And you can get it from the workshop here.
In case you did not know, a small team of modders created Long War for Enemy Unknown and Enemy Within, which vastly overhauled the campaign. It made it less forgiving and harder, but also more interesting in some respects (less so in others). It was widely accepted as an 'unofficial expansion' for the game.
The guys who called themselves Long War Studios at the time have since started doing more projects and renamed to Pavonis Interactive, becoming an indie studio that is actually working on their own unique game at the moment. They were also announced to be modding XCOM 2 before the game was even out. They have since released several mods for the game:
- Alien Pack; which adds several new alien and ADVENT enemy types to the game. In traditional Long War sense, all very powerful (but ultimately fair).
- SMG Pack; which simply adds the SMG weapon type, sacrificing damage over increasing a soldiers movement range.
- Leader Pack; which allowed the Guerrilla Tactics School to be upgraded to train Leaders. One Leader could go on any given mission at a time and had their own unique perk tree along with the perks from their class proper.
- Laser and Coil Pack; which added Laser weapons into the game, which could be researched after Magnetic Weapons (and after Elerium was researched) and at the same time pushed Beam weapons a bit further down the tree.
- Perk Pack; which added 8 new classes and over 70% (I made that percentage up purely as an estimated guess based on my usage of it) new perks among them.
- Toolbox; which added a few Second Wave options and made the game support more than 6 soldiers natively, letting you alter it on the fly in the options as well as some minor quality of life tweaks with regards to weapon/soldier/item swapping and such.
Now, while these mods were cool (I use most of them), XCOM 2 is actually a lot easier to mod than Enemy Unknown was. As such, the marketplace is flooded with great mods already. I even made one myself. The community is still very active and while Pavonis' mod style certainly has a lick of quality that most others don't, they also have not been my favorite mods for XCOM 2 so far, which is not incredibly surprising as I find their sense of balancing a little off from my own interpretation of it. Nevertheless, the fact I play with most of their mods proves I like them.
Now, they have released the full on Long War 2 which is a total conversion overhaul of the game. It will be tricky to get it to work for people like me because it converts the game... totally. Meaning it can and will conflict with other mods. As to no one's surprise though, PC Gamer was able to play it early and calls it essential for long time XCOM players. From what I've seen of it so far it seems really neat and adds various layers of depth in almost all area's in a pretty cool way.
If you have any interest in XCOM 2 at all, you should probably check it out. Note that all the DLC they have made previously is already in Long War 2 so you should not have those mods active separately while playing Long War 2.
You should also play Shen's Last Gift and Alien Hunters if you consider yourself an XCOM player. Both are great DLC, though if you did not play them already, perhaps it's not for you anyway since they only add some things into the regular XCOM 2 campaign.
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