By Dan Stapleton

As you might surmise from the thousands of words of detail below, gleaned from a massive, hour-long info dump from XCOM Creative Director Jake Solomon today, XCOM 2: War of the Chosen is a huge expansion. What it promises to revamp and layer on top of an already amazing tactical combat game makes me a little bit frightened at how much time I’m likely to sink into it when it comes out on PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 at the end of August. Stay with me, because this gets kind of complex.

First, a big issue for the existing XCOM 2 community: what’s to become of the Rulers, the absolutely vicious boss characters introduced in the Alien Hunters DLC? Once the ultimate threat to XCOM, they’ve been scaled back and reigned in. With War of the Chosen installed, you’ll be notified that certain facilities are guarded by a Ruler; they won’t come after you until you’ve voluntarily attacked their hideout at the time of your choosing. However, once you’ve engaged them if they escape they’re free to pop up in any other Mission as normal (unless that mission is also invaded by a Chosen). They’ll also be easier to manage: instead of reacting to every single action any XCOM soldier takes, they’ll now only get a free move for an attack or a movement, and even then only if it happens within the Ruler’s line of sight. That means things like reloads or certain special abilities won’t trigger them, which should give us a little more room to breathe when in combat.

The role of showing up in random missions to ruin your day is now occupied by The Chosen, a trio of blue-skinned, white-haired alien siblings created by the Elders. (It’s not actually random – they each have an agenda behind the scenes.) The Hunter, the Assassin, and the Warlock each have what Solomon calls map behaviors, which means that as soon as you make contact with an enemy on a mission they’ll teleport in on the far side of the map and do their best to throw a wrench in your plans. The examples given were the Hunter, who can snipe you from across the map, and the Warlock, who can summon spectral enemies out of the ground. Solomon says that in the case of the Hunter you’ll be warned when you’re targeted and it’ll be easy to get out of his line of fire, but that and the Warlock’s summoning will force you to move and change up the way you’d have played otherwise. This makes the Chosen effectively map modifiers, forcing you out of the rut of playing the same way every time even before you engage them in direct combat.

Unlike the Rulers, the Chosen’s goal isn’t to kill soldiers – they’re trying to disable your troops and interrogate them in order to gain a resource called Knowledge, which will eventually lead them to the Avenger. So many of their attacks don’t even do damage, but instead inflicts a new “dazed” status that leaves XCOM soldiers temporarily vulnerable to interrogation – or worse, capture – if the Chosen can reach them before a teammate can move adjacent to them and snap them out of it. (Rescuing a captured soldier requires that you send your troops on a stealth mission.)

The Chosen are also active on the strategic world map. At first, they’ll just attack the regions you control, damaging your income and gaining Knowledge. But if they gather enough Knowledge they’ll begin sabotaging the Avenger, and they can start interfering with your Covert Actions (more on those in a moment), potentially resulting in your agents being captured.  Eventually, they’ll attack the Avenger in their own special mission type that involves huge cannons trying to destroy the ship on the ground. (It doesn’t replace the existing one where you’re shot down by a UFO and have to defend – it’s a whole new threat on top of that.)

But, importantly, the three Chosen characters are not working together – they’re in competition, racing to be the one to defeat XCOM and thus be left in control of Earth by the Elders. Each one controls their own territory and has their own knowledge meter, so those factors will influence which ones you attempt to track down and kill in their stronghold (they’ll teleport out if you defeat them on a normal mission). The way Solomon describes those stronghold raid missions sounds a lot like the alien base missions in XCOM: Enemy Unknown, where you fight through a linear series of chambers to reach a boss fight at the end.

Allowed to run free, the Chosen will level up over time, gaining randomly selected strengths and weaknesses as they go. They might acquire Shadow Step, making them immune to reaction fire, or be able to spot any concealed unit in their line of sight, or a weakness to psionics or start taking double damage from explosives. Some are more elaborate, says Solomon. “One of the interesting ones is that if you miss a shot against them they have a chance to return fire immediately. So now you have to be like ‘Oh, I shouldn’t take any low-percentage shots against this one.’ Or, when their turn ends, they go into Overwatch immediately. What they’re really supposed to do is modify how you approach that Chosen, and then they change because they pick up a new strength.” Notably, those traits are exposed to you, so you’re never going to find out the hard way that the characters you brought aren’t going to be effective against the potential Chosen threat.

