We Are Struggling Together / Video Games

We ARE Struggling Together in Video Games.

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• Command & Conquer's Brotherhood of Nod is unified in that they need to defeat GDI. That is the only thing they are unified on, and usually when Kane isn't around, they voice their disagreements with laser beams and fire. And when Kane is around, they still formally lodge their complaints with laser beams and fire... in the back. As for humanity as a whole, the war between GDI and Nod is so bitter that an alien invasion doesn't do much more than make them pause... for a couple of hours. Then they go back to blasting each other, much to the aliens' shock and disbelief.
• The Crusader Kings series, being modeled after the dangerous politics and intrigues of the Middle Ages, naturally has this in spades. You can be defending against an invading force that intends to roll over and conquer everything in sight, but that won't stop your courtiers and vassals from plotting to see each other (And you!) dead. Of course, if you yourself are a vassal, there's no better time to assert your independence then your liege being at war somewhere else. Let No Crisis Go to Waste after all...
• In the first Crysis, after the aliens wake up and freeze Lingshan island, you'd expect the Americans and the North Koreans to put their war on pause and turn their attention to this new threat. Wrong! As a matter of fact, in the Crysis Warhead Expansion Pack, your commanding officer will even give you explicit orders to consider the North Koreans the priority threat... after the aliens have woken!
• In every game in the Danganronpa series, the attempts by each protagonist to get the trapped students to work together and fight against the Killing Game is inevitably undercut by the students giving in to personal grudges and feelings. This also extends to the Future Foundation itself — despite being the symbol of Hope in a world run by the Ultimate Despair, the organization turns out to have crippling infighting issues:
  • Nagito Komaeda, while not a Foundation member, is trying to secretly help them, but sows despair believing that despair builds character.
  • Haiji Towa from Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls, the Adult Resistance leader, refuses to work with the Foundation because he believes them to be the real mastermind behind the Ultimate Despair, and is fully willing to go to war with the Foundation.
  • Shuji Fujigawa from Killer Killer wants to eliminate despair by killing everyone, putting him at odds with the Foundation members.
  • In Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School, the factionalism comes to the forefront:
    • The Foundation council actually splits up into two factions; one faction supports the efforts of Makoto Naegi to reform the Remnants of Despair enemy agents, while the other faction believes that the enemy agents should be executed. The leader of the latter faction, Kyousuke Munakata, is not as extreme as Shuji, but still thinks that everyone even associated with despair or trying to help people in despair should die.
    • The prime example of this is when it is revealed that there is a spy among the council dedicated to subverting them, and has trapped them all in a final killing game. The council members readily turn on each other out of paranoia, while Ruruka Andou becomes more concerned with saving herself than aiding her friends. The spies are Monaca Towa (disguised as Miaya Gekkogahara), Chisa Yukizome, and Chairman Kazuo Tengan. Chisa wants to further Junko Enoshima's agenda, Monaca wants to toy with everyone one last time, and Tengan is opposed to the extremism of the others- because he wants to brainwash everyone into feeling hope, not kill them.
• Diablo III:
  • It's mentioned that one of the biggest problems the demons have in their Eternal Conflict with the angels is that their egos get in the way of them working together, and on at least one occasion an almost-successful invasion of Heaven has fallen apart at the last second because the Lords of Hell started quarreling amongst themselves before they could secure victory. When Diablo attacks Heaven in the fourth act, he is the Prime Evil, a combination of all seven Lords of Hell in one being, and nearly succeeds in shattering the Crystal Arch, the very pinnacle of Heaven.
  • Also comes up in the Reaper of Souls expansion when a human noble and some peasants try to start a revolution against Westmarch's king at the same time an army of Reapers are leading an anti-human genocide. Your character suggests humanity should be uniting against the threat posed by the Reapers instead of bickering and killing each other... and is promptly attacked by the rebels, who've decided you're With Us or Against Us.
