much as humanity, and most of them got fucked up even worse by it all. Like, the Archons are basically so utterly traumatized that they've shut themselves away into a shared cyberspace and they're getting crippling panic attacks the moment anyone else so much as tries to start a conversation with them. Faceless are all suffering from multiple personality disorder because they literally *become* the people they disguise as even mentally.
@@magni5648 "with no real culture or society..." - I have to disagree quite strongly. Mutons clearly have a culture and seemingly even tribes (see muton autopsy in EU, confirmed by Tygan in the second game), and Gatekeepers have ornate shells (flavor text for Gatekeeper's shell). So while not all alien breeds have a profound culture, some of themm most definitely do.
Great video Verac, love the energy as always... But I'm surprised you didn't bring up the snake brothel/s. There's a sign in one of the pre-mission screens I also kinda like the game. It's not amazing but I enjoyed my mostly bug free experience. I also seem to be weirdly lucky with notoriously buggy games... Just not with others.
I think people forget that humanity wasn't at war with the aliens for 20 years straight. Most of humanity lived in the city centers before the fall and got used to seeing aliens around them for 20 years
for real, this assumption that all the aliens would be killed in a purge post game and not being able to suspend his disbelief that this didn't happen is really weird and displays a lack of imagination and empathy.
@@ishill85 They were already imprisoned in internment camps and "tested for empathy." Even in the egalitarian City 31 there's still aliens and hybrids joining terrorist gangs in droves. I think the aliens may have it worse than it may initially seem on the surface.
@@MouldMadeMind some were oppressed, but lots got access to fantastic alien tech and their lives were vastly improved as a result. geneclinics might ship you off to be refined into an avatar, but they also might cure somebodies terminal cancer, people signed up to go to them. and after so many years of propaganda lots of people would just not believe what x-com told them. and theres a whole faction of aliens that helped fight the elders and free the earth too, you expect everyones just gonna turn around and purge them along racial lines? you're assuming way too homogenous and hostile a reaction to the aliens.
11:44 IF ONLY that was valid apologia. The XCOM books-with the possible exception of XCOM 2: Resurrection-are hot garbage and there are no books that help explain what happens between XCOM 2 and Chimera Squad.
I liked some of these ideas they had. Like. "Breaching" is kind of cool, gives you a way to kick off a fight without having to do the awkward slow crawl XCOM EU/2 did required. Having compact fights so you can dive back into the action instead of killing cells and cells of enemies. But man I cannot stand that "Initiative" system. I didn't like it when my DM did something similar playing D&D. Because when we rolled initiative, we weren't rolling against the enemy, we were rolling *against each other.*
What really hurts about Chimera Squad is how close it is to being a really good game, with a good story. Cutting down the sprawl of levels to focus on room-by-room engagements is a cool idea, for example. The narrative really needed to stop rushing to being a neoliberal "and then everyone joined hands in harmony, because systemic racism isn't a thing, except the token evil terrorists that the cops can murder with impunity". And really explore how precarious the socio-political landscape would be in a city where humans and aliens were expected to live side by side _within living memory of the old regime._ Where Chimera Squad being mixed is a real controversial move, rife with friction from without and within. There absolutely needed to be a major element of simmering animosities. By selection bias, you could justify the setting city as being more egalitarian, because those humans who couldn't stand living next to aliens wouldn't move there. But it would probably also have people barely willing to tolerate aliens if it meant living in a stable urban polity. (I fully think you could justify a lack of full-blown anti-alien mob violence, if you establish the world got distracted by hundreds of petty fiefdoms or power plays being established to exploit the old regime's demise, for the benefit of individual parties with ambition). Some folks may just have been tired of all the fighting, in a "I don't want to do a xenocide, I just want to grill" kind of way. But no one should _forget_ that they were a little over one university bachelor's program removed from tyranny, repression, and people getting juiced. The game shouldn't ignore that. It should embrace the drama inherent in the premise. One of the enemy factions, right from the get-go, should have been an openly anti-alien militia. Cells of people so pissed about the invaders, they could never let it go. Make them really scary, because what they lack in technology (that's Shrike's forte), they make up for in numbers and support from members of the civilian population. Use that faction's presence to advance the character arcs of the main cast, especially those with personal histories with the aliens and the old regime. Showing what those characters could become, if they allowed their grudges, even understandable ones, to radicalize them into bigoted violence. (And if "enemy faction of nothing but humans" sounds boring, you could always make them hypocrites and have them use stolen alien tech or even the more savage aliens, like Chrysalids). Maybe raise the stakes of the narrative, by putting the city inside a complex geopolitical environment. An urban core sandwiched between rad-soaked wastes, large alien enclaves, a human-supremacist theocracy, and some isolationist police state beyond a demilitarized zone. Where the enemy factions causing civil unrest are being quietly funded by other polities, looking to destabilize the city. You may never fight those greater entities, but it would make the world feel more lived in. More importantly, it makes maintaining peace and stability in the city all the more important. The city is worth preserving, because the alternatives in the immediate vicinity aren't great for the people just trying to live their lives.
Like, yeah, a lot of the aliens were used by the Ethereals. Technically a lot of them literally didn’t have a choice, the “just following orders” excuse gets easier when you’re kept on a psychic leash. Still… yeah, snussy wouldn’t persuade most people to forgive so easily.
I have only ever known one person who unironically played Chimera Squad for the fun of it, and he was a total WoW guy and threatened to unalive me, thus why he isn't my friend any longer, and why I have never played this game. It is very nice to have Verac veracsplain shitty (and occasionally incredible) games to me.
Damn, it feels like the XCOM people saw all the people on the Internet thirsting on the Aliens, and not only thought it was a good idea to twist and turn the story in unnaceptable ways... ...But also did it wrong, ommiting like half the species, maybe for some crazy reason thinking that people wouldn't be into the Berserker. THey havne't spent enough time on the Internet.
I know I'm super late on this but as a massive Firaxis XCOM fan let me rant for just a bit. I bought Chimera Squad on release, got it for 10€ so I went in with expectations fitting a 'minor spin-off game', and I think the mechanics are okay. The breach is actually a good idea, I don't like the initiative turn though. But all in all Chimera Squad is basically just X2:WotC mods but official so that's atleast something since the X2 mods are amazing. (If you're ever gonna buy Chimera Squad, get it on a deep discount but honestly you don't miss out on anything by not playing it) Humans, even with a 20 year occupation, would not readily accept aliens AFTER proof that they are responsible for basically genocide and no it really doesn't matter that they were mind controlled, it just baffled me how this is the story sequel to X2, where let me remind you the game ends with a massive psionic spiral coming out of the ocean making not so subtle hints at a Terror from the Depths situation or at least a major issue if Firaxis didn't wanna do TftD. But its never even mentioned. Then we have the rest of the world, resistence settlements/XCOM being the only functional goverment-like entity left after ADVENTs collaps, most if not all ADVENT cities would descend into chaos and anarchy and it would take years for XCOM to come close to restoring order and they would probably have to fight new human and alien warlords who would take control in this vacuum. But no there is relative order and peace in this new world. And this is not even to say anything about the Lost zones, like what the fuck happened to all the fucking zombies flooding earth from the original invasion, that should be a major problem, maybe even a permanent one with actual Lost Zones that cannot be reclaimed. The same could and should be said about Chryssalids, these are actual mindless beasts, living weapons made by the Ethereals. It makes sense that while the Ethereals are still in control they can keep these beasts from going out of control but after the defeat of the Ethereals they would infest the world, quite literally. Think back to Newfoundland in EU/EW but on much larger scales, they should be kind of like the Lost, a plague upon Earth but no they're just regular enemies from the ADVENT faction. Another problem is how fucking lenient XCOM treats the remnents of ADVENT, like one of the 'gangs' is literal ADVENT soldiers fighting to return to the glory days of ADVENT. There is no way they would ever have been allowed to live in the first place. You can argue that the freed hybrids that don't want to return to ADVENT would be welcomed because the Skirmishers paved the way in the resistence but literal ADVENT goons? No never. Then speaking of how XCOM would treat the world as basically being the defacto goverment, sorry but we wouldn't be returning to democracy. We would have a military dictatorship with the Commander/Bradford/XCOM in charge, for atleast a good while. Not because either Bradford or the Commander would want to but out of necessity to counter the anarchy and warlords that would inevitably form from the vacuum of ADVENTs collaps. Finally we get the Chimera Squad finale, its own sequel hook, we have yet another shadow organisation looming but where the fuck did they come from? ADVENT remnants? Impossible since XCOM wouldn't have allowed that. Elder remnents? Possible since their grand design was to create the perfect human body for them to takeover and thereby live but very unlikely as the Ethereals were fighting/fleeing from something else as seen in EU/EW and hinted at in X2. A third organisation unrelated to anything? That would be incredibly stupid how they would be able in 5 short years to rival XCOM. Or finally the 'shadow organisation' would be a pawn from whatever the Ethereals were fighting/fleeing from, this is probably the best choice as that would explain how literal nobodies are somehow able to play Illuminati. The ending just feels like a cop out because Chimera Squad basically ignores anything from X2 apart from the general premise, it does not adequately follow up on the story on what would have happened if aliens actually invaded, actually conquered humanity, actually committed soylent green, actually introduced like a dozen alien species, actually left said aliens after they got kicked out. Oh and I fucking hate all the characters from Chimera Squad, Marvel movies and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race, and aliens too apparently. Edit: Oh yeah I forgot how they absolutely fucked the aliens up with that shit artstyle they used, like please they look worse than the EU aliens and good god Mutons got fucked... Oh yeah I don't like how Mutons got retconned into being spiritual space mechanics, they used to be tribal warriors. I mean fuck the X2 berserker is a Muton female for gods sake and in EU/EW Muton elites used to have tribal markings and be used as elite bodyguards but now... ahhhhh...
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wow! this video got TWO LIKES!!! just for that, im gonna use code VERAC at checkout on gamersupps dot com, thanks guys. make sure to lik combnet subcscib
Helb, camt subscrib, i already did (button not there) I PANIK, bell is already on (its white) am CONFUSHION
10%!!????
I liked it, sucks no one else can, the writing was bleh but I found it fun, but hey that new 2K launcher update after 3 years was pretty good right? they are taking great care of the xcom series :)
It's Sweet Baby's fault maybe
There was a tidbit of lore that it was either in the first game or Xcom 2, that the aliens were races controlled by the Ethereals, kind of like how the commander is seen in a cutscene being controlled by an Ethereal as well. (Aka the player though this Ethereal is against the others, but not explained fully.) So with the destruction in the second game or non cannon ending in the first game would mean the aliens here would have their mind control severed and snap out of their programing. If humans who most of which were living in blissful ignorance until the broadcast in the 2nd game about the gene clinic blacksites would have likely seen the mind control as the reasoning for the aliens atrocities more than them being evil in general. Now if the popular opinion/ for the sake of unity and ending the war everyone bought the Ethereals were the only bad aliens thing then maybe Chimera Squad cannon would be okay. Then Shrike would make sense as a smaller rebel faction as most accepted peace while some would only rest with antihalation. Realistically we know there is only one xcom alien race that would survive the human purges, and that is my beautiful snake ladies.
