To be specific, the PS4 version including War of the Chosen, Shen’s Last Gift, and Alien Rulers. I’ve played plenty of times on PC, but Grace is seeing this for the first time! As a result we’re playing with the Tutorial and Lost And Abandoned turned on. The rest of the DLC will be integrated since The Nest and The Lost Towers are cool and all, but get awkward when you’re trying to juggle everything
We’re playing on Commander difficulty, and since the game hard crashed twice while I was testing, we’ll be foregoing Ironman and playing Honestman mode Grace could never resist roasting me for eternity if I dared savescum so don’t worry, you’re in good hands.
I should also mention I’ve never actually finished a Commander difficulty game so there’s a very real possibility of us blowing it and dooming Earth.
Drinking Game?
That’s right, XCOM 2 wasn’t difficult enough, so I’m buying the most bitter beers I can find, and drinking on the following conditions:
-Drink if XCOM misses
-Drink if XCOM panics
-Drink if an XCOM soldier goes into bleedout
-Drink once per rank if an XCOM soldier dies (one for rookie, two for squaddie, etc)
-Drink if a civilian dies
The civilian condition includes Resistance members, VIPs, as well as the shameful narcs running around in Advent cities. We’re here to SAVE humans after all, keep those grenades on a leash. The drinking conditions start once we officially take control of XCOM. I’m not being punished for Bradford’s shitty commanding. Dude’s great at planning stuff but always gets most of the squad killed when he does a tutorial. I’m adding the second episode to start since it’s when the drinking game officially begins!
This is the final episode of that session, and I promise that between sessions we learned how to pronounce “Zhuang” properly. Grace also forgot immediately after I told him but at least I start pronouncing it right.
This marks the start of our tech all falling apart for most of the session. This episode was easily fixable but between episodes 15 and 16 you’ll notice I become SIGNIFICANTLY more drunk since I blue screened right as I was about to stop recording the first episode 16, and only rescued it because an autosave didn’t overwrite properly, meaning we also got saved by a tech issue. It also results in a continuity snarl that I took several drinks for but we’ll talk about that when it’s more relevant. Between the PS4 port being a buggy mess and me being too poor to replace computer parts for the last like, six years, we’ve been having a rough go of things. Needless to say this is why I didn’t play on Ironman.
“Well hey maybe you had better luck on the missions!” you might say, here’s a preview from 15:
In which a tiny button fumble has some fairly extreme consequences
Some important notes about this episode, putting them behind spoiler tags since I talk about stuff near the end:
-The alien hunter weapons actually can NOT be rebuilt, I was thinking of a mod a friend of mine used on PC. So those are gone forever
-After this episode was the episode that bluescreened right before the end of a nearly hour long drink heavy episode. We managed to save an autosave from near the end of this mission, and due to it playing out slightly differently, Vega escapes the battlefield but everything else plays out the same. In the next episode I take as many drinks as I would if he died, combined with all the drinks I took in the last episode I consider it a fair penance.
-YEAH I SHOULDA SAVED ELENA’S CLAYMORE TO BLOW UP THE WALL OF THE PRISON CELL IT KILLS ME INSIDE
This episode was REAL ROUGH but fortunately it’s the last episode of the tech-hell session, and our last session went real smooth Also Vega fell out of the timeline so welcome back buddy
I might seem a little salty in this episode but please understand this is like hour seven and I worked that day, so for the back half of the episode I had to focus on not passing out. It was a rough time.
A new session! One without any major tech issues! This sitrep can be an absolute game ender near the endgame but it’s still early enough for us to shrug it off.
Grace could never resist roasting me for eternity if I dared savescum so don’t worry, you’re in good hands.
Also Vega fell out of the timeline so welcome back buddy