Long War (mod)

Long War
Developer(s)	JohnnyLump Amineri XMarksTheSpot Ellatan
Release	Initial release January 4, 2013 (2013-01-04) Latest release December 28, 2015
Genre(s)	Partial conversion mod

Long War is a fan-made partial conversion mod for the turn-based tactics video game XCOM: Enemy Unknown and its expansion, XCOM: Enemy Within. It was first released in early 2013, and it exited beta at the end of 2015. Almost every aspect of the original game is altered, creating a longer, more complex campaign that presents players with more strategic choices and customization options. Long War adds a significant number of new soldier classes, abilities, weapons, armors, and usable items, and also introduces new features, including soldier fatigue and improvements to alien units over the course of the game.

The mod was developed by Long War Studios, a team that came to include four core members, with assistance from 29 contributors, 20 voice actors, and three members of Firaxis Games, the developer of Enemy Unknown and Enemy Within. According to one of the mod's core developers, Amineri, the mod started as a series of changes to the base game's configuration file, and grew more expansive as the team's capabilities grew. By the end of the mod's development, the team was working directly with the Unreal Development Kit and had created a Java-based tool to help manage the changes that the mod was making.

Long War has received praise from both video game journalists and from the developers at Firaxis. It has been downloaded over 1,000,000 times, by almost 400,000 different users. Firaxis pointed to the popularity of Long War as a reason they added built-in support for modding into the sequel XCOM 2, and used Long War Studios to provide initial add-ons for the game at release. On 19 January 2017, the core team that released Long War, now going by the name Pavonis Interactive, released Long War 2 for XCOM 2, and has created their own independent game, Terra Invicta.^[1][2]