We didn’t just make trophies of them, for the really cool looking ones, we wore their skins.
GOOD POINT
Which to be honest is shockingly believable if you know what happened in the Pacific theater involving the Marines.
We even turned the meanest one into a jet pack.
Shit so SO cash.
one snake was so cool we turned that fucker into a grappling hook suit
You forgot that the reapers ate aliens and hybrids
I do vaguely remember that the chrysalids were basically feral animals and didnt even have psychic potential. The elders just used them as weapons
There's a mod for the OG dos xcom called x-pirates set hundreds of years after the game.
Every mission there was a chance for every enemy to be replaced with chrysalids and zombies. Implying they rolled through, turned everyone before you got there.
That's how I imagined post xcom earth. INFESTED with bands of random chrysalids
Yep you hear that straight from a ethereal
They are, and they're treated as a dangerous feral animal infestation post-war, too.
Axiom notably got to skip some of the mandatory socialisation and empathy-building exercises Mutons have to pass to get released into civilian society because he straight up put his life on the line to save a bunch of human civilians during a major 'lid attack. As in, he literally went into a fistfight with one or more of the critters to save complete strangers.
You're more likely to make friends with a tiger then a Chrysalid. They aren't just feral animals, they are feral animals permanently on crack.
Aliens nothing, they were nightmare fuel. They turned humans into incubation pods. Fuck, remember that dock mission from XCOM Enemy Within? Pure... Nightmare... Fuel.
The "hanging alien and hybrid heads as trophies on their walls" bit reminds me of how in Discworld, the non-humans and humans (and non-humans and other non-humans) were constantly at each other's throats, to the point where people would hang troll heads on the wall as a hunting trophy. They had a nice scene explaining how "thems were the old days," and how basically "sure, it was a shame your ancestors would've killed older, weaker trolls, pulled out their diamond teeth and replaced them with shiny glass to make it look scarier. But, you don't. And my ancestors used to eat people. But, I don't."
It doesn't specifically explain how long ago "the old days" were, but it *sure wasn't 5 years ago.* I think if 5 years ago my dad was beheaded and had his head stuck on an alien's mantelpiece, I would be reluctant to join hands and sing about how wonderful and nice the world is.
Great example, thank you. Would have loved to have seen them elaborate on it like this.
Theirs an even closer parallel in Discworld; the goblins. When introduced, they have been hunted and killed for sport by humans so much that human bars have their heads hung on their walls as trophies. Them going from that to "accepted" by humanity as a real race took a ridiculous amount of pivotal events including:
* Saving arguably one of the most influential men in the world, several times.
* Said man having connections with nobility and pressuring them towards social change, including the leader of the world's economic hub city.
* Goblins intrinsically being adept and useful to the human economy (being tiny mechanical geniuses when the world is undergoing an industrial revolution)
* An entire scene where its established that human economic leaders are hiring them because they're cheap, expendable labor, thus exposing the other races to them and their cultures
* Them playing a critical role in preventing the assassination of another race's leader, who then also starts putting on the political pressure for change
And even with all that, they are still second class citizens to most of the other races and living in slums; and they weren't even at war with humanity before! They were just little guys who humanity subjugated because they could; literally one human is killed by them ever as far as we know!
@@joezebov5537 Yeah, thing is? In XCOM the pwoer dynamic actually the opposite. At the end of XCOM 2, humanity "wins" not by military superiority, but because the aliens don't wanna fight the people that just liberated them from the Elder's mind control. In terms of access to technology, infrastructure and military power, the aliens stranded on Earth still completely fucking outmatch humanity at the end of the war.
Yes, humanity accepts them. Because the alternative is not having a realistic way to fix the apocalyptic mess Earth's turned into within an acceptable timeframe. And the possibility of a renewed war that humanity would be damn near guaranteed to LOSE.
@@magni5648 The aliens without support structures would collapse within days. Remember most of their forces are effectively meat puppets with next to no sentience. They would probably devolve into small pockets of resistance. Most of them rely entirely on external factors for reproduction. Without those factories and labs they could not sustain themselves. Without leadership they can’t coordinate to protect these lifelines. Humanity would snuff them out in a year.
@@magni5648 That might make sense for XCOM to do, because yeah, the Aliens still presumably have all the battleships from the last game in storage somewhere, but there's absolutely no way people would just nod and accept that. "This alien monster that gored your son has got a fusion lance so if we try to kill him he'll vaporize us" is a sound rational (if not moral) argument, but emotionally it's probably going to get you stabbed by a grieving mother. That's to say nothing of the fact that the aliens are not, and cannot be a united front after the events of the last game. They'd be factionalizing, selling one another out, and turning on one another about as soon as they were sure they were safe from the angry mobs as they have absolutely nothing to unite them anymore.
I think that, if Chimera Squad was written competently by people who actually understood what the situation from the last game entailed going forwards and actually cared to explore it, it could have resulted in a very interesting story. Perhaps we could have the aliens mostly consist of a bunch of rebel-like factions operating out of the old remote Advent bases and armed to the teeth and with a variety of different agendas, with the majority of the Advent Cities being controlled by human militias, with surviving aliens being driven into hiding. Kind of a role-reversal of the last game. Maybe take it one step further and have alien enclaves hiding out in the pre-invasion cities that are still too infested with zombies for the humans to follow them there, at least then there would be *some* acknowledgement that that was a thing that happened
The problem is that you, I, everyone who criticized this game, *and* everyone who defended it put far more effort into envisioning how this world would function than any of the actual writers did.
Why did some aliens get to be playable or seen in natural places in society. That answer is really simple Verac! They didn't want rule 34 of those other ones, especially the chryssalid because this team was trying to put spider waifus down and put snake waifus up.
That the real reason this game exist.
True and unforgivable.
Why can't we love both?
The enduring nature of the Harkness Test will never expire
they can't keep getting away with this
@@calebsmith3259because some men can't let the rest of us be happy.
Yeah the biggest writing mistake would be not making the gap not 40-50 years
They have to squeeze it between XCOM 2 and 3. Heavily implied it is something from the bottom of the ocean/sea with all of those cutscenes after beating XCOM 2.
The whole premise is just... meh.
More like hundreds of years.
Thirty years at least, maybe even ten!
But not a single digit like five
That's what they did for X-COM Apocalypse. Game takes place about 100 years after UFO Defense, and even then hybrids can only be recruited if you're on good terms with a certain hybrid rights organization, implying that they are heavily discriminated against.
Having everyone on decent terms with full blown Aliens, to the point of giving them weapons, 5 years after THEY TRIED EXTERMINATING HUMANITY, makes no sense and shows a complete lack of understanding of basic human psychology.
@@themaniomarianScrew the ocean. Xcom 3 should take us to the rest of the galaxy. That would give us an excuse at have aliens on the squad
I like our "racist towards aliens" snake girl. She considers herself an earthling.
I genuinely love the idea of a non-human whose a Uncle Ruckus for humans. Like a Khajiit who forces themselves to talk like a Human and shouts about how Skyrim belongs to Nords or a ayylium who somehow gaslit themselves into thinking the Man-Emperor of Mankind loves them.
Considering real life examples (non-white fans of fascists regimes that would either seek to destroy them or be despised by most fans of aforementioned regimes) - that's not surprising...
Best girl fr fr
I like the idea of having a main character whose perspective is so warped you have to disregard most of what they're saying, even if you kind of inwardly want to agree. You hear other perspectives and stories and go 'ohhh, they're just full of shit and hate.' I think the lesson works well when it's aliens.
@@PeachDragon_ Torque IS best girl, fr.
Biggest questions:
What the hell happened between 2035 and 2040?
What the hell happened to the super soldiers created specifically to fight aliens? Did they disappear? Did they get an "off camera" death?
Follow up to that question: What the hell happened to the skirmishers, reapers and templar? Did the templar and reapers disappear too?
The same soldiers who hung up alien heads as trophies, who used the corpses of the rulers to make armor, and who also received genetic, cybernetic and psionic enhancements to fight aliens.
This game would have been a lot better if it was just some extended "Skirmisher city vs. Reaper rebels" thing.
The Skirmishes probably integrated back into “society.” The Reapers… I could see torn between wanting to “come in from the cold” and “there are still f-ing aliens!!”
The Templars… probably a mix between a public new “religion” focused around reclaiming the psychic power of humanity… and terrorist.
They put em in a mind prison like in xcom 2. IT WAS ALL AN ILLUSION WITHIN AN ILLUSION.
1. A revolution took down ADVENT after humanity revolted and most aliens got freed from the system. The world is most likely an anarchy very loosely unified under XCOM.
2. XCOM is still around. Chimera Squad is part of XCOM Reclamation Agency. The reason why Chimera Squad was formed was partly for propaganda purposes, and partly because the game acknowledges that sending in the XCOM2 veterans who did that shit into a majority alien city would be a really fucking bad idea. There are a few text conversations between Bradford and Kelly about this.
3. The XCOM 2 ending shows that the Reapers disbanded. Skirmishers and Templars are still around, they are brought up a few times, they just don't operate in City 31. Kelly explicitly rings the Templars up during the Progeny investigation to ask if they have any idea who Progeny's leader could be.
4. XCOM 2 soldiers didn't get any super soldiers enhancements? That was XCOM EW.
Weren't the cybernetic and genetic enhanced soldiers only in XCOM 1 though? After 25 years, especially during the 20 years of aliens rules, I could assume theses ones are not exactly here anymore.
No excuses for the rest though.
Forget the "emotional" argument. If the people who were oppressing me until yesterday said they only did it because mind control after they lose, I wouldn't believe them, and even if I wanted to entertain the idea that this might be true, I'd still never again let them within shouting distance or touch so much as a butter knife.
half life did this way better with the vortigaunt, who wern't mind controlled but were slaves. but the literal instant they get the chance they ally up with humanity to try and get rid of the combine.
@@True_Terror_TalesNow that I think about it, even the Elites from Halo are more believable allies, even though thaay were earlier willing and enthusiastic participants in humanity's genocide.
What makes an enemy becoming an ally believable is them making that decision on their own and putting visible effort into being good allies.
To return to the Halo example, a lot of people wouldn't have forgiven the Elites, but I bet they trust them to be allies because they didn't switch side at gunpoint and they've been seen fighting the Covenant alongside UNSC troops.
