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The ultimate objective, the final mission


Gazz

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While it hasn't exactly been confirmed, yet, there have been some educated guesses on how the game will end.

Possible SPOILERS ahead! OMGZ!

The player conquers the alien baseship. The Xenonaut commander mind-merges with the organic computer and takes control of the remaining UFOs. Using these and the growing terran space force, he takes the fight back to the aliens.

They are so going to regret picking on that little blue planet.

Carthago delenda est!

Or do you think humanity would be content with "just" fighting off the invaders...? Yeah. Bloody likely.

The player conquers the alien baseship. The Xenonaut commander mind-merges with the organic computer and learns that the alien invaders are actually fugitives, fleeing from an even greater menace.

In a classic buddy movie way, the humans and aliens pull together to defend earth from the soon to be arriving fleet of super aliens.

(turns out the humans bumbling research attempts activated a hyperspace beacon)

Since the super aliens won't take no for an answer, we now take the fight to them and RAAAWR! BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!

Err, okay. I feel better now. All that love&peace, yaknow...

To the player's surprise, aliens seem to incinerate upon dying, leaving very few clues about their origins.

After a few lucky finds, it becomes clear that these are not aliens but

near the end of WW2. Now they are coming back under the guise of aliens to finish what they had begun decades ago.

Of course the player now has to stop them and conquer the moon for humanity! (for our half of it anyway)

Next stop Mare Berlinium!

The aliens are in fact genetically advanced humans who live underground (note the pale skin and huge eyes!), are quite peaceful in nature and communicate with Earth itself.

They are not invading the planet but reacting to the anguished screams of a raped and polluted planet. They must put an end to this!

When the player finds out, he can either continue to wipe out Captain Planet and the Alieneers or ally with them, trying to conquer the rest of Earth to install an ecologically correct reign of terror!

A GREEN ending! Bet ya didn't see that coming!

All these things are pretty much present in the game, they kinda cannot be avoided. Now if you mean that these themes should be given some kind of literary or philosophical or deeper artistic dimension you're probably asking for things that are outside the scope of a game such as this. In that case better to just read Ayn Rand and play Bioshock.

But I admit I'm not really certain what you mean.

Well I was mostly just waxing philosophical, these kind of things don't have to be and even work better if they are subtle. (something that Ayn Rand *shudder* and bioshock are not) And you are probably correct that the deeper elements of my musings are in fact ourt of the scope of this project. but let me try and explain a little better.

scenario 1: Traditional ending open play until the "final fight" you go squash the foe at his home. This is satisfying at plays on the themes of the underdog made good, vengeance for wrongs, human superiority. Nothing wrong with this and the traditional approach, but it does stray firmly into a black and white arena in regards to the conflict.

Scenario 2: A more Civilization-esque multiple "victory condition" type end game. You could implement multiple game ends up to and including an Alien victory. But the key elements hear would be things like maintaining relationships with world governments and working towards specific goals occasionally at the expense of others. tactical choice would be key here, Combat ability vs. Diplomacy, striking at aliens vs. aggressive defensive operations, etc... this would be probably largely out of the scope of this project but could be a very interesting game and the themes invoked would be more dependant on the players path than anythign else.

Scenario 3: A "best we can do scenario" with essentially a counting clock (being a known or unknown) time period and the goal being saving as much as you can before"time is up". This would be a scenario where-in the aliens being vastly more advanced/powerful/numerous the best hope is to limit damage rather than even be able to truly "strike at them". This would be able to be managed with the same game mechanics in place but the tone is drastically shifted away "kill the aliens" to "Stay alive". It's the difference between the Action genre and the horror genre. With this endgame Terror sites become things to truly fear because they are actively harming your diplomacy which would be your first priority in trying to keep humanity together and alive.

This is what i was talking about the above being only 3 of many possibilities but your could see how themes and in fact game play and strategies would be effect by which particular endgame is in place. The themes evoked by a game only serve to create an immersion and make things interesting. But really anything done well is worth checking out.

The aliens are not a "race" but the staff of an intergalactic university. That explains both their racial diversity and the sometimes ah... lacking tactical finesse of a bunch of janitors and history students.

They accidentially released a mutagen which entered Earth's atmosphere and is now spreading across the globe.

Their attempts to cure infected specimen are taken as alien abduction. When they are trying to selectively scorch outbreaks, we see this as terror missions and react with deadly force. UFOs spreading vaccines are mercilessly engaged with a hail of missiles. Who can blame them for defending themselves?

The question is: Will the Xenonauts win (and doom all of humanity to a horrible death once the incubation period is over) or will the aliens be able to save us in time?

Gazz is off his medicine today. :P Good stuff.

I'm writing in bullet time.

The aliens are envoys of a peaceful galactic civilisation.

