How Empire Of Sin’s New Updates Are Adding More Strategy, More Drama, and Stranger Truths Than Fiction

I doubt I’ll be much of a cop on card counting in Vegas, but I just counted every single entry on the patch notes for Precinct, the latest update to Romero Games’ banned era kingpin sim Sin Empire. There are over 350 of them, from making the gangsters less flirty to giving back a cigar to Al Capone on the character select screen. So it’s not Capone’s self-delusion that should be, as game director Brenda Romero describes the patch list to me as “monstrous”.

“When we put out the fire immediately, we prioritize response,” says Romero [King, senior systems designer]Our hair was completely black when we launched this game. All has completely turned gray. I thought we were great at debut. Extremely fast response. The team did their best. ”

Thankfully, the launch of the Make It Count DLC – and the free Precinct update that comes with it – has gone a lot smoother.

“When EOS first launched, it felt like 4 seconds later, someone discovered a big exploit,” said Romero. “It was just reaction, reaction, reaction. This is a much different launch. Night and day.”

You would think that a big launch for a game like Empire Of Sin could give the team some breathing space. But no, Romero said. They are instantly available on every forum. Tweetdeck. Conflict. Reddit. Try to jump on everything as it appears: “All hands on deck.” Launching matters, of course. In RPS . reviewTom Senior calls it a “game on the edge of excellence, let alone a few key issues,” with bugs and ambitious systems that don’t always play well together.

Determined to develop the game in ways that make sense for both themselves and the players, the team established what Romero calls their community council. “We chose the players with the best vocals. And I don’t mean the lines where we’re like, ‘this is great, you guys are great!’, “she explains.” What we mean is “you did the following things wrong and I’ll describe them to you as really fine. No offense, ha! but don’t leave any of the stones unturned.”

Make It Count and Precinct focus on a few core pillars, aiming to both expand on the game and distill its occasional chaos into the good that it has always been. The addition of territories and supply lines provides a more structured, intermediate empire expansion layer. “To follow the matches at the neighborhood level, it was asking for a lot,” said King. “By collecting them into smaller groups, it’s a lot easier for players.”

King describes the new supply lines as adding a “checkerboard-like” decision layer. “Not just” what do I get? , but also “what opportunities will it bring? ”” And the more meaningful strategy gives it more dramatic confrontations. “These warehouses fight each other. They have meaning. They are important. They are the ones who upset the territory. ”

Precinct also offers new win conditions, like the option to buy back your opponent. King said the aim here is to give players more options for meaningful engagement diplomatically; to play tall rather than wide. “The weakness of foreign policy is that the goal is to kill everyone. If you sign agreements where you won’t kill them, you’re not going to win. But now you can sign agreements, get protection treaties, then buy them out. “Diplomacy is now a way to eliminate opponents, instead of just keeping them behind your back.

I offer something infinitely more gangster about luring your opponents out of town with a bigger pile of cash than a shotgun. “It’s an offer they can’t refuse!” King said.

“Players really want – because the game is part of the empire builder – a way they can win using the power of their empire. More diplomatic power,” Romero added.

Make it Count – the paid portion of new content – brings with it loan sharks, a new Fixer class and new boss Maxim Zelnick. We know what role these new additions play to Chicago’s ecosystem, but I wanted to know how the move from real-life Meyer Lansky character to fictional Maxim Zelnick influenced the direction of the DLC. how.

“There is an excitement about having people like Capone in the game. They are known names,” said Romero. “They bring their own cache. The great benefit of having a character that is all yours is that they become much more ‘game’ than the fictional character ever was. Capone is bigger than life. I don’t think the same is true of Lansky.”

I admit I was a bit disappointed when I learned that the IP issues meant Lansky wouldn’t be in the DLC. But then I also have to admit that I’d never heard of him if it weren’t for the Boardwalk Empire. So what’s the writing process like at Zelnick?

“When you start with a character,” says narrative designer Katie Gardner, “you already have a vague sense of where you want to go with them.” The next step, Gardner said, is to look at what the mechanics mean for the game and the character. But in EOS there is also choice, both mechanical and narrative. “Whether they want to portray certain characters is up to the player. If you want to ‘burn the body’ or ‘burn the book’ . ”

If you want to feel like a boss, ride around Chicago in a hippo-drawn carriage?!

In the past, I’ve heard Romero compare Lansky to Mike’s harsh but implacable break in Breaking Bad. So which show’s character is the best fit for Zelnick?