@@lucaballarati9694 aslo becuse humanity didn't really have a choice. without the elites humanity would have lost the war and went extinct.
XCOM humanity kinda had very little choice in the matter. Earth's fucked, billions are dead and a renewed war between humanity and the now liberated aliens stranded on it would just result in mutual extinction. Alien tech is needed to even seriously try to restart a working civilization, and the by far largest pool of individuals trained and educated in its use happens to be not the humans.
@@lucaballarati9694Yeah the elites were the strongest case of enemy of my enemy. I mean all throughout H3 there's an intense tension, up until the very end. Even lord Hoods final line is perfect. " I remember how this war started, what your kind did to mine. I can't forgive you, but you have my thanks..."
"You can accept dragons and wizards but not a 1990 Honda Accord?" That's such a good analogy argument that I'm definitely going to steal in the future.
Wild part is that the opening museum bit says the casualties at the start of the occupation were in the billions. Not Millions. Capital B Billions. That mean, at best, 1 in 7 people you know lost their lives during the war.... and that it only got worse from there. yeah, that is not getting patched up in 5 years. They could have just not mentioned it and let the audience think this is 100. 1000 years later. But no, they had to specify the time frame.
I also have answers about the alien races as I (for some reason) read all the documentation. The sectoids have to submit to a psychic inhibitor to keep their powers in check. The faceless are suffering a kind of multiple personality disorder. Chrysalids are functionally animals and livestock. And the Andromeda are just jerks... I can only assume this is suppose to be a joke or jab, but that is literally their entire lore.
How the hell did humans win against a alien occupation in 5 years?
@@getfreur2458 Uh, luck and plot contrivances. The elders were dying and working on their final project to make new bodies for themselves. We stole said body and used it against them.
And technically we won in 12 months, 5 years was just the mop up.
@@getfreur2458Basically the aliens had a funny mind control network for their troops, in the ending for xcom 2 it gets knocked down. I actually thought it was just their comms network, but apparently it literally just freed all aliens from mind control, which does actually make more sense.
Unsuprisingly the no longer mind controlled aliens would rather *not* stay in the force that mind controlled them.
@@omppusolttu5799this is still bullshit.
make that 2 in 8, cause you wouldn't say billions for only one billion. (and world pop would be at 8b by then).
I specifically want to point to those unfortunate enough to witness and survive a chryssalid encounter. These people have witnessed their loved ones such as family members getting turned into a feeding bowl just for said bowl to explode into a stack of chryssalid babies coming out of them. These same people then decided that five years is enough to forget these lightly traumatic events. I want whatever therapist they got in this world pronto.
Notably chryssalids are still hunted because they are actually just non-sentient bioweapons (this was established long before chimera squad). So they absolutely wouldn't need to forgive chryssalids.
Let’s not forget The Lost and the cities of walking corpses. If an alien wants to earn the privilege of continued existence, they can clean up each of those cities or die trying. Otherwise, my commander would’ve fed them(aliens) to the reapers and called it a day.
@@shibasaurus322You're rather misunderstanding the power dynamic there. Mankind "won" against ADVENT and the Ethereals by breaking the mind control network the aliens were slaved into. By the end of the war, it was still those same aliens that held massive superiority militarily. They just weren't particularily inclined to keep fighting the people who just broke them out of enslavement.
If humanity tried re-enslaving or genociding the aliesn after XCOM2? Then best case that results in a massive war of mutual annihilation. Nobody wins. Everybody dies. Game Over.
@@shibasaurus322 Not an option if you want human civilization to survive. At the end of XCOM 2 humanity flat out needs the aliens more than the aliens need humanity. ADVENT moved most of Earth's popualtion into their new city centers. And those new cities, they depend on alien technology and the alien workforce keeping it running for things as basic as keeping the lights on and food on the table.
Oh and also those aliens might object to getting genocided, and they're still the ones with the fuckoff massive fleet of flying battleships by the time the war ends.
The therapy was just a psyker emotion wiping the whole world probably to remove the trauma. Not the memories, just the horror, the fear, and the sad.
Humanity: Do you really think we'll accept you after all you did to use!?
Aliens: but we're sorry :( also snitties.
Humanity: UNDERSTANDABLE HERE IS YOUR CITIZENSHIP.
The only reasons Aliens are allowed to continue existing are Faceless shapeshifting into our Waifus/Husbandos and Snitties.
snitties are basically Earthlings so its kosher.
@@kuronanestimare "Perfectly balanced, as all things should be."
i would do anything for snitties
>Aliens: Also, btw, we have the infrastructure and trained workforce to start rebuilding civilization before millions of your people starve to death due to logistical collapse. Also, you have one ship and a guerilla movement. We have a fleet and an army.
>Humanity: UNDERSTANDABLE HERE IS YOUR CITIZENSHIP.
FTFY.
This gives me war flashbacks from the Xcom streams. So many deaths.. our blood is on your hands Verac. NEW GAMER SUPPS FLAVOR, THE BLOOD OF YOUR FALLEN COMRADES CONFIRMED?!?!?!
7 RIP Jaghatai 1, Jaghatai 2, Jaghatai 3
That would be unironically a good name for a flavor. Cherry Flavor "Blood of your fallen Comrades"
Wanna know what's even funnier? Despite the clear intended message of "We should love and respect each other despite our differences", the game tries to present that while also redesigning the visuals and voices of any non-humans to be more human. Aliens dress in human clothes, no more garbled vocal filters on ex-advent, Verge has got an actual face, whatever the fuck it was they did to the Muton. So in practice, the message is really "We should love and respect each other despite our differences, but only if you change your differences to be more like us".
Weirdly enoug, they made the aliens and hybrids look a lot more disgusting when trying to make them more human like in appearence, compared to their designs in XCOM 2 and 1. I mean they did the Mutons so dirty with that human mouth.
Wait, I don’t wanna go like, full conspiracy or whatever, but this shit like actual cultural genocide. There’s no real mention as far as I can see of like, their cultural norms or dress or hell even language, the aliens were all human-washed
*(looks up the muton)* holy shit that belongs in horror
would the aliens even know much of their previous cultures before the elders took over? I'd assumed its been so long that they dont know where they're from and have to start fresh on Earth with everyone else.
Yeah, plus aren't the berserkers just Muton women? The game seems to treat berserkers as mindless beasts so I imagine they're not seen as citizens, in that case, are the mutons just cool with all the women of their species being treated like animals?
I dig the *premise* of Chimera Squad; after all, it seems like many of the aliens underwent the same thing humans on Earth did: get invaded, experimented on, and assimilated into the Elder's army. It makes sense that, once they were freed, there would be enough evidence to justify (among some humans) that the aliens are deserving of a fair chance to live.
But 5 years is all it takes for things to be hunky-dory??? It feels like, at minimum, it should have been 20 or so years after XCOM 2.
The only way that should be possible is if the Allies Unknown Mod is canon...
actually five years is fine things should just be on a razors edge and everyone has to aknowlede it's humanities planet 5 years being treated correctly would be interesting slowing working up rapport within the squad and them getting to know and like eachother then again I also want only one human on the squad to start and he's got a taste for alien flesh
I do just want to point out that this is only a single city. Presumably, according to the game itself, the rest of the world is -in all likelihood- still very segregated at best, and still fighting the war at worst. The city is largely this "future ideal" that is more of an experiment to see if humanity and the aliens have the capacity to get along.
Additionally, the choice of some of even the more hopeful humans to ally with the aliens might be more due to pragmatism, as opposed to idealism -perhaps a mix of both-. The world is scarred, all the old industries are long gone, and many had become dependent on advent in order to keep them alive. To launch straight into a full scale war, not just the guerilla war like in XCOM 2, would be disastrous for the planet and all of its inhabitants, human or otherwise. Even if the humans did win, it would be long and bloody.
To top it all off, the skirmishers already set the precedent for the fact that the aliens, when broken free of the Elders' control, will indeed work with humanity.
@@instantautopsy7581if I remember corretly the exact words used were it' the most cooperative place but still the fact that none of the gangs seem to have an issue with other species is still a problem
@@marley7868 I wouldn't trust any aliens after the invasion honestly. Not even if they did civilian jobs away from guns, I definitely would throw a fit if they let em into military/key positions because I'd definitely think "advent's at it again with the subversion". Specially considering mindcontrol is real so for all I know the guy saying "no trust me guys they're okay" have been mindpuppeted.
I find the idea of an alien coming to Earth and becoming an Alex Jones-style conspiracy buff to be incredibly hilarious. Just Alex and the alien accusing each other of various globe-spanning plots in a feedback loop.
It's even funnier in that Floyd is actually a way better person than Alex Jones. He's literally doing the whole thing because he was part of the Elders' whole infiltration and mind control plot and he now wants to teach people to be sceptical and think for themselves so it can't happen again, as a sort of personal repentance.
It's pretty notable that if you get a random snippets from his show on the map table during the Sacred Coil investigation, he utterly shittalks Sacred Coils' propaganda broadcasts and tears down how they're plain ADVENT propaganda with the serials filed off. Dude genuinely fucking hates what he was part of.
19:26 Chrysallids are explicitly violent animals that even the Elders didn't have full control over (hence why they were primarily used in terror missions). And the Vipers used to be the Thin Men.
Otherwise, yeah. Kinda weird. I could see this sort of city rising like 40 years after the invasion, but not FIVE.
Just 40? After all that went down? More like a century.
Technically the Thin Men used to be Vipers, and after infiltration was no longer necessary for the Elders they stopped genetically modifying them to be so.
Besides the Speaker who still has the trademark Thin Man spots on the back of his neck.
@@BigBroTejanoInfiltration was no longer necessary...yet they also created the Faceless whose entire job is to infiltrate.
@@G1ingyIt was probably a case of "we made better infiltrators, we don't need the snakes to infiltrate anymore".
@@TankHunter678yeah the thin men were too obvious for the rebels, the faceless can make perfect copies
I could never see my boy Bradford living next to a hot snake lady.
I could - but he's like a weird paranoid neighbour itching to unload his EDC shotgun right into the snek
@@LurkinHandworker He's in a Clint Eastwood Gran Tourino situation.
@@jacksonbowns1087 exactly! understands how things have changed, but still bitter.
In one of the loading screens it shows a conversation between Bradford and Kelly talking about this.
........ are you insinuating something?
My main complaint is the character design, torque and the humans are fine, but the new "friendly" designs of some of the aliens are uncanny, why did they give them more human appearances? aren't they supposed to be aliens? Why do only the rebel aliens retain their original appearance? Why does Verge the Sectoid have lips? *Why does Verge not wear any footwear?*
EDIT:
Wait weren't the lost also a problem? what happened to them as well? It would have been more interesting for them to be the main enemy, in fact if the lost was the main problem it could have been a better reason as to why the aliens and humans teamed-up in the span of 5 years.
