Before we begin today, we wanted to just take a quick moment to once thank our incredible community for their overwhelming feedback generated from our Elite – Ghost Division announcement.
Facing the bombardment of hundreds upon hundreds of points of engagement across our various feeds is quite the humbling experience for us; it truly is amazing to really see that so many people have such passion for Panzer Corps. It’s an honor to read so many of your insights, ideas, and yes even criticisms, because it totally demonstrates how much our community really cares. So once again, our deepest thanks to all of our community, we’re absolutely going to continue to do our best to provide you the best Panzer Corps gameplay content we can make.
Now then, on to the Developer Diary!
Welcome to the Elite – Ghost Division Developer Diary and DLC preview.
As Ghost Division swiftly moves towards its May launch date, we wanted to do a little bit of a deeper dive into the upcoming content. We’ve got a whole bunch of cool stuff to showcase, from scenario analysis to revealing our internal thought processes, so let’s begin!
Something New, Something Familiar
One of the biggest internal objectives we have with these Elite campaigns is to bring back more focus on the classic Panzer Corps combat gameplay, while mostly regulating some of the more whacky and wild elements to optional aspects of the campaign. The best way to explain this will be to look at some of the scenario design within Ghost Division, so let’s take a look at a couple of maps and see what that’s all about. The first scenario will actually take place in Poland before the formation of the 7th Panzer Division with its predecessor unit that was known as the 2nd Light Division.
As you can see from that screenshot, Ghost Division is immediately starting on healthy sized maps with significant turn limits, so players can anticipate plenty of action through every step of this campaign.
From your starting positions, objectives are spread out before you in many directions, offering the player ample choice on where to focus their forces as the battle unfolds. And since someone is going to inevitably ask about it, we can talk about the various types of objectives because their design philosophy is important for allowing players the option to disable the turn limit, should you so choose.
Victory Objectives are the conditions that directly control your campaign progression:
These are objectives that must be met and they also instant award scenario victory upon completion, so if you’re hunting for bonuses, make sure to save the Victory Objective for last! These objectives are marked with solid outlines around such hexes.
Prestige Objectives are your primary source of prestige resource income, and they are marked with dotted outlines.
In the past, players have frequently struggled with predetermined prestige settings. Some players will find themselves starving of prestige that effectively ends their ability to repair their forces and continue to wage an effective campaign, while others find themselves so flush with prestige that they basically have unlimited resources at their disposal. By removing almost all predetermined prestige settings and instead populating each scenario with an abundance of bonus Prestige Objectives, we’re hoping to increase player agency in terms of economic management. If you’re starving for prestige, there are very specific tasks you can aim for that will provide huge prestige rewards, while players who feel they have enough prestige can instead bypass some of these objectives to give themselves extra time to tackle Special Objectives.
Special objectives are where we’ve put in some of the more complex and advanced DLC mechanics, and also really ratcheted up the difficulty.
These optional tasks will definitely test your mettle to complete, and they will always offer some pretty fantastic rewards, such as access to unpurchaseable equipment or perhaps a chance to custom pick a new hero’s abilities.
That’s just the beginning of your campaign, and as it progresses, you will find even larger maps with more options on how to approach them laid out before you.
Historical Context
Something else we’d like to aim for in the Elite campaigns is to keep the all important focus on history omnipresent without steering too far into heavy narrative or character-centric elements. While some players absolutely adore deep diving into the kind of writing that frequently colored the Axis Operations series, especially the alternate history branch, we definitely recognize that not everyone was a fan of seeing some briefing dialogue-only scenarios. Instead, Elite campaigns are going to strive for maximum gameplay with minimum friction to get right into historical Panzer combat. The whole concept of this particular campaign design is to showcase the real history of some of the most elite and legendary divisions that fought during World War II, and we want their heroic exploits to really speak for themselves.
Ideally, we’re going to spotlight every major nation of World War II with this treatment, but of course that is highly contingent on producing campaigns our players really want to engage with, so we’re not going to get ahead of ourselves too quickly on talking about distant plans here.
The Art of Ghost Division
You have probably noticed some of the awesome imagery we’ve been embedding throughout the various Ghost Division articles, and we wanted to make special mention of them real quick. They’ve all been drawn by the artist Adrián Rodríguez, and we’re super stoked to have them to enhance the characters and events that populate the Elite – Ghost Division campaign!
Because generative AI artwork is such a hot topic though, we thought we’d better briefly talk about it. While generative AI artwork is an incredible technology that is improving by leaps and bounds at an unbelievable rate, we just didn’t feel comfortable utilizing it for any aspect of Panzer Corps 2, past or present. All of our artwork is human made, and all of our writing is human written. One single person wrote all of the base game briefings, and that same person wrote the entire Axis Operations saga without any AI aid. I know this, because that person is me, Kerensky!
So again, while generative AI is pretty amazing stuff, it’s our official position that it won’t ever be utilized in the creation of official Panzer Corps 2 assets, files, or materials.
Now that said, there is no such restriction placed upon the custom modding scene, so if any aspiring modder out there is wondering, you are fully allowed to create mods of Panzer Corps 2 that invoke things such as AI generated briefing VO. In potential anticipation of that, in part of the Panzer Corps 2 update that accompanies the launch of Ghost Division we’re investigation the possibility for custom player mod campaigns to enable their own sets of VO audio files.
