There is an issue in 4X games. In fact, it's so persistent, that Amplitude Studios' co-founder and CEO Romain de Waubert de Genlis describes it as an "inherent problem", one his team have been attempting to solve since the first Endless Legend released back in 2014.

"One of the X's, 'explore', disappears after a while," de Waubert de Genlis explains. You've discovered the map for one thing, so there is no more world to uncover. But 'explore' can also refer to something more abstract, your strategy becomes fixed. Because you can see the lands, and you can see the resources, and you can see the enemies you face, you must decide on a course of action and there will rarely be much reason to change it.

But spotting the problematic 'X' is far simpler than fixing it.

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Amplitude have always used early access for their games, even before Steam Early Access was a thing. Ahead of Endless Space's release in July 2012, players who preordered the game got immediate access to an alpha build that was steadily patched and updated on the lead up to launch.

To this day, the studio still uses its Games2Gether program, where they discuss design issues with players and poll them for thoughts on how to proceed. Right now, there are a small group of players giving feedback on the recently announced Humankind 2.

However, as Amplitude prepare to launch Endless Legend 2 after a year in early access, co-founder and CEO Romain de Waubert de Genlis readily admits "The whole thing has changed over time."

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Each time you start a new campaign in Afterworld, Paradox's upcoming post-apocalyptic grand strategy game, a tiny virtual historian cracks their knuckles and gets to work writing a new 200-year history for what happened to North America in the dying days of the great war.

They will decide where the great powers fired their nuclear-tipped missiles, where they released their clouds of flesh-eating nanites, where they dropped their lung-bubbling chemical weapons, and they will decide who survived and who died. These procedural changes should mean that each time you start a new game of Afterworld, the map will be dramatically different from the last.

That flexibility to rewrite the surface of Afterworld is vital, game director Dan Lind tells me, "Otherwise it undermines a lot of the exploration".

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I remember once when I was a child, my uncle was visiting and completely unprompted (and kindly) he gave me a copy of one of the Total War games, I think the Rome one, you'll have to forgive my memory. I'd literally never played a strategy game in my life, but I gave it a go anyway, and quickly found myself thinking, "hey, where are the collectibles? Why's there no triple jump?" The onboarding process did not help me much, and after a failure of a battle where I lost everything, I soon gave up after. So it's because of not particularly strategic people like me that makes me understand why developer Creative Assembly want Total War: Warhammer 40,000 "approachable and accessible".

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Total War: Warhammer 40,000 feels like one of those games where you think to yourself, "wait, how doesn't this exist already?" There have been previous Total War: Warhammer games, three of them in fact, but all set in the original, fantasy setting, not the far flung futuristic sci-fi one. We still don't know when Creative Assembly's Total War: Warhammer 40,000 is coming out, though they have shared one thing that will be different compared to the previous Warhammer games: they have no plans for any sequels.

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The idea behind Humankind is a funny one, in that it pulls from real-world history to essentially let you craft historical fanfiction. I suppose that's true of many strategy games, but this one's all about mixing and matching different cultures throughout history. And now, it's asking you to do so all over again, as a sequel in the works. Zero points for guessing what it's called, because it's very plainly titled Humankind 2.

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Following leaks earlier in the week, Crusader Kings 3 and Hearts of Iron IV creators Paradox Interactive have officially announced Afterworld, a post-apocalyptic grand strategy game about wasteland tribes jostling for dominance of a procedurally generated North America. It's Paradox Development Studio's "first non-historical setting in a decade", in the words of game director Dan Lind.

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The early access phase of oceanic, asymmetric faction war strategy sequel Endless Legend 2 is coming to an... end? That can’t be right. But apparently it is, as the Amplitude Studios-developed, Hooded Horse-published 4X game officially has a 1.0 launch set for September 17th.

If you’ve been waiting, then, for Amplitude to get their UI fixes and shame-inducing ‘Bully’ badges all in order, them’s the time. The 1.0 launch will also add a sixth major faction, while introducing smaller Rogue Factions: fringe groups that have splintered off from the main societies of oddballs and monsters, all with their own quests and stories.

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