Not sure about the lost, but I think they're still out there. City 31 is just one place and is likely considered a lost-free zone, but the vast majority of the world is probably still overrun by the creatures, they just happen to be an out of context problem. As for some of the more "friendly" designs, that could be some form of gene manipulation done by XCOM. That's a bit of a stretch though and I'm making assumptions here. Idrk about the rebel aliens, but if we're going with the gene modding theory, they just didn't bother with it.
@@gumebe4349
I don't really see the purpose of XCOM performing gene manipulation, if the aliens made peace by choice why modify them?
It's still odd that they make no mention of the lost, again, so much potential lost (pun intended). Instead of fighting aliens again, have them defend the city against hordes of lost that have breached city sectors.
Feed Dograc, toss Dograc, roll Dograc down the stairs, alley-oop dograc into a dunk, race Dograc in a Marbles track
I remember reading an XCOM fanfiction ages ago, made when XCOM 2 wasn't even out yet. It was a crossover with Mass Effect, a hundred years after the liberation of Earth humanity was expanding through the stars and the moment the humans met the kind, diplomatically inclined people of the council a war started, because the humans were like "those are aliens, open fire".
Completely believable and a nice twist of the first contact war. But yeah, sure, 5 years is long enough to forgive the occupation, rebuild the cities, build new political entities and create whole ass governments that in chimera seems to now be in control of the planet. Surely, in a scant 5 years everything will be ok, 70% of countries won't still be in the hands of warlords as people and factions turns themselves more tribal in order to find food that apparently was already a hot commodity while advent turning people in soylent green. There is not gonna be mass starvation at all.
They wanted to make a small scale game, then why isn't city 31 just "the city". Just one city that unlike everywhere else is a refuge for people that don't want to kill the aliens and aliens that realize they have done horrible, horrible things and are trying now to live with the guilt (if their race is even capable of feeling such an emotion).
Hell, you can do so much cool shit with such a premise, how cool would it be to find a sectoid commander that years after the fall of advent, having seen exactly what he has done decides to become a monk and take up preaching christianity and running a soup kitchen because praying to this alien god who supposedly forgives people is the only way he can figure out how to live with himself and hope he can somehow fix his mistakes? What about a deathcult of people that get themselves killed by chryssalid because they think it will make them "be reborn as a better being" or some shit like that? That would have been interesting, hell, you could make an isometric RPG in this setting, since this is XCOM after all.
But no, we get the sweatshop squishamallows squad instead. I pirated this game and i still felt like i got scammed.
What's the fanfiction called? I wanna check it out
I was always under the impression the city was an outlier, and everywhere else people still hated the aliens
Pretty sure City 31 is called City 31 because it was the 31st city made by ADVENT. It's not the 31st city to integrate aliens into society, that's just what the city is called.
"What if we take Zero Punctuation's joke about alien cops and P.C. Hissy and make a game of it."
Ah Zero Punctuation, another ‘reviewer’ who wasn’t really paying any attention
I know my XCOM vets wouldn't be singing kumbaya with no xeno scum. It would've been an interesting direction to go however, if the Commander was the BBEG for this game instead of just some PMC.
Maybe not the commander since it's supposed to be the player and therefore we shouldn't know if it's a male or female or whatever, but i could absolutely see bradford or the speaker masterminding this stuff (with very limited alien presence in the ranks, at most a few skirmishers), and i'd sign up to shrike immediately btw.
@@bonogiamboni4830 The Bureau, XCOM Declassified implied that the commander of the XCOM project is actually possessed by a psychic alien ghost.
This ghost is the real player character, the commander is just a vessel.
Skirmishers: "...."
@@bonogiamboni4830Yeah, uh, none of these people strike me as short-sighted zealots of that kind. Let's be real for a second here: Humanity "wins" the war because the aliens don't wanna fight anymore after being freed from the Elder's mind control, not because they're beaten militarily. At the end of XCOM 2, the aliens still hold massive military superiority over humanity. Oh, and a large majority of human civilization at that point is literally dependent on alien technology and infrastructure that requires the aliens' know-how and trained workforce to keep running.
Trying to start a race war is a really fucking stupid thing to do when you're blatantly going to lose and when even you winning by some miracle would all but guarantee the collapse of your civilization and risk extinction anyway. The Commander, Bradford and the Speaker all strike me as smarter than that.
@@magni5648 ehh half and half there C&C is broken and civilian uprisings are decimating there occupation forces meanwhile xcom and it's resistance movement is exploding in growth the aliens have no leadership no momentum and no reinforcements coming so quite frankly they lose but I'd see the skirmishers actually showing empathy and trying to help them though yeah the hungry hungry reapers should probably be treated as major boss monster terrorists but that's the problem humanity wins the skirmishers should be granted like two cities and you play in one that has some humans in it cause well they were running out of room and some people showed up out of empathy but everyone should still be angry
hell the viper chick actually has a good point "I've never eaten anyone but you guys did employ people who did" that's fair honestly imagine if your starting squad was mostly aliens with one human and he's treated like a slasher villain full on ranger class nightmare and maybe have him admit the flesh of his enemies is the only food he likes know but he's trying not be a monster hence why he the chryalists mostly that could be interesting
1:23 Verac continues to tease the DRG fans by acknowledging the game exist but not reviewing it. Again.
Fun details Verac didn't mention about the game:
A lot of the game's systems are VERY BAD, such as:
>Godmother's Close Quarters Specialists activating when a corpse is near her, leading to shooting it and wasting your ammo
>dot effects not stacking (you can't burn AND have acid on you, silly)
>Androids are either better than normal oepratives or outright useless (they don't deploy when a teammate gets KO'd, they show up after you deal with the current encounter which sucks big dick and makes them incredibly underutilized)
>resource management is broken, you have nothing to spend intel or supplies on besides districts, equipment or black market (which itself is very dry in options), leading to a surplus of resources with nothing to spend then on
>there is no other way to research faster, besides doing Ops (this ties in with the previous point, you can't spend your cash if getting a new thing takes you 10 days, approximately 5 fucking missions for a shotgun upgrade that costs 150 supplies, while i have 2000)
>Operator wound debuffs are minimal at best
>you can't train or send multiple people on sep ops (there's some research that increases the number, but i already finished the game before i got to it)
>skill trees got gutted, only getting yo choose between offensive and defensive abilities
>you don't get all of the operators in a single playthrough
>the game is set in a limited small area and yet it throws enemy numbers like Xcom 2
>the enemy variety is boring, they're either recycled assets or reskinned enemies (even the bosses aren't unique, they are simply a boss version of a basic enemy, unlike XCOM 2's Alien Leaders)
>a severe nerf to operator inventory size
>Verac mentions how some aliens are bad and some are good, but forgets that the Gatekeeper was literally stuck in transit, which explains why it's an Advent asshole, while the chrysalids were described bt the Elders as disappointing animals that just kill, eat and reproduce (not defending Chimera Squad, it sucks but it's good to know all the details)
>speaking of the Gatekeeper, the dialogue implies that the psi zombies are hostile to the Advent simps, but they still attack you as if they're friends with Sacred Coil (which in itself is a shitty detail)
>Thin Men apparently don't exist anymore, including several Xcom 1 aliens
>Faceless don't disguise, they just come at you out in the open (a missed opportunity, even if it would lead to recycling Xcom 2's Faceless mechanic)
>Cherub being a clone of thr Sacred Coil Leader, but has zero interactions with him
>shit ending, insert super secret enemy that has totally won despite us knocking out 4 rebel groups
>the entire city is on the brink of civil war, but there's no actual army, they just send the Xcom version of Rainbow from R6S
I'll post more if i find anything, but Xcom Chimera squad fucking sucks and playing it was a pain.
In XCOM 2 they state that the snake people are thin men they just got spliced with human DNA
@@daniel-w9n9f They were still around. The Advent propagandist from the X-COM 2 cutscenes was a thin man, if you look at his neck.
I liked that touch. Even the quislings were alien plants, there really was no way to just roll over and please the occupiers.
THE ORB MUST BE FEED
You know, with how quickly humanity forgot the war and all the atrocities, I am not fully convinced that mind control ever stopped. It just expanded onto humanity.
They forgot it so quickly, the tutorial literally starts with a bunch of human extremists blowing up the mayor because they're angry about XCOM being too soft on the aliens. All because XCOM decided that getting human civilization back from the brink was to be the priority after the war, rather than getting millions to billions more killed for the sake of mindless revenge.
I will say it : Shrike should have been just left over of Xcom and their leader should have been Bradford while Chimera is just claiming the heritage of former Xcom.
Could you imagine ? Going against the organisation you basically built in the previous game and having a face against your most trusted ally ? I would have gone bananas
Eh, I think people would see that as too much of a "screw you" to the people who poured themselves into XCOM 2.
My response to the apologist at 11:40 would be "There's a fucking book?"
Yeah no you can’t dislike this game with a bloody Halo 4 profile picture.
As a “muh evil apologist” is never excuse writing with external media. Pieces of lord are given at the end of every missions. I guess he just didn’t read those…
@@jakespacepiratee3740 sure I can. I'm allowed to dislike both games. Halo 4 may have sucked but it looked good doing it.
@@kanebekkattla3963 what? No everyone says the opposite. It looked terrible but the story was cool.
@@jakespacepiratee3740 I didn't say anything about story. I'm saying the game sucked but it at least looked cool... except the elites, look how they massacred my boys.
In most X-Com lore the aliens are messed up genetically. Living weapons, heavily cloned, genetic dead ends, dependent on alien feeding schemes to the point of having organs removed or replaced with machinery. Basically only the Ethereals have real agency and they see humanity as a tasty buffet of fresh genetic material. It's a really grim and well, alien culture for the antagonists. All prior enemies are conquered slave races and a big mystery in early X-Com games is figuring out just how to ID and attack the leadership.
The biggest exception is probably snake women, who seem to be a functional species. Mutons are likely closest to their former state as a natural species and then something like Sectoids are by design expendable and shouldn't reproduce. Chryssalids are walking zombie plagues, so imagine living next to one and he gets fired and goes on a rampage. They're the poster boy terror weapons for a reason.
All that to say I guess in Chimera Squad everybody just ran around banging aliens as fast as possible to produce hybrids? In 5 years. Or more likely the writers looked at the old lore and said "nah fam I ain't reading all that nerd shit."
Chrysallids are literally dumb animals that evne the Elders were abrely able to control (which is why they were onyl used as terror weapons) and there's an active campaign to wipe them out during Chimera Squad. They just happen to be resilient buggers and have so far managed to be a persistent problem for everyone despite the effort to exterminate them.
