It's been a decade since Endless Legend, the 4X genre's most inventive weirdo and the closest thing we've got to a modern Alpha Centauri, launched—we're long overdue another one
The mighty 4X genre is my forever obsession. Even while massive RPGs and life-consuming MMOs steal me away, I'm never too far away from conducting another conquest of a fantasy realm or an entire galaxy, rallying my armies or pretending I'm down for diplomacy when I'm really just planning to pinch some new technology. But for the last decade, every conquest, every deal, every new city plonked down has hammered home one sorrowful fact: this doesn't feel quite as good as it did in Endless Legend.
Amplitude Studios' sci-fi/fantasy 4X came out 10 years ago and I was immediately smitten. The developer's previous game, Endless Space, showcased some smart ideas and a handsome aesthetic, but Endless Legend took it to a whole other level. One that earned it the coveted spot next to Alpha Centauri in my personal 4X pantheon.
The world of Auriga, much like Alpha Centauri's Chiron, is an immediately fascinating battlefield: lively and strange, and wholly unique. It hosts a vast assortment of disparate factions and fauna, some native, but many interlopers, each wrestling with the complex moods of this weird, temperamental planet.
Each campaign is a journey through this alien space—a physical and spiritual journey. The factions explore their past, attempt to carve out their future, wrestle with ethical conundrums and try, through conquest, expansion, and their bespoke narrative adventures, to define their empire. Thus, the map is really a stage for elaborate stories, constantly spitting out evocative text even as it's driving you to participate in the more traditional aspects of the genre.
Where a lot of 4X games leave you to make your chosen empire distinctive, Endless Legend offers up a bounty of factions that already look and play in entirely different ways.
Ununited nations
The all-consuming Necrophages are a plague upon Auriga, a hungry, monstrous species whose ravenous appetite precludes them from the niceties of diplomacy. War is all they know. They are a crashing wave trying to drown the planet.
The Broken Lords, meanwhile, are a tortured faction trying to juggle their chivalrous past with their current predicament, where they are immaterial, vampiric creatures housed in suits of armour, consuming the life force of other sentient beings to prolong their existence. They need no food but have an endless appetite for Dust, Endless Legend's primary currency.
The Roving Clans are a nomadic people and masters of commerce. They can up sticks and move whenever they want, and effectively run the global marketplace, making cash out of every transaction and banning factions they don't like from trading—at the risk of turning everyone against them.
You've also got your diplomats, your shadowy espionage-lovers, your one-city wonders, your terraformers—each blessed with an assortment of entirely unique features that dramatically transform how you make your way through the campaign. Endlessly inventive and unusual, it's a wonder that Amplitude knew how to balance them. But I guess the trick was not really worrying about balance. There are obvious powerhouses and factions who you really have to work on to make them successful, but in each case, the journey is—crucially—fun.
Endless Legend remains the king of 4X faction design. And that's a huge achievement, because it's not like 4X games have been getting lazy in the decade since.
Total War: Warhammer similarly boasts absurd diversity, and it continues to grow. The skaven and their under cities, dwarfs with flying ships, vampires commanding undead armies immune to morale—even a faction that exists within other factions, dwelling in their cities and establishing cults that manipulate and feed off them. With Immortal Empires, a campaign that combines all three games and their DLC, Creative Assembly created the most ambitious, audacious game in the series.
Now, we can argue if it's really a 4X, or a grand strategy game, or whatever, but it's definitely playing in the same space as Endless Legend. But for all of its ambition—and to be clear, this is one of my GOATs—it's definitely not elegant. It's massive and unwieldy, and CA is still making frequent tweaks to it. It is a lumbering, complex behemoth, lacking the artistry of Endless Legend's design.
Last year also saw the arrival of Triumph's best entry in the Age of Wonders series. Age of Wonders 4's approach to factions turns the game into a laboratory, with empires you build from scratch, determining their culture, appearance, traits and magical proclivities, which you then expand upon during the campaign, allowing you to create things as bizarre as dark god-worshipping undead cannibal rats or frogs infused with magical energy who summon spirits to do their bidding.
But AoW4 is all about experimentation and player creativity, and for all the wonderful factions you can make yourself, they never feel as cohesive or smartly-designed as the bespoke empires that stride across Auriga.
Unbeaten
Endless Legend's inventiveness stretches beyond just its faction design, too. There's also the way it blendings RPG-like storytelling with 4X mechanics, the interactivity of the world itself, the nitty gritty empire management—it's all just top tier. And then there's the interplay between major and minor factions, where the conquest or assimilation of other species unlocks new units and unique traits, allowing you to transform your empire into something new, shoring up gaps, emphasising strengths, going in entirely new directions—it's brilliant.
So while I still feel well-served by a genre that continues to be incredibly vibrant, spitting out games like Stellaris, which indulges every sci-fi dream you've ever had; Old World and its brilliant take on the Civilization formula, where it's been reshaped around characters and dynasties, essentially splicing Crusader Kings with the Firaxis flagship; and Sins of the Solar Empire 2, which feeds my hunger not just for space 4Xs but also space RTS games, I still can't get Endless Legend out of my head.
Naturally, I'm more than a little disappointed that Amplitude hasn't followed it up. Sega acquired the studio in 2016, and then we got Endless Space 2, a dramatic improvement over its earlier space 4X, and another example of phenomenal faction design—but it never quite reached Endless Legend's highs. Then Amplitude made the baffling decision to take on Civilization with Humankind, which ended up being a massive step back.
Over the course of 30 years, Civ's been done so many times, and while we're still waiting to see how the next one pans out—Tyler had a good time with his hands-on in August—it's a formula that lends itself to small, incremental changes rather than the big, creative ideas that Amplitude has become known for. Ultimately, Humankind just hewed too close to its inspiration. Old World was a much better example of what you can do with a historical 4X, and while Humankind's culture stacking mechanic was novel, it wasn't enough to build the game around—at least not when it was so conservative in other areas.
Amplitude's last game at Sega was Endless Dungeon, a follow-up to its 2014 roguelite Dungeon of the Endless. I enjoyed the first one, throwaway as it was, but I never felt compelled to try this one. Roguelites aren't really my thing, and it just didn't play to the studio's strengths.
Earlier this year, Amplitude and Sega split, and we still don't know what the studio's future holds. It's unlikely that Sega was the one holding it back from doing Endless Legend 2, since the whole point of the acquisition was to expand the publisher's PC and strategy gaming portfolio, but I am holding out hope that Amplitude's first game as a newly independent developer will be to return to its greatest 4X. There'd be a nice symmetry to it, given that Endless Legend was the last game it created before the acquisition.
In the meantime, Endless Legend still absolutely holds up. I fired it up again this week and it's still as novel and striking as it was in 2014. There's never been a 4X like it since. So if you are looking for another 4X fix, and for some reason you've not been initiated in the mysteries of Auriga, you owe it to yourself to pick it up. Conveniently, it's heavily discounted at the moment, so you can grab it for just over a fiver. Or you can just buy the entire Endless series (excluding Endless Dungeon) for under £20.