Paradox Interactive has just announced some interesting new details about the future of Stellaris with a new trailer, depicting upcoming DLC called Ancient Relics. The company also unveiled the details of the upcoming patch to the grand strategy title.
Just like other story-based DLC for this game, Ancient Relics tweaks core mechanics and adds some fruitful new additions to the base game. For one thing, prepare to uncover some potentially dangerous alien life buried deep in the forgotten sands of time. And along with this new DLC is a free update that introduces some basic new mechanics and tweaks existing elements. Patch 2.33 for Stellaris will rebalance megastructures and introduce the new Designation System.
The Designation System will allow players to control the role different planets within their domain play. You can set a world as one of a number of Designations, controlling it’s economic output and course of development. You can choose to make a planet a Colony, Urban World, Mining World, or an Agri-World, among others.
The Ancient Relics DLC introduces two extinct Precursor civilizations, the Baol and the Zroni. These two new races leverage existing mechanics, like hiveminds, to offer a historical perspective on the development of the galaxy. Interacting with these lost races through the scraps of their civilization will uncover some powerful secrets that are key to understanding how these once-great empires lived and died. A cunning player can even make use of this new information to make themselves stronger.
You can see the preview trailer for the DLC pack down below.
The DLC is yet another in a long line of additional “story” content for Stellaris. Now that designation might confuse some of you because Stellaris is a strategy game that doesn’t really lend itself to story-driven content on the surface. The Story DLCs released for the title have slowly worked to change that by adding new event chains and race elements that served as their own self-contained stories. Many of the major expansions like Distant Stars and Synthetic Dawn were sold as story packs that, in addition to adding new gameplay mechanics like race choices, included brand new event chains.
Ancient Relics takes the bold direction of casting an eye back to the past. Journeying through the twisting halls and annuls of your race through new events and decisions will allow players to unlock the full history of their chosen race. Completing this journey will confer small bonuses to your empires as they increase their mastery of the stars and themselves. But Ancient Relics doesn’t stop there.
Players can also uncover a bunch of really powerful artifacts through other quest chains. Think of these like the megastructures from previous updates. These powerful new artifacts have the potential to change the balance of power in a game, so there will be a definite race to uncover them.
Stellaris: Ancient Relics drops on June 4.