• The communist vision quest in Disco Elysium features a lot of this. When the Detective finally encounter a proper communist cell in the city, it consists of a pair of college students who run what is effectively a book club, and they don't do much besides read various communistic texts and argue about theory. It's said that all the other erstwhile communists in the city they could have recruited have been whittled down due to the college students refusing to allow anyone who can't understand their brand of Mazovian economics. Much of the quest ultimately comes down to trying to talk them into accepting that if a revolution is going to happen, it needs people in it.
  The Detective: Hang on, what will I do once I establish contact with my fellow communists?
  Rhetoric: You'll discuss the monumental world-historical task that lies before you. You'll engage in rigorous and spirited debates about Mazovian theory and practice. But mostly you'll probably complain about other communists.
  The Detective: Isn't that last part kind of counterproductive?
  Rhetoric: Not at all. Complaining about other communists is one of the most important parts of being a communist.
• In Divinity: Original Sin II the Player Characters are Godwoken, avatars of the local Fantasy Pantheon tasked with stopping the Void from swallowing all of reality. But rather than uniting against this common enemy, the gods are all more concerned with their squabbles for dominance and expect their Chosen One to subjugate their rivals and Save the World at the same time. In fact, the only time the assholes are willing to work together is when they try to kill the party for a Grand Theft Me near the end of Act 3.
• Any game that features enemy infighting can qualify as this. DOOM gives an interesting example: aside from being generally united against the player, the different species of monsters comprising the legions of hell generally don't like each other, and while they'll attack you on sight, they'll be just as likely to attack any of their erstwhile "allies" at the slightest provocation (read: an errant fireball).
• Dragon Age:
  • In Dragon Age: Origins, Loghain decides Orlesians are more dangerous than The Blight, betrays the Grey Wardens. Meanwhile, Orzammar is more concerned about crowning a new King than immediately helping out with the Blight.
    Alistair: You know, one good thing about the Blight is how it brings people together.
  • Continued in Dragon Age: Inquisition, where despite the hole in the sky from which demons are constantly pouring, the Inquisition created to combat the threat is declared a group of heretics by the Chantry despite technically being formed by the Chantry's Divine; the Templars have broken from the Chantry, feeling they weren't doing enough to combat mages, and are now in a gigantic Civil War with the mages; meanwhile, there's another Civil War in Orlais, and also an elven uprising over their second-class conditions in human society. To be mildly fair, most of these conflicts were already occurring before the Breach opened, and indeed the Breach opened right on top of an attempted peace talk, killing hundreds of ranking mages, Templars and Chantry clerics and rendering negotiation impossible. Of course, they all immediately blame each other for this obvious act of sabotage...
• Far Cry:
  • In Far Cry 4, the leadership of the Golden Path is split between the traditionalist Sabal and the progressive Amita. The player is occasionally given the options of siding with one over the other in certain missions. Eventually, you are forced to choose one as an uncontested leader, who will later task you with assassinating the other. Depending on who's alive, Sabal becomes a full-on religious extremist who issues purges of non-followers of the native religion of Kyrat while Amita becomes a dictator who forcibly conscripts women and children to work in drug dens.
  • Far Cry 5 and Far Cry 6 both feature three different resistance factions located across three different regions who the player must unite to take down the game's main villain. Unlike the above however, the factions remain fairly united against the main threat and never reach the same division.
• Fire Emblem: Three Houses
  • Part 2 of the game revolves around the Adrestian Empire's attempt to conquer the continent, toppling the Kingdom and fracturing the Alliance in the process. Despite Claude and Dimitri sharing a common enemy, Dimitri in the Golden Deer route is so blinded by his Roaring Rampage of Revenge that he labels the Alliance as enemies just for "being in his way" and sends his forces to attack his former friends despite them trying to accomplish the exact same thing.
  • The Alliance itself, being a loose federation of noble houses, has had this problem for most of its history, with its nobles known to become The Quisling at the smallest provocation. On the Verdant Wind Route, Claude has to leverage Byleth's Crest of Flames to unite them enough to fight back against the Empire. They'll succumb to this on every other path, as they're easily conquered after Edelgard defeats Claude (Crimson Flower), have to be bailed out by Dimitri later in the war (Azure Moon) or quickly fall into ruin after losing most of their forces at Gronder Field. (Silver Snow)
• The Hua Lian Rebels in the People's Republic of Da Han Zhong in Front Mission 3 suffered from this, especially after they were about to win the revolution, leading to a crushing defeat of the whole rebellion.
