This has just came in. Paradox Interactive announced an expansion pack for Sword of the Stars 2 called “End of Flesh”, which will be bundled with the base game in Sword of the Stars 2: Enhanced Edition, due for release on November 30th 2012.
Kerberos Productions had already activated the “all clear flag” on Sword of the Stars II one month ago, stating that the game would be now “in the shape we would have wished it to be upon release” ~Martin Cirulis (Kerberos Productions CEO). Today, Paradox and Kerberos announced a new expansion on top of the “all clear” announcement.
Paradox is offering the new expansion for free to all the people who bought Sword of the Stars 2: Lords of Winter!
New features for this enhanced edition include:
- The new Loa race with a new drive for their ships – the Neutrino Pulse Gate
- Over 25 new technologies including a new tech tree for cybernetics
- 10 new weapons and attack systems
- Expanded ship building options for all six original factions, including new Leviathan class ships
- 2 new independent races to seduce or bludgeon into your imperial orbit
- New random encounters and mission types
- All previously released faction based DLC – the voices, the badges, the avatars, the skins…all of it.
Now that’s more like it. After a terrible release and about one year of extra development, Paradox Interactive and Kerberos Productions are doing an effort to redeem themselves by offering new content to patient fans for free, and a (hopefully) better product for new customers.
Looks like there’s more hope for the Sword of the Stars 2 Universe now! And that’s surely good news for the 4X genre as well.
Check here for the full press release.
Thanks SQW!
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Interesting thing about failed releases.. most companies just give up and fold, Kerberos did stick with it and tried to make up for the situation…
Here is the thing though.. every time i try to get myself to install that game, i remember the hours I spent trying to get something game like out of it when it was first released, when they were still claiming that it should be “okay”… and I lose all motivation to continue.
Maybe if they would gift the expansion to the original buyers of the game, I would bring myself to try it.. as it stands right now, I will probably just pick it up along with the other expansions as a bundle somewhere a few years down the line for 5 bucks.
But csebal, they ARE offering the new expansion to the original buyers of the game :) I guess I need to work on those titles, or perhaps bring more up the sentence where I wrote that.
Well, I either missed that part or some sneaky editor added that line after I first went through the article :)
It might be enough of a push to make me install the game again.. then again, those horrid memories are really haunting me, so yea.. there is that part. They definitely got their work cut out for them if they want to win back the support / trust of their fans.
This might be a good step in that direction. Did definitely work for Stardock, with Elemental.. thing however is that Elemental was released in 2010 and while it wasn’t particularly fun or entertaining, being little more than a framework for a fantasy strategy game, it wasn’t particularly broken either.
Point being, they have had a better start and more time passed since their failure allowing people to forget and forgive. SotS 2 is still in recent memory, so it might not work out that good.
As usual, I hope it works out for them though, if for nothing else, then just so they get a shot at making SotS 3 eventually. One of these days, someone will manage to nail it and make the perfect game.. we just have to make sure that not just we, the players, but also the developers are around for that to happen.
Still, Kudos to Kerberos for trying. As said, most companies would just fold, pack up and start a new business under a different name.
The sentence was there. Since you missed it I moved it upwards a bit so that it isn’t easily missed due to its importance.
Well, an expansion at this stage was undetected, though sensible from a business point of view, i.e. new reviews etc.
I wonder, will you be doing a review Adam? And if so, have you maybe got your hands on a build yet? To be more precise, do you think its worth getting ones hopes up, or is it the current disappointing state of Sots2 + new race?
Yes, I agree with you. A new expansion now makes all the sense from a business point of view, to “force” reviews as you say. I also got that impression.
About my review, well, this changed my plans a bit. I was planning to do a SotS2 re-review now but as this new expansion is coming in two weeks I think the best course of action is to wait just a little bit more and do a review of the Enhanced Edition instead, which includes the “all clear” improvements plus the new “End of Flesh” expansion. Seems the more sensible approach.
I don’t have a build yet but I’ll request one asap. I’ll try to have a “release day” review (that would be on the 30th of November). That or release it a few days after as usual when I don’t get an early review build. I’ll keep you guys posted on this.
Oh boy. I knew this would be on here today :D
They’ve done marvelous work on the game, it’s in excellent shape.
SOTS1 became great with expansions and SOTS2 will become even better in my view.
SOTS1 was a good game from the start. It started as a more or less Spaceward Ho! style game, simple but enjoyable and envolved and expanded with the extensions, not always to the better IMHO. SOTS2 was a beast on release: complex, undocumentated, unenjoyable and very buggy.
I remember thatSOTS II has no tutorial scenario. It is not too hard to learn for a standard 4X gamer but still it needs a tutorial scenario.
I had a really hard time understanding fleets and what they should be comprised of. I remember not being able to figure out how the supply system and command ships worked.
“Paradox is offering the new expansion for free to all the people who bought Sword of the Stars 2: Lords of Winter!”
I hope they offer the expansion even for non-buyers *G* I bought the game but i am still using the registration code i won at the spacesector give-away contest. So my bought code is still unregistered :)
For those of you who have played SOTS 2, have they improved the star map and managing your colonies at all? In SOTS 1 I had a really hard time keeping track of the distances between my colonies. And as the game progressed it got harder and harder to navigate the 3D star map. Usually I just played on the 2 D map.
If you found the former 3d map confusing the new one will hardly remedy that, arguably you could use the 3d nebulae as orientation reference, but generally speaking I have heard many people complaining of not getting along in the 3d structure.
