Endless legend best custom faction series#

'The thing is, we'd always wanted to work on 4X games, and when you work for big publishers, it's really hard to sell them a niche game,' says de Waubert, creative director on Endless Space.

Endless legend best custom faction series#

Love them so much, in fact, that they left careers at Ubisoft - where they'd worked on series like Ghost Recon, Call of Juarez and Might & Magic - to make Endless Space, which they'd been hashing out over nights and weekends. And in many ways, this idea has taken over the whole project.ДЄmplitude's co-founders Mathieu Girard and Romain de Waubert de Genlis love 4X strategy games. By making fan suggestions the centerpiece of its debut title, it's been giving fans the power to impact Endless Space's content.

But before crowd-designing became a byproduct of Kickstarter becoming a household name, Amplitude Studios - working without fan funding - found itself ahead of the curve. The new trend is seeing fan feedback serving as the equivalent of holding a design meeting while a game is still early in development. And strategy games, first-person shooters, and MOBA titles rely on their fans to help balance and tweak and stamp out bugs - but that kind of input often comes after a game's release. Minecraft, for example, occasionally draws on forum suggestions for new features. Independent developers whose games first grew popular through Internet communities have fared better. In 2011, Capcom asked for fans to help design Mega Man Legends 3, only to later ditch the project - arguably due to a lack of interest. The thing is, it hasn't always worked well in the past. Whatever the result, it's quietly become one of the industry's biggest trends.Д¬ommunity-driven game development isn't a new concept, of course. Depending on your perspective, it's either the equivalent of having incredible community outreach or inviting thousands of mini-publishers to the party, each with their own quirks and demands.

Which, of course, was true.Д«ut soon after a curious side effect occurred, with many of these developers inviting fans to vote on their games' features and allowing them to be part of the process. In February 2012, when 'Kickstarter' became the game media's new favorite word and Double Fine popularized crowd-funded development, everyone assumed the big news was that players were taking control away from publishers and giving it to developers. Amplitude Studios set out to develop a 4X strategy game and simultaneously built a new form of community interaction.