• The hatred between the human and servile rebels in Geneforge is matched by the hatred between the drayks and drakons, but each pair is held together by a greater hatred for the other pair, and all of them are forced to work together against the Shapers. In the fifth game, the four allies finally split off, with the humans and servile allying with the Trakovites and the drayks and drakons forming the Ghaldring faction.
• If we take ambiguously-canon "midquel" Cataclysm as canon, this happened to both sides after the events of Homeworld. The death of the Taiidani Emperor and the ensuing power vacuum resulted in a swift descent into out and out civil war ending in the messy Balkanisation of three quarters of his regime's former territory, with the newly-formed Taiidani Republic squaring off against multiple Imperial Loyalist factions -most of whom are implied to hate each other as well- plus a number of Former Regime Personnel who've turned warlord or Space Pirate. For their part, the Hiigarans have achieved the goal that compelled them to unite under one banner and are now going back to business as usual, various "kiithid" ^note which are basically True Companions the size of and fulfilling many of the same functions as nation-states; it's complicated jockeying with one another for greater power and influence, though their preferred medium is apparently equal parts Proportional Representation and behind the scenes wheeler-dealing.
• Part and parcel of Imperium Nova. Each and every noble house is intended to work together for their galaxy's sake... and betray each other for the favor of the Emperor.
• Team NESTS (Kula, Foxy, K9999/Krohnen and Ángel) from The King of Fighters ultimately collapses due to this trope - the former two make plans to quit working for the Nebulous Evil Organisation, and the latter two will have none of it (even if they do end up jumping ship themselves). It ends with Foxy literally getting backstabbed, and years later it's still enough of a sore spot that all 4 of them reuniting nearly ends in a brawl breaking out.
• In Life Is Strange: David is the only person who believes Chloe when she says that something bad happened to Rachel Amber, and takes her seriously enough to investigate. However, their relationship is so strained that they are incapable of working together.
• Mass Effect:
  • In Mass Effect 3, getting the races to co-operate is the main objective, with even those who are not actually at war with each other proving to be very unhelpful. In the most extreme case, the quarians have launched their attack on the geth, despite the Reapers actually starting their invasion in other parts of the galaxy. Unless Shepard has done literally everything right with regards to both species, the genocide of one of them is inevitable, despite most of the geth having actually wanted peace for the past several centuries--the remainder having sided with the the reaper Sovereign back in the first game, being Shepard's primary enemy back when the quarians were barely surviving on their own.
  • This trope is also very much in evidence with the Illusive Man, who both averts it and plays it straight. The aversion happens during his first in-game appearance in Mass Effect 2, wherein he orchestrates the rescue and recovery of Commander Shepard and forms an alliance with them to combat the Collectors, who are in fact slaves of the Reapers. However, after Jumping Off the Slippery Slope in Mass Effect 3, he plays it painfully straight as Cerberus spends a lot of effort and resources openly opposing the Alliance and Council rather than joining them, partially explained by his being indoctrinated, (the DLC Prothean character, Javik, says that this happened during his cycle too, suggesting that divide and conquer is one of the Reapers main tactics).
  • Even the Systems Alliance isn't immune. When they are forced to work together with the batarians to fend off the Reaper forces, the Alliance decides to screw them over by deliberately giving them false info, letting the Reapers deal batarian casualties first before swooping in, and only applying medi-gel to them... after the Alliance medics found out that it works on batarians. Mikhailovich in particular has no problems letting batarians die out of spite. Which needless to say only benefits the Reapers by virtue of amassing husks (Cannibals) to their arsenal.
  • In fact, one of the few powerful characters who does recognize that personal goals need to be put on hold for now is the ruthless crime lord Aria T'Loak, who gives Shepard useful advice and prioritizes the overall war effort above her own short-term gains. Furthermore, thanks to starring in the Omega DLC, she actually gets what she wants, recruiting Shepard to help her with the pragmatic incentive that she'll be able to pledge her forces to the war effort once they're back under her control.
