Having built a name for itself with only a handful of games released, Amplitude Studios is certainly a developer worth keeping an eye on. With 4X games Endless Space and Endless Legend, it has proven it has the talent to take on what is typically a challenging genre to succeed in. Yet the developer has also released Dungeon Of The Endless, a roguelike, tower defence strategy game that has won over critics and consumers alike.
With Endless Space 2 in development and recently released updates that expand upon Endless Legend and Dungeon Of The Endless, it’s clear there’s a lot to expect from this Parisian developer. We speak with Romain de Waubert de Genlis, creative director at Amplitude Studios, to find out more about the developer’s plans for its games.
GameWatcher: Part of the update for Endless Legend focuses heavily on modding and community involvement, why was that?
Romain de Waubert de Genlis: So modding hasn’t been a big part of our games yet although we always have some people who want to work more on the balance of the factions, on adding more stories and all that. But it’s not easy to implement and it’s not easy for players to get access to, so we decided to take a much more user friendly approach to modding. So we hope that people will pick it up even more.
GameWatcher: Do you wish you had focused on Steam Workshop support on release of Endless Legend?
Romain de Waubert de Genlis: There are two things, each time I work on a game, you’re always looking at modding and player tracking - as in how they play - towards the end. And by the end you’re just running with so many things you need to do that you say ‘oh, right after release we will do it’. And then after release all you can do is work on patches and add-ons and stuff and so you never do it. Do I wish we had? Yes, I do. But I think you need to have the time to realise it and think it through before you do it and I think if we jumped into it when we were running with a lot of work we would have ended up with something pretty bad. We wanted to do it properly. But I think now we have a lot of experience in doing it, so for our other games - such as Endless Space 2 - it will be much easier to add. Hopefully from the beginning this time, but with modding it’s hard to know what access you can give to the modders, because they always want more. And the more you open your game to modding the more you have to make it very generic and everything could take twice as long to do.
Endless Legend did some interesting things with the 4X genre, and had the necessary quality to compete in a difficult genre for newcomers
GameWatcher: Was it something that the community was asking for?
Romain de Waubert de Genlis: Actually, what the community was asking for the most was for improvements to the AI. It’s a game - particularly in single-player - where you play 100 hours or more, so it’s easy to see the limits of a non-human player. So the AI was the biggest one. It’s a very good improvement to make in the update, so we’re very happy about that today. Again it’s also experience that we’ve gathered for the future. I think the AI that we had was an extremely complex AI that could probably send a rocket to the moon, but was unable to do a battle in our world so that was a good lesson. We need to make an AI that is easy to understand and easy to tweak and easy to teach, basically. So that’s how we tried to improve our AI, it was a lot more focused.
GameWatcher: Well AI in a 4X game is a significant feature after all, was it difficult to do since you have been overhauling the whole game?
Romain de Waubert de Genlis: The thing is, on our game, all the factions play differently - it’s not just improving the overall gameplay, it’s about adapting their own unique gameplay and so each time you have to relearn everything for each faction. It’s a game where you count through everything in a single turn and so the AI will have to focus on playing the game not just in a single way, and not just for their faction but to their tastes as well. And teaching them to focus on particular way of playing might not work and so you can’t force it to do that because maybe after a while it will be a wrong choice. So the AI needed to understand how to switch strategy and that’s particularly hard to do because it’s hard to tell the AI when to recognise this moment.
With different art and gameplay styles, Dungeon Of The Endless was a shift for a developer making a name for itself as a 4X developer
GameWatcher: Now these elements have been updated in the game, are there new areas that you or the community would like to change?
Romain de Waubert de Genlis: There are always a few things. One has been coming up quite a lot, and I hope to be able to do it. They want to have fixed teams, and this is something that they have been asking for since the beginning of Endless Space so it’s like four years the community has been asking for that. It’s a pretty high priority. Another one is that they want to see more things on the city, boats and vessels and stuff. There’s been lots of people asking for improvements to the winter season; some people don’t like it, some people think it’s too easy and some people are not too bothered. With this we want to make sure that we can adapt it to everyone’s tastes.
GameWatcher: To what extent does the community drive the content of the updates you create?