If this sounds similar to Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor/War’s Nemesis system, that’s because Solomon says that game was the inspiration for the Chosen’s progression. (Which is fantastic – I’ve been saying every game should borrow from the Nemesis system since 2015, but disappointingly few have.) “That’s definitely what got me thinking along these lines, though it ended up being pretty different. It would be really fun if we had enemies that actually had personality, but we would never want that to change what XCOM is.”

Beyond progression, the Chosen inject personality by talking to you (one of whom is voiced by Nolan North, because he’s contractually obligated to participate in every video game). They’ll pipe up on the strategy layer or in combat to talk about things that happened on the last mission, such as gloating about capturing a soldier or stating they won’t be as easy to defeat as their sibling. “That’s not influencing gameplay, but I’ve found that something I’ve missed in XCOM is that the strategy layer can feel a little cold,” says Solomon. “Especially mid-game when you get on a role, it’s nice to have the Chosen commenting on things.”

But they’re not the only new voices we’ll hear in War of the Chosen. The new resistance faction leaders will comment as well, and we’ll get an earful of spin on our actions from both the Resistance Radio (hosted by Jacob Busey) and the Advent Speaker as we’re returning from missions. “It adds a lot of life to the game,” promises Solomon.

In order to hunt down a Chosen, you’ll need to work with your targeted Chosen’s rival resistance faction, which is randomly paired each game. You’ll need to spend some of your Covert Action efforts with either the Reapers, the Templars, or the Skirmishers to pinpoint the location of the associated Chosen’s stronghold (and the Chosen will take more damage from that faction). Solomon says you don’t have to and probably won’t hunt down all the Chosen before you beat a game. However (minor spoiler alert!) any Chosen you don’t kill before reaching the final string of missions will face off with you at some point – all at once. Also, there’s a whole new ending cinematic, too, so there’s something waiting for those of us who’ve already beaten it.

The Chosen aren’t the only new enemy types, though. We’ll see two new Advent soldiers: the Priest, a psionic soldier who can mind control foes, buff enemies, and has a chance to put himself into stasis and revive if he’s killed; and the Purifier, a flamethrower trooper with incendiary grenades. There’s also a new alien in the Specter, a stealth enemy who can knock out one of your soldiers and replace them with a dark copy of that unit. Effectively, it’s a mind-control ability, except without the added pain of losing a soldier for good if you kill them. Also, if you use a revive ability on the downed soldier, the dark copy will cease to exist.

Finally, there’s an entirely new enemy faction, the Lost. Yes, they’re zombies – hordes of former humans, transformed into mindlessly aggressive husks by the green gas-spewing pods we first saw in Enemy Unknown. They come in numbers and are attracted by the sound of explosions, which discourages the use of everybody’s favorite area-of-effect attacks. However, they also have what Solomon calls a headshot effect. “There are a lot of Lost – so many that you couldn’t kill them in a single turn without headshots. If you kill one, that’s a free action.” Basically, if you target the low-health zombies first and have a fair amount of ammo loaded into your guns, you can mow down a lot of them before they reach you, but it requires some thought in what order to take your shots. Also notable: if the Lost are on fire they’ll panic and run around, lighting other Lost on fire. The Advent know this too; hence the Purifier.

On the topic of the Lost, many missions will now have what Firaxis calls sitreps – mission-wide modifiers, which are visible when you’re choosing between mission options – that can drastically change the way you approach both new and old objectives. Here’s a list of the examples Solomon gave, which is by no means the complete set.

High explosives – The map is littered with explosives that you or the AI can target

Surgical – You’re limited to just three soldiers (and the enemy is ramped down to compensate).

Lost – There are lost here. They’re on all Abandoned City maps, but can also be on others. Every couple of turns these things are going to swarm you, and with every explosion that turn counter drops down. You don’t want to use explosives against Lost.

Horde – It’s all Lost – no Advent. You’re trying to reach an objective like destroy relay, but the map is flooded with zombies.

Shadow Squad – Every member of your squad has the conceal ability.

Savage – All beast enemies like transformed Faceless and Cryssalids.

Which brings us to the new abilities XCOM will have to allow it to stand a chance against all of this. Don’t worry: there’s quite a lot.

Starting with the simple thing, SPARK units will be tougher, more accurate, and can add mods to their guns. But even so, they’re lightweights compared to the “hero” units we’ll get from the three resistance factions, the Scrappers, the Templars, and the Reapers. Because of their wide range of powerful abilities, these units are hard to come by in numbers, but sound like they’ll be more than capable of turning the tide. You’ll get quick access to one (fully customizable) hero unit to start with, but signing on more won’t be easy or cheap (though if you lose one, replacing them won’t break the bank).