Seeing how humans are still fighting dozens of wars around the globe after having reached the technology for nuclear weapons, a decision need to be made if a race of such clinically insane creatures needs to be terminated by dropping a mid-sized celestial body onto their planet.

This fake "invasion" is the last chance for humanity to prove that they can set their differences aside... at all.

Victory can only be achieved by uniting the planet. Any other solution (such as a military victory over the "invaders") means annihilation.

The aliens are actually a marketing stunt by Microprose.

Victory can only be achieved by storming the HQ and informing them that this will all end in yet another FPS knockoff.

To get back on topic - Xenonauts will follow a similar structure to the original X-Com in that you learn enough about the alien threat to launch a 'final mission' against the aliens to win the game.
No no, even worse, the aliens are just coming home! Turns out that humans evolved while they were out, and have now messed up their beds and eaten all their porridge! So daddy alien et al. all get upset, which is reasonable. You then have the late game option to join sides with the alien fathers to conquer evil, bed messing humanity, and in return they'll turn you into a bear!

What a choice!

How about the end game is to gain access to the Planetary Rotation Destabilizer? You know, that thing the Xenos used to make the world spin backwards and cause global changes that will wipe out life on earth over time so that the xenos can easily acquire the mineral resources without having to deal with pesky humans. They're showing up to make sure that all is going according to plan, and humanity needs to take advantage of these surveys to interrogate them and find the one thing that can save the world. At the end of the game, a nice pic could show the sun rising in the east, and all will be right again in the world! :P
Well, we have two super-secret alternate endings planned in a devious branching story tree. They are:

1) You win.

2) You lose.

Seriously, though, the game has a few 'plot missions' at the end to provide a climax to the game, but there won't be any proper branching story trees. If you complete them, you win. If you fail, you lose. There will be an element of choice for the player in when they initiate these missions, but beyond that it's going to be pretty linear.

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Actually, the ultimate goal is to find the 5 soul fragments which are the only reason the aliens are "attacking" Earth. They are not abducting people, they are backtracking their genealogy, looking for the fragments. Once the player figures that out, he has to beat them to it while hindering them as much as possible. Very little is know about the specifics, yet, but they will be "special" humans. For one of them you need to clone comrade Stalin to steal his soul.

The only way to reform the "lost soul" is within an alien brain so either the player has to corrupt an alien commander or research the brain wave transplant technology and transplant his mind into an alien body.

Either way, the alien will then quickly mutate into a giant butterfly. You can either use it as a super weapon to drive off the aliens or have it lay eggs in an active volcano, which will then hatch beings with the power to control the aliens. So there will even be multiple endings!

Well...there was Gazz's Moon-Nazi's idea. That's...like a Scooby-Doo ending.

Maybe the moon-nazi's are allied with the aliens! And have convinced the aliens to invade to take control of our most precious space-fuel. Opium.

But the Illuminati and their allies, the crab people, are opposing this. They need the opium to create the colony ship to leave earth and bring the glorious light of Neo-druidism to the cosmos. As such, through their connections with the US army and Soviet Union, they caused the Iceland Incident by broadcasting a signal suggesting a vast natural deposit of opium in Iceland, ripe for mining.

But the Deep Ones, lost cousins of the crab people corrupted by the darkling song of the Dragon-Whale, have their own plans for the opium. They plan to use it to ascend the Dragon-Whale's fragment avatars (the dolphins) and thereby create a divine blanket gestalt across the planet, using it as a warship against the Dragon-Whale's arch enemy, Pluto.

Pluto of course being the mother/home of the Jötunn, cast out in the great war that created the solar system and resulted in the creation of Jupiter as the prison of the First Gods. Who created the aliens from their dreams to free them.

It makes a kind of sense.

Its probably all a malicious ploy by dolphins to clear the land for their dominance. The final mission is fighting alongside the battered remnants of the alien command structure against dolphin war-armatures after sub-oceanic surface-to-orbit particle cannons destroy the alien mothership/s at their moment of victory.

Or relatively something sane.

It was the Ants all along. Just when you start to get the better of the aliens their Ant master decide to strike. They combine into giAnts and attack both sides with guns that fire bees and grenades made from hornets nests. Its obvious really.
"Congratulations on passing basic training recruits! If you'll strip the last neural connectors from your interface suits and shake the last of that fog from your heads, go ahead and follow the blue line to be assigned to bunks and this afternoon you'll proceed to more specialist activities. Remember, the aliens we're REALLY fighting are far more dangerous than those simulations you just encountered, and against them you can ACTUALLY die. Pip pip."
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Moon Nazis is the storyline to the independent movie "Iron Sky" if I'm not mistaken. Looks promising. For the end of Xenonauts though I'm voting for the "going to the alien planet" mission. Just make sure there's enough room in the ending to leave it open for "Xenonauts 2" :).

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