There's loads of lore in the game about how various alien species are coping (or not) with what the Elders did to them and how it's shaping society and how they're essentially trying to find an actual culture of their own etc. It#s jsut not in easy to find encyclopedia-style entries, but scattered across random conversations, blurbs and background details.
If by "hybrids" you mean the ADVENT-manufactured hybrids, then it actually one of the more sensible parts. ADVENT was pretty large organisation, and with collapse of its control network and, as a result, a large influx of newly-awoken hybrid soldiers that Skirmishers would receive, it makes sense to have a lot of hybrids around.
I think that the devs forgotten how Vallen used to "interrogate" aliens and how Tygan made a Skulljack, which kills it's victim after *redacted*. Did they forget how outside the cities there are literal zombies, a disputedly living legacy of what the aliens did humans which inhabit ruins of cities some of which still contain remnents of past lives of resistance members? Like, wtf. A better Chimera Squad would explore the events immediately after liberation of earth it so blatantly avoids. I WANTED a vharacter focused game that explores those events. Instead, we got this... shitshow.
I liked the idea of Chimera Squad but was straight up disgusted by the horrible execution. I wanted a XCOM game set after the war with Advent where you had the option (I repeat, the OPTION) to fight alongside the ayyliums against the Elders to liberate their homeworlds. As well as the option to go full "fuck it, we Imperium of Man ballin" and kill em' all. That would have been sweet.
Also Vipers did nothing wrong and deserve love and respect. They just want to hug humans.
That just isn't an option with how XCOM 2 ended. Humanity wins the war in XCOM 2 because the aliens don't wanna fight them after being freed from the Elders control network. At that point the aliens still hold massive military superiority, and the vast majority of the human population remains dependent on the aliens' technology, infrastructure and trained workforce for their basic survival needs. If humanity tried to go all Imperium of Man, humanity would LOSE. Not only that, but the situation is so bad that even humanity winning by some miracle would result in civilization collapsing wholesale and a good chance of outright extinction.
I don't agree wth your point of Viper did nothing wrong when they keep grabing my soldiers into trucks
The Imperium thing is overdone and would have been the more lazy and generic path if believable.
At least we got Torque.
😊
For her alone, this game is, if not redeemed, then deserves to exist.
You mean the worst part of the game?
@@burningphoneix
You shut your mouth
@@thereseemstobeenanerror1219 Shut up Snake simp
Absolutely wild that this game came out the way it did. Having alien squadmates actually sounds really cool but they fumbled it
Excellent video Verac, you've made many excellent points that I doubt any could refute. Unfortunately for you however, Chimera Squad is the only game to have snake women in office lady attire, making it the best XCOM game by default. I'm sorry, I don't make the rules.
I can't argue against this, I'm deleting the video
The story of Chimaera squad is "imagine if after half life 2 people just forgave THE COMBINE"
Its more like "imagine if after half-life people just forgave THE VORTIGAUNTS", which they did
The vorts were a slave race, and every single alien you fight in XCOM, with the exception of the Ethereals/Elders are a slave race, you literally see sectoids in shackles in XCOM 1, this is a consistent theme of the franchise
@@joseaca1010 everything in the combine is a slave race, like all the aliens but the elders
@@joseaca1010 That's a little different, because the only people who know of the Vorts first hostility were the scientist and military at Black mesa, when it got nuked, most anyone who encountered the Vorts as the slave race, were mostly dead. The combine is a different faction to the Vorts, they are not even the faction that enslaved the Vorts originally, that was the Nihilanth, killed by freeman freeing them completely. Notice how we never encounter the Grunts in HL2, that because they were all killed by the combine, most likely after their leader, the Nihilanth, died. The combine were probably unable to enslave them due to their strenth and loyalty to their previous leader, and the Vorts were re-appropriated from warrior-slave, to labor slave, which is the form of the Vorts that most of humanity encountered for the first time. That is why Vorts living amongst the humans in 2 is believable, they never fought humanity proper so humanity has no grudge on them.
@@sladeswanson1013 even if we were to accept this argument, EVERYONE who was at black mesa is OK with the vorts, Eli, Kleiner, Barney, etc
Is that not unrealistic? The only dialogue even hinting at animosity, comes from Gman and the secret vortigaunt, and even then it describes animosity FROM THE VORTIGAUNTS towards Freeman
@@joseaca1010 well Eli and crew are scientists, they would absolutely see reason and accept the Vorts, being smart enough to understand their situation before, Barney is a resistance fighter, and even if he dislikes the vortigaunts, he would keep it to himself to ensure the revolution and overthrow of the combine is successful. we don't get much time to interact with these characters mind you, so we cant truly know their feelings. Vort feelings on freeman are irrelevant, they were technically the invading force at Mesa, where freeman was the invading force when he killed the Nihilanth, they have every right to dislike him. But my entire points still stands, most of humanity only ever encountered the Vorts as combine slaves, not Nihilanth battle slaves.
Something I hate that chimera squad completely glossed over is alien cultures intersecting with ours. Even if you take that massive leap and logic and have everyone live together peacefully. The aliens culture is never brought up at all. They just completely merge with the humans. No culture shock, or clash, nothing. No culture to even begin with. Even the things chimera squad wants to do it can't even be bothered to give 2 seconds of thought to.
Tbh that can be handwaved as the alien being mind controlled drones with no autonomy, so other than the ethereals who got purged none of them had any culture of their own.
@@keqet12This. There's a big undercurrent throughout the game that the aliens are trying to actually find a culture or cultures of their own, now that they actually have the ability to do so. Some do by trying to merge into human society. Some (like the Andromedons) are being isolationist assholes. Archons are apparently so completely traumatised that they're permanently confining themselves to a shared cyberspace and are essentially getting panic attacks if people so much as try to talk with them.
One of the reasons that this whole co-existence thing isn't falling apart instantly is that it's quite blatantly obvious that the aliens were *victims* in this whole damn thing, too. And if at all, it's arugably fucked them up even more than humanity.
@@keqet12 Even while mind controlled Mutons ritualistically scarred themselves for tribal honour, definitely the case in EU/EW but I am pretty sure they still do it in 2 judging by their appearance. They showed signs of culture. The Gatekeepers are described as having ornate symbols inside their shell, why would a creature have that if it wasn't some kind of belief or some semblance of sapience?
Even though i would like to see a grey alien just doing human stuff like waiting for a bus or just getting groceries in the background… yeah where’s the culture shock? Where’s the argument caused by greeting an alien of a different species wrong? I mean.. shit 5 years and everything runs smoothly like a greased up gears? No no… they just cobbled this together and hoped for the best
@@gamejunky3040 City 31 is hardly running smoothly, and it's doing better than most of the planet.
Culture shock isn't really the issue, it's more that most of the aliens are struggling to even define or find or build a culture of their own after all the Elders did to them.
Gameplay wise Chimera is pretty fun for a spin-off. Fast-paced missions, breach mechanic, etc. and for a price of average kebab. Its even better when characters DONT TALK. That where cringe-fest begins.
I don’t even think all the characters are that bad. The problem is two of the best performing ones (Cherub with his shield and Terminal with her medkits and extra turns) who you’ll generally want at least one of to keep people healthy, are the two most annoying to listen to.
@@nerdyvids1 > all the characters are that bad.
Again, only when they stay silent, because rainbow-reich narrative school in its finest. Concept- and gameplay-wise some of them are not so bad, i agree.
Verac, buddy, pal, bro. Jake Solomon left Firaxis because Marvel's Midnight Suns underperformed. I don't think we're getting X-Com 3.
I don't think it's likely either, buddy pal bro. I used the word "hope" very intentionally.
@@Verac_VG Truly, our only hope is Xenonauts 2. Or the After- series, but that one's getting old.
@@Verac_VGThis video is literally just “I draw you as the soyjak so I’ve won!!” Vipers are not Animals, Crysalids are. Vahlen in XCOM: EW says Thin Men are “highly intelligent” in autopsy. Tygan in XCOM 2 days Vipers are “highly intelligent” they just look like snakes. Their deafult mindset is cunning and intelligence. Crysalids had no chance at citizenship because they are fucking animals.
Why would Faceless have to wear clothes when they can just transform into Humans?
Andromedons already wear clothes, it’s their Exosuits.
Archons are under a lot of physical pain because Cybernetics so they put their minds into a Matrix where they can feel at peace.
Due to decades to being mind-controlled, the aliens don’t remember their culture. So it makes perfect sense Torque doesn’t talk like a Snake, the Voice Actor literally said it was a good move. You took her out of context. They explain this all in the game in end-mission Lore excerpts. You never needed a book. People aren’t gonna change their minds when you act this arrogant.
"I'm sorry I turned your grandma into dog food but it was like, an order from my boss. also sorry bout unaliving your parents and your adopted parents. can we be buddies now?"
"Haha, yeah! never change buddy! :D"
are we sure this game isnt just a fever dream of an xcom member being mind controlled? xD
I truly hadn't realized just how many people think vidictiveness is a virtue until Chimera Squad was announced... or how many people just don't understand the concept of mind control.
We didn't exterminate all Germans after nazism... because we had another enemy at that time (Stalinist Russia)...
XCOM is the same. Yeah, we could exterminate all aliens as they did to us by putting us into tubs... but hermmm... aren't we forgetting something ? Oh yeah, the Elders... Maybe some alien tech could help against them, too bad we already genocided them...
Oh and also, remember Berlin ? That's literally City 31. Normally, aliens and humans don't live together, they are segregated. Why ? Well, to avoid humans beating the shit out of 'em for revenge, or to avoid your sectoid neighbor to blow off your head or steal your credit card code...
Anyways. Cool video. Cool energy. But feels like you didn't read enough between missions about the "Reclamation agency", literally made by cadre executives of XCOM (Bradford and Kelly) to associate strength of humanity and aliens to fight against Elder brainwashing...
@@diegogonzalez9877 It's called being human. Doesn't matter if said group is mind controlled if the events were so horrific, it makes WW2 look like a playground activity after recess. "controlled" and "just following orders" doesn't matter to a human who lost everything. The tribal mentality burns strong, and it's part of what makes humanity strong. It also comes with consequences, as it makes people reckless. They seek justice, but the perpetrators died without them even realizing (the elders being defeated in XCOM 2) and thus seek it out to the closest thing that is tied to said Elders: the aliens.
Can humans be compassionate? Yes, of course, but we're also extremely vindictive, and after 5 years from finally ripping the control off their homeworld, without a doubt that rage is still fresh and boiling hot. The aliens will have to show far more than 5 years they're supportive of humans and wish to be redeemed in the massive population's eyes, and it's going to be a brutal climb.