Though personally I never found it to be a problem, and rather gracious in general.
There is a way to display the exact distance between any two points ingame. its ctrl r click for sots one, and just r-click in sots2.
Seeing as I have a good sense of spacial orientation in rl I am not sure whether this will help you, but you could try to imagine a 3 dimensional grid with your starting system being the “center”, that way you should be able to gauge relative position at a glance, though ultimatlly its irrelevant in any space game (or rl too..) since borders as such are a virtual, and distance in sots is relative
Ah thanks. I played a lot of SOTS and never new about the ctrl r click thing.
My understanding is that those who have the base SotS 2: LoW installed in their steam account, get a big update at the 30th that’ll bring the game up to the new SotS 2: Enhanced Edition state.
You guys should go check Kerberos forums about it, there’s a LOT of chatter going on (and as usual, the devs are responding).
I really think a re-review now would be better than waiting. I was hoping this would be a good game but the MASSIVE CRATER its release made and Paradox products in general dont give me much confidence in anything with there name on them much anymore.
I wouldn’t say Paradox products in general are untrustworthy. EU3, Heart of Iron, Victoria 2, CK2, are all great games. Did they mess up this one? Yeah, but it isn’t indicative of all their products.
Paradox as a publisher is having more issues than Paradox as a developer (now named “Paradox Development Studio”). The former is partially responsible for SotSII and that terrible Civil War game (Gettysburg: Armored Warfare). The latter is responsible for greats like EU2, EU3, CK2, VR, and, hopefully, EU4.
Meant to include this. If the base game is still a shambling wreck what difference will the expansion make?
We’ll find out in a couple of weeks. I’m not expecting this expansion to make a big difference in the game’s current state. The expansion seems to be about new content and not really about fine-tuning. That’s why the best is to wait a couple more weeks and do the review of the all thing.
I’ve never been a fan of this series as it’s all about tactical fights rather than actual strategy (that is not building ships or researching). People compared it as TW in space but it’s way more dumbed than TW series IMHO, both the RT and TB parts.
Anyways, the second game has partially fixed the shallow TB phase to be more substantial although it’s still too many sliders and too little actual choices with profound consequences.
The sliders does make the game a bit more ‘realistic’ as in thats the best way to model how an actual ruler projects power (they wouldn’t actually travel to each planet and ‘select’ which building to build every year would they?). But a sci-fi 4x game isn’t meant to be any realistic in the first place.
Despite all of this, the game is pretty enjoyable now, provided you got through the painful learning process without permanently ragequitting from the game :)
Ai is good, tactical combat is great, strategic aspect is adequate, graphics are great, research is great, UI sucks balls but you’ll get used to it, immersion is way bad but not catastrophic I guess because of the voices and story and game play feels a bit too static and strained sometimes.
All in all, provided if you haven’t bought it yet and wants the free expansion, you should PROBABLY get it.
SotS has always been about removing the standard micro of 4x games. They’ve never claimed otherwise, so Im not sure why you would expect it to be?
However, SotS Prime and 2 are both full of “actual choices with profound consequences”.
The difference is those choices are not displayed in a simple “press this button to pick choice 1” manner.
For example: The AI only has info within its sensor range. So it will act in a profoundly different way if(in SotS prime) you send all your colony info. Suddenly it goes from thinking your a smaller empire to realizing your bigger than it thought. Which has a large impact on how well you are able to push diplomatic solutions. Demanding a surrender becomes much easier for example.
All of the profound consequences and choices are set up this way. Requiring real action in order to gain benefit/suffer consequences from.
One of the more well known consequences(and the focus of the new race) is in fact the AI Rebellion. Those techs come with signifigant gains, but when you bugger up the research it results in a horde of AI fleet stealing half your empire and waging civil war on you.
How is that not an actual choice with profound consequences?
Still its nice to hear you enjoy it. :)
Uhm, I’m telling you what it is, never said I had any “expectations” to it.
SotS is still meant to have a focus on tactical fights, so I actually expected that to remain that way; I never bothered with the first game and now I’m just re reviewing the series and telling my feelings.
And the things you said isn’t really unique to SotS, even though it has quite a bit of unique stuff (AI interaction especially). My point was all those sliders overly abstracts allot of game play mechanics that deepen other 4x games and enriches game play.
I’m very happy about this expansion :) Loving the new race design, always wanted to play a mechanical race in the SotS universe. Already had a lot of fun with SotS2, but this really made my day :)
I’m really looking forward to the new drive tech. Sots universe has one of the most unique faction lores in space genre thanks to what’s-her-name. Also, how will the existing psi tech affect a robotic race?
A former mechanical slave race does seem a little cliche though compared to what we have already. You can almost see a organic race a la zerg peeking over the horizon. =P
I’ve stuck with Kerberos from the first installment of Sword of the Stars… through the struggle to stabilize that game and through its end with the lead in to Sword of the Stars II with Argos Shipyard. Purchased SotS2 on release and though there were issues, I’m glad I never once gave them hell for it. Everyone is human and all humans make an oops happen from time to time. I think over the span of time until the all clear was given, they gave a lot into the game to make those of us still supporting them understand they did care. This on top of their ‘The Pit’ game will make for a wonderful end of the year game time! DO check out their rouge like ‘The Pit’ if you haven’t heard of it yet. Awesome demo they have out.