Let's talk a bit about the Broken Lords.
Endless Legend is a 4X fantasy strategy game. But you know us and how crazy we can be, so here are some interesting facts and concepts on the not so typical faction of noble knights.
Jeff (aka Slowhands), on the lore
"The Broken Lords began life with a handicap. As we did to a lesser extent in Endless Space, we wanted to take a traditional, familiar faction and give it a sharp twist to make it unique and interesting. They started as the basic knight-aristocracy-medieval faction with a relatively classic look and feel (though of course, as always, that changed when Sostene got her hands on them!). We were kicking around different ideas when Romain said, “Hey, let’s make them vampires!” You will see that I tend to blame most of my sleepless nights on Romain…
I think it’s actually a great twist on the typical chivalry-and-honor faction of noble knights, to make them live off the life force of others. It opens up a lot of great potential as a storyteller for all of these conflicts between their ideal of what they want to be and the terrible things they need to do to stay alive, which is the reality of who they are.
Once we had that idea, we worked out their backstory of what caused it and what the ramifications were for their culture. That was useful not only to round out the faction descriptions, quests, and biographies, but it generated great discussions among the designers to invent and improve gameplay."
Corinne (aka Sostene), on the art direction
"Broken Lords are a “fallen branch”, a mutated descendant of the Endless Concrete. Those who had remained in stasis on Auriga and emerged on the surface to resettle after the cataclysm, were overwhelmed by the ambient mysticism and Dust magics going wild on the planet. As their technology failed, they had to gain autonomy from the “science only” spirit of the Endless Concrete and find another path to survival.
Main inspirations
I mainly sourced ideas from Ottoman, Byzantine, and Indo-Persian armor and equipment.
- I did this primarily for their unusual silhouette, because I found it more interesting to move away from the traditional European Knight dress codes and armor.
- Furthermore, this type of armor has the advantage of displaying a “softer” aspect, and combines harmoniously pieces of clothing made from fabric.
Keeping the face partially or totally covered seemed very interesting to bring an element of strangeness that highlighted the Broken Lords “ghostly side”. I associated this with “Kulah Khud” inspired helmets that are Persian/Ottoman -- the idea of “Are you sure you want to know what they really look like underneath ?...”
Ditto for weapons
Almost all of them come from Indo-Persian inspiration. The funny part was that, when we reviewed all the photos we collected of genuine Indo-Persian weapons, the first comment was something like: "Their shapes look way too weird; they already look like some twisted oversized video game weapons”. ^^
Costumes, colors, patterns and textures to focus on
- Cotton, copper, silk, and leather, all in shades of red and old gold
- "Scales" of metal stacked plates assembled to form a kind of coat of mail, metal inlaid, engraving
- Lots of gilding and embroideries, but they are frayed, worn and tarnished (however one must understand that it was something magnificent -- a long time ago)
- In the end we stylized and simplified this idea of decorative patterns/engravings for a better readability, due to the size of the characters on the terrain.
As far as the cities go, our idea was to build a fairly traditional medieval city, albeit in a somewhat more ghostly-Gothic variation ^^"
Max (aka Skamaks), on the game design
"We’re very proud of the Broken Lords! They were the second faction we defined for Endless Legend. The Broken Lords were inspired by vampires and knights, so we wanted their gameplay to be based on life drain. Being more or less a form of living armor, their units are expensive but also highly resistant which makes them tough opponents. Needless to say their unique trait, that Food is insignificant to them, was a challenge for designers, but we had already tried something similar to that with the Harmony faction in Endless Space: Disharmony. So, of course, we figured we could just push those boundaries…
From the beginning we thought it would make a lot of sense to have the spirits of the Broken Lords mixed with Dust, and a lot of game design ideas came out of that. Dust quickly became critically important to them. As beings who are mainly constituted of Dust, we thought of adding a unit healing system using Dust which turned out to be very handy when you need to have multiple fights in a row; it makes them very strong in prolonged military conflicts. We also switched the standard system of population growth linked to Food to one where you can buy a new unit of population with Dust.
As always, we tried to find cool gameplay ideas that still make sense in terms of lore. When “buying a population with Dust”, you can imagine a ritual where the Broken Lords sacrifice some Dust to animate a new unit (like in the Main Menu scene). The fact that they lost their physical bodies over time, and evolved into Dust-animated suits of armor, ended up tying tightly into the gameplay mechanics. Finally, because of their dependency on Dust, the Broken Lords needed some boosts to produce it, so we gave them some boosts like generating additional amounts of Dust on map tiles that provide it."
Download on [DEVIANT ART] our wallpapers: LINK, and submit your own fan art!
For more information on the Broken Lords, check out the [FACTION PAGE], [FACTION CARD], and the focus video below:
