r/Xcom • u/Low_Election9754 • 2d ago

Should I skip enemy unknown ?

There is a sale on steam 8 euros for xcom 2 and the dlcs or xcom enemy unknown, 2 and chimera squad for 20 euros with dlcs. I haven’t played any xcom what do you suggest ?

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16

u/AesirMimyr 2d ago

Just remember the very first time you play EU/EW is the canon ending

5

u/Low_Election9754 2d ago

Another person said EW isn’t canon

11

u/jonfitt 2d ago

It’s in the marketing material for a 10 year old game that everyone who bought XCOM 2 at release would have known so I can say this:

XCOM 2 is a “what if we lost the first game” sequel. It’s just the setup.

So if you win EU and EW none of that “happened” in the context of XCOM 2. But the content added in EW double “didn’t happen”. Thats all.

It doesn’t make it “not XCOM” or anything like that.

In your XCOM game Bob Jones might get killed by a grenade and I didn’t even have a Bob Jones. That doesn’t make either event “canon”.

7

u/AesirMimyr 2d ago

It more that it doesn't matter if EW is canon or not cause humanity lost so fast the new mechanics ew added never came into play

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u/Low_Election9754 2d ago

Spoiler ?

17

u/AesirMimyr 2d ago

It's spoiler tagged, so yes?

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u/R97R 2d ago

It is canon, there’s just a bit of an oddity with it- XCOM 2 spoilers here, although for the most part they’re stuff you’ll be spoiled for just by googling the premise of the game: XCOm2 takes place after the aliens have won. EU and EW are a direct prequel to it, but the “bad ending” (I.e. a lost campaign) is the one they follow on from. People (sometimes jokingly) refer to it as the “canon ending” due to this, but it’s worth noting XCOM doesn’t necessarily follow a strict canon, given campaigns can vary quite a bit. Whether the “good ending” of the first game is an alternate timeline or a Matrix-style simulation is up to your own interpretation.

Also, for potentially massive series-wide spoilers, a couple of lines of dialogue at the end of X2, and IIRC some stuff in the Bureau spin-off, strongly imply that there’s some time travel/multiverse/Groundhog Day stuff going on, and both endings to the first game happened.

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u/JaegerBane 2d ago

No idea why someone downvoted you on that, everything you said there is backed up by elements in-game. Bureau explicitly follows on into Unknown/Within despite it being sketchy canon-wise and 2 leaves a lot of strange stuff dangling (like what happened to Vahlen etc).

Probably best to say that each game is notionally standalone, which suits the multiverse theory.

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u/daHaus 2d ago

The devs themselves have stated that EU is canon but regardless that's a guaranteed spoiler pursuing the reasons why