Today a large patch was released for Endless Legend, introducing Steam Workshop support and cheap DLC for new music, quests, heroes, etc. While I'm busy cursing my lack of time to properly finish a match of this, I figure it's time to examine why I keep coming back to this game time & time again, to the point it's become my 2nd-most played 4X strategy game (beaten only by Civ4). The broad reason is that it does enough things different from both 4X games and fantasy games to give it a distinct personality, but I'll dig a bit deeper than that.

The first thing that strikes you, when choosing a race, is how utterly different they are, both from each other and from the standard fantasy tropes. Each race has a schtick which drastically changes how they play, from mobile cities to being restricted to just one city to using Wealth instead of Food to grow population. The "elves" act more like industrial lycanthropes. The "undead" are covered by a hivemind of ravenous sci-fi bugs and a knighthood of animated armors that drain souls to survive. The "dragons" are renowned diplomats and historians. The "humans" are traders who build cities on giant beetles or the stranded remnants of a colony ship that crashed on the planet long ago. The doomsday cult? Follows an indestructible supercomputer that went insane from its isolation and inability to destroy itself.

The colony ship and supercomputer aren't the only sci-fi artifacts in the game. The game is heavily tied into Amplitude's previous sci-fi 4X game, Endless Space, and the more you poke at the seemingly-magical aspects of the game, the more Clarke's Third Law reveals itself. The sheer variety of fauna/flora? Escaped specimens in a genetic testing ground. The spectral wraiths haunting the ruins? Manifestations of ancient AIs. The increasingly-hostile winters? A planetary weather system breaking down from millenia of disrepair. The melding of "magic" and sci-fi justifies the struggle to understand this world. If it was pure magic, you could simply rely on faith in the gods for answers. If it was pure sci-fi, you could study it, break it down, and reverse-engineer it. Instead, you play medieval people picking through the ruins of spacefarers, struggling to comprehend what came before you and why they all died off.

The Winters themselves play a key part in the game's mechanics and feel. As turns progress, the seasons cycle between Summers and Winters. Summers are your typical 4X-building setting, but Winters confer a myriad of penalties that slow down production & movement. The typical response to Winters is to slow down or halt production, have armies huddle in your cities instead of roaming, and try not to starve. As the game progresses, the Winters grow more numerous and worse (forcing civilizations to adapt), and they're revealed to be tied to the eventual destruction of the world, lending the whole game a feeling to trying to thrive on a beautiful-yet-dying world.

I could get into the mechanics of the game, and how they restrict your choices while making them more meaningful (similar to the XCOM remake), but that wouldn't be enough to keep me coming back. But Endless Legend paints a vivid picture of the rise and fall of a fantasy world amidst sci-fi ruins that's unlike anything else I've seen in gaming (although some of the later Might & Magic games come close), and I keep coming back to try and unite the world as the Drakken again.