Hello everybody,
Today is the day of our ninth anniversary, so we want to take a moment to look back at the development of Endless Legend and Endless Space 2 and share some funny or interesting stories from our time working on these games together with our community. So head below for stories of fortuitous ideas, agonizing over names, course corrections, and community feedback.
The Death of Auriga and the Resurrection of the Lost
Slowhands wrote:
Romain and the designers were kicking around ideas for making something fundamentally unbalanced not just in the factions, but also in the game world itself. 4X games too often take the map itself as either fixed or predictable/controllable, and they were looking for a way to have the world add another layer of strategic challenge.
Once we started kicking the idea around, the notion of the Dark Season came pretty quickly. And the way it tied into a darker and more sober meta-story appealed to all of us. I think it’s interesting that a lot of players really, really liked the idea.
When we started on the dev of ES2, we were looking for another metaplot that would have a similar effect on the gameplay. Unfortunately, our ideas and plans were far more impressive than the time and budget we had to execute them. I think the Academy story, and Isyander, and the return of the Lost makes for a really interesting narrative, but we simply lacked the time and the means to take it where we wanted to.
Endless Legend: Reworking the Economy
At the beginning of development, EL inherited the model from Endless Space, so population used to work as a multiplier to City Tile output. The economy skyrocketed a lot as a result. We tried various approaches to balance the bonuses given by improvements and boroughs, with no success… Until some people suggested adding a new value, the worker power. This solved the issue indeed, and even gave us a new input for effects.
Endless Legend: Revamping the Battle System
Until about a month before release, we were not really happy with the battle system. The outcomes were lacking uncertainty and were too easy to predict. We tried a few models without finding a satisfying solution.
Then Vieuxchat, one of the VIPs, visited the studio and discussed his favorite RPGs with the designers. The battle system used in one of them looked interesting, so we decided to study this system. After we were satisfied with it, Meedoc spent a (very intense) month reworking all the data related to battle attributes and battle actions to work with the new system.
Endless Legend: Shifters and Tempest
Shifters and Tempest were brainstormed at the same time. We had seen how well the “New Mechanic + New System that uses that Mechanic” model had worked for Shadows, so we knew that in both we would add a new faction. We definitely wanted to overhaul the naval game, but we were not quite ready to do that yet, so we tackled Shifters first.
We wanted to improve the way winter works in the game, because we knew many players were unhappy with its implementation in the base game. The focus on Winter naturally combined with the theme of shapeshifters to create a faction that would change shape between the seasons. The Ice Shelf also fit the winter theme incredibly well, so we moved it to Shifters rather than Tempest as originally planned.
Since we needed some form of terrain to makes movement and battles on the oceans more interesting, we introduced the ocean weather to create a more interesting field for exploration and landscape. However, we originally also had ocean currents that could force ships to move in a direction and could damage them by smashing them against a reef. While this feature was cut, we managed to preserve the Sea Monster, so the seas remain a dangerous place in Tempest.
Endless Space 2: Naming the Vodyani
Slowhands wrote:
Probably the longest and most difficult part of the dev process for ES2 was finding a name for the Vodyani. This is not a joke.
We did roughly a billion iterations on “vampire” and “leech” and “bloodsucker” in pretty much every single language you can run through Google Translate, hoping to come up with something that resonated. Maxence, Casper, Mathilde, Steve, myself, Romain, and François, plus the two freelance writers we had (Jeremy Sim and Bryant Francis) spent uncountable hours trying to come up with something that everyone else liked.
In the end it was actually a bit ridiculous – we discovered that the Ancient Romans referred to the restless dead as Lumures, and that there is a malevolent water spirit called a Vodyanoy… Somehow, we liked it better when we switched them around, so the “Vampirilis” became the Vodyani, and the “Venetians” became the Lumeris! Utterly illogical.
Endless Space 2: Tech Tree
We did not expect the reaction we received on the tech tree when we released in Early Access. We had built the tech tree as a hybrid between Endless Space and Endless Legend. We were proud of what we had achieved with the tech tree in Endless Legend, and felt this hybrid was a nice step forward. A lot of our players disagreed and felt this new system was a betrayal of the spirit of Endless Space. Base on this feedback, we rebuilt the tech tree from scratch and found a solution to answer their concerns while keeping the nice improvements we wanted to add to the Endless Space 1 formula.
Endless Space 2: Hissho and Honor
The Hissho went through several iterations during their development. After two major rewrites, we presented them to the VIPs, and immediately sparked an impassioned discussion about what kind of honor code the Hissho would subscribe to, as “Keii” was known as honor back then. This had a profound impact on the discussions about gameplay and balance, and we also found that the initial implementation of losing Keii per system every turn was too punishing and could lead to negative reinforcement spirals that were too difficult to recover from. So these keii losses based on Empire Size were instead moved to laws that a player could cancel in an emergency.
Finally, let us close off with the video of today's stream, with SpaceTroll and Slowhands sharing some insight into the founding and history of the studio:
We hope you enjoyed this little insight into the back and forth of the development of Endless Legend and Endless Space 2.
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