Hey everyone,
We had a very busy week-end, with two releases, a free week-end, and a beloved freebie on the side. Things went... a bit too well. Here's a quick recap of the crazy last few days we had.
Amplitude Free Week-end & Endless Space 2 Challenge
The free week-end was a resounding success, and we're happy to announce that all reward objectives for Endless Space 2 have been unlocked! For those of you who missed it, players could play Endless Space 2 for free this week-end, and in doing so, unlock content for everyone, free of charge! Welp, that part went pretty well as you all breezed through the thresholds we set. The free content will be coming to Endless Space 2 in an upcoming update, hopefully a few weeks from now!
Endless Space Free Forever
We've had this little gift in mind for a while now, to thank our community for hanging around for so long and helping us create the games we know and love. Giving the very first Endless Space for free indeed was part of the plan... What we didn't anticipate was how many of you would try to redeem the game at the same time. The Games2Gether was hit by thousands of attempts to connect profiles to the Steam API per minute, and on Thursday evening the servers came crashing down. We added more capacity, then the redeeming process on our end decided to give up the ghost on Friday. We fixed that as well, added even more server capacity, and that held... for a few hours. This process continued into the week-end and we are still monitoring the situation to prevent further issues.
If you are encountering issues to redeem Endless Space, please let us know in this thread.
Endless Legend: Symbiosis & Endless Space 2: Penumbra
We were humbled by the reception that was given to our two new expansions, Symbiosis & Penumbra. To see that so many of you are still to this day fans enough to support a game that released several years ago is enough to warm our tiny developer hearts. Both the Mykara & the Umbral Choir factions coincidentally expanded on the tall gameplay that made the Cultists so unique! Nonetheless, even with beta testing going on, there were some unforeseen kinks to work out:
For Symbiosis, a hotfix was released on Thursday to address certain performance issues.
For Penumbra, there's a little more than that going on. To contextualize things, our beta ran for quite a while, and both our community and VIPs are among the most dedicated players we could hope for, and we're grateful for them! They have access to our design documents almost from the start, and they're part of what makes working at Amplitude a joy. Their feedback was very valuable to improve the expansion and make it into something truly one of a kind. However, there's a bit of a bias when testing new systems, since we wanted hacking to be a very different system from what it had been in Endless Legend, a system that would add a layer of mind games to the gameplay. Hacking proved to be just that... and then some.
We do however understand that for a portion of our players, Penumbra has for that reason been a little disappointing so far. The system works very well once you've grasped not only how to use it, but how to use it effectively: for instance, it's good to know how to hack the closest system, but it's even better to know that running the hack through a bunch of dummy systems is the surest way to prevent your target from tracing you back. There's a couple of other things, tiny additions and hints that make hacking a little more difficult than it was intended to be, to be fun and effective. We aim to remedy that, to make sure that this expansion is one you want to come back to and enjoy for years to come.
The planned changes are listed in this thread and the earliest will take effect in a branch (to try it, right-click on Endless Space 2 in your Steam library, then select Properties. Under the Betas tab, click on the drop-down menu to select Preview1_4_3). Do take a look and let us know what you think!
We want to thank you again for taking part in this week-end's celebration, and are looking forward to many more with you!
-The Amplitude Team