Slowhands wrote:

That's great! As the devs are RPG fans (tabletop and computer), we like the idea of giving the players the 'right' to play around in the Endless Multiverse and make it their own. 

And I like your attitude towards the other aliens, as not every species will view the galaxy as a "zero sum" game.

-Slow

Exactly! Here's a great example of the kind of shift in thinking I think you're asking for here:  To most players within the usual fandom paradigm, the question "Did X race/faction escape the end of Auriga?" is "No".  Or rather "No, until we hear otherwise". Even though it's possible for every faction to get to the end in some way and, well, survive. So picking a favorite would indeed be invalidating people's experiences.

But nonetheless, most of us likely thought of the Sisters of Mercy as having not survived. At least until they were announced as part of the Vaulter expansion, whereupon the "most likely dead until we hear otherwise" was updated in status to "Alive".

I get the sense you'd like us to try and move past that sort of binary way of thinking about it. Embrace, well, endless possibilities. It's even possible everyone escaped the end of Auriga in some fashion or another depending on timeline or even what direction of space they went out to. Just because someone isn't accounted for in Endless Space 2 doesn't mean they didn't survive. If you ever study just how big a place space is or how many directions one can go, it's a miracle anyone would ever meet again. (and indeed, that's the whole theme of the Vaulter questline in ES2)

I think Amplitude likes to work in that awe that comes from infinity and even derives a sense of fantasy/magic from that. Of course, being able to just deal with infinity is hard for a lot of people because we're just not wired as a species to comprehend how small we are. Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot comes to mind.

With an infinity of possibilities to work from, yeah, it's not too hard for everyone to have their space and their stories. The Endless universe would make a hell of a tabletop setting. (indeed, Endless Legend kind of reminded me of playing one, the map felt more like a literal game board than a realistic depiction of a landscape)

You could say there's endless alternate timelines. This is particularly going to be the case in Endless Space 2 where faction quests can lead to radical mutually exclusive changes, esp. noticeable with the Cravers in particular. Which timeline is the canon, solid one? The one that means the most to you. Amplitude and the folks running G2G want you to take ownership of your personal experience with the story. It's a big ask and not everyone will feel comfortable with that, but it's very much keeping in line with their vision of encouraging the impulse to create and for their community to make something of their own. As someone somewhat familiar with Comiket/doujin culture (and marveled at the Touhou boom of the mid 00's) this resonates a lot with me.

I'm just grateful to see creators who feel the same way I do and I want to appreciate the Endless setting to whatever degree I'm welcome to. I'll even go so far as to say that I think that many years from now, Amplitude and the Endless universe will be looked back on and will be seen as being way ahead of their time.

In other words, if you feel very strongly something in your personal headcanon ought to be true, proceed with the idea that it is. There may not be any word of god coming to put it in stone for you, but you are encouraged to pick up a chisel and look for a slab of your own. If it makes you or others happy, then "your" canon is doing a great job. 

EDIT: Here's an example of one of my headcanons - with the exception of the Vodyani, Cravers and the Horatio, most of the races in ES2 aren't out for genocide and in fact are fairly good at pluralism. (I have nothing to back that up except for some of the official-art where even Cravers can be BFFs with other races)  Where in most space games it can be hard to tear yourself away from wanting to play the human faction because you the player are human, a non-Mezari descended major faction winning the game doesn't necessarily mean bad times coming for humans. Indeed, I see the Sophons as greatly valuing the comfort/happiness of their Pilgrim minority for instance. I can't prove that and it's not been set in stone, but it feels right to me. This actually makes me feel comfortable playing any one of the other alien races. It's not about who I want to see become the only race in the galaxy, it's about who I help ascend to a position of control/supremacy. This is in stark contrast to a lot of other space 4X games in a way that's almost hard to describe. This actually means that even the most intensely pro-human side of me thinks it'd be a pretty great idea if the Unfallen were to win and as such they tend to be my main. I know this is a bit off-topic, but it's an example of how much a personal canon can mean to you. ES2 feels very progressive-minded to me and even without overt canon confirmation that it is so, that sense of it keeps a passion going for me.

