As a WMG subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
- Former XCOM and ADVENT soldiers working as mercs for criminal gangs regardless of species.
- Jossed in that they have more of an agenda than money; Shrike is a former resistance movement with a cell-based structure and no clear leadership. Some do useful, innocent work (like protecting city food supplies) whilst others are work as mercs for other crime syndicates. It turns out that there are some former XCOM personnel amongst their ranks, and their ultimate plan is to escalate the situation until XCOM is forced to crack down and become The Empire. The former ADVENT goons meanwhile formed the Sacred Coil and just want to reopen the Psionic Gate Network so that the war can continue.
- Human Supremacist groups who don't like living with aliens and want to exterminate them. Can also count as a Take That! on speciesist Xcom fans by showing how insane they are.
- Confirmed;
- The tutorial enemies are a bunch of idiots who aren't happy XCOM decided to hang up their guns post-ADVENT.
- Shrike thinks that humanity is worthy of becoming the next Elders. They don't so much care about species relations as consider them weaponized assets.
- The Progeny are psionics (mostly humans with some Sectoids) who let the power get to their heads; they see anyone without psionics as their lessers, and in the case of Hybrids, the Progeny outright mind-rape them into becoming their slaves and use them as battle thralls.
- While not fought directly, Earth Above All is what happens when RightWingMilitiaFanatics convince themselves that Earth is one giant super-country, and aliens aren't invited. Offscreen, what starts as a reasonable protest against giving religious fundamentalists access to battleships turns into full-blown racist fearmongering, including the classic "Insult your target until they maul you, then get it on your phone and blame them for being inherently violent". Luckily, the fundamentalists are arrested and explain their actions as part of being 'nationless' from persecution and lack of immigration, driving a huge stake into EAA's reasoning.
- Former ADVENT loyalists who want the Elders back.
- Confirmed, the ADVENT remnant is called the Sacred Coil. They appear to be going for weird skintight bodysuits instead of their old armor, but otherwise have most of the old ADVENT units in their ranks like Purifiers.
- Additionally they still practice Elder worship as a sort of religion with the same sort of reverence that The Speaker expressed.
- Human Right Wing Militia groups made up of former Reapers and XCOM soldiers.
- Semi-confirmed, as noted above; your opponents in the tutorial are human supremacists. They don't seem to be a full-fledged faction though; according to the Mayor, the only thing they posed a threat to until now were beer bottles. Actually, fully confirmed; the Progeny has some human-supremacy ideology in its makeup, and the idiots were being funded by the much more organized Renegade Splinter Faction, Shrike.
- A criminal gang made up of humans and aliens.
- Confirmed as Gray Phoenix, a gang of scavengers and outcasts. They are primarily aliens, but they have extensive contacts and competent leadership.
- EXALT survivors who want to control the city for their own goals.
- Maybe. Depending on what actually happened, some surviving elements of EXALT could now be amongst the ranks of Shrike and the greater conspiracy.
- Ordinary citizens being mind controlled by a gang of psychics who think they are the true rulers of Earth.
- Confirmed - this is part of the Progeny's MO.
- A surviving Viper King running a criminal empire with his harem of Viper wives.
- If only. But no.
- A feral Muton warband that has regressed to their ancient pre-Elder tribal culture and is playing barbarian.
- Closest we got was Gray Phoenix. They are somewhat tribal in a sense but this is primarily expressed have a religious reverence for their invasion transport ships and the maintenance there of. They're still perfectly intelligent and in fact probably the most competent enemy faction in terms of technology.
- A Cult who follow whatever is under the purple glowing underwater cracks from the end of XCOM 2. Added bonus if it acts as an intro for a major villain in the next game.
- The Progeny have some nautical allusions with their quoting of The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, but that's as close as they get.
- An Ethereal who survived the end of the previous game, working to rebuild their control while staying hidden in the shadows.
- Nope. You'll have to settle for a Gatekeeper driven insane from being stuck in hyperspace for five years.
- A Corrupt Politician playing the various groups off against each other, increasing their personal power at the cost of unity of the various races living in City 31.
- Jossed at least for the events of the game itself, but the Sequel Hook leaves it a possibility for XCOM 3.
- Some desperate Templars resorting to smuggling to gather resources for their operations monitoring the ocean, as a hook for XCOM 3.
- Jossed. The psionic supremacists, the Progeny, are people who the Templars wish would Stop Being Stereotypical.
- A group that believes that there is going to be another invasion and is engaging in criminal activity to gather what resources are necessary to survive what is coming. Added bonus if they are right about the invasion as a hook for the next game.
- Confirmed - this is pretty much the game's Framing Device in a nutshell.