The Reaper, for starters, is a stealth unit who can attack and, if he gets lucky, remain concealed. They also have an attack called the Claymore mine which they can throw out and then shoot in order to do damage with a guarantee of maintaining concealment (and, with the right ability, a kill with the Claymore can even put them back into stealth). On top of that, when they’re in stealth they’re 50% faster and the enemy detection radius is one square, giving them essentially free reign over the whole map. If fully leveled up, you can get access to abilities like Banish, which fires every bullet in your gun at a single target. (Imagine what that’ll do when combined with a superior expanded clip.)

Skirmishers come with a wrist-mounted grapple that can pull enemies to them, Viper-style, or pull themselves to enemies so they can finish the job with a melee kill. On the high end of their ability tree, they have skills like Battle Lord, which effectively turns them into an XCOM-controlled Ruler and allowing them an action for every enemy action taken within their line of sight. They also have Interrupt, which lets them take any action of your choosing as a reaction instead of simply firing their gun.

Templars are psionic specialists. Less is known about them right now, but on the high end of their tree, you’ll find an ability to create a clone of themselves or bring down lightning on every enemy in a radius around them. If they score a kill with that one their focus is fully restored.

All of these soldiers have access to more abilities than the standard XCOM soldier, plus some of the same ones. The catch is that you have to buy them using skill points that come both from leveling up your heroes and from a shared pool of ability points that come from executing certain maneuvers in combat, such as flanking or killing from an elevated position. “Every time you do that, there’s a chance to earn points,” says Solomon. Core soldiers can use ability points as well in the new Training Center facility – they can purchase from both branches of their tree or from other classes.

That facility, in combination with the new Infirmary, replaces the Advanced Warfare Center (RIP). The main difference is that now instead of every soldier having a secret ability that’s uncovered at the AWC, everyone has a set of four possible abilities that you can unlock using ability points. If you want to put all your eggs in one basket, you can pour points into one soldier and unlock them all – though some will be more expensive than others. If you want to put Rapid Fire on a sniper, for example, it’s going to cost you.

Cozying up to the three factions can bring you other extremely powerful perks. You have a limited number of slots to fill, but you’re presented with randomly available options like instant kills every time you hit a Lost, having Advent units defect to your side, reducing the Advent’s progress bar by one every month, doubling the resource rewards from investigating a rumor, and many more. Each faction has a completely different set, so there’s a lot to think about when choosing where to spend your resources.

Now might be a good time to discuss Covert Actions, which are huge. They’re similar to what we saw in XCOM: Enemy Within with dispatching agents on time-based missions to hunt down Exalt bases. But here we’re sending them off in pairs, with an option to attach an extra resource like a third soldier, an engineer or a scientist or a piece of equipment or some Intel to mitigate a hazard the covert team might face. (“But a lot of the time, as a player, I’m like, eh, they’ll be fine,” Solomon adds.) If you don’t spend the extra resource and your team has bad luck, they could be captured outright or it could trigger an Ambush mission in which you have to control them in a mission to try to sneak them out of danger from both Lost and Advent pursuers. From the sound of it there will be a lot of opportunities for Covert Actions, since they’ll be used to improve your relationship with the three other resistance factions. “You’re constantly juggling what you should be doing with Covert Actions,” says Solomon. He adds that the Resistance Ring is a new facility that helps do Covert Actions faster

But these Covert Actions should be well worth the risk and investment considering the benefits they bring. Most of your interactions with the resistance factions are done this way, as are your counters to the Chosen’s maneuvers. They also benefit from the bonding mechanic, which is still another thing we must discuss before I can go to sleep.

Every soldier has randomly assigned compatibility with every other soldier, from low to very high. Sending them on tactical or covert missions together builds that relationship until you’re given the opportunity to level it up. (First one’s free, but increasing it requires a trip to the Training Center.) Solomon describes the process: “After the mission you’ll see a flyover on the soldiers, and the camera will zoom in and you’ll see those two soldiers having a beer together, or looking at a computer together, or at the rifle range shooting guns together, and Bradford will say ‘these two have enough compatibility to form a bond.’”

At the lowest level you’ll see abilities like this: once per mission you can give up one soldier’s action to give the bondmate another action (this will work anywhere on the map). At bond level three, Solomon says, you can do that twice. Also at bond level three, there’s something called Dual Strike where you both shoot the same target at the same time and it doesn’t cost the bondmate an action. There are abilities where all you have to do is run up next to your bondmate and it cleanses them of all negative mental effects, so it would be like a revive. Bondmates can also complete Covert Actions faster.

