Age of Wonders: Planetfall – The Syndicate Faction Spotlight, Interview

The Syndicate is one of the factions you’ll be able to play as in Paradox Interactive and Truimph Studios’ upcoming 4X strategy with RPG elements Age of Wonders: Planetfall. The faction augments its ruthless trading practices with considerable psionic prowess and is fairly formidable when it comes to espionage. Here’s a fresh faction spotlight video dedicated to the Syndicate:

You may also be interested in this recent VentureBeat interview with Truimph Studios’ CEO Lennart Sas. A few sample questions:

GamesBeat: Was it difficult for your team and for yourself to get out of the mindset of fantasy medieval units and work on sci-fi?

Sas: A little bit. Of course we’ve been science fiction fans for all our lives. We grew up watching the old Battlestar Galactica. I was a six year old boy. That defined a lot. Star Wars, all that stuff. We know all the pop culture stuff. But translating that into a game world is a lot more work. Especially, Age of Wonders was more of a classic fantasy setting, relying on more direct tropes. In science fiction there’s a lot more freedom to shape your future. The entire world, the Star Union, all the faction designs, they rely less heavily on predefined tropes. Of course sometimes we still talk about, oh, let’s cast a spell, when we really mean let’s use an operation. It’s been a lot of fun to do a science fiction game for once.

GamesBeat: What’s one aspect of science fiction that you’ve put into this game that you yourself love?

Sas: Primarily the way that the world of the Star Union is a reflection of our own world and what could happen to it. The doomsday scenarios looming over the horizon that we made real in this game. The technological changes affecting the world, like mass automation maybe resulting in mass unemployment, doomsday weapons, sentient AI, ecological disaster, genetic modification. What does it mean to be human in such a world? What ideological differences are there between people, between factions? Where does humanity go to? Those questions are things we deal with in this game, especially in the single-player campaign.

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GamesBeat: Is Ages of Wonder going to be on Steam or the Epic store, or are you going to try to sell it everywhere?

Sas: It’s going to be on multiple stores, yeah. I don’t know exactly ones, but Steam is one of them.