- A group who believe that the current multi-species government is ADVENT by a different name.
- Jossed, although there's at least one group that has this as their goal.
- A group who want to advance themselves through unethical methods using alien tech/genes (think turning people into goo as part of the Avatar Project from XCOM 2). Could explain the Sorting Algorithm of Evil.
- Jossed for the most part, but the Progeny seeking to forcefully awaken all of humanity's psionic potential whether the victims want to or not comes fairly close.
- Fantastic Drug dealers who make their product out of things like Elerium or alien organs.
- Jossed. These probably exist in the setting, but aren't a big enough deal for Chimera Squad to be going after.
- A private police force or similar that is secretly arming the gangs so Chimera Squad will be fired for failing to control the criminals then they can step in and take over in the power vacuum.
- Semi-confirmed. Sovereign's Shrike forces want to overwhelm 31PD so they'll get hired back on as paramilitary security. Chimera Squad turned out to be a Spanner in the Works.
- Jossed. Shrike wanted this to happen, but Chimera Squad intervenes and it never needs to. You can fight actual Chryssalids though - the Sacred Coil use them as pets.
- The Spokesman isn't mentioned at all, leaving this ambiguous. Firaxis is probably saving him up for the next main title, XCOM 3.
- Jossed as far as the player can tell - if the Final Boss was controlled by an alien infiltrator, it's not even hinted at.
- The Fade that seems to be afflicting various Hybrids might be a foreshadowing to a full-scale infestation/infiltration by the Micronoids.
- Semi-confirmed. The last scene of the game shows two unidentified individuals who say that XCOM is already fighting another war, whether they realize it or not. However, what relation this has (if any) to the "real war" Geist mentioned in the expanded ending from War of the Chosen and what it means for XCOM 3 is unclear.
- At least partially Jossed. Aliens have had varying degrees of success at integrating into Earth society, even after being cleared for release by XCOM. The Gray Phoenix faction is made up of aliens whose difficulties in adjusting has led them to try to return to their homeworlds or just to find somewhere safer. Axiom also shares some insight into muton culture, such as their quasi-religious attachment to their spaceships, so they definitely have their own cultures.
- Further jossed by evidence of preserved tribal customs and tattoos found on interrogated or autopsied Mutons by Dr Vahlen during the initial invasion.
A bit of half and half. Some of the Aliens like some of the Sectoids, the hybrids/clones, and the Vipers appear to lack an inherent culture for exactly the reason described. The most they retain is personality traits more common in their particular species. This would make sense as the Sectoids have been heavily modified repeatedly having lost their original form entirely, while the clones are a new group entirely without a chance to form a culture aside from the weird religion of Sacred Coil, and the Vipers have been reduced to a monogender species probably kept alive via cloning or artificial insemination of eggs without the family unit to pass information down.
Conversely other species like the Mutons retain a tribal culture because as the heavy hitters they were alive and in training on the invasion ships. Some of the Sectoids also retain something of a culture based around domination but it appears to be derivative of the Etherials rather then unique to them. The Andromedons also appear to be doing their own thing but it's unclear if they have a fully developed culture or are simply isolating themselves in an environment livable for their species.
Still others like the Chrysalids are effectively just wild animals barely controllable by certain parties. The Faceless are as ambiguous as ever have not visibly changed since the invasion while going uncommented on. Achons and Floaters meanwhile seem to willingly exist in some sort of psionic induced permanent rest or false world to ease their endless pain from the cybernetics they've been fused to leaving their situation even more ambiguous.
Considering how advanced technology is in City 31 courtesy of the end results of ADVENT and XCOM research, humans, hybrids, and aliens all having translator devices capable of flawlessly translating each others speech isn't that far-fetched. On top of translating into English, the reason most alien accents are "normal" (to the point Hybrids don't have Turian-like flanging) is because they prefer it that way on the accent settings, to prevent coming across as even more off-putting to humans.- New Chimera Agents, which would include other alien races such as a Faceless (whose species has apparently helped rescue cats from trees), an Andromedon (who live in a specially sealed-off section of the city designed to fit their Bizarre Alien Biology), and a Chryssalid (who is "domesticated", but closer to a police dog than the other agents, essentially being Chimera's Team Pet)
- Other gangs who weren't shown in the base game (see "The type of enemies Chimera Squad will be facing" WMG above for details)
- More sections of City 31 or beyond it (such as the Andromedron Sanctuary, possibly with a new enemy gang operating in the area that the Andromedron leadership calls in Chimera Squad to stop, and introducing an Andromedon agent among some others)
- A loose end from the original invasion, they would have laid low (or had obvious former agents join XCOM to ensure they can succeed in fighting ADVENT) and waited for a reasonable amount of stability to return before they made their move to change the world government to fit their tastes before resuming their shenanigans in the background. Alternatively Shrike is just their patsies, used to conceal their actual revival.
