Hey everyone,
Today we will have with us Jeff (Slowhands for those recognizing the name), Narrative Director for the Endless Universe. He will be talking about the challenges and plans for the narration in Endless Legend 2.
Greetings from the ink-stained cubicles where the narrative team hammers out triggers and texts, racing deadlines and fighting spellcheck (“No! It’s S-a-i-a-d-h-a!”) as unsteady towers of lore tomes threaten to fall on the keyboard and erase hours of sweaty work… At least we get croissants 🥐
As you have seen by now, the creative team on Endless Legend 2 decided to approach the storytelling and narrative structures in a very different way from past Amplitude games. The results have not been what we hoped for, and we understand that many of you in our community are not happy with the outcome.
We have therefore been working on changes that should better match your expectations and, hopefully, make the narrative soul of the game more appealing. To make sure we get this right, however, we need to get your feedback on the new approach to help us decide what works best.
Challenges and changes
These are the key narrative vectors that we are changing, with an explanation of why and how we think this will improve your game experience.
First off, we will be excluding major factions from Events that are inconsistent with their tone or their gameplay. This means things like removing Food-oriented Events for the Last Lords and friendly diplomatic Events from the Necrophage.
Another concern that you have voiced is the length and the “clickiness” of some of the narration. We will be removing a large chunk of this by returning the Pacification Quests to a much more Endless Legend 1-style, with a narrative intro and at most 2-3 clicks to get to the Objective (including perhaps an incidental line about the minor or major faction or the game situation). The relatively lengthy intros will be reduced to something like this
In addition, further dialogue exchanges will generally be reduced to a single line
We are also reviewing the Faction Quests to lighten the number of clicks and improve the flow and the tone, as well as working on additional 2D art for each faction.
Our next task is to make the Victory Quest and narrative victory content more meaningful and understandable. For the moment these texts and screens are very much Early Access; the ideas are there but the details are far from being finalized. We are working to improve the clarity, flow, and impact of the endgame content and the narrative outcomes that the player can choose. The Event chain will be fleshed out, and the user interface improved to better explain and track what is happening.
We are also reworking the Relationship Events by reducing or removing certain Event classes, improving the Lone Wolf Events, and adding some unique Events that are more appropriate for the Necrophage.
One other final change to the text content is to edit and update Events and Quips to make sure the tone is more in line with the game style, free of modernisms and contemporary references.
On the system side, as well as the structures and scaffolding of the above changes, we will be providing a Settings option to reduce the frequency of narrative interactions; if the player chooses to, they can minimize the narrative content to only the Faction Quest and the Victory Quest.
We will also add small 3D models to indicate Map-based Events (these are Events that are triggered by an army traversing a specific map tile—it could be related to the FIDSI, an Anomaly, a Resource, etc.). The player will have to interact with the model to launch the Event, which should make the link between the tile and the Event clearer. Currently, it is possible to open e.g. a Forest tile Event when the army that triggered it is now in the Desert. Adding a pin will also put the decision in the player’s hands as to whether they want to launch the Event or ignore it.
Please note that this is a long list, which means it will require time and resources to address. You should start seeing these changes by the end of 2025, and we will continue to roll them out during Early Access. We hope that these revisions take into account some of the issues that you have had, and we extra-hope that the game keeps getting better for you. Feedback, as always, is welcome.
Greetings from the narration team; Nicky_N, StoryEngine, and Slowhands