I'll just add to Pluvinarch's argument, that if Vaulters recolonize Auriga in ES2,

*SPOILER ALERT*

they will find no indication of fate of their brethren who stayed behind .

I think that also extends to other races too. They all could leave Auriga in some other way.
And remember that Grey Owl explosion that caused a rift to parallel universe? Auriga was closest to it, and we don't know how it affected its natives. It could've killed them long before they would freeze, or it could teleport them to another plane of exsistence. Kinda like Dwemer vanished in The Elder Scrolls lore.

Randoming unfallen and spawning right near of cravers, and ending as unfallen-eater-of-worlds, seems canon in my games.

Anyway, rewrite the history of the endless galaxy each game is always a pleasure !

Pluvinarch gave an amazing example, but this applies only to EL and ES2, since there are not main quests in ES1. So, the inner workings of the UE are set on stone in ES2, but not seein in ES1.

This makes me think that in any conflict between both ES, the secuel have prevalent lore. For example, in design, we know that Horatio is Horatio in both games, but one has a more androgynous population (all beautiful and perfect), while the other has only masculine specimens (all beautiful and perfect). By my logic, that means that ES1 could not have the same physical aspect, so ES2 Horatio is most likely the cannon design. 

[Well, maybe there was an Horatio clone who posed as Prime, and played with XX and XY chromosomes, but the idea stand]

Having farily recently gotten more into the Endless IP, I think this sheds some light on many desgin choices regarding narrtive. On the whole, I think it is a good mentality.

However, I think the problem that arrises with the fact that there is no one Auriga map, for example, or that no real time-line is established is that it makes the lore feel very...secondary, for lack of a better term.

While the idea that the player creates their own canon, so to say, it perhaps robs someone the notion of there being a sense of "permanency". I think in general that this is a major problem for IPs that in different ways suffer from "cannonzation issues" (Star Wars and Fallour are two of many that comes to mind.) To try and make my point as clear as I can, the fact that there is such a thing as the Dust Wars, but then what comes after that during the events of the Endless Space games for example, is entirely left up to the player, makes the lore and descriptions of everything to be less prioritized.

Obviously, this is a set of video games, with more installments to come. It is also games that focuses on gameplay rather than narrative or story, which is nothing I have a problem with. The issue I might have is just that fact that (being someone who finds immersion and narrative to be a major motivation for engrossing oneself in games, movies and books) having it feel like a side activity coupled with few established events and lack of a main story or primary focus, leaves it too thin to be engaging. Having many facts vague and mysterious is something I actually like a lot. As in, what really happened to the Endless, who are the Lost and so on. But I can't shake the notion that without the narrative aspect being more relevant, it ends up making the galaxy feel limited, not endless.

By writing this, I am not trying to harshly critque the writing team, Amplitude or anyone in the community in general. This is just sort of where I've ended up with the lore. In so many aspects, I adore these games and I am actually finding myself in a community that I feel somewhat comfortable in. The reason I write this is simply because things like this make up major things that I think and wonder about. Often, frankly. I had the idea of posting something about this (lore and the IP itself) one of these days, and then I saw that the lead writer posted something relevant to those thoughts, it gave me a perfect room to share some thoughts.

Have a wonderful day.

Its super silly to ask on my part but its possible to get at least a cobfirmation on some numbers like , how big is the endless galaxy or how many people is a pop , how big is a ship or how fast it is or when the endless died or small stuff lile that :p ?.

Or maybe some info on the biology of the endless space races like the sophons or the cravers there will be information like that or maybe a book focused on or something lile thst  in the far future.

Thanks beforehand.

And a more far more important question , there is the posibibility that we might get a novel or an endless space book in tje future i would love one , i can dream i guess.

Sorry about my english and thanks alot.