- The Viper King mission can take place pretty much anywhere's convenient - it's simply the center of his den that's frozen over, and no doubt purely because of the whole ice powers that were presumably thanks to Vahlen's meddling. Though it's entirely possible he escaped and avoided the Commander for the remainder of the war, and may still be at large. The New Arctic facility was probably just a secret ADVENT cloning/breeding facility.
- As with quarians and turians, sectoids have a different chiralty compared to all other known species, which is why vipers and mutons can eat Earth food but sectoids can't.
Due to Vipers being an entirely monogendered species by the end of XCOM 2 (potentially with any spokesmen Thin Man killed off by angry mobs and/or political reasons), they are forced to rely on either cloning machines and/or artificial insemination to actual propagate the species, as mentioned above. Since the Etherals are gone and the actual need to make future Viper solely killing machines being gone, the genetic coding used by these processes are made completely random in order to match the spontaneous nature of actual reproduction (minus any debilitating genetic diseases and deformities, of course). Put of the random includes the birthing of actual males, many behind the processes know that such a result is exceedingly rare and would take another couple of years or so before one, maybe two, males are born.
TEN EGGS ARE REVEALED TO BE MALE.
This, of course, causes a massive media frenzy, and XCOM and the world governments are scrambling on this because there is the clear implication that every single gang, criminal organization, terrorist group, corrupt wannabe dictator, and morally bankrupt sleazeball with enough cash would trample over themselves in order to get their hands on a breeding stud to create their own army of Vipers loyal only to them, and that's just with a single male, let alone TEN. Because of this, all ten eggs are to be sent to a secret facility within City 31 so they can be hatched and raised there either by XCOM personal and/or their birth mothers if they have one and be able to have actual, normal lives. Chimera Squad is sent to escort the convoy meant to transport all ten eggs to the facility, as news of the existence of these eggs was leaked before any measures could actually be taken to hide it and XCOM wants the whole thing to be as discrete and under the radar as possible.
Unfortunately, any and all various criminal and terrorist factions, including all the ones fought during the main campaign, come out of the woodwork and attack the convoy simultaneously. The mission is essentially a horde mode based affair, with every member of the team needing to hold the line and make sure no badguy gets their grubby mitts on any of those eggs and makes off with them, until reinforcements from XCOM Actual arrive. The mission can be completed if only a single egg is taken, but it is an automatic fail if a second egg is successfully stolen. If one egg is stolen, it is revealed that some of the criminals and mercs sent to steal them were sent by Xug, who only wanted a single, machine created egg for herself so she can raise the child as her own son.
NUKE THE PLANET!! wait, what?:
A terrorist group consisting of radical Andromedans rises up, proclaiming themselves to be Reverse Ecoterrorists: Terrorists who want to pollute the planet further. After realizing that they are incapable of returning to their homeworld and tried of living in sectioned off areas of various cities, their main goal is to terraform the planet to make it inhabitable for Andromedans without needing the use of their suits, even at the cost of all other lifeforms, as the only means of achieving their goal is polluting the planet to Hell and back. Their plan here is to detonate several nuclear devices (either a few nukes or several hundred dirty bombs) across City 31 in order to contaminate the city enough to leave only inhabitable for Andromedans. Chimera Squad, of course, as needed to not only defeated the terrorists, but also defuse the devices, with better grades for more bombs defused before the end of the mission.
Return to (sic)Repture:
A special standalone campaign, starring a mixed-species mercenary outfit looking into one of the Elder's undersea mad laboratories, only to discover that its history dates far before the invasion or even the suspected date the first alien scouts discovered Earth. As the team fights new horrors lurking within the leaking corridors, they will be forced to discover that the line between empathy and monstrosity is far more blurred than it seems.
But more importantly: ever wanted to see an Andromedon suplex a Hulking Diving Suit With A Giant Head? Bet you do now.
- In the Real Life tab on the Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism page, we have several creatures listed where the males come in two varieties: a big macho-male who keeps a harem of females and fights off other males, and a smaller variety of male that resembles a female so he can sneak into the macho male's harem to cuckold him. Perhaps mutons evolved from a creature that operated the other way around, with the males like Axiom comprising the harem and the females being split into harem-keeping berserkers and male-looking cuckolding females. Of particular note is that some species that work this way have yet a third type of male, whose strategy varies, so we may get to see yet a third type of muton woman at some point.