Not saying it's a pure virtue, just understanding where it comes from, and why it be like that. Even the mess of Chimera Squad does hint that City 31 is the best city of human-alien integration, and as you saw, it's a goddamn mess, we're just seeing the 'nice' side of it all. We're not seeing the cities that brutally executed the aliens in cold blood or chased them out and thus rebuilt the cities as fully human and resettling with farms and local wildlife.
@@diegogonzalez9877buddy there was at least a billion casualties minimum if your entire family was killed by a group of invading aliens are you really going to care if they were mind-controlled after the fact no going to be out for blood
This game being the mindcontrolled hallucination of the commander is the only way for me to forgive this game
Under the descriptions for most alien characters, it states that they spent time in basically a re-education camp to see if they were good to re-enter society. torque, who clearly isn't good to re enter society, was only let out if she joined chimera squad.
Giving dangerous people guns cannot backfire
@@dioniscaraus6124 When they are surrounded by 3 other people with guns whenever they are out with guns it's much less likely to
@@milomichelisaustin1981
Less likely ≠ won't
Making an ORB companion would be far more funnier and interesting than "Tall and a bit deformed human".
ORB is love. ORB is life
I remember Chimera Squad, because for the first two weeks the Xcom subreddit was flooded with Torque fanarts, to the point of having all fanarts banned by the moderators 😂
Based mods
I love the idea of humanity always persevering and that made me realise that Chimera Squad is literally just a Weenie Hut Jr's version of XCOM 2
I think we're all agreed, that It would be more fun with a little more group discourse. Maybe one human hate the sectiod guy cause she's see her family killed by one. Have a group distrust sectoid in general cause they can read mind, and build relationships from that. Expand the "live with alien" thing, like what non combatants Andromedon suit look like. Also the T-shirt thing, if they want alien to wear thing and don't look dumb. Just make them wear cool armor similar to what Mass Effect did. Man, imagine if chryssalid are like Vorcha, can hold gun and act as a merc group that we fought with.
The game is made with pre-established characters but does not create any kind of relationship or conflict between them. In many aspects this game simply seems poorly planned.
Ngl, most of stuff I see about Xcom:CS give me full of feeling I got with many "Modern day Correct Politic Moral" writing.
Like the "STONK WAMAN" "Just misunderstood criminal" "Old thing is bad, new better" "Haha my joke is funny"
Also while I don't play/read more Xcom stuff, I gonna guess/give them a slack about "Why these aliens are always on enemies side", I guess that most are always have been Generically Created as Mindless Puppets, so when there's no control, they become wild beasts.
You need help.
Replaying XCOM 2 and utilizing the Skimmishers does indicate that we can have aliens working with humans in the games. If they do make a 3rd game, I kinda want to see them include more aliens as special classes. Like Vipers would be amazing supports debugging enemies and binding a target you don’t want to deal with.
But they were people
To be honest I agreed with some of your points. For examples, there are many examples of different groups of people that moved to far away locations and stayed away for at least 100 to almost 1,000 years before coming back to coexist with their former enemies, oppressors, victims.
YOu cant even say its 'Only Been 5 Years' because it takes a lot of time to set up a city like this. It takes a long time to create an organization like shrike. So it had to have been way less time for them to get to this point. Bro i still get mad at people dont pay me back borrowed money in that amount of time.
I know the SECRET TRUTH about the lore in this game, Verac. The mind control never ended, they just shifted to make humans treat their alien invaders as friends.
this is an unironically very good idea that wouldn't save the game, but the lore
babe wake up new verac vid just dropped
As someone who has lost party members because I missed a 97% chance shot I didn’t forgive the aliens
chimera squad has the same problem destiny 2: lightfall had. They expected that thin veneer 80 action movie would mean that they don’t have to make an actual plot. Think of all the time and effort they saved. Well money, money and effort they saved. Except whoever was involved with making the snake woman. Based on the snake model and the various… other items scattered around the game those were people of culture and they did some good work.
CS does have a story, heck id say its pretty good, but its hidden in special character interactions, debriefings, radio chatter, etc
Honestly every time people say CS doesnt make sense because X or Y, i usually can recall a piece of dialogue in game that perfectly explains X or Y
@@joseaca1010 it has like half of a story, it’s all set pieces, and exposition no real interaction. Sure all of the characters have a background and action movie quips or background chatter but they don’t grow or accomplish anything personally. You could use the robot replacements and the “story” would unfold in exactly the same way. It’s so inoffensively edgy and bland I wanted to care so I played it twice but there are just better stories out there.
@@Ruggedtoaster how is it inoffensive? I mean for starters City 31 is pretty much the only city like it, and its barely functioning, most other cities resisted XCOM, City 31 surrendered peacefully, thats part of the reason why aliens and humans live together, and even then society is clearly tailored in favor of humans in several ways, for instance aliens are kept in detention centers until they are deemed "socially acceptable" something one of the faction leaders you fight describes as "until they are human enough", psychic individuals, which includes ALL SECTOIDS have a psyonic dampener chip implanted on em, this chip seems to be very painful in atleast some individuals, oh, and the whole reason Chimera Squad exists, is for XCOM to test how effective it would be to use alien/human units in combat against the Elders, which you know, is kind of what the Elders were doing
You can criticize CS storytelling all you want, and i wont disagree some things are clumsily told, but the picture it paints is that of a society barely hanging on, that doesnt seem inoffensive to me
@@joseaca1010 simple it failed to paint that picture. Every story beat is broken up so you can pick and choose what faction to focus on it doesn’t resolve any of the problems that this system has and instead of having any impact on the story your squad and the gameplay is just a time sink between the game stopping you to tell you the “interesting” bits in motion comics. And those “interesting” bits are just so generic but it breaks them up to spread out some sort of implied mystery. It’s lazy writing just like it’s lazy gameplay backed up on a lazy backstory. Thank goodness it was only $20.
@@Ruggedtoaster how did i manage to describe a picture that was not painted then? Everything i said i backed by ingame dialogue, i didnt make anything of that up, you dont have to read any books or external material, its all ingame, maybe its not PRESENTED in the best way, but its there
As for "lazy gameplay", i suppose it would be too much for me to expect you to elaborate,i suppose changing up how the game plays almost in its entirety compared to XCOM 1 and XCOM 2 is lazy, but XCOM 2 copying most of its mechanics from XCOM 1 isnt lazy
I almost spit out my drink when the mobile game came up, there's no way that's real dude
I didn't think about it too much but you do raise a good point about how the game should have explored and explained what happened after the aliens were freed. That would have been really cool.
At least there is one good thing coming from this thing being cannon.
SNEK STR1P CLUBS BABYYYYYYYYYYYYYY
yea where i would be fine if they retcon everything EXCEPT the snake girl brothels. where if there isn't any snake girl brothels in Xcom 3 then i am review bombing the fuck outta that NEVER FORGET WHAT THEY TAKEN FROM US.
i just really, really like snakes
The obvious thing that they could've done is have the Chimera squad be the first time humans and aliens worked together in a meaningful way, so you'd have to manage public opinion and inter-squad conflicts in addition to hunting the enemy cells, like I want alien slurs being used and squad mates refusing to help other squads because "I ain't touching no scally bastard", give me Jagged Alliance 2 levels of "Fuck that guy I'm out"
Yeah, uh, this is the War of the Chosen timeline. The Skirmishers were a thing back in the war already, so that first time's been quite a while ago. And reading the teams bios, the members were pretty obviously picked not only for their skills, but also their ability to get along well enough. As you'd expect when you think about it.
Man I loved the new Xcom games, the fact we got this instead of the Terror from the deep expansion/sequel they teased at the end of 2 just makes my blood boil
i had the game since launch and barely remember the story..
what I do remember was that the game became more bearable, if I roleplayed a *achem* more accurate police force and surrounded perps with 4 characters all melee-ing them and yelling "stop resisting!"
For some reason when I played the game, my mind turned that 5 year gap into a 50 year gap...probably was trying to protect me from the hurt
Holy shit this game is an actual alien propaganda
i dont belive humans made this
There is sadly a certain mentality some humans have where they hate their own tribe and deify the outsiders. It's not even xenophilia really because a xenophile can still have a sense of civic and national pride it's more that they hate their own tribe so much that they project goodness onto everything not of their tribe especially if it's adversarial. So yeah unfortunately I can totally buy that humans made this I'd even say real alien propaganda would be less ridiculous.
It was a mistake disregarding Bradford and the commanders opinion that all aliens should be exterminated
Was literally thinking to myself "Man, haven't seen a Verac video in a hot second."
Thank you for delivering a perfect video before bed.
What if the canon for Chimera squad's existence was a massive brain wave hallucination of alien propaganda in an attempt to subconsciously convince humanity not to skin them alive.
Why is there such a weird trend of game writers seemingly just not knowing what time is? 5 years is not long enough to squash the beef with the aliens. 200 years is way too long for the towns in fallout games to look like the bombs dropped fucking yesterday. Why are there so many prequels to games where the technology is somehow better than it was in what would eventually be the modern day in universe?
As somewhat of a chimera apologist myself (who didn’t even know a book existed, so that doesn’t inform this at all), I will make a few points I feel are worth considering regarding humanity forgiving aliens.
1. The big one is that ADVENT had control for like twenty years, and there were plenty of people who didn’t particularly hate them. Heck, that’s a whole generation that was born and raised under their rule. Whether they bought into propaganda about the Elders being benevolent, or just had solid enough lives that they never concerned themselves with or believed the stories of atrocities being done, it’s not hard for me to imagine a good chunk of people being predisposed to feel sympathetic to the aliens upon finding out about the truth. Heck, there’s plenty of people today who will defend one tyrannical regime or another because they think one or two things they did were pretty cool. Imagine how many people would still have goodwill towards a brutal regime that also eradicated most diseases because of alien medical tech. Sure you had a chance to get wheeled off to a backroom where they’d turn you into goop, but that was worth it, right?
2. From general in-game chatter, this type of situation is very much not the norm. City 31 is one of the only major population center where species co-exist on the planet. It’s very much a testing ground to see if this kind of thing is even possible long term. That’s a big part of why so many people are so devoted to seeing it succeed or fail. If it does, it’ll be proving someone’s point either way.
3. Some of the maps clearly show that in the time between liberation and chimera squad, someone started setting up snake strip clubs. I feel like that would have convinced a solid 20% of the populace on its own.
I can totally get not caring for the game’s story, tone, or gameplay, even if I do quite like aspects of them myself. It’s a very weird tone shift from the other two games, and even as someone who likes it, I can say it’s not executed super well.
Also holy shit, I barely encountered any bugs when I played it. What kind of cursed copy do you have?
Thank you for your polite disagreement. I agree that the game is not executed super well.
