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 new installment in our series, set on a very special planet, a Vaulters Sentinel makes a choice.
Slowhands, lead writer on the project, wanted to share these thoughts:
Another comic, another narrative challenge...
The Vaulters are a particularly demanding case, given that there is more lore out there (because of ES1, Dungeon, and Endless Legend) than there is for any other ES2 faction. More information extant means that there is less flexibility to invent things, and that there are players who will know if we get things wrong!
They are also difficult as their story in ES2 is a direct continuation of the EL storyline, which is another constraint. And finally, to make things really complicated, their iconic hero, Opbot, was already in the game--with a biography selected by the community.
The Vaulters have long been a community favorite, so their tale had to make sense to those who already knew them well, but without confusing newcomers.
So what story should we tell?
There were a number of ideas: surviving the crash-landing of the Argosy (which for obvious reasons would have put us in a whole lot of trouble!); the struggle of those left behind to find their ancient vaults; a hunting rite of passage for a youth translated into space; Opbot's history and disappearance...
Spacetroll (Creative Director -ED) really liked the emphasis on the families torn apart by the departure, underlining the desperate gamble that both parts of the Vaulter society were taking. One is flying into the void in an inexpertly rebuilt ship held together by welding and hope; the other is fighting the Necrophages in the hopes of holding them off long enough to find their old underground cities. To fit that in 8 pages, however, we decided to simplify and focus on a single family--the leaders. That's how we came up with this comic.
We hope you enjoy this story! If you have any questions or comments, you can shoot them in this thread at Arkel, who leads the project. And if you want to learn more about our comics, you can rewatch our comics livestream on Youtube!