It’s important to note that these factions don’t operate against Advent independently, and only enter combat when you take them with you, so they’re not competing with you for control of territory or attacking Advent on their own. However, Solomon says there are missions where you’ll have Resistance Soldiers on your side who will take a turn independently of yours.

Another completely revamped system is Will. Before it only affected psionic abilities, but now it’s a full-on fatigue system that will force you to rotate your soldiers out of combat to let them rest, or face some pretty nasty consequences.

The most basic are that as a soldier’s Will drops (which is accelerated by injury or exposure to large numbers of enemies) they’ll be more susceptible to mind control, stuns, and panic. It’s important enough that you’ll now see Will on a bar in the Tactical UI.

Worse are the consequences of sending a soldier who’s already tired in for another round of combat. You can do it if you need to, but if you do they’ll could potentially pick up negative traits such as Aggressive, where telling them to go on Overwatch might cause them to attack immediately. Another one causes the to want their weapon to be fully loaded, so sometimes when you move them they’ll automatically use their next move to reload their weapon. Others are more straightforward, like a fear of certain enemy types that cause them to go berserk and attack that unit or hunker down on sight of that enemy. Those traits only trigger a max of once per mission, and can be cured at the Infirmary.

We’ll also get some nice new toys. Reapers use Vector Rifle, Skirmishes use a Bullpup Rifle and a ripjack (can pull enemy to you or you to an enemy), Templars have the Shard gauntlets. For equipment, there’s a Lost Lure that can be used to make them attack where you want. And, if you’re paranoid about losing a soldier, you now have an insurance policy: there’s a consumable Sustaining Sphere item, if a unit is killed while carrying it, it will prevent them from dying and bring them back with one hitpoint the next turn.

Also, Killing a Chosen won’t just remove them from play; you’ll also get access to their weapons. The Hunter’s sniper rifle is called the Dark Lance, and it allows you to equip “a ton” of mods. It also only requires a single action to use, so a sniper can move and fire. Combined with Death from Above, it becomes even more powerful. You can also get the Warlock’s rifle and the Assassin’s blades.

Meanwhile, research has a new angle to it in Breakthroughs and Inspirations, which are meant to tempt you away from your standard research path of choice. They appear randomly: Once you finish researching a tech, Tygon will sometimes offer you a one-time chance at researching a new tech that might offer bonuses like increasing all sniper rifle damage by one, or all conventional weapon damage by one, or halving the cost of a given facility. Inspirations will give you one-time opportunities to research a tech at a discounted rate.

With all of this, a game if XCOM 2: War of the Chosen is considerably longer to play than base XCOM 2 because of all the new content. Solomon says it’s generally around 10 to 15 missions longer. That’s no Long War 2, but it’s nothing to scoff at, either.

Once you’re done with that, or if you only have a few minutes at a time to play, there’s the new challenge mode. These missions can be either hand-crafted by Firaxis or randomly generated, but either way we’ll take a group of units – both human and alien – into combat and see how we fare against others on a leaderboard. They give you updates as you go, saying things like “75% of people have lost a soldier by now.” Firaxis isn’t sure yet how frequently they’ll be available – maybe weekly.

Firaxis hasn’t forgotten about those still experiencing technical issues with XCOM 2, says Solomon, and War of the Chosen will come with some engine fixes. “We’ve definitely made improvements to loading times, certainly to stability, steady state frame rate has gone up. We have, right outside of my office, a bunch of machines running the game on a loop. It’s pretty fun, actually, because you can watch the AI play the game over and over, and there’s a performance monitor. They’ve done a lot of improvements, performance-wise.”

On the possibility of XCOM on the Switch “I can truly say that I have no idea. I’d be happy, but I truly have not had that conversation, so I don’t know. Wait, what are you talking about, Mario+Rabbids, man! I just saw Luigi take half-cover yesterday, so I dunno, they beat us to it, I guess. It was pretty cool.”

And finally, I asked Solomon about his reaction to the announcement of Mario+Rabbids: Battle Kingdom. “Honestly, my jaw dropped a little when I saw it, but I thought it was pretty cool. It can’t be a bad thing. I’m excited to see how they do it. My fellow designer said ‘I’m interested to see how they handle autopsies.”

Obviously, you can expect to hear more about XCOM 2 in the next few months as we get closer to the August 29 release date.