There would certainly be a small amount of people still stuck on ADVENT's propaganda. Would there be enough of them to maintain a city, and defend it from all the other humans who, if they didn't know they were being oppressed already, are starting to realize they've been lied to and that their friends and family were all turned into slop so that the aliens could bolster their DNA? This majority of people would certainly all react - in a giant, emotionally-charged way.
Much of the debate surrounding this game's story relies on us, as the audience, doing the writer's jobs for them. We speculate on what must've happened, and how we think things would've went, because we don't have much to go on. That is an enormous writing problem that precedes anything else. It's why I focused on "assumptions" in the video - I could be fine with these things if they were appropriately established, but they're not. I'm willing to believe there would be people sympathetic to their ex-ADVENT overlords - but the game does not set up a believable situation where there would be enough of those people to make City 31 work as a premise in this game's world. The writers dropped the ball, and now we, as the audience, have to attempt to make sense of things.
What I'm saying is, they needed more snake strip clubs. In fact, just make the game based around managing your empire of snake strip clubs. Then I will be ADVENT's strongest soldier.
Yeah, pretty much every city on earth was under ADVENT's pristine law and order, benefiting from their tech, etc. The vast majority of humanity was probably more or less on board with them.
And same, I also didn't encounter any bugs. Verac's game must have heard him talking shit.
I remember playing a pirated copy of this game and I encountered less bugs than this. Verac is just cursed i guess
@Himomo3 People react very negatively to regimes of "pristine law and order" when it disappears their friends and family in the night and turns them into soylent.
@@Verac_VG Or how no one on earth knew the advent soldiers were horrible mutated alien freaks until Xcom showed video of taking their helmets off at the end of the second game.
"My son joined the police force and they lobotomized him and made him not a human any more, so now no grandkids" would not be accepted.
Frankly, it feels like the main issue is that it's just 5 years. If you just increase that and still add some animosity between aliens and humans, it'd be fine. I do remember trying (read: pirating) this game a while back and dropped it after an hour of playing but it did strike me as odd that everyone just works together now.
I think the game has the same meta problem other games/media like this have nowadays. Most contemporary fantasy and scifi writers in Western video games, TTRPGs, etc. seem to be really uncomfortable and unwilling to write stories involving bigotry, that aren't just "Bigotry/Xenophobia bad". I find a lot of formerly darker settings have had their bigotry removed, not because it made sense within the setting, but because it simple outght not to be. DnD , Pathfinder, WoD, Dragon Age, XCOM and countless other settings have followed this trajectory. Will it be profitable for the XCOM brand? Don't ask me. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
Well its obviously because it's a hot button topic now and unless you want twitter freaks attacking you and anyone wanting to play the game(which would be kinda be a good way to make loads of money) it has to be black and white
Chimera Squad was by all accounts a moderate success. Then 2K made the mistake that was partnering with Marvel.
Also, the game very much drives it home that things are far from simple in City 31, let alone anywhere else. The peace is what it is largely for simple pragmatic reasons, chiefly that it ended with the aliens still holding the military advantage when they asked for peace and that after 20 years of ADVENT a large majority of humanity just outright depends on the infrastructure built and maintained by the aliens for basic survival. It's a lot easier to be forgiving when you literally need the other guy's help to not starve.
And Chimera Squad aren't exactly a good yardstick for how well aliens and humans get along in general society. They're literally handpicked volunteers, specifically selected to make the team work.
Honestly I get ya
You want them to write bigotry good?
Humans would go full 40k imperium on the aliens
When we talk about disaster spinoffs of Xcom I thought you were going to talk about The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, the third person xcom shooter they made after xcom's reboot that is both extremely jank and extremely boring.
To this day, I do not understand the people who try to convince me that The bureau is canon to XCOM EU/EW and 2
@@xandernightmare4985 it's because the psychic alien ghost works as an explanation for why the ethereals are so obsessed with the commander.
@@xandernightmare4985
Because it is cannon, granted it's cannon in a way that you can easily ignore and it has no impact on future events.
At least it was fun. In a relatively simple way, it was fun. Fighting mutons in general is something to experience.
It was actually pretty fun. Heavily flawed with tons of room for improvement, but the end product was pretty fun for a cheap little game.
"Just forgive the aliens"
No thanks, bro.
in leons voice
Your choices are forgiving the aliens or extinction through mass famine, civilizational collapse and the Lost and Chrysallids eating anyone left after that.
@@magni5648you be surprised how people would choose the latter option when being enslaved for decades.
@@TheGamernews1 Yeah, well, too bad for them that the aliens still held the upper hand militarily once the war was over, and the average one is quite able to defend themselves from random idiots trying to do a hate crime. While the actual people in charge are thankfully more competent and less suicidally inclined than that.
@@magni5648 I guess. Doesn’t make it any less stupid for everyone to be all holding hands and singing kumbaya when they Killed hundreds of thousands of innocents only a couple years ago.
Very well said and nuanced.
People don't understand how people work, far too hopeful and naïve. Which would be fine if not stacked on top of being resiliently Unchanging. Just like this game, it doesn't understand itself or where it came from. or why, it just wants to be and force fans of the series to deal with it, on a foundation of excuses.
The best thing about Chimera Squad is making snake woman brothels canon
i think that 5 year gap is meant for xcom 3 considering the ocean hell portal is open the day the game ends, so no matter what the cannon is from this it won't really affect xcom 3 or that's my guess at least
Here's a thought for an alternative take (5 years is still too soon but let's say we can't change that, grumble). Say that when the mind control releases, a number of public service officers/aliens turn themselves in and get locked up while the officials in city 31 work on figuring out what all they did thanks to immaculately kept Advent records. Further, let's assume that there was a big ol' purge across the planet, but City 31 was the most mild of them. Tensions run high between the humans and the aliens left in the city (the humans because of the invasion and the aliens because of the purges), but after the (human) mayor is killed, Chimera Squad decides to go over the records of those public service officers and see who they can let out to potentially combat this new threat. So instead of having the main "upgrade" loop be about armor and guns, you instead get to unlock new super units with unique backstories as the game goes on. Maybe even bring back permadeath for each of them, add their heroic actions into their records alongside what they did under Advent.
Also I found it really weird that the former advent hybrid didn't talk like the Skirmishers from WotC.
Yeah, uh, you kinda misunderstand the power dynamics here. The Elders' mind control network going down didn't mean that humanity suddenly held the military advantage. The war ended because the aliens offered peace after being freed, not because they were beaten. Big ol' purge doesn't really work when the people you want to purge are both the ones with the guns and the ones who are keeping civilization itself running. The war ended in an uneasy negotiated peace, not a one-sided capitulation.
Basically, humanity is in charge because the aliens agreed to that, and both sides need each other in different ways at this point.
@@magni5648The ending to XCOM 2 suggests otherwise.
@@HalfTangibleReally,? Where, exactly?
A couple rioteers overrunning a checkpoint doesn't actually amount to much in the grand scheme of things. It certainly doesn't magic away the freakin' spaceship fleet that in itself represents more military power than everything else in the solar system combined, just to point out the most obvious thing.
It's such wasted story potential in terms of a story yeah.
Imagine if they'd gone the route of 'yeah humans *absolutely* tried to exterminate the aliens and we created chimera squad to try and stop vigilantes killing aliens in ghettos (which they have to live in because nobody wants them around) who legally did nothing wrong but are still hated because y'know many year occcupation and war crimes'.
It's a genuine shame because that kind of story could still have provided a really good vehicle for the 'forgive and forget' message by showing you just how badly the aliens were and are being treated and the reprisals they have to suffer through. You could have recruited aliens into the task force and have your human members actually work through their own traumas through that process and become much better people and build genuine friendships.
On top of that, you could then still have the three extremist groups who target different alien species for different reasons and in different ways and also the big bad 4th group as the old XCOM guys funding all of that hatred because war and suffering was all they ever knew thanks to the aliens and they vehemently believe that said aliens need to go.
If only.
The problem with mass reprisals against the aliens is that that would end badly for the humans. People fail to understand that humanity didn't win the war by beating the aliens on the battlefield, it won because the aliens decided to stop fighting and offered peace after being freed form the Elders control network, at a point where said aliens still very much had the means to literally wipe humanity out wholesale. Hell, at a point where the aliens *just going away* would have resulted in the collapse of human civilization and the deaths of billions of humans, simply because the entire system was running on alien technology and know-how at that point and the aliens' workforce was needed to keep all of that maintained and running.
And casting XCOM as the villains would have been a massive disservice. Throughout the series, XCOM as an organisation and its characters were always about protecting humanity, not killing aliens for the sake of it. Unthinking zealotry to the point of risking humanity's extinction for the sake of revenge would be the absolute opposite of what XCOM stands for.
"You could have recruited aliens into the task force and have your human members actually work through their own traumas through that process"
Actually I'd call that *BAD* storytelling. Chimera Squad in-story is a proof of concept essentially. It absolutely makes sense that when handpicking personnel for that they'd ensure that it's people who will get along with each other decently well right from the start. You don't want people dangerously hung up on personal trauma in that kind of position.
The thin men from XCOM 1 literally turned into the snake people in XCOM 2. I don't see why they couldn't talk in chimera squad.
Though the game could have had a lot more racism. City (whatever i forgot the number) the only one where aliens and humans are living together. Show the dysfunction, we need to relate to the literal xenophobia that is going to be present in such a setting.
"Mom, can we get Xcom Apocalypse?"
"We have Xcom Apocalypse at home."
Xcom apocalypse at home:
It's been too long since we had new Verac! Always glad to see more.
Weren't the Aliens in Xcom 2 specifically mentioned to be bred to be warriors, with the ADVENT Troopers standing out? Seems like they would intregrate poorly in an organized society. I don't see the Sectoids filling out a tax form. Guess that's what the Chimera Squad is for.
Dangerous opinion, chud. Sectoids are our friends.
I cannot imaginee Mutons driving either, imagine the epidemic of road rages those guys would create.
They were essentially mind-controlled slaves, with no real culture or society beyond their function within the Elder's war machine. It is a pretty big point in the background that the various aliens are now trying to essentially find a culture of their own or otherwise fit in, with varying outcomes and degrees of success. Like, one of the reasons the whole co-existence thing is even able to work somewhat is because the more you learn about it, the more clear it is that the aliens were *victims* in all of this every bit as much as humanity, and most of them got fucked up even worse by it all.
Like, the Archons are basically so utterly traumatized that they've shut themselves away into a shared cyberspace and they're getting crippling panic attacks the moment anyone else so much as tries to start a conversation with them. Faceless are all suffering from multiple personality disorder because they literally *become* the people they disguise as even mentally.