“Can it be Saul, please! Let it be Saul! “, said King.

“He’s too kind!” Romero said. “For me, Zelnick is Gus. He’s a very gentleman, someone you can trust. Behind the scenes, he’s all in business. But a different kind of business. King expressed that he was upset that it wasn’t Saul, but said he would “get over it”.

The same blend of real history and romantic caricature runs through EOS’s playable rogue gallery. The team often mentions the bizarre rabbit holes they’ve fallen into during their research – learning that, in most cases, any fiction they can invent besides the real thing. economic. Whether live characters or prototypes, what inspired the new class of Fixer?

“So we had one of the fixers. Ma ‘The Pillar’ Miller – she’s a pillar because she’s a pillar of her community,” said Gardner. “She is loosely based on Ma Ferguson, one of the first female governors of the United States. Very corrupt! But also very popular. We wanted to take that character – this Bill Thompson kind of character – there’s something very interesting about that kind of lovable character. In general, we would go for people who don’t always like getting their hands dirty. That’s why you have the option of bribery in combat. ”

“We were asked, ‘what do you have to drop in the game?’ Chris came out with the hippo carriage. There’s a lot of weird fiction,” Romero said. For his part, King points out that if you want to feel like a boss, riding around Chicago in a hippo-drawn carriage will do the trick.

“We looked through a lot of sources,” says Gardner. “Trying to find the source. For the launch and for Make It Count, we wanted to use history as much as possible. When it comes to balancing, we make the mistake of using historical content, even if it seems a bit backwards.” Romero explains that they do weekly reviews with the team, and multiple times in meetings the writing team has called something absurd – but Gardener can then tell that it actually happened.

This fascination with the history of this era has profound implications for the team, especially for Romero himself. She told me how she grew up near a bar called The Place that she learned never closed during the ban. Her mother dodged her questions about why. “She didn’t want to explain to me that people turned a blind eye. So I became enamored with criminal empires.” Romero lists several popular cultures that have these elements: Casino movies; Sopranos; Ozark; and real-life criminal empires. She has, she said, “researched the Sinaloa Cartel in the ground”.

“I never lost that appeal because it required such an incredible system,” she explains. Some parts of it must be good, some parts of it must be bad. To give an example: cartel thing: let’s build schools, hospitals, roads in a town. That put the townspeople on their side. But at the same time, they get involved in drugs and all kinds of violence.”

And Make it Count allows the team to make these systems playable. “The diplomatic conditions Chris talked about, the path to ‘bottle town tycoon’ victory, just show the broader side of what it takes to be a crime boss.” eyes, so i have to ask, which forbidden age gangster group the reckoning team will be the best game designer?

King said: “Bugsy Siegel. “He was the one who convinced the crowd to come to Vegas. He founded Vegas as a gambling hub, who realized that ‘we can make a lot of money running legal casinos that we can make from petty theft!’ “On the other hand, Gardner favors someone like Daniel McKee Jackson: ‘Those who have a good grasp of underworld intrigue, try to make it look like you have a completely normal front. That’s a lot of organizations across many different hierarchies. ”

To avoid taking things too seriously, I try not to ask anyone in the gaming industry who the team feels will make the best mafia boss. Instead, I want to know what Romero Games’ Chicago future looks like. “Because the game is live and happening there, there’s no point in us just sitting around and saying, ‘this is what we want to do’,” Romero explained. “We are fortunate because we have a very engaged and vocal community. So we know what they’re really hoping for.”

“The point of EOS is that you’re the boss of a criminal empire,” says King. “With Make It Count, we’ve tried to make you feel more like a boss, while also uncovering new crimes and interesting for you to commit. That will be the future of EOS. What new crimes can we make you feel, and can we make you feel more like a boss. ”

The future of EOS, it turns out, is even more fluid than that. Even if the team put out community claims faster than Sicilian on the day of their daughter’s wedding, they couldn’t afford everything. But the Precinct update also brings mod support, complete with in-house made mod instructions available in the Steam workshop. Meanwhile, for the team itself, it seems Precinct marks a turning point in development. They’ve put out the fire, redone the racket, and now it’s time to splash that insurance money on some nice outfits.

“At this time, we are not considering [development] like, ‘what are the players doing? They can finish the game in 20 minutes! ‘ said Romero. “We are past that point. We are doing interesting work now what else can we do with this core game experience? And it’s a great location. ”