Video: What Is XCOM 2? Publisher 2K Games Tells You Everything You Need To Know

Easy pass for me if it is not all in the cartridge.

@setezerocinco you’re best sticking with Animal Crossing then

It's the alternate timeline of Mario+Rabbids Kingdom Battle. Great games.

It's Mario+Rabbids with a serious man vs alien vibe. I'll buy it .
@setezerocinco Almost no game in this day and age has everything on the cartridge, almost no PS4 or XBOX or PC game has everything on the disc. Everything has day 1 patches. Even Nintendo has day 1 patches. I don't get why people still use that as a dealbreaker.

@Friendly It's a similar to the complaint I see regularly about people having to buy SD cards for Switch. One of the first things I had to buy for my Xbox was an external hard drive. Those game file sizes are huge.

@Friendly Thats true. Games is rarely, if ever complete on any Switch cart. It's better to just download full game instead.

You can just buy original empty Switch boxes, and print out the cover and it's equally physical as the store cover with no flash.

@Friendly
This. Exactly this. Last console generation, I was 90% physical, so that I could still play in 30 years time. This time, I’m about 70% digital, because in 30 years most cartridges won’t work without their patches. Either the game will be buggy, the play servers will be closed, or the game will be missing tonnes of content that I remember it having. Even my BOTW cart won’t be the same as it plays now.

Most modern carts will die at the same time as their digital counterparts. Sad but true.

[muffled ayyy lmao in the distance]

@Cromwell why? I have never played Animal Crossing.

@Friendly a patch is acceptable. A DLC is extra stuff. A box that says Collection, but just one game (or part of it if I understood correctly) os in the card IS a deal-breaker. Why bother printing a box then?

@setezerocinco still applies to other console, Fallout 4 game of the year edition comes with codes to download as does the Arkham collection. This isn’t something limited to just to Switch, all consoles suffer from this practice

Almost day one for me first i will see how is running and if there will be game breaking bugs, i dont trust 2k they are worst than activision and EA combined

Looks like the graphics took a serious hit on this port. This and the fact that the game won't be entirely on the cartridge are making me have second thoughts about buying it.
Guys, don't say "filesize is huge, other games need additional download" when The Witcher 3 was published on a 32GB cartridge and (patches aside) is entirely on the cartridge.

@setezerocinco with games getting larger and larger it’s going to get more and more common that they won’t fit (either due to size or the cost of the larger capacity cartridges) on a disc/cartridge. If a person maintainS the opinion that any game that requires a download is an insta-pass, then those people may find themselves missing out on a number of games ‘just because’.

I see no logical reason to be fearful of the benefits of digital.

Awesome game, really am thinking about this one. Not super thrilled that 2K is behind it though. Haven’t had great experience with their ports in the past.

@setezerocinco
The box is nice for display purposes, and as long as there’s a cartridge at all (unlike Overwatch), the at least you can sell/trade the game if you choose.
For this reason I’ll buy physical regardless of the download required.

played this to death on pc quite a few years ago. it's really good and time-consuming, but i'd rather replay bioshock 3…

Great game but tbh I preferred Mario+Rabbids!

@datamonkey I wanted to love Mario+Rabbids but I missed the diversity of characters to play with and the cosmetic options that XCOM allows.
If they could just add a bunch of characters to M+R and some character customization options I’d buy that instead!!!

Best of the best. I'm playing war of the chosen right now on ps4.

Having played both the original XCOM: Enemy Unknown and Mario + Rabbids, I found myself dramatically preferring the later. Gorgeous presentation, faster gameplay with hand-designed levels as opposed to trudging through the same couple of maps with random soldiers again and again, puzzles, overworld exploration... I hope we get a sequel.

I do constantly hear good things about XCOM 2, so I hope this is a competent port. I'll be waiting on reviews, though, because I have my doubts about performance in handheld mode, which is the main reason I'd buy this on Switch. Even the PS4 reportedly struggles a bit with this game.

@Ainze Ditto. Going physical to avoid huge downloads for certain games is fine, but modern games are so utterly dependent on patches/updates to run properly that it makes no sense going physical to "preserve" them. With a ton of big games, you'd be left with buggy shells of the games you used to love.

Physical media will likely always have a presence in the industry, but, in a very real sense, we've already arrived in the digital gaming age. Switch games often require huge downloads to work properly. PS4/Xbone "physical" games are just install discs/physical DRM that allow you to play what you already have installed on your hard drive. And that's before the huge amount of data being pulled from online to make those run properly, too.

@setezerocinco I haven’t but just be pleased these games are being Switch converted..it’s great..don’t you guys put a downer on it

@dacosmicegg I am not afraid nor disagree with the benefits of digital, I am just do not condone a box with two levels in the card and 80% of the game having to be download. Just release digital and period. They make that exactly to get more money from collectors that want to have the box, even knowing that it is useless.

@setezerocinco I agree. I have many digital games on my Switch and on my PC (yeah ok, PC now is almost completely digital) and I don't mind buy digital from time to time.
But just like you, I don't like buying a physical copy of a game and still have a giant download to do.
If CDPR managed to put The Witcher 3 on a single cartidge using 32gb cartridges, I can't see why 2K can't do the same.

@dacosmicegg and do not forget they will do the same with Outer Worlds.

@Zuljaras well, for Xcom, you are able to play two base game missions without any download required. So it’s perfectly playable. You have to download the rest of the missions and dlc. So by your standards the release of this game on physical media is apparently perfectly fine.

@Zuljaras I agree a bit though... make it completely physical or completely digital or completely both, but not a mixture.