There's one problem with this idea, we aren't given the tools to make our canon a reality. One persons canon could be that the Drakken or a hero of the Drakken survived, while another's canon could be that the broken lords or cultist survived, yet we aren't given the tools to be able to experience that in ES2, E.L's technical sequel in lore. We are only able to play as the vaulters and we cant use heroes like Namkang from E.L. Its a good concept that all playthroughs are canon, but in practice, it just falls flat. Perhaps ES3 could fix that, by bringing all the factions, heroes and Species from E.L and ES2 into one game. Allowing everyone's canon to become reality.

The two game world/universes of EL and ES are only tenuously connected. The Vaulters are clearly in both, and Opbot is all over the place, but I like to avoid too much obvious crossover between the games and game worlds. The reasons for this are:

- The Endless Universe is enormous; there could be a hundred different planets like Auriga so I don't want it to appear that Auriga is at the center of all of our games

- Following on to that, there could be thousands of factions like the EL factions, and hundreds more like the ES factions, that we will discover alongside you all as we continue to make games

- Having some crossover is good so that the community has references and anchors and the occasional Easter egg, but too much of that means too much repeated content -- and no credible maker of video games would make their players happy with that

In addition, if we were to do the opposite, and have lots of EL factions in ES and pull the two game worlds tightly together, then suddenly the vast galaxy that was exploited by the Endless telescopes into a pretty small package.

Finally, given all of that, and the multi-dimensionality of space-time and the desire to make a player playthrough be a valid story, we would really rather not condense the gigantic possibility space of the Endless games down to a linear set of "first this then that...". Things will eventually seep out over time that shrink that possibility space, like the Vaulter story in ES2 altering the end of EL, or Amplitude releasing a canonical map of Auriga, or .... other things we are working on (mwa ha ha haaaa). But I want to keep that sense of wonder and vast scope of potential stories as wide as possible for as long as I can.

-Slow

So the chances of seeing Researcher Namkang and the Drakken being allies with Senya Snowridge and the Hissho in a future Endless space game are low but never zero?

Slowhands wrote:

The two game world/universes of EL and ES are only tenuously connected. The Vaulters are clearly in both, and Opbot is all over the place, but I like to avoid too much obvious crossover between the games and game worlds. The reasons for this are:

- The Endless Universe is enormous; there could be a hundred different planets like Auriga so I don't want it to appear that Auriga is at the center of all of our games

- Following on to that, there could be thousands of factions like the EL factions, and hundreds more like the ES factions, that we will discover alongside you all as we continue to make games

- Having some crossover is good so that the community has references and anchors and the occasional Easter egg, but too much of that means too much repeated content -- and no credible maker of video games would make their players happy with that

In addition, if we were to do the opposite, and have lots of EL factions in ES and pull the two game worlds tightly together, then suddenly the vast galaxy that was exploited by the Endless telescopes into a pretty small package.

Finally, given all of that, and the multi-dimensionality of space-time and the desire to make a player playthrough be a valid story, we would really rather not condense the gigantic possibility space of the Endless games down to a linear set of "first this then that...". Things will eventually seep out over time that shrink that possibility space, like the Vaulter story in ES2 altering the end of EL, or Amplitude releasing a canonical map of Auriga, or .... other things we are working on (mwa ha ha haaaa). But I want to keep that sense of wonder and vast scope of potential stories as wide as possible for as long as I can.

-Slow

Hopefully this doesn't sound aggressive because I certainly don't mean it that way (and feel free to correct me), but one of my biggest complaints about the Endless Universe is that there's a lot of non-concrete lore that I can't dive into. For example, the Vaulters probably were the only faction to escape Auriga, but other factions could have. While the looseness of the lore adds to the mystique around the lore in general, it's frustrating to know that there's no "right" outcome for anything, and removes a lot of my want to dive into the lore and "uncover" what's going on. As a player, knowing my playthrough isn't canonical doesn't particularly bother me, it's just an interesting alternative story.

