Endless Legend 2, the sequel to Amplitude's sublime 4X, is finally coming, and it's fully leaning into the joy of exploration: 'It is a feeling that will stick with you until the end'

It was only a couple of months ago that I bemoaned the fact that it had been a decade since the launch of Endless Legend, my favourite 4X, and there was still no word on a sequel. I needed my fix—more of that best-in-class faction design, more weird stories, more exotic maps to fight over. It turns out that while I was praying Amplitude would eventually return to its best game, the studio was already hard at work making this dream a reality. Endless Legend 2 is coming.

"When we started Amplitude, we always had the vision that we would definitely, every once in a while, revisit our games," says Amplitude CEO and co-founder Romain de Waubert de Genlis. But the studio likes to have a gap between the sequels to, as he puts it, "refresh our crazy minds".

Since the first Endless Legend launched, Amplitude's returned to space 4Xs with Endless Space 2, tackled historical 4Xs with Humankind and experimented with roguelikes twice with Dungeon of the Endless and Endless Dungeon. It's learned some new lessons, split up with its former publisher Sega (Endless Legend 2 will be published by Hooded Horse), and is beginning its next chapter, kicking it off with a return to its most inventive game.

In Endless Legend 2, we're bidding farewell to Auriga, the exotic and evocative setting of the first game, and planting our flag on the new world of Saiadha. Amplitude's not throwing everything out, though. Factions both human and alien will once again be fighting, trading and politicking their way through a sandbox with a strong narrative bent, and as you may have noticed from the trailer and art, we're seeing the return of some familiar faces—namely the Broken Lords and Necrophages factions from EL1.

"You can expect some of the old ones and some new ones as well," says de Waubert de Genlis. At first the plan was just to have new factions in the sequel—until Amplitude started to miss some of the old favourites. "So then we had to pick and choose some that we wanted to bring back with us and link it to the story of the planet, so it makes sense. Basically, it can't happen just by chance that you have these cultures, all these races, all over the universe without a reason."

Ununited nations

We'll be learning more about the factions soon, and Amplitude intends to first release Endless Legend 2 in early access with four of them. I assume—though it's not been confirmed—that they'll go with two returning factions and two new ones. And it's an exciting prospect to both see how the old factions adapt to this new world, and what strange hooks the new ones have. See, one of Endless Legend's best traits is its asymmetrical faction design, where each empire has a dramatically unique playstyle.

The Broken Lords, for instance, are a vampiric, spectral faction who have sacrificed their physical form, and now exist inside ornate suits of armour, feeding off Dust, which in the Endless universe serves as the primary currency. They don't require food, and expanding their population costs cash. The Necrophages, meanwhile, are a faction of ravenous bugs determined to consume everything. They have no concept of diplomacy, and are eternally at war with all the other factions.

As the stage for all this drama and conflict, Auriga was perfect—secretive, surprising and always in flux. But with Saiadha, Amplitude's taking this even further. It's an oceanic world, and with the prevalence of water you might assume that one of the big threats facing the factions would be flooding, but the opposite is true.

"So there's one thing that we know for sure, and we already were aware of this in Endless Legend 1, and it's that players hate when you destroy things," says de Waubert de Genlis. If it's an AI faction storming your city, that's different, but it's less compelling when the game just tells you that a flood has destroyed everything you've built. "No, it's not fun. It's frustrating. So the way we look at it is we want the planet to feel alive, and something is happening that will indeed change the gameplay."

With changing seasons and the dramatic tidefalls, Saiadha is an evolving world. The vast oceans will recede, says de Waubert de Genlis. "The sea bed actually becomes new regions, and they're fertile, and they have dangers, but they also have rewards, and it's happening at the same time for everyone. It's like this sudden rush for new lands, where everyone will know that it's happening."

He likens this rush to a battle royale, but one where the map gets larger rather than smaller. All the factions are racing to exploit the new regions before the others can arrive, and if they get there at the same time, they'll need to duke it out. This way, Amplitude is trying to maintain arguably the best 4X phase, where you're exploring the world and seeing a constant stream of new things.

