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Hey everyone,
We often get requests for some more material to dive into the Endless Universe outside of the games. Something to keep immersing oneself into the lives of heroes and villains, as a hero holding a standard or a fly on the wall... So we listened and thought real hard about vignettes that could capture the spirit of each civilization in Endless Space 2. Comics seemed a great material to convey an atmosphere, and we hope you like these. In this new installment in our series, set in an ancestral temple, a delegation of Hissho fight against all odds.
Slowhands, lead writer on the project, is back with some insight on this story:
I was pretty sure that the Riftborn comic would be the one that had the most changes, but was unaware of what was lying in wait with the Hissho...
The Hissho are maybe my favorite faction from the style and lore point of view; I studied Japanese history and lived there a few years, and have traveled in Central and South America. The look that the artists came up for in Endless Space, and the lore that we built around that, has been one of the most enjoyable faction creation processes for me. As a result of this I was, of course, a little bummed when they were only a Minor Civ in ES2. I was then, obviously, like a six year-old at Christmas when I heard that they were coming back to full faction status! Once that was decided, the comic was one of the first big tasks we started working on as it has a very long lead time.
We generally start by deciding what aspect of a faction we want to emphasize or present in each comic, and for this one we decided to tackle the idea of explaining the difference between the Hissho that were there at release as the Minor Civ, and the grim warriors that came along later with their different look and style. My first suggestion was to do something based on the epic defense of Fushimi Castle by Torii Mototada (google that, it's impressive), with the "old" Hissho (now renamed Yuusho) holding off an enemy so that the new Hissho could come and sweep them out.
We eventually dropped that when we came up with the idea of the Endless blades that record the epic events that they see, the Behemoth technology and the Hissho knowledge of it, and the various ways that Endless lore fit into the Hissho faction story. In fact (trivia note), we decided that the Yuusho were the Hissho from the Endless arenas on Sykagoja, who retained a better knowledge of Endless technology, while the "original" Hissho continued to develop on Uchi, their home planet. That is why it is Yuusho defending the temple in the comic, acting as the blacksmiths and caretakers of the site.
The rest is just the team channeling a little samurai and a little Aztec, and doing a heck of a lot of rewrites. I should take a moment to thank our artist, Yoon, & Olivier, our editor, for their extraordinary patience!
To check out the comic, go to your Endless Space 2 installation folder,
and to the Stories subfolder. By default, this is the following path:
C:\Steam\steamapps\common\Endless Space 2\Stories
We hope you enjoy this story! If you have any questions or comments, you can shoot them in this thread at Arkel, who leads the project. And if you want to learn more about our comics, you can rewatch our comics livestream on Youtube!
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