  • It's easy to ignore the salarian threats about curing the genophage, since they quickly come crawling back when they realize the Reapers are threatening them. Depending on your actions in previous games, most of the salarian military (and potentially their own Council Representative) will basically give the finger to their government and rally themselves behind you.
    Major Kirrahe: Regardless of what the politicians decide, you can count on my support retaking Earth.
  • The asari Councillor at least gets a Jerkass Has a Point moment when she says that "cruel and unfortunate truth" is that by letting the Reapers focus on Earth, other races can regroup. One of the soldiers guarding your war room even comments on it, saying that humanity would say the same thing if the positions were reversed. Why should other races risk their worlds falling to save Earth (which has already fallen)? Even after you do get the various races cooperating, retaking Earth doesn't really become viable or necessary until it becomes obvious the Final Battle will be held there, and the Crucible (the only chance anyone has) can only be fired over Earth.
  • Mass Effect: Andromeda: The angara face this with the kett, who as their opening strike took out nearly all the angaran leadership. Over the next several decades, their army fell apart. It wasn't until Evfra formed La Résistance from sheer exasperation (well, and personal motivation) that they made any organized effort to fight back. And even then, the angara still aren't a united front.
• The Relationship Values in Miitopia can cause this. If two party members get into a fight over things like jealousy over a party member showing more affection towards a third person, petty fights in the middle of missions, using abilities that aren't pleasant on other party members (such as the Tank using them as a human cannonball or the chef using them as improvised flamethrowers via Fire-Breathing Diner) or some negative character traits (laid-back Miis hiding behind another Mii to avoid damage or stubborn Miis refusing healing), lead to infighting, causing things like characters sulking, which reduce their attack, healers having less effect on the offending party or both characters getting into a Big Ball of Violence which damages a random enemy, but also causes some damage to the involved Miis.
• In Neverwinter Nights 2, there are at least three factions trying to bring about the downfall of the King of Shadows (The Player Character and his/her allies, the Githyanki, and the fiend army led by Ammon Jerro), who end up spending a lot of time at odds with each other and interfering in each-other's plans. There's also a fourth faction, the Githzerai, who refuse to involve themselves in the war, because the Githyanki hate them even more than the King of shadows, and would put their conflict with the King on hold in order to wage war against the Githzerai, allowing the King to grow in power unopposed.
• Octopath Traveler II has the Moonshade Order. As part of what makes the group capable of being overcome by the party is that the group itself is split into two factions, with Harvey, Trousseau, and Claude acting as wild cards. Otherwise, Arcanette's side minimizes contact with Oboro's side, and Oboro's side treads cautiously with Arcanette's. Several of their plans fall apart in large part due to them not working well together; Claude doesn't work with the group at all past giving them an item they need, Harvey goes behind the Order to saddle Osvald with a life sentence over a death sentence, and Ori is more or less left as an errand girl for the group because no one else really steps forward to help with the various tasks the group has.
• This is what led to the initial fall of Overwatch: the titular organization and its black-ops division seemed more interested in going after each other's throats rather than going after the terrorism that was taking place in the wake of the Omnic Crisis, eventually leading to the United Nations outlawing it. Unfortunately, said terrorism eventually was structured into Talon, necessitating Winston to call upon every former ally he could think of despite knowing that anybody who took him up on his offer is risking jail at best.
• Phoenix Point: There are three major factions that maintain protected havens in the After the End world of 2046, and they have major disagreements on how to deal with the Pandoravirus and the creatures it created. New Jericho are genetic purists who want to kill anything and everything that has been infected, even people who survived without mutating, and somehow go back to the way things were before the virus outbreak. Synedrion is an anarcho-syndicalist collective that wants to find a way to co-exist with the new, altered ecosystem. The Disciples of Anu are a transhumanist cult that want to use the mutagenic effects of the virus to improve humanity. As one would expect, the Disciples and New Jericho do not get along at all. Synedrion is opposed to the authoritarian structure of the other factions, and they in turn consider Synedrion's constant debates over everything to be wishy-washy. As the game progresses relations between factions will grow worse until they start attacking each other. It is possible (though extremely difficult) for the Phoenix Project to remain on good terms with all three factions^note On higher difficulties, it's flat out impossible: the only way to stay on good terms is to juggle the faction relation bonuses from doing their missions with the lower penalties from other factions, but on higher difficulties, the penalties will be higher than the bonuses, but the constant appeasement will distract from the actual problem, which is the pending extinction of the human race.
• Red Faction: Guerrilla:
  • Fridge Logic has this being the only plausible outcome after the end. The Marauders and Red Faction unified in the name of defeating the Earth Defense Forces and shoving a gigantic torpedo with a Nanite Disassembler Swarm warhead down the throat of a huge warship capable of annihilating all life on Mars (and Earth, for that matter,) but what comes afterwards? The Marauders are the xenophobic, murderous descendants of Ultor scientists who survived after the EDF came down like a ton of bricks on Ultor and restored order to Mars (the first time around.) Red Faction are the spiritual successors of the original Red Faction, the miners who revolted against Ultor's brutal conditions. The Marauders have been for the last fifty years or so killing anyone they see, whether EDF or civilian. It can't end well.
  • Bonus suck is awarded for the fact that the only primary character other than the player who survives from start to finish, Samanya, the Wrench Wench Sledgehammer Ninja (as revealed in the DLC bonus campaign, Demons of Mariner Valley,) is a Marauder by birth, but wound up joining Red Faction when she risked life and alienation from her people to rescue Kepler and Hugo Davies (better known as RF Commander) from an EDF internment camp before a gigantic Marauder offensive wiped the captive civilians out along with their captors. She's going to be caught between both sides of the coming war.
  • That's basically what ends up happening in Red Faction Origins; the White Faction tries to pit the Red Faction and Marauders against each other, first by killing Samanya, then engaging in a False Flag Operation in the hopes of getting the two sides to destroy each other and allowing them to pick up the pieces.
  • Red Faction: Armageddon seems to show the two sides ended up agreeing to leave each other alone for the most part. There are definite tensions between the two camps, but they band together once again fairly quickly once the aliens show up to threaten the human populace.
• The overall conflict in Relayer is between humankind and the Relayers, but the primary personal conflict is between protagonist Terra who joins the Asterism, her sister Luna who infiltrates the Relayers as part of her Roaring Rampage of Revenge, and the Starchildren-hating, Knight Templar father to both sisters Grayson Order of the Earth military. All three do want to defeat the Relayers, but with their own methods and ulterior motives, and almost as much time is spent fighting Grayson's elite squadron and anti-Relayer weapons as is spent fighting the titular aliens. That's before getting into ATLAS Corp and Xoth, who believe that a war against an existential threat to Earth is a perfect time to engage in corporate espionage.
• Rogue State Revolution: In addition to the various social and political factions within the country, you also have to contend with the competing interests (and loyalties) of your own ministers, some of whom may have aspirations for seizing power themselves.
• In contrast to the first RosenkreuzStilette game where the RKS members are all (aside from Spiritia and Grolla) united in their fight against the Empire, Freudenstachel has them split and doing their own thing, completely disjointed while the Schwarzkreuz are hunting them down. Trauare and Zorne are actively trying to kill the Church's army, Grolla gets possessed by her sword, Luste is off playing superhero, Schwer-Muta is hiding in the Zeppy ruins, Sichte fights off anyone who comes near her thinking they might be a homonculus copy, Liebea is nowhere to be seen, her brother Kahl is off investigating the Schwarzkreuz, Schirarch betrayed RKS to join Schwarzkreuz, and Doris (who even calls RKS "random and unorganized") actively refuses to follow Luste's orders, thinking her to be an idiot (and she's not wrong). And every last one aside from Liebea comes into conflict with Freudia for one reason or another. This is likely a result of their commander, Count Michael Zeppelin, dying in the first game, leaving them without strong leadership.