Trailblazer

"It is very fulfilling," he says. "For me, in 4Xs, exploration is one of the elements I love the most. But most of the time, it is over once you've scouted the whole planet, right? So that pleasure disappears." What Amplitude wants is for this to be "a feeling that will stick to you until the end". Tension and surprises and rewards that the game keeps on spitting out whether you're just starting out or are 15 hours into your campaign.

The way Endless Legend treats its setting makes it rare among 4Xs, where the maps are mostly battlefields or resource generators. "The way we want to look at our planets in our games is, in a way, the planet is the hero of the game, because it's the only one that we're playing on each time," says Waubert de Genlis. "We want to put it at the centre of the storytelling. Sometimes we want to make it feel like it's alive, that has a story behind it. It can react somehow. I think it is a very interesting way of putting it, to create a bond between not just you and the factions, but you, the factions, and the planet itself, and to make it feel like it is all intertwined."

He's preaching to the choir: it's an approach I've loved since Alpha Centauri, and it's a shame that most 4Xs eschew this powerful sense of place. It works so well with Amplitude's 4Xs, too, because storytelling is already such an important pillar in them—you can see the narrative tendrils everywhere. Like its predecessor, While Endless Legend 2 won't have a traditional campaign, each faction has their own bespoke storyline with quests and characters and specific challenges with different branches, effectively giving the game a whole bunch of campaigns—which you can choose to engage with or ignore.

One of the things I particularly dug about Endless Legend was the extra effort it made in catering to less aggressive playstyles, with certain factions leaning more into mercantilism, diplomacy and espionage. And when it came to battles, Amplitude wanted you to feel like the ruler of a people rather than a military commander. As de Waubert de Genlis puts it, "It's not all about a war. It's all about building an empire and being an emperor, not a general, not a captain." He wanted battles to last a couple of minutes rather than half an hour. You could still command your troops, and then watch the turn play out, but the brawls were all pretty simple and brisk. That's all I wanted. But it proved to be divisive.

"Some people love it," he says, "but some people really didn't love it at all." Players were "frustrated" because they didn't have enough control over the battles, and the same went for Endless Space 2, where you picked cards for different phases of a battle to determine the actions of your fleet. Again, I was really into this, but it split the community.

For Endless Legend 2, then, Amplitude is taking some lessons from Humankind, which had more traditional turn-based fights—at least in the sense that you command your units one by one—though still in instanced battlefields. In hindsight, de Waubert de Genlis wishes he would have used this combat model for the first Endless Legend, but now he can rectify that.

He's also glad to have an opportunity to improve the AI. "When you work on a 4X, AI is a nightmare because you work on the rules of the game until the last minute, and the AI is always lagging." The AI programmers are always having to play catch-up, with gameplay tweaks occurring right up until the last moment. One of the ways Amplitude is improving the AI is by creating tools to better help it to understand why the AI is doing something. "Sometimes it was impossible to tell if it was really smart or really stupid." We won't see these tools—it's all under the hood—but we should hopefully see the impact.

Reassuringly, one thing de Waubert de Genlis doesn't want to change is Amplitude's philosophy of asymmetry, even when it means factions might be unbalanced. The differences between the factions don't come down to statistical bonuses—they are far more exotic than that. And leaning too much into perfect balance would risk removing some of the fun, the potential for experimentation and the novelty inherent in each empire. He doesn't want to launch the game with a bunch of broken factions, naturally, but if players find "a crazy way to win the game with a faction no one else has found," then that's a good thing. It's part of the game: "How can I exploit all these weird quirks of the faction to win?"

Early access also gives Amplitude the opportunity to tweak the factions along with the community, and the studio has a long history of this. It's been doing early access since before early access existed, as well as running player initiatives to get feedback and bring in testers. So along with early access, there's the Amplitude Insiders Program, through which the studio will invite players to test the game before it launches on Steam. You can apply to join it now.

Amplitude hasn't revealed exactly when Endless Legend 2 will launch in early access, but it's coming in 2025. After a decade, I guess I can wait just a wee bit longer to conquer Saiadha as a bunch of tragic Dust vampires, or whatever new weirdos the team flings into the mix.