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Stellaris Dev Diary #298 - Renowned and Legendary Paragons

Hello fellow Explorers of the Void.

We're excited to share with you another Dev Diary, this time focusing on the characters of our upcoming DLC, Galactic Paragons. Today, we have Arctic Art Director Frida, and Arctic Game Director Petter to talk about the new handcrafted characters you may encounter.

Watch the Video Dev Diary:


Petter (Arctic Game Director): Paragon is primarily an expansion with new mechanics such as the council and the leader rework. But, in a DLC that centers around leaders it felt only natural that we would craft some exceptional characters for you to encounter out there amongst the stars.

The initial ideas for most of these characters were generated during a half-day workshop. We gathered everyone at Arctic and sat down to brainstorm what kind of characters we would like to see in the Stellaris galaxy. They got somewhat cryptic names such as ‘Sneakson’, ‘Big Woman’, ‘Harkon the Governor’, ‘Charming Pirate’ and so on. But the concepts became the foundation for our iterative process. Their backstories changed the art, and the art changed the backstories. We also got good input from the Content Designers on Studio Green that led to even more tweaks. So, the characters you will encounter have evolved organically.

We call these individuals “The Paragons”. Now, these paragons are divided into two categories: Renowned Paragons and Legendary Paragons. You will find out more about what these categories means (and some examples) below.

Frida (Arctic Art Director): From the Art team, we have meticulously hand-crafted numerous unique portraits for the Renowned and Legendary Paragon. Each leader is designed to have a distinct appearance that reflects their personality and story, making the galaxy feel more alive and diverse.

During the creation of the portraits, we wanted to elevate the art and storytelling aspects of the leaders, particularly for the Legendary Paragons. One way we have done this is by breaking up the static poses typically seen in the species portraits. Instead, we've incorporated dynamic poses, gestures, and expressions to make these characters truly stand out.

For the Legendary Paragons, we've moved away from the traditional three-quarter pose and experimented with more engaging and dramatic poses. This change not only helps to emphasize the importance of these characters but also makes their portraits visually striking.

The Renowned Paragons, on the other hand, maintain a pose closer to the original species portraits, but with added details and props that help convey their personal stories. Subtle elements such as hand gestures, smirks, scars, or unique clothing items help to give a glimpse into each character's background and personality.


The Renowned Paragons

Petter: Speaking of the Renowned Paragons. These are individuals who you don’t stumble upon out in the galaxy, instead they will seek you out! We have 16 of them in the DLC (two for each ethic - sorry Gestalt) and they will strive to join empires whose ethics match theirs: A pacifist paragon will seek out a pacifist empire, a militarist paragon will seek out a militarist empire, and so on.

The idea behind the Renowned Paragons is to give the sense of a living galaxy. Each character hints of a bigger world. And we see them as something that will spice up your playthroughs and give it a more distinct flavor. You will find that vastly different types of characters seek you out depending on who you are. Each renowned paragon can be seen as a possible representation of an ethic.

Each Renowned Paragon that you encounter has unique art, a personal backstory, and a powerful Destiny Trait from the start. But, they also have a negative trait that adds some flavor. And, they have a chance of triggering some events tied specifically to them that show more of their personality.
Here are some examples.

Kai-Sha, the Spymaster


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Gameplay-wise Kai-Sha is a General (specialized to sit on the council), with the Authoritarian ethic. She is the shadowy right hand woman you would want to have on your side as an Authoritarian ruler to deal with anything that threatens your power.

Frida: Funny story about Kai-Sha - she was actually inspired by our UX designer, Kajsa (also known as kc), purely by coincidence! As we worked on her design, we emphasized her features more, creating a unique look for this character.

Borin: The Friendly Salvager


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Frida: Borin's design was inspired by the salvager portrait from Overlord, and we had a blast taking that concept further, creating another character of that species