Jul 4, 2019

ENDLESS™ Space 2 - Frogsquadron

Hey everyone,

Welcome to the first ever Endless Summer, a weeklong celebration of the hot months, all things Endless, and our great community. We’ve got plenty in store for you this week, so grab a cold drink, kick back, and hang out with us and your fellow Endless fans.

STREAMS

For the whole week of this celebration, we will host a stream every day. We will cover all the Endless games, and a few SEGA games on top of it! On the weekend, we will even be joined by guests from around the world, with more than 12 hours of streaming content on Saturday and a German guest stream on Sunday! You can find the full schedule on our new hub page.

ACTIVITIES

If you fancy a more active role, we got you covered as well!

We’ve published scenarios for both Endless Space 2 and Endless Legend today. These are not as vanilla as some of the previous scenarios, as we’ve asked the devs to create some custom factions for you to face off against. So, take to the seas on Auriga or the stars around it!

Looking for more action? Try yourself at our Dungeon of the Endless Speedrun challenge. Don’t worry, it’s nice and cool down in the Refreezerator pod, even when our (presumably) cold-blooded hero is taking heat!

Perhaps the weather as beautiful as a Horatio greenhouse has inspired you, and you feel that something is missing from our visual novel Love Thyself - A Horatio Story: A little more mystery, a little more clone romance, a little shopping trip on the concourse? We have put together a little guide on how to create your own scenes for Love Thyself, and you can even earn a reward for your efforts in beautification.

REWARDS

Even if you’re just relaxing on these sunny summer days, we still got new digital goodies for all of you!

For your refreshment, Slowhands has shared some of the most popular cocktail recipes from the Endless galaxy. We’ve also released a small wallpaper collection for each of the Endless games, so you can enjoy our artwork even when you take a break.

Finally, everybody who participates in our Endless Summer by being active on Games2Gether during the event will receive a new badge.

GIVEAWAYS

If you’re looking for something else to play, just for this week of Endless Summer, you can get two free games from a selection of five classic SEGA titles from the Mega Drive! Grab them while you can!

Don’t forget, the Steam Summer Sale is still going on for a few more days as well, with virtually all our titles heavily discounted. A great time to round out your collection!

Have a great summer!

-The Amplitude Team

Apr 2, 2019

Love Thyself - A Horatio Story

ENDLESS™ Space 2 - Frogsquadron

Hey everyone,

Do any of you remember April 1st of last year? On that day, we briefly glimpsed perfection as we imagined a new standard in Horatio dating simulators. Back then, we honestly had no plans to follow through on it, for while we could imagine this perfect game, we could not imagine any way to truly capture the experience of dating Horatio, for who can earn his love but himself?

However, at Amplitude we always strive to listen closely to our community. And what we heard were a lot of requests for a Horatio-based experience. A LOT of them. In fact, there were so many remarks about it that they might as well have been clones, with a few remarkable exceptions.

Now, after a year of tinkering, we have finally been able to enhance a select few members of the community team to be able to deliver a true-to-vatgrown-life Horatio experience. We hope you will appreciate their great effort on your behalf, for they will never be the same… No, actually, they will forever be the same, as each other, for they have probably become Horatio. Check out some of their work below.

Part 1 of “Love Thyself – A Horatio Story” is available now on Steam for FREE, and we have dedicated a new forum to it.

Check back later this spring for part 2 and the exciting clone-clusion of this Horatio story!

Have fun,

The Amplitude Team.

Mar 27, 2019

Muck & Makers Content Update

ENDLESS™ Space 2 - The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales

Way back in January, we challenged you to explore a target of 3.5 million systems in in 4 days during the Endless Free Weekend. Well congrats, because you made it! Well, maybe not you specifically, but that doesn’t really matter since this hot pile of update is available to all ES2 players! Here’s a more detailed list of the contents:

1) Hero – Fore Sagazh Jabble
A carefree, curious and accident-prone creature, integrated to the society of Heroes when an Academy explorer ship arrived to study their planet.

2) Minor Faction – Basryxo
This society evolved in the detritus of what is essentially a garbage planet, as myriad forms of waste were dumped on the world for centuries. Starting from ragged scavengers to become pragmatic and efficient recyclers, they have learned to turn garbage into gold.

3) Quest – Munchie Madness
The coolest, tastiest treat across the galaxy is a new fast food, Haroshuarm. The trend has taken settled planets by storm, but unfortunately, the incredible leap in take-out consumption has created vast quantities of garbage, that you will need to handle…

Claim “Muck & Makers” via Games2Gether

Games2Gether is our collaborative video game co-creation platform, where we work with the community to build better games via voting, forums, and more. It’s also a great place to claim free Endless rewards!