Another thing I find frustrating is that there's no explanation as to why things are different in ES1 and ES2. Why aren't the Sheredyn an autonomous faction anymore, and are demoted to just being a subfaction within the empire? Why aren't the Harmony considered a major faction anymore? Where did the Automatons go?

And probably the thing I find most frustrating is the increasing amount of factions with The Lost in their backstory, but no real explanation as to what the lost are, or a timeline of events when things have happened. For example, when did the Nakalim rule? Did they overlap with the Endless? What led to their downfall? Do The Lost facilitate the creation of races, because most worlds with the lost tend to be.. special (with Auriga and Koyasil being the biggest examples).

Thank you for a work, love what you write!

CaptainCobbs wrote:

Hopefully this doesn't sound aggressive because I certainly don't mean it that way (and feel free to correct me), but one of my biggest complaints about the Endless Universe is that there's a lot of non-concrete lore that I can't dive into. For example, the Vaulters probably were the only faction to escape Auriga, but other factions could have. While the looseness of the lore adds to the mystique around the lore in general, it's frustrating to know that there's no "right" outcome for anything, and removes a lot of my want to dive into the lore and "uncover" what's going on. As a player, knowing my playthrough isn't canonical doesn't particularly bother me, it's just an interesting alternative story.

Another thing I find frustrating is that there's no explanation as to why things are different in ES1 and ES2. Why aren't the Sheredyn an autonomous faction anymore, and are demoted to just being a subfaction within the empire? Why aren't the Harmony considered a major faction anymore? Where did the Automatons go?

And probably the thing I find most frustrating is the increasing amount of factions with The Lost in their backstory, but no real explanation as to what the lost are, or a timeline of events when things have happened. For example, when did the Nakalim rule? Did they overlap with the Endless? What led to their downfall? Do The Lost facilitate the creation of races, because most worlds with the lost tend to be.. special (with Auriga and Koyasil being the biggest examples).

Thank you for a work, love what you write!

The Answer to the first question can be found in the first text of the thread, the Devs want everyone's version to be canon and while we might see more backstory and lore about factions and people, we wont see what is considered the right outcome in major events, as it would break the Devs belief in making your own canon.

For the Second question, Ive heard in videos on the Endless Universe youtube channel that ES2 is a reboot of ES1, though the Devs are unsure whether it is  soft or hard reboot, as it has some of the same characters but at the same time, new major factions have replaced previous major factions.

Im gonna have to agree with you on the third question, the lost do seem to be replacing the endless as the mysterious long lost civilization, Its starting to feel more like Lost Space instead of Endless Space.

Yes yes I'm aware it's a reboot, but I find the point of "everyone's version is canon" to be very.. off-putting. "If no everyone's version is canon, no one's is". Since a large portion of the events that happen aren't canonical, I don't feel like the canon itself has much weight in my gameplay. The 'dynamic canon' just feels like a lame solution to something that could be much cooler.

The Lost just feel like a more endless endless, I don't find their lore as it is now to be particularly interesting, and hope that the concept is improved in the future.

I've made my Canonical version since learning of the thread. In mine, the Drakken escape Auriga instead, but not before going into civil war between the Survivalist's lead by Researcher Namkang and the other 6 Drakken Heroes who are forward thinking, pragmatic and want to get off the planet and the Revivalist's lead by Kehangana and the Drakken Council, who are fanatic in their belief in the Endless, and want to stay and save the planet, The Survivalist would go on to become a major power in the galaxy.

In an effort to bridge some parts of ES1 to ES2, My Version also involves a Hissho Civil war, that would result in the Yussho being demoted to their minor species status, while the ES2 Hissho rise to power, they too become a major power, going on to blast the Vodyani and Lumeris back to the stone age, as well as becoming an industrialist faction as Clan Snowridge rises to leadership.

My Canon also involves the Drakken and Hissho joining the Defenders and winning the war against the Academy ensuring that their future is theirs to control and not a long dead race.