The Bolivar Update brought many important improvements to Humankind, but we still have a lot of ideas how to make the game better in the future, and we’re sure many of you are eager to hear about them. So it’s time for us to talk about what’s coming in the Ibn Battuta Update in late July, starting with a feature that we’ve been working on for a while: the Immersive Empire Names.
“Immersive Player Names” may actually be a more accurate name for the feature. Giving consistent names to the empires in Humankind honestly turned out more difficult than expected, and we went through several iterations looking for a version that worked well in all supported languages. In the end, we decided to move the spotlight from the empires to the avatars themselves.
So, why is this important? Well, while changing and adapting your culture to the shifts in your situation is a core part of the Humankind experience, it could honestly get pretty confusing (as many of you were quick to point out). “The huns have declared war on me? The who? Oh, they used to be...” And referring to the other players as “the green empire” or “that pink $#?@!” isn’t much fun, either, and robbed the avatars of a lot of their personality, as they were just not very present while playing.
Now the game will focus on the avatar name for most interactions (with their culture usually added in brackets), so you should feel much more like you are interacting with the same leaders throughout your game, rather than a string of different cultures. You’ll probably notice this most with the various notifications, where you don’t get the benefit of seeing the other avatar as you do on the diplomacy screen. Now it’ll be much easier to keep track of who is who and what they’re up to if they’re properly addressed by name.
Hang on... Priest-King? Supreme Ruler?
Yes, now that the names of the avatars are featured more prominently, we have decided to give them titles as well. Unlike the names, these titles will shift over the course of the game as they enact different government civics, so you may deal with kings and queens in the early game, but presidents and great leaders in the late game. Some of these government civics also take into account your ideologies, so even an aristocratic republic might be ruled by an emperor if their ideology leans towards authority.
These all rule absolute monarchies, but their ideologies differ.
As with most aspects of Humankind, we still have many ideas on how to improve this, but we think this new focus on the avatar names will already add a lot of flavor to your diplomatic interactions and allow you to build lasting alliances (and bitter grudges).
And if you want to know more about the other improvements we have coming with the Ibn Battuta Update, stay tuned to our announcements in the coming weeks.