To claim your Muck & Makers free update, simply logon to the Games2Gether platform, select the update from the rewards page here, and the update will install immediately on your Steam account.

We hope you enjoy,

- The Ampliteam

PATCH 1.4.12 - MUCK & MAKERS CONTENT UPDATE

ADDITIONS [MUCK AND MAKERS ADD-ON]

New Minor Faction: Basryxo
New Population Quest "Munchie Madness" for the Basryxo
New Basryxo Hero Fore Sagazh Jabble

ADDITIONS [PENUMBRA]

Trace status and speed are now displayed in the tooltips of trace operations

FIXES [ALL VERSION]

Fixed Menu Screen always showing the Umbral Choir scene
Increased Food output of Vodyani Cathedral of All Worldy Affairs (Colony Base equivalent) to prevent starvation on Endless game speed
Rebalanced the industry cost of most ship modules introduced after the Vaulters DLC
Fixed Diplomatic Pressure not resetting when you joined a war as part of an alliance
Removed invisible Probe Module on the Hissho Explorer

FIXES [PENUMBRA]

Players can no longer win Supremacy by placing Sanctuaries on destroyed home systems
The System Politics Tutorial no longer triggers on Sanctuaries
Improved trajectories for Umbral Choir Fighters and Bombers

FIXES [CELESTIAL WORLDS]

Chapter 5 “Trust in Authority” will no longer ask the player to reach a negative value of influence generation

Jan 28, 2019

Overshooting for the stars

ENDLESS™ Space 2 - Frogsquadron

Hey everyone,

We had a very busy week-end, with two releases, a free week-end, and a beloved freebie on the side. Things went... a bit too well. Here's a quick recap of the crazy last few days we had.

Amplitude Free Week-end & Endless Space 2 Challenge

The free week-end was a resounding success, and we're happy to announce that all reward objectives for Endless Space 2 have been unlocked! For those of you who missed it, players could play Endless Space 2 for free this week-end, and in doing so, unlock content for everyone, free of charge! Welp, that part went pretty well as you all breezed through the thresholds we set. The free content will be coming to Endless Space 2 in an upcoming update, hopefully a few weeks from now!

Endless Space Free Forever

We've had this little gift in mind for a while now, to thank our community for hanging around for so long and helping us create the games we know and love. Giving the very first Endless Space for free indeed was part of the plan... What we didn't anticipate was how many of you would try to redeem the game at the same time. The Games2Gether was hit by thousands of attempts to connect profiles to the Steam API per minute, and on Thursday evening the servers came crashing down. We added more capacity, then the redeeming process on our end decided to give up the ghost on Friday. We fixed that as well, added even more server capacity, and that held... for a few hours. This process continued into the week-end and we are still monitoring the situation to prevent further issues.

If you are encountering issues to redeem Endless Space, please let us know in this thread.

Endless Legend: Symbiosis & Endless Space 2: Penumbra

We were humbled by the reception that was given to our two new expansions, Symbiosis & Penumbra. To see that so many of you are still to this day fans enough to support a game that released several years ago is enough to warm our tiny developer hearts. Both the Mykara & the Umbral Choir factions coincidentally expanded on the tall gameplay that made the Cultists so unique! Nonetheless, even with beta testing going on, there were some unforeseen kinks to work out:

For Symbiosis, a hotfix was released on Thursday to address certain performance issues.

For Penumbra, there's a little more than that going on. To contextualize things, our beta ran for quite a while, and both our community and VIPs are among the most dedicated players we could hope for, and we're grateful for them! They have access to our design documents almost from the start, and they're part of what makes working at Amplitude a joy. Their feedback was very valuable to improve the expansion and make it into something truly one of a kind. However, there's a bit of a bias when testing new systems, since we wanted hacking to be a very different system from what it had been in Endless Legend, a system that would add a layer of mind games to the gameplay. Hacking proved to be just that... and then some.

We do however understand that for a portion of our players, Penumbra has for that reason been a little disappointing so far. The system works very well once you've grasped not only how to use it, but how to use it effectively: for instance, it's good to know how to hack the closest system, but it's even better to know that running the hack through a bunch of dummy systems is the surest way to prevent your target from tracing you back. There's a couple of other things, tiny additions and hints that make hacking a little more difficult than it was intended to be, to be fun and effective. We aim to remedy that, to make sure that this expansion is one you want to come back to and enjoy for years to come.

The planned changes are listed in this thread and the earliest will take effect in a branch (to try it, right-click on Endless Space 2 in your Steam library, then select Properties. Under the Betas tab, click on the drop-down menu to select Preview1_4_3). Do take a look and let us know what you think!

We want to thank you again for taking part in this week-end's celebration, and are looking forward to many more with you!

-The Amplitude Team