• In Star Wars: The Old Republic, playing on the Imperial side reveals the fearsome armies of The Empire are the ones doing all the infighting this time. Because of the Chronic Backstabbing Disorder encouraged by the Sith religion, the Sith spend just as much time fighting each other as they do the Republic and Jedi while everyone else from their military, their intelligence service, and even low-level officials try to undermine each other. Their Not-So-Omniscient Council of Bickering is too busy trying to secure their own power/agendas to actually come together as effective rulers, The Emperor is more interested in his pet project on the edge of the galaxy than actually managing his civilization, and of the four playable storylines the Bounty Hunter who isn't even officially part of the military is the only one fighting a Republic target for their Final Boss. As a result, the Galactic Republic stood united while the fourth Sith Empire (not counting the Sith Triumvirate) had the infrastructure and political stability of a third-world Banana Republic crossed with 1600's Italy before its inevitable collapse. But damn if they didn't look good doing it.
• Terra Invicta: Alien Invasion stories usually have the nations of Earth putting aside their historical grudges and differences and teaming up to fight ET. Not here. When news breaks out that we are not alone in the universe, the world splits into various ideological groups (from the Servants' "join the alien empire" to Humanity First's "exterminate all the aliens and anyone else who sides with them" to Project EXODUS' "build arkships and leave Earth") that fight an international shadow war against each other using entire countries as pawns. And sometimes real wars too.
• Them's Fightin' Herds: Fœnum's plan to combat the return of the predators seems to be 1) Find the Prophet's Key, 2) Defeat the Ultimate Predator and close the portal, and 3) pick a champion Key Keeper to safeguard the key for the future. Unfortunately for the rest of Fœnum, no nation can decide on a single Key Seeker, so each race is to have their own Champion where they battle each other through hooficuffs for the rights to be their world's savior.
• Total War:
  • In Rome: Total War, Rome isn't a unified faction, but is divided into three houses, the Julii, Brutii, and Scipii. They start out allied with each other, and will spend the early part of the campaign fighting Rome's enemies on behalf of the Senate, but they're also competing with each other for favor and territory, and their ultimate objective is to overthrow the Senate, capture Rome itself, and crush their rival houses in the ensuing civil war.
  • Can pop up in Medieval II: Total War when the Pope calls a crusade or an imam declares jihad for a specific province. You'll usually see a bunch of Christian or Muslim armies rushing off to get some Piety points by participating in a holy war, but unless two nations are explicitly allied, their armies won't support each other in battle. So it's not uncommon to see a pile-up of Catholic or Muslim armies around the targeted city, which would stand no chance of repelling them if they all attacked together, but instead each force will wait its turn to be the one to try to claim all the glory for itself. And if some of those armies belong to factions that are at war with each other as well, you may be treated to the spectacle of a bunch of religious zealots ostensibly on the same side tearing into each other.
  • Total War: Warhammer:
    • This is a game mechanic for the Greenskins: Greenskin armies that go too long without fighting another enemy army succumb to attrition damage as the brutes' animosity and fight-happiness overcomes their discipline; setting up raiding camps can alleviate this somewhat but not fully.
    • Also comes up for the Empire, as Karl Franz starts out only controlling the city of Altdorf — the rest of Reikland is controlled by Empire Secessionists and other provinces are controlled by the various Elector Counts who will go to war with each other and Karl's own faction.
    • Subverted in what's known as the Ordertide, an accidental late-game combination of events that involves the Order factions (dwarves, Empire, Bretonnia, elves etc.) maxing out their diplomatic relations with each other and ganging up on the disorganized and backstabbing chaotic factions. Very heartwarming and inspiring, of course (and the complete opposite of what heppened in canon), unless you happen to be one of those factions.
• Typically occurs during Trouble in Terrorist Town. Teamwork between innocents is regularly undermined since nobody knows who the real innocents are. A sufficiently paranoid and trigger-happy group can often wipe themselves out while the traitors just watch and Pass the Popcorn.
