Having been a part of the Sins of a Solar Empire franchise for more than 15 years, I’ve often been asked how we make decisions on new features or DLC. Why did we choose to do Paths of Power versus something else? After all, there’s no shortage of ideas and requests from players, and we have our own things we’d like to implement as well. This is a question that all developers, especially those with smaller teams, grapple with and there’s no single answer. Let’s look into how the Sins team came to our answer.
The first thing we had to determine was where we want Sins II to be in 2.5 years. What features did we want to implement? What features were players asking for? We brainstormed on this quite a bit and came up with an initial wish list of ideas. (I know some of you are saying, “Post it!” right now. I would… but we’ll probably use them in the future, so you’ll have to wait.) So now that we have a list, how practical is it to actually make?
Here we introduce the Dark side of the equation - business. There are a couple of major questions that we need to answer next: First, how much time and investment do we estimate each DLC idea will require to make? Do we think an idea will be of enough interest to players that they’ll want to buy it (so we can recover our expenses)? This part is always a bit of a gamble because you can only make your best guess as to what fans will think is worth their money. Success will help keep the team employed and propel work on the next update; failure can have equally dire results.
In the case of Sins II, we decided on ideas that we felt players would enjoy (because it’s stuff you’ve all been telling us you want), while at the same time spreading out the risk a bit. This is the DLC lineup we’ve announced:
- Paths to Power - a collection of mission-based scenarios with custom conditions.
- Reinforcements - a collection of six new units (1 per faction).
- Times of War - a story-driven campaign mode.
- Harbinger - a new, playable faction.
Looking at this, the last 3 appear to be slam dunks - they’re all things that players have been telling us they want. They’re also all progressively more expensive to make and thus have increasing levels of business risk! So, why Paths to Power? Nobody was asking us to explicitly make custom scenarios, though many had asked for more victory conditions, random events, etc. The answer is simple: the campaign expansion, the victory conditions, random events, and more all required an underlying system of automations, triggers and scripting that did not yet exist. By front loading the foundation of our future DLC and features, we were able to spread out the engineering time and cost, thus reducing our risk over time.
The vast majority of what we’re planning to add for free to Sins II this year will only be possible thanks to the humble, Paths to Power DLC. This also greatly empowers modders who have long desired the ability to add custom gameplay elements and even campaigns.
