Vine-ways allow for faster travel of friendly ships, while slowing down foes. They spread from their home planet on a branch-like structure of vines, and can awaken ancient Guardians to serve as planetary protectors. “We always said we’d never have plants in space or monsters in space,” Romain says, “But I think our community was craving that.” The Unfallen are a little of both, massive tree-like beings who tend towards diplomacy and pacifism. Speaking of plants, towards the end of the demo session I got a brief look at the Unfallen. They have some nuance to their destructive tendencies however protecting plants and nature is important to them. The Vodyani are characterised as space vampires, draining life from other beings in part from necessity and in part because they just enjoy doing so. They enslave people to use as cheap labour and food.” Pretty unpleasant stuff, but the Cravers now have some rivals in the race to be most immoral faction. “The new stuff that we do with the Cravers is slavery. “The spirit of all our previous factions is still the same,” he adds, when I ask how the returning factions have been adapted for the sequel. In the early Riftborn game Romain was demonstrating at this point, their Industrial faction was dominant enough to push for a law which would provide the next established colony with a bonus to overall population happiness. Factions will represent various interests (Industrial, Ecological, Military, and so on), and heroes can be appointed to lead factions and give them more influence. “Population will have feelings, they’ll react to their surroundings, and they’ll do that through politics.” The political feelings of your empire’s population are reflected in the Senate. Making them work together, evolving them, knowing when you’ll have to sacrifice some of them in wars, and knowing that long wars will take a big toll.” “When we’ve played 4X games, too often we see population just represented as a bunch of numbers,” Romain says, “For us population should be key. Basically we shut it down and threw more or less everything away.”Īmplitude have incorporated ideas from the first Endless Space and Endless Legend into this sequel, but an addition unique to Endless Space 2 is the politically motivated population. “Not only did they hate it, I have to admit it was not very good looking … That was painful because we’d spent a lot of time on it and it was a whole game mechanic. “We based the design of the tech tree on Endless Legend, and actually our players hated it,” he says. The recently revealed Unfallen faction are the result of a community design contest, feature design documents have been available for discussion on the Games2Gether forum, and Romain tells me that the final Endless Space 2 tech tree owes a lot to community feedback. But what matters is that you can prove it.” Amplitude’s Games2Gether platform has supported the creation of all the Endless games to date, and Endless Space 2 is no exception. “It’s simple to say ‘I will listen to my community.’ Everyone wants to say that. Romain de Waubert de Genlis, Amplitude co-founder and Creative Lead on Endless Space 2, prefaces the live demo he’s about to show me with the studio’s philosophy of community collaboration and transparency.
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