Trivia / XCOM 2

• Acting for Two: If SPARK's "Warrior" voice and Mox are in the same mission squad. Both are voiced by Michael Dorn.
• Actor Allusion: John de Lancie voices the sinister sounding leader of a group of soldiers who dual wield wrist-mounted psionic blades. To further the ties with Starcraft, his faction are called the Templars. And for the cherry on top, Brian Bloom is now voicing The Captain Number Two Four Star Bad Ass of a rebellion hosted aboard a repurposed enemy starship where he serves directly under The Commander.
  • Michael Dorn voices an alien warrior with a penchant for using blades who in his introduction mission gets hit with a serious case of The Worf Effect.
• Ascended Meme: Around the time of the first game,the community came up with a list of zany things XCOM operatives weren't allowed to do. One of them (Nr. 17) was "DO NOT USE THE GRAPPLING HOOK TO DRAW YOUR ENEMIES TOWARD YOU (even if it worked the first time)". Along comes War of the Chosen, where one of the new skills is to do exactly that.
• Author's Saving Throw: The frequent Timed Missions that the game employs were a very contested feature among players. Some thought that it can lead to some tense situations and forces you into a more proactive playstyle, while others considered it to be an outright Scrappy Mechanic that ruined much of the game's enjoyment by punishing more careful approaches. While War of the Chosen doesn't allow you to disable them outright, it added an option that doubles the time you have available before failure, which gives a lot more breathing room without losing the tension factor. There's even an option to double the work needed to complete the Avatar Project, allowing for more tactical freedom on the campaign map.
• Celebrity Voice Actor: Jake Solomon assures us that it is a total coincidence that several actors from one of his favorite TV shows happen to have provided voices for characters in War of the Chosen, the actors in question being:
  • Jonathan Frakes (Riker) as Volk, leader of the Reapers.
  • Michael Dorn (Worf) as Pratal Mox, a veteran Skirmisher. He'd already supplied his voice for "Warrior" SPARK in the "Shen's Last Gift" DLC.
  • Marina Sirtis (Deanna Troi) as Elena "Outrider" Dragunova, a veteran Reaper.
  • Denise Crosby (Tasha Yar) as Betos, leader of the Skirmishers.
  • John de Lancie (Q) as Geist, leader of the Templars.
• The Danza: The DJ, real name Jake Levy, is voiced by Jake Busey, also being a reference to his role as Ace Levy.
• Official Fan-Submitted Content: A contest was run that asked fans to design tattoo options for XCOM soldiers.
• The Other Darrin: In this game, Bradford is voiced by Brian Bloom, replacing David Hoffman who voiced the character in Enemy:Unknown.
• Promoted Fanboy: During development of the sequel, the team that did the XCOM: Long War mod were brought in by Firaxis Games to start development on various mods to be made available at launch.
• Word of God: Firaxis put the kibosh on ideas that ADVENT and EXALT were in any way related.
  • Jake Solomon has explicity stated that the alien invasion didn't last very long:
    When the aliens showed up, XCOM suffered massive casualties, and governments around the world crumbled in face of popular support to surrender. Then, the Earth was quickly overrun.
  • This game's Easy difficulty level is equivalent to XCOM: Enemy Unknown's Normal.
• What Could Have Been:
  • There were originally plans for several enemies that got cut from the game, as seen in the code. Among them are the Synthoid, a bio-mechanical android; the Viper Queen, a fire-breathing version of the Viper; An ADVENT Witch, their version of a PSI trooper; the Archon King, capable of picking up your troops and dropping them out of the sky for massive damage; and an ADVENT ACV, an unmanned attack vehicle that would have appeared on retaliation missions to "pacify" the population. Of course, with the modding community being this strong less than a month after its release, they probably won't be cut for very long...
    • As it turns out, the majority of them have been turned into DLC.
    • And as of War of The Chosen, the ADVENT Witch has been introduced as the ADVENT Priest. Only the Synthoid remains cut now.
    • ...though actually looking at the stats for the 'ADVWitch' entity makes it clear that the trooper in question is merely the internal name for the Avatars, much like the Codex is internally referred to as the Cyberus.
  • As seen in the E3 2015 gameplay demo, the Specialist's Haywire Protocol would have been called the Intrusion Protocol, and the options were to either control robotic enemies, or improved control, which increased the turn duration. In the final game, the options are shutdown (which is the easier option) and control. In addition, instead of choosing which hack reward, if you exceeded the percentage for both checks, you were given both rewards.
  • The Informant was originally going to go by the codename "Cato", referencing Cato the Younger, a Roman senator best remembered for his opposition to Caesar. They eventually ditched it in favor of maintaining his No Name Given status from the previous game, though a single line of dialogue referring to him as such remains in the game^note Shen calls him as such in a random early-game comment on the Avenger.
  • There was originally 4 Chosen instead of 3. Just as how the Assassin, Hunter and Warlock correspond to XCOM's Assault, Sharpshooter and Specialist respectively, the 4th Chosen was supposed to mirror the grenadier. This is further reinforced by the mention of a "Chosen Cannon" and "Chosen Mortar" in the games files.
  • As well, there were going to be four Resistance factions, with the fourth faction being a group of cyborgs possibly led by Julian. There's dialogue in the game that mentions cyborgs hiding in the deep woods and if they should be sought out.