• This is the main theme of Tyranny:
  • Even though Evil Overlord Kyros has successfully conquered the known world, there are now job openings for governors and mayors of the multiple conquered districts, and all the former generals are throwing their armies at each other trying to grab these claims. You play as a Fatebinder, a representative of Kyros sent to deliver a message to the fascistic Disfavored and the bloodthirsty Scarlet Chorus that are infighting over the last disputed district: work together and get the job done, or the Overlord will use an Edict to kill everyone in the area, wiping out the resistance and squabbling armies alike. They don't, leaving the Fatebinder to be the tyrant, pick a side, and unify them properly. Alternatively, the Fatebinder can cite this as a justifcation for joining the Rebels. You can tell your superiors, truthfully or not you decided the Rebels, convinced to surrender, would serve Kyros better than Kyros' own squabbling armies. Your superior sees the logic.
  • The natives of the Tiers suffer from this problem even more because their deep-seated grudges have left them isolated enough for the overlord's armies to bulldoze through. Indeed, in one path, the aforementioned Rebel path, much of the struggle is in getting the Tiersmen to stop fighting one another, even in the face of a horde of rampaging lunatics and racist conquerers.
• Warlords III Reign Of Heroes: Lord Bane has invaded the civilized lands of the world, and the infighting over how to resist them is even more savage than actually fighting the undead hordes. In most of the campaign's maps, your goals are twofold: to defeat Lord Bane and his ally Lord Sartek completely, and to either ally with or beat the other factions badly enough that they'll sit down and listen to you, allowing you to fight the real enemy.
• Werewolf: The Apocalypse — Earthblood: The Garou Nation is not united against the Wyrm, with the Red Talons disdaining Cahal's caern for working with humans. Cahal's caern is also only working with humans who want to protect the environment under heavy duress.
• World of Warcraft: In Wrath of the Lich King, the Horde and Alliance agree on one thing: We need to destroy the Lich King. That doesn't stop them from insulting each other, stealing supplies from each other, and it certainly doesn't stop the war that they have been fighting. They even manage to restart their own war while The Scourge is still up there trying to wipe them out. If not for the Ashen Verdict, which is comprised of Death Knights and the Argent Crusade, you would be dead. That's right, you're killing your allies, while the Ashen Verdict is saving the world and actually doing what you guys came up here to do in the first place. And the moment the Lich King bites it the war becomes more prevalent. Even the giant dragon ripping out from the core of Azeroth while setting half of the land on fire isn't going to stop them.
• Averted for the most part in XCOM: Enemy Unknown; the Council is made up of most of the G20 countries and a few others that give you money and support to keep everyone alive, but will bail if their country's panic level gets too high and they have to focus on keeping the peace. However, several lesser factions continue their infighting despite the full-scale Alien Invasion over their heads, as you learn from Zhang in the Slingshot DLC who defects to XCOM over the Triads squabbling for money and power. Enemy Within introduced EXALT, who wanted to use the alien technology to Take Over the World but does nothing to stop the aliens from doing the exact same thing and sabotages XCOM while they're trying to stop them.
• XCOM 2: The War of the Chosen expansion reveals that after twenty years under a Vichy Earth, XCOM isn't the only major Resistance group fighting the ADVENT Accord. Three other groups pose a serious threat to the alien occupation, but as Bradford puts it, "together they'd make one hell of a fighting force — too bad they hate each other." The Reapers despise the Skirmishers over the losses suffered when the latter were still part of ADVENT and hunting the former, the Skirmishers look down upon the Reapers' habit of eating the aliens they defeat, both factions consider the Templars a cult of psionics-obsessed lunatics, and the Templars in turn sneer at the other groups for being blind to the "true nature of the world." Making contact with each group, building their trust through joint missions, and incorporating them into XCOM is a large part of the game's strategic layer. On the aliens' side, the titular Chosen are competing with each other for the glory of being the one to recapture XCOM's Commander for the Elders and be granted rulership over Earth once the aliens' plans are fulfilled. A lot of their Boss Banter consists of digs against each other, and it takes the "Honor Among Thieves" Dark Event for the Chosen to actually share the intelligence they accumulate in their campaigns to track down XCOM's base of operations.

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