But I also get they still want to release a form of physical media. store sales, something on the shelves, are still important for big publishers. A lot of people have no idea how the eshop works (I know right), a box at a shop checkout, a kid seeing the box, a mom with said kid crying it wants that box, still produces sales. Publishers are cutting corners wherever they can.

But honestly, if you want a game only on physical media nowadays, you wont be able to find anything that’s complete / the definitive edition on the store shelves.

@TimboSlice well fingers crossed you get those options in a (hopeful) sequel! 👍

@Zuljaras ok, your opinion. Also, don’t forget, a physical cartridge you are also able to sell the game where you won’t have that option if you go the digital route. Could make it a much cheaper option.

Spent hours with this game on my mac. But never beat it. Too vast, and I can never sit at a computer desk for too long. Will eat this up on the Switch though. It's the best tactics game every made imo.

@Ajent Although I can obviously only speak for myself, I don't think that most of us who prefer physical games over digital ones are fearful of digital: we're just more aware, apparently, of the long term picture, which is VERY bad for us gamers.

In my view, especially younger gamers are completely fine and accepting concerning modern day's all but disposable gaming culture, where there is zero ownership, and zero control over what you can or cannot play, and don't even get me started on what will happen 5 to 10 years from now, where I will more than likely not be able to re-download or even play an older game anymore in case I wanted to, like I can now still do with all my consoles and handhelds, right up to the Xbox 360.

Everything released after that has become more and more digital, offering us physical game collectors ever less value for money.

And like somebody else also noted, the amount of data to be downloaded on the Switch vs versions on the other consoles is ridiculously massive. Sure, there are SOME titles on Xbox and PlayStation that also require entire game downloads, but that's only true for a handful of titles, whereas the Switch seems to be getting more and more of them.

And you also have to wonder why this moronic "cartridge cost" myth keeps coming back, when smaller publishers like CD Projekt Red are perfectly capable and willing to invest into a 32GB cartridge, that fits the entire game, so that excuse can also be thrown in the trash can, because if they can afford it, then MUCH larger publishers like EA, 2K or whoever don't even have to think twice about it, but apparently, they do.

And all the hungry but decidedly short-term thinking gamers are enthusiastically lapping it up, so they're getting away with it as well, while we should actually be sending them a VERY strong message, that this just isn't acceptable.

The whole damn point of the Switch using cartridges was having the entire game on the go WITHOUT such idiotic shenanigans, but it would seem that even Nintendo isn't able to stick to that concept.

@ThanosReXXX Your post got progressively more aggressive as it went on.

I mean, clearly I disagree. I could level my counter arguments why I believe your points are wrong and why digital media is not better, but certainly complimentary. I could even level the same insults of people being moronic and idiotic. But I can’t be bothered.

I quite like digital media, which means I get to carry on being quite happy with how things are progressing. You can carry on being grumpy (and it’s not an age thing... I’m probably older than you, which is maybe why I can see the wood for the trees. A benefit of not constantly looking backwards!).

As someone who's played all the Xcom games, without mods I won't double dip this game. It's hard to go back to the regular game once you get used to the options the alien recruitment mod gives you. That being said if you enjoyed Mario+Rabbids you will likely enjoy Xcom 2. It's a solid game.

@Ajent Aggressive? Well, I don't know what you seem to be reading into my comment, but there's nothing aggressive about it. It's just a matter of fact comment, from the point of view of wanting to own and collect physical games. You shouldn't take it personally.

If you by chance perceived it as such, then allow me to assure you that it's not meant as an attack on people that want or like digital games.
I mean, to each their own, so if you prefer digital then fair enough but in all honesty, it actually IS sometimes pretty annoying to see the digital game fans question the people that prefer physical, as if it's something weird or stupid, whereas the digital collectors, if we can even still call them collectors, might want to reconsider and ask themselves the questions that I mentioned in my previous comment...

As for the moronic and idiotic part: also not aimed at people or individuals, but at the (expensive cartridge) myth itself, because it's simply not true.

Literally the ONLY "insult" I directed at gamers themselves is saying that a lot of them are short-term thinkers, which, while maybe a bit of finger-pointing, is still true for quite a lot of them. They just want to play games now, and don't seem to worry too much about publishers pulling them from digital store fronts, or discontinuing the servers at some point in the not too distant future and so on.

On a side note: seeing as I mentioned facts, I'd say it's pretty hard to disagree with, if not entirely impossible...

Personal preferences aside, which as mentioned are all fine by me, the few questions I posed are still largely left unanswered, but recent examples of the last couple of years, showing entire lists of games being pulled from digital shops definitely don't seem to bode well for the future.

As for you being older: unless you're one of the small group of older members like me that populate this site, I highly doubt it. I was born in 1970...

@Ajent But having said all that, I can definitely agree with you that digital games can be complimentary, so absolutely no argument there.

It is a shame they couldn't put it on a bigger cart .... Although I'm not sure if the whole lot would fit, even then I've got the whole XCom franchise on Steam, though, so I don't mind digital

I'll probably get physical anyways. I trade games when I beat them except for my favorites. Loved the first Xcom and very much looking forward to this. I gotta get through a couple games first.

It’s so much fun, action and strategy in equal measure. The only thing I didn’t like about the PS4 version is the crazy small text, really hope that’s fixed as that was awhile back.

What is XCOM2? It is yet another Switch game I played years ago.

Is this getting a physical release in the UK? Pre-orders are up at 2k website but digital option is only one offered for United Kingdom. North America has both digital and physical pre-orders open.