Romain de Waubert de Genlis: So what we do is that we always have our own plan, but we don’t give it any more value than the community’s requests. So what we do is regularly - every couple of weeks or so - we merge our plans with the community requests. We let them know our plans and the things we want to do, and we give them our priorities on that and do the same with the community requests. In the end we just combine the two and it highlights some of the things the community asks for. The problem is the difficulty of some of these features, so that’s why sometimes the community has to ask for a long time before we can create it. They are tricky, and so they push, push, push until we don’t have any other choice to add it in.
GameWatcher: Is that your same approach to updating Dungeon Of The Endless as well?
Romain de Waubert de Genlis: Yes, it is for all our games. Endless Space and Endless Legend would be the same. Basically we consider our players to be an extension of the team. Or that the team is also our first community, so it goes both ways. We look at them as being the first guys that interact with the game and what they want to see from it. But yes, definitely, we’re a small studio with two community managers, We have a lot of designers, probably because we expect that the job of a game designer at Amplitude is also, in a way, to interact a lot with the community so it takes a lot of time. So you need more designers. In development, when they are in full-dev, it’s around 30 percent of a designer’s time spent interacting with the community, which is huge. Before we did this it would have been perhaps one percent of the time. And it’s great while creating it because you can’t hide behind your screen or your desk, you’re working in front of everyone’s eyes and you’re responsible for what you do. It’s a great, positive pressure. You’re talking with the guys who are going to play what you create. if you don’t deliver then they will be the ones that are mad or you can be ashamed of yourself for not delivering. So absolutely, it’s not just a job. You could say it’s true for every designer but it’s even more true when you really discuss with the community and they really tell you what they think.
GameWatcher: How do you decide what is going to be free content and what is going to be paid-for content?
Romain de Waubert de Genlis: Well, if we add a whole layer to the game then we make it as extra DLC. It’s just if we know that it’s going to involve a lot of the old bits - I think Shadows is a very good example. With Shadows we added the whole espionage system into the game. It’s a whole new layer, you can play the game without but adding it in just opens a whole new way of playing the game and the faction obviously makes a big use of that. It’s a classic approach, but it’s a pretty extensive approach and it’s really standing on the game by affecting the way the game is played. That, for me, I think is okay to be an expansion; of course I don’t think it’s okay to make it a 30 Euros expansion, but it is still okay to make it a paid expansion. What we would consider to be a free expansion is the stuff that we believe everyone should have. Or when we do a bit more of the same but it’s on a smaller scale. And we always want to make sure that you still add content for everyone, even if it is stuff that you could say ‘okay, you don’t need to have that’. You want to be generous with the players and you want to keep them coming back to the game, even if they didn’t buy extra content. But the free content will not be a whole new aspect of the game, only playing with what exists.
Endless Space was very well received, but it was Amplitude’s first released title - expect the sequel to be a considerable upgrade
GameWatcher: So now you’re working on Endless Space 2, what does that mean for support for Endless Legend and Dungeon Of The Endless?
Romain de Waubert de Genlis: So on Endless Legend we still have a lot of stuff coming in. It’s been a very successful game, the community is extremely active so we definitely have plans to keep working on it. We have a whole team dedicated to Endless Legend, which is a team different from the team working on Endless Space 2. Many of the guys, if not most of the guys, from the Endless Legend live team are from the original Endless Legend team. So there’s some guys who are keeping the flame up and they have a lot of ideas, as well as with the community. With the list of all the things we want to do and the community want us to do, I think we have a whole lifetime of updates to come. I’m not saying that we’ll do a lifetime of updates, but just there are so many things that we could do. And we still want to continue to do it so long as we see the community responding positively to our expansions in the game then we will try to be there. For us, if the community helps us by buying DLCs and stuff and it remains viable then we’ll want to continue to keep doing that for as long as they allow us to do it. If people stop playing it then the team will move onto another game, but it’s not looking like it is anywhere near.
Whether you’re a fan of Endless Space or the fantastical Endless Legend, it’s clear that Amplitude isn’t giving up on either title just yet. Updates will be coming for Endless Legend for months to come, while a sequel for its space-faring 4X game is due this year. Either way there’s plenty to look out for.
