Hey everyone,
We often get requests for some more material to dive into the Endless Universe outside of the games. Something to keep immersing oneself into the lives of heroes and villains, as a hero holding a standard or a fly on the wall... So we listened and thought real hard about vignettes that could capture the spirit of each civilization in Endless Space 2. Comics seemed a great material to convey an atmosphere, and we hope you like these. In this fourth installment in our series, set on a familiar planet, a crack team of survivors tries to get to the next level.
StoryEngine, Slowhands' favorite henchman, tells us what's what:
Bringing the Horatio comic to the page has been a long journey, but we're immensely proud to finally get to show you the fruits of our labour. Perhaps we should have always expected this story to be a difficult one to realise, given that our central character is a vain, arrogant--but brilliant-- megalomaniac! Even in the wonderfully diverse and crazy Endless universe, Horatio has always been something of an outlier--an entire civilization of clones founded on one man's ego and drive--and when you really begin unpacking such concepts, it's important to try and give as much consistency and coherence to the idea as possible. Do the Horatio clones share the original Horatio's hunger for power? What is their basic social structure? How do they recognise one another as individuals?
In fact, the first incarnation of the story told the lead-up to the questline that can be played in the game itself: how Horatio precipitated a crisis when he created five "super-clones" who were as smart and devious and power-hungry as himself. The trouble was, in a very visual medium, it was very easy to lose track of which character was which when they're all doppelgängers of one another.
So we scrapped that, headed back to square one.
And found a piece of artwork from the original game that held a great deal of power: Horatio defeated.
We decided that it was a vision--a vision that had inspired and driven and haunted Horatio--and one that had led him on his grandest ambition: to create a civilization in his own image among the stars.
A vision that led him to Auriga . . .
Mix-in Dungeon of the Endless and we had our story.
Just click it.
The Horatio comic concludes our first series. We hope you liked it! If you have any questions or comments, you can shoot them in this thread at Arkel, who leads the project!