Title: XCOM: Second Contact
Author: Agayek
Rating: T
Fandom: XCOM/Mass Effect
Genre: Sci-Fi/Adventure
Chapters: 4
Words: 21501
Updated: January 11, 2013
Published: January 1, 2013
Status: Work in Progress
Summary: With the destruction of the Temple Ship humanity knew peace. XCOM never forgot their motto however, 'always vigilant, always reliable'

Link: FF.Net

I know a great deal of the ME fandom is either novelizations of the games with SIs or slight tweaks, but this is really something else. No romance, no crappy reduxes of the game missions are found here. Take the pure Xenophobia from XCOM: Enemy Unknown, with a somewhat isolated humanity recovering and swearing that it will never happen again, then mesh it with a first contact scenario with the Citadel forces from Mass Effect. Both of the sides highlight some of the absurd stuff in the opposing series and how it really shouldn't work. It also really emphasizes the scale of conflict difference between the XCOM series and Mass Effect. Read some of the descriptions of ship size, and think about it carefully at the beginning.

So far the story looks like more of a what-if that ran away from the author, and I'm not sure where the plot is headed precisely- hopefully to an all out war with the Reapers vs XCOM, with everyone else hoping they just kill each other off, but it's still pretty early on. The update rate is fairly high, but I'm not sure how long they'll be able to maintain it.

Codex entry, quoted from the end of chapter 4, accurately summing up Humanity:

Spoiler

Codex Entry (Humanity and XCOM)
Humans have a fairly robust physiology. Their internal makeup and reproductive processes are typical of most bipedal mammals, and their biology favors extended stamina over extreme physical ability. This stamina is reflected in their culture and mindset as well. Humans simply refuse to quit under pressure. In fact, they only grow stronger from it. Humans are also well known for their uncanny ability as scavengers. Due to the events of the Ethereal War, adaptation and rapid technological advancement has become synonymous with survival for the human species. As such, the species rabidly pursues new forms of technology whenever they are encountered, and progress at a rate that is astonishing to most council races. While it has created many beneficial breakthroughs, this pursuit of knowledge is widely regarded as reckless among most council species.

Humanity formally united their entire species under the Human Coalition, or 'The Coalition' in the wake of their first contact with alien life, an event that has become known as the Ethereal War. The Coalition serves as a moderating body in the face of the many wildly varying cultures and societies of humanity, remnants from before unification. Their military arm is known as the Extraterrestrial Combat Unit, or XCOM.

XCOM was founded in 2015 to combat an invading alien coalition led by an extremely powerful species known as Ethereals. This coalition killed over 600 million humans over the course of 9 months of conflict, and firmly cemented human distrust of extraterrestrials. XCOM ultimately proved victorious over the Ethereals and led human expansion into space.

Humans first came to the attention of the galactic community after a brief conflict with the Turians near Relay-314 which took place in 2157.

Overall, story is technically sound from a writing point of view, and the author is a pretty decent wordsmith. I haven't found any huge plot-holes yet, and it seems to follow the respective game canon decently. I've had a hard time finding a good Mass Effect story, but this is a fairly fun that has really hit the spot. Solid 4/5- it's still fairly early on, but it's noticeably better than what I've seen from most crossovers.

[edited for stupidity-firefly oops]

 

I second this recommendation. Agayek is a cool dude with a cool story.

EDIT: As much as I like Firefly, I think you mean Reapers.

 

Huh, so this totally showed up on DLP. Go figure.

And yes, it's something that popped into my head after playing nuXCOM and wouldn't leave me alone til I started writing and it won't let me stop.

As for plot, ultimately it's Citadel + XCOM vs the Reapers. A lot of ME1 is going to be present in one form or another, but once that's done, things go off the rails pretty hard.

 

Funnily enough, I just finished XCOM a few days ago. I read the first two chapters, and it's a pretty good read. I'll have to read more before rating, but so far, it's looking pretty good imo.

 

Pretty good, actually kind of reminds me of Bad Neighbors, although that cross suffers from one of the verse being nothing anyone's ever heard of. I'd say give this one a spin.

 

Pretty decent, though only time will tell if it's just another alternate human civilization diplomacy-wanking in the ME-verse before pittering off after 30,000 words.

 

It's okay, but it feels like we're still in the prologue.
It constantly switches from one character to the next as needed. That makes it feel more like an interactive history book than a story.
You can incorporate occasional glimpses into other characters in a story, but you still need your main character(s).

Also, all the guys in the human military seem to be the exact same character.

 

I was little hesitant about starting this up, seeing as I've never played XCOM, but I'm damned glad I decided to give it a shot. Enjoying it so far.

 

I've never played XCOM- Hotpoint's fanfic story xsgcom being my first introduction to the game, but damn is this story getting intense. It's way more updated on the spacebattles forums, although you have to wade through about 20 pages of forums per every update, because people are going crazy commenting on this story...

 

Oh good a FFnet link. I tried reading the spacebattles thread but good god it got bogged down in the technical aspects of how the ships worked, how big they are, what are their armaments and just blah blah that killed my interest completely.

 

I honestly just use the table of contents in the first post, it's pointless trying to read through the crap, if only there was some other place for Agayek to post snippets...

 

I sense a hint here.

And yea, I'll throw it up here once I finish chapter 4 (which should be tomorrow or day after).

 

Actually I like this style of story telling and find it a lot more appropriate for this kind of story then a more character focused one.
XCom means that everyone is replaceable, total disaster and massive death is expected and the only thing humanity has is the will to win no matter the cost.
I am interested in how you plan to follow this great start and hope that you will ignore Cerberus as it has no place in a setting like that.

 

Cerberus doesn't exist. XCOM does enough mad science with far more competence on its own.

As for the story-telling, it's going to become more character focused. The first few chapters are setting the galactic stage. Then Saren/Sovereign shows up. After that, the story's going to follow Shepard and/or Hackett (depending on the situation) primarily. However, there will be alternate perspectives as required.

 

Don't know anything about XCom, but I'm a sucker for alternate first contact ME fics and I find this one very interesting. Along with the nice update rate and good writing, it looks like you aren't going down the cliche human!wank road that so many of these kind of fics tend to do. 4/5 for now.

 

I think it lost some of it's interesting qualities when you made the switch to first person focused, having read the space battles thread.

I found the Shepard narrative to be... uninteresting, honestly. He was just bland. Even when he was

Spoiler

Killing and taking names, or lamenting the deaths of pretty much everyone, I couldn't really... care.

And honestly, I kind of hated the OC sister.

Spoiler

I wouldn't say her death was exactly welcomed, but I wasn't crying any tears over it. She just felt like a odd OC shoved in and killed before she really "mattered." I can understand the necessity of the character, but I didn't care for the execution.

Other than the recent gripes, I really like this story. I'd say a good 3.5/5, rounded up to a 4 based off of the story's promise.

 

Generic doomed hometown intro. I skipped the entire thing till Hackett appeared.

 

Poorly written, and fairly unoriginal themes. 2/5, not library worthy.

 

Really? Not even gonna say what you don't like about the story, you're just gonna pull a bash and dash?

At least say what you don't like and how the author could get better. This is like shitting on his keyboard WHILE MAINTAINING EYE CONTACT and just walking away.

It's fanfiction you idiot, of course it's not new.

 

Yeah like, I've been doing nothing but complaining on Agayek in his thread, but even I am highly amused and interested in this thing. What exactly do you think is so bad besides one or two minor things?