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From the literal use of ‘grimdark’ to the fact that the environments (if not the units) look like they’ve been inspired by the terrain of Gladius, is Zephon some kind of vision of your previous game freed from the shackles of a restrictive license?
While we are big fans of the Warhammer universe, it is definitely refreshing and complementing to work on something in parallel where we have full creative freedom. In Gladius, you build up your war machinery and battle it out with all the amazing units and factions of the 40K universe. ZEPHON is more involved: you will struggle to survive in a post-apocalyptic world, manage a more sophisticated economy, negotiate with others leaders, traverse a vast research tree, make complex ethical choices and, of course, go to war with rivals by utilizing a sophisticated mix of three distinct technological paths (conventional troops, cold-hearted machines, and eldritch horrors). A new IP allows us to express all the ideas that we’ve been accumulating over the last 6 years.
Proxy wants to go it alone with this one—any particular reason? You’ve historically partnered with Slitherine before now but there are plenty of self-publishing successes out there as well.
ZEPHON is co-funded by the Creative Europe MEDIA program of the European Union, so from a financial point of view there is no need for a publisher. We might decide to team up closer to release for marketing purposes, but we want to engage with players directly and react to their feedback with new game versions in a matter of minutes—which people are loving on our Discord.
“Let’s face it, 4X combat is often boring or shallow”—It’d be remiss of me to not want to explore this further—how does Zephon solve this proposed problem with 4X combat?
4X games often give combat the back seat. It’s not necessarily an issue, but it’s a question of focus. We feel that these games, after the economic infrastructure is created, most of the time end up being decided by combat anyway. We can do the whole experience more justice by going beyond simplistic combat. That’s done primarily by giving each unit a very distinct role through unique weapons, skills and upgrades. We’ve been inspired to bring RTS elements into 4X combat and believe it works excellently.
Considering Proxy has spent a lot time recently making a game that’s been famously devoid of any kind of diplomacy (there is only war in the grimdark, after all), how do you plan on shaking up those mechanics specifically with Zephon?
With ZEPHON we really want to emphasize the roleplay aspects when you talk to other leaders. So in order to feel as immersive and interactive as possible, they will react pronouncedly to actions you perform or choices you have made in the past. You will be able to influence leaders to perform any diplomatic action on third parties, and all leaders will have fully unique dialogue lines to bring their respective character traits to life. It’s important to us that none of this detracts from the combat experience, but rather augments it. Being able to decide with who you’re at war will ultimately give you more control over the combat than a free for all.
Your steam page also mentions shaking up other 4X foundations as well—what other innovations are you proud of?
Some are still in the experimental design stage, but two important foundations that we can mention now can be split into gameplay and visual. Gameplay-wise, we’re doing an involved economic model where resources combine to create more powerful resources (think Settlers or a simpler Factorio), but also where you pay for production ahead of time instead of your resources ticking down each turn. That means you’ll have to think about your build orders and resource allocation ahead of time if you want to play optimally. On the visual aspect, we’ve recently been seeing an influx of 4X games that try to appeal to a large mass with casual graphics. We want to go into the other direction, be more realistic and show the gritty and the dark. On top of that we are going to uniquely model every unit upgrade and also every distinct type of building in your city--so you know what kind of city it is just from looking at it.
From Pandora, to Gladius, and now your work on Zephon, what do you think is Proxy’s defining or enduring legacy on 4X strategy games?
The relentless pursuit of creating a great combat experience. And we’re doubling down on it by making it more visceral and immersive.
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