After a little over a year in early access, fantasy 4X game Endless Legend 2 is ready for its full launch on PC and consoles. Ahead of its big moment on September 17, we were invited to sit down at Gamescom for a chat with Romain de Waubert de Genlis – CEO of Amplitude Studios (and co-founder). As an extra, Benoît Humbert was also there and gave us a small tease of Humankind 2, the studio’s next game (which he’s directing).
The following interview has been trimmed for better flow and ease of reading.
GW: What can you tell us about the new faction coming with the 1.0 update (The Sandshapers) and the rogue ones? How are they different from the rest?
RWG: We love the opportunity that you will have to play a bit with the environment and the connection with your surroundings. We’re adding three factions, with two that we call rogue factions that will be alternates to existing factions, and the idea is to be able to revisit some of your fan-favourites and twist the gameplay. It’s a whole new way of looking at the world, different stories as well. We go from five to eight factions, so nearly double.
GW: How do you feel the early access period has gone for you? Was it what you were expecting at the beginning or did you have to take some different routes?
RWG: We had a few elements where we had to take different routes, and that is to be expected from early access. Sometimes it’s tough because the expectations of players have changed over time… Nowadays, we have more people joining us in early access, but with an expectation that the game is nearly finished. So when you have to really change a real part of the game, it’s tricky.
We had a lot of feedback initially on the narration and its tone, sometimes taking you away from the immersion; kind of too modern sometimes. It took us a while to clearly identify the issues of the narration; we have a huge game narration-wise. It took us maybe nine months from the beginning of early access to the moment where we were able to change that. We’re extremely happy now, but it was a long road.
GW: What were the biggest challenges and lessons learned, looking at the systems and all those moving parts?
RWG: One of the biggest innovations we had was the recess of water. Nobody else does that, and by doing it, we learned. When players came in, they loved the concept, but after playing dozens of hours on the games, we realized it could be better. The pieces of land were too vast at the beginning, not always interesting. That feeling of exploration wasn’t as fun as it should have been.
So that’s been part of the improvements we had together with the community. It’s interesting to have this new piece of land that’s smaller, more intense, richer, and also more dangerous. Honestly, it’s stuff that you discover together. For me, that’s what I love as well.
GW: One problem that usually comes up when you have so many asymmetrical factions is that some of them might be trickier to balance, especially when you’re doing multiplayer. Which was the one that gave you the biggest headache?
RWG: I don’t think we really had headaches. But Sandshapers is the last one to come in, so it was difficult with less people to balance. Also, you already had the balance before, but the way we look at factions is that it’s alright if they’re not balanced at first. For me, it’s part of the fun of the gameplay; finding out a perfect way of playing a faction and finding its unbalance. If you feel like someone is abusing a faction in multiplayer, you won’t be happy, but for me it’s fine. The only way, I think, to really work on very different factions is to accept there will be ways to be advanced.
The best way for studios to not take a risk is to have a faction that has “plus one” somewhere and “minus one” somewhere else, but in the end, you’re always playing the same. We don’t do that, but you have to accept that it’s impossible to tell you it’s perfect.
GW: Can you share a bit of the plans after the 1.0 release?
RWG: Early access was one year. I think, 59 or 60 patches, ten major updates. There’s been a lot of stuff that came in, but you can expect that it will continue. The game is now complete and it will be more of us getting more feedback, more balance… Of course, the more support we get from players, the more stuff we can do and give them back.
GW: A point of contention when it comes to 4X and grand strategy games are the matters of onboarding and the user interface. What have you learned after iterating several times on those until 1.0?
RWG: It’s always difficult, and you want to know everything. I think the best learning experience I had was when we had a fan coming over to try Endless Space 1, and I was stressed out. Turn one, he spent like one hour. Turn one. He looked at every single icon, tooltip. I was like ‘Just play, you’ll see’ and I think that, since that day, I’ve been trying to balance that overwhelming feeling.
You want to give them enough stuff to do, so there’s a variety of starts when you play a game like that. But it’s a tricky thing, so we keep that in mind, the balance between the number of actions to do… The first few turns, for me, are extremely important. Now that we’ve added the nested tooltips system, it’s quite an improvement; it allows you to dig deeper into the game without having to open up screens or a wiki or whatever.
GW: On console ports, which are also coming in September, what specific work has been done there to adapt the experience?
RWG: I will first slightly rewind. When we were at Sega, a big console company, they asked us to do Humankind on console. It was not our DNA at the time, so we worked with a partner and shipped it a year later. We realized after a while a third of the players were playing the game on console. So it was like ‘Okay, are we a PC or a strategy developer?’ We should be able to service the players wherever they are. So that’s the mentality we have now.
Two, of course, the controls. You don’t want players to have to relearn the controls if they move from consoles to PC. Now, the tricky thing is if you make the controls looking like the console controls on PC, the community will be outraged. They want to have all the details, all the information. They don’t want to see big icons and two decisions.
If we were to do exactly a PC interface on consoles, then we have another problem, which is that on consoles, you couldn’t read it or interact with it. The approach that we have for all our games moving forward is that we have a common base of interface that works on both, and never ever decide to remove information on PC… I think the interface feels the same, but it’s not the same; it’s adapted.
GW: Finally, on Humankind 2… You haven’t revealed much yet, but how does it differ from the first one? It’s been a while, and a lot has happened since that game.
BH: I would say exactly the same things that you can find on the Steam page. We changed the way we approach cultures, and we also introduced more dynamic maps.
RWG: A lot more will come later on that.
Endless Legend 2 will hit 1.0 on PC (Steam, Epic Games Store & Microsoft Store), PS5, and Xbox Series X/S on September 17. A physical release for PS5 will arrive exclusively via the Strictly Limited store and certain retailers worldwide, too.
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