My best guess is that Firaxis is being considerate of new players, who may find soft limits confusing and therefore frustrating. Good point - there are softer ways to encourage the player to be more proactive. I hope you get the gist of the idea - it should be the player's weighted decision whether to go risky or not, especially considering the huge value of risk for XCOM and the domino effect it can easily cause. So, there was a pretty good incentive to finish up before turn 20, but if not, it wasn't necessarily a mission failure. Like, in the original 1994 XCOM aliens acquired full vision of your troops after turn 20, which was therefore followed by the spam of their psy abilities. For example, the longer the mission drags the more enemies appear and/or stronger they become. In my opinion, players should not be forced to finish missions in a limited number of turns, instead there should be incentives to finish missions faster. I just think that enforcing turn timers is a wrong, heavy-handed approach. They don't want the players playing safe, sitting in overwatch turn after turn, they want players to take risks, as that makes the game more exciting. Now, I understand why Firaxis is doing this. But in XCOM2 there are mission timers, that when timed out outright fail missions? Or do they lead to less severe consequences? So, I've heard there is to be heavy reliance on turn timers in XCOM2? There were turn timers in XCOM:EW, but they were of risk/reward type - if I found it too risky I could just ignore the meld.

Xcom 2 turn off timer