The Exquisite Corps has made me want to play XCOM: Enemy Within. But I was wondering just how to access the content...

So I played XCOM: Enemy Unknown on the Xbox 360 way back when it first came out. A few years later, I bought XCOM: Enemy Unknown and Enemy Within on Steam on sale, but I never got around to playing it. Is Enemy Within a separate campaign I can select, or is it just extra content that's added to the Enemy Unknown base campaign? Because if I have to play through Enemy Unknown again just to see the Enemy Within content, then I don't think I'm gonna play through it...I can't put that many hours into XCOM again...

And while I'm asking questions, I have another for people who played XCOM 2: would playing Enemy Within be kinda jarring if I already played XCOM 2? Just wondering if the new features in XCOM 2 would make playing Enemy Within feel dated or something. Cause I played through XCOM 2 earlier this year and loved it.

Enemy Within is content added on top of Enemy Unknown, yes. There's no separate campaign.

Enemy Within just adds content to the original Enemy Unknown campaign. It's not a separate standalone thing.

I think going back and playing Enemy Unknown/Within is still totally valid after you've played XCOM 2. I say this having recently done it myself. It's a much more streamlined experience, and I think that allows it to feel distinct and different from the sequel. It never felt "dumbed down" to me, it just feels more focused.

@wumbo3000: When you load it up on Steam, there is a launcher that gives you two options: regular old XCOM Enemy Unknown, or XCOM Enemy Within. They're two separate executables, as far as I can tell. Like you've seen in Exquisite Corps, Enemy Within is the same basic campaign as the base game with new things layered on. Enemy Within has all the same campaign as Enemy Unknown (do all the research and upgrades, find the alien base, find the alien mothership, etc.), but also some new story missions, some new upgrades, some new enemy types, etc. You don't have to beat the original game to access Enemy Within or anything, because it still is the original game, just with extra stuff.

I remember the Bombcast ragging on it (or at least Jeff) because it isn't some weird little post-game minicampaign and instead you basically had to do a whole new playthrough of the XCOM campaign (with new stuff), but I think the way they did it is the way you do expansions for this sort of game. The Bombcast was asking XCOM to be an RTS like Starcraft where you can just bang out a few more scripted singleplayer missions to extend the game, but it just doesn't fit with XCOM because to do that you'dbasically be designing a whole new game.

As for XCOM 2, yeah, Enemy Within will probably seem markedly different since the mission styles and soldier classes and everything changed a lot from XCOM 1 to 2. It's jarring going from XCOM 1 to 2, or 2 to 1, but I don't think you'll play Enemy Within and exclaim "What is this peasant garbage?!" after having played XCOM 2 already.

Enemy within is a separate .exe file located in its own folder inside the orignal game folder. I think you just run the steam launcher amd select enemy within but i dont remember. And yeah its basically the main campaign with extra missions, classes, and gameplay tweaks.