The persistent challenge of maintaining player engagement in the mid-to-late stages of 4X strategy games, particularly regarding the 'explore' aspect, is an "inherent problem" that developers have long sought to address. Romain de Waubert de Genlis, co-founder and CEO of Amplitude Studios, describes this issue as one where the initial excitement of map discovery fades, leading to fixed strategies with little incentive for change.
Amplitude's past attempts to counter this included introducing dynamic environmental changes like shifting seasons in the original Endless Legend, which aimed to make longer campaigns less static. For Endless Legend 2, the approach was more dramatic: campaigns begin with players on scattered islands, with receding waters gradually revealing new landmasses throughout the game. This mechanic ensures that players cannot fix their strategy early on, as the game continually shuffles the available territory.
De Waubert de Genlis also highlighted the issue of players restarting campaigns until they achieve an ideal starting position, noting that full playthroughs are likely a small percentage of total games. To encourage players to see campaigns through, Amplitude focused on ensuring a balanced initial area, offering some good resources but avoiding extremes of either overwhelming abundance or scarcity. When new land appears in Endless Legend 2, it is now designed with more strategic choke points around valuable resources, creating a greater sense of competition and the need to fight for newly revealed territories.
Firaxis Games, developers of the Civilization series, have also grappled with this problem. For the upcoming Civilization 7, creative director Ed Beach explained that the team aimed to make campaigns more digestible by breaking them into chapters. Each chapter would end at a crisis point, leading to a new era with fresh technologies and objectives, offering a different path to victory rather than requiring players to restart when a game feels unwinnable. Executive producer Dennis Shirk noted that this chapter-based approach serves as a way to introduce new, engaging elements that might encourage players to continue rather than restart.
However, an earlier implementation in Civilization 7 involving players selecting a new, successor civilization for each chapter proved unpopular, leading to a sense of disconnection from the original faction. Firaxis has since reverted this system, allowing players to guide a single nation from start to finish.
Amplitude is currently working on Humankind 2, and game director Benoit Humbert indicated that they have learned from player feedback, particularly from the original Humankind, where players felt they were switching cultures rather than evolving a single entity. For Humankind 2, the system has been redesigned to function more like an RPG, with players adopting cultural traits like skills from a tree as they advance through ages. This aims to provide a sense of continuous evolution for a single nation, rather than abrupt cultural shifts.
These different approaches—receding waters in Endless Legend 2, chapter breaks in Civilization 7, and evolving cultural traits in Humankind 2—all aim to refresh 4X campaigns. The transition moments in these games offer distinct strategic considerations: Endless Legend 2's land grabs are universal and immediate, Civilization 7's chapter transitions introduce new technologies that alter how players interact with the map, and Humankind 2 allows players to strategically choose when to adopt new traits, potentially countering opponents' choices. Ultimately, these efforts reflect a desire to keep the mid-to-late game as engaging as the early stages, ensuring players remain invested until the very end.