XCOM2 just came out. This time aparantly the game is set 20 years in the future, and rather than playing an organization defending Earth, we'll play as an organization trying to reconquer Earth.
XCOM EU/EW Spoilers ahead:
In the end of the previous XCOM, the organization has to chose a psionic character and have him in the party that beats the final assault of the mothership. The thing is, it was all a ruse, merely for Ethereals to test humans to assess 'our' strenght. In the end, the mothership flies up, commanded by the psionic soldier and the end of the game comes with a cliffhanger where the ship explodes and several pieces of the aircraft fall on Earth.
Without spoiling the story of this new game, is XCOM2 a sequel to XCOM EU/EW? If not, is it a sequel to any other XCOM game?
Best Answer
The story of XCOM2 is a divergent future from the start of XCOM: Enemy Unknown -- that is to say, the events of players beating the first game are not canon. In the XCOM 2 Universe, the Earth's governments had abandoned XCOM and surrendered to the aliens by July, just 5 months into the invasion.
I won't spoil the details, but you do get an implication quite early on into the game that playing (and winning) XCOM EU/EW were combat simulations.
So, depending on how you want to interpret that, either the events of the first game did not happen, or, the events of the first game happened, but "it was all a dream", and the hard, cold, reality is that the Aliens won.