@@magni5648 "with no real culture or society..." - I have to disagree quite strongly. Mutons clearly have a culture and seemingly even tribes (see muton autopsy in EU, confirmed by Tygan in the second game), and Gatekeepers have ornate shells (flavor text for Gatekeeper's shell). So while not all alien breeds have a profound culture, some of themm most definitely do.
@@MharaHal-qp5fp The Mutons seem rather unique in that regard, and even in their case it seems vestigial moreso than an actual living culture.
Great video Verac, love the energy as always... But I'm surprised you didn't bring up the snake brothel/s. There's a sign in one of the pre-mission screens
I also kinda like the game. It's not amazing but I enjoyed my mostly bug free experience. I also seem to be weirdly lucky with notoriously buggy games... Just not with others.
14:24 The only ones i'm seeing getting any form of forgiveness would have been the skirmishers and that's because they actively fought advent
I think people forget that humanity wasn't at war with the aliens for 20 years straight. Most of humanity lived in the city centers before the fall and got used to seeing aliens around them for 20 years
for real, this assumption that all the aliens would be killed in a purge post game and not being able to suspend his disbelief that this didn't happen is really weird and displays a lack of imagination and empathy.
@@ishill85 They were already imprisoned in internment camps and "tested for empathy." Even in the egalitarian City 31 there's still aliens and hybrids joining terrorist gangs in droves. I think the aliens may have it worse than it may initially seem on the surface.
Because people love their occupiers who oppressed them, because they saw them for some years.
@@MouldMadeMind some were oppressed, but lots got access to fantastic alien tech and their lives were vastly improved as a result. geneclinics might ship you off to be refined into an avatar, but they also might cure somebodies terminal cancer, people signed up to go to them.
and after so many years of propaganda lots of people would just not believe what x-com told them. and theres a whole faction of aliens that helped fight the elders and free the earth too, you expect everyones just gonna turn around and purge them along racial lines?
you're assuming way too homogenous and hostile a reaction to the aliens.
GOOD GODS. I played this game and didn’t think it was THAT BAD.
Sectoid Alex jones is amazing, and i want even more of him in Xcom 3!
For anyone wondering. 8:37 "Laisse moi aider" is french for 'Let me help.'
This games greatest contribution will be canonizing the Viper Strip Clubs
It ain't _THAT_ bad...
Then again I was more invested in the Loona-voiced snek than anyone else tho lol
Wait torque is voiced by loona's VA?
@@ChucktheSpicyChicken
Yep
@@admiralpepper6933 this answers why there's so much po-
It was written by someone young enough to think five years is a long time.
11:44 IF ONLY that was valid apologia. The XCOM books-with the possible exception of XCOM 2: Resurrection-are hot garbage and there are no books that help explain what happens between XCOM 2 and Chimera Squad.
I liked some of these ideas they had. Like. "Breaching" is kind of cool, gives you a way to kick off a fight without having to do the awkward slow crawl XCOM EU/2 did required. Having compact fights so you can dive back into the action instead of killing cells and cells of enemies.
But man I cannot stand that "Initiative" system. I didn't like it when my DM did something similar playing D&D. Because when we rolled initiative, we weren't rolling against the enemy, we were rolling *against each other.*
I remember the promotional material for this game. It was all the warnings I needed.
What really hurts about Chimera Squad is how close it is to being a really good game, with a good story. Cutting down the sprawl of levels to focus on room-by-room engagements is a cool idea, for example.
The narrative really needed to stop rushing to being a neoliberal "and then everyone joined hands in harmony, because systemic racism isn't a thing, except the token evil terrorists that the cops can murder with impunity". And really explore how precarious the socio-political landscape would be in a city where humans and aliens were expected to live side by side _within living memory of the old regime._ Where Chimera Squad being mixed is a real controversial move, rife with friction from without and within.
There absolutely needed to be a major element of simmering animosities. By selection bias, you could justify the setting city as being more egalitarian, because those humans who couldn't stand living next to aliens wouldn't move there. But it would probably also have people barely willing to tolerate aliens if it meant living in a stable urban polity. (I fully think you could justify a lack of full-blown anti-alien mob violence, if you establish the world got distracted by hundreds of petty fiefdoms or power plays being established to exploit the old regime's demise, for the benefit of individual parties with ambition). Some folks may just have been tired of all the fighting, in a "I don't want to do a xenocide, I just want to grill" kind of way. But no one should _forget_ that they were a little over one university bachelor's program removed from tyranny, repression, and people getting juiced.
The game shouldn't ignore that. It should embrace the drama inherent in the premise. One of the enemy factions, right from the get-go, should have been an openly anti-alien militia. Cells of people so pissed about the invaders, they could never let it go. Make them really scary, because what they lack in technology (that's Shrike's forte), they make up for in numbers and support from members of the civilian population. Use that faction's presence to advance the character arcs of the main cast, especially those with personal histories with the aliens and the old regime. Showing what those characters could become, if they allowed their grudges, even understandable ones, to radicalize them into bigoted violence. (And if "enemy faction of nothing but humans" sounds boring, you could always make them hypocrites and have them use stolen alien tech or even the more savage aliens, like Chrysalids).
Maybe raise the stakes of the narrative, by putting the city inside a complex geopolitical environment. An urban core sandwiched between rad-soaked wastes, large alien enclaves, a human-supremacist theocracy, and some isolationist police state beyond a demilitarized zone. Where the enemy factions causing civil unrest are being quietly funded by other polities, looking to destabilize the city. You may never fight those greater entities, but it would make the world feel more lived in. More importantly, it makes maintaining peace and stability in the city all the more important. The city is worth preserving, because the alternatives in the immediate vicinity aren't great for the people just trying to live their lives.
Like, yeah, a lot of the aliens were used by the Ethereals. Technically a lot of them literally didn’t have a choice, the “just following orders” excuse gets easier when you’re kept on a psychic leash. Still… yeah, snussy wouldn’t persuade most people to forgive so easily.
It’s like this - they can SAY it’s canon, but I don’t have to fucking swallow it.
I have only ever known one person who unironically played Chimera Squad for the fun of it, and he was a total WoW guy and threatened to unalive me, thus why he isn't my friend any longer, and why I have never played this game. It is very nice to have Verac veracsplain shitty (and occasionally incredible) games to me.
VERAC YOU S.O.B, YOU USED MY ‘SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF’ QUOTE FROM A SUPER CHAT I SENT. I DEMAND REPARATIONS
nah bro just forgive him. like it wouldn't take me 5 years to forgive the aliens if i can have some snitties and some snake girl brothels.
Damn, it feels like the XCOM people saw all the people on the Internet thirsting on the Aliens, and not only thought it was a good idea to twist and turn the story in unnaceptable ways...
...But also did it wrong, ommiting like half the species, maybe for some crazy reason thinking that people wouldn't be into the Berserker.
THey havne't spent enough time on the Internet.
I know I'm super late on this but as a massive Firaxis XCOM fan let me rant for just a bit.
I bought Chimera Squad on release, got it for 10€ so I went in with expectations fitting a 'minor spin-off game', and I think the mechanics are okay. The breach is actually a good idea, I don't like the initiative turn though. But all in all Chimera Squad is basically just X2:WotC mods but official so that's atleast something since the X2 mods are amazing. (If you're ever gonna buy Chimera Squad, get it on a deep discount but honestly you don't miss out on anything by not playing it)
Humans, even with a 20 year occupation, would not readily accept aliens AFTER proof that they are responsible for basically genocide and no it really doesn't matter that they were mind controlled, it just baffled me how this is the story sequel to X2, where let me remind you the game ends with a massive psionic spiral coming out of the ocean making not so subtle hints at a Terror from the Depths situation or at least a major issue if Firaxis didn't wanna do TftD. But its never even mentioned.
Then we have the rest of the world, resistence settlements/XCOM being the only functional goverment-like entity left after ADVENTs collaps, most if not all ADVENT cities would descend into chaos and anarchy and it would take years for XCOM to come close to restoring order and they would probably have to fight new human and alien warlords who would take control in this vacuum. But no there is relative order and peace in this new world. And this is not even to say anything about the Lost zones, like what the fuck happened to all the fucking zombies flooding earth from the original invasion, that should be a major problem, maybe even a permanent one with actual Lost Zones that cannot be reclaimed. The same could and should be said about Chryssalids, these are actual mindless beasts, living weapons made by the Ethereals. It makes sense that while the Ethereals are still in control they can keep these beasts from going out of control but after the defeat of the Ethereals they would infest the world, quite literally. Think back to Newfoundland in EU/EW but on much larger scales, they should be kind of like the Lost, a plague upon Earth but no they're just regular enemies from the ADVENT faction.
Another problem is how fucking lenient XCOM treats the remnents of ADVENT, like one of the 'gangs' is literal ADVENT soldiers fighting to return to the glory days of ADVENT. There is no way they would ever have been allowed to live in the first place. You can argue that the freed hybrids that don't want to return to ADVENT would be welcomed because the Skirmishers paved the way in the resistence but literal ADVENT goons? No never.
Then speaking of how XCOM would treat the world as basically being the defacto goverment, sorry but we wouldn't be returning to democracy. We would have a military dictatorship with the Commander/Bradford/XCOM in charge, for atleast a good while. Not because either Bradford or the Commander would want to but out of necessity to counter the anarchy and warlords that would inevitably form from the vacuum of ADVENTs collaps.
Finally we get the Chimera Squad finale, its own sequel hook, we have yet another shadow organisation looming but where the fuck did they come from?
ADVENT remnants? Impossible since XCOM wouldn't have allowed that.
Elder remnents? Possible since their grand design was to create the perfect human body for them to takeover and thereby live but very unlikely as the Ethereals were fighting/fleeing from something else as seen in EU/EW and hinted at in X2.
A third organisation unrelated to anything? That would be incredibly stupid how they would be able in 5 short years to rival XCOM.
Or finally the 'shadow organisation' would be a pawn from whatever the Ethereals were fighting/fleeing from, this is probably the best choice as that would explain how literal nobodies are somehow able to play Illuminati.
The ending just feels like a cop out because Chimera Squad basically ignores anything from X2 apart from the general premise, it does not adequately follow up on the story on what would have happened if aliens actually invaded, actually conquered humanity, actually committed soylent green, actually introduced like a dozen alien species, actually left said aliens after they got kicked out.
Oh and I fucking hate all the characters from Chimera Squad, Marvel movies and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race, and aliens too apparently.
Edit: Oh yeah I forgot how they absolutely fucked the aliens up with that shit artstyle they used, like please they look worse than the EU aliens and good god Mutons got fucked... Oh yeah I don't like how Mutons got retconned into being spiritual space mechanics, they used to be tribal warriors. I mean fuck the X2 berserker is a Muton female for gods sake and in EU/EW Muton elites used to have tribal markings and be used as elite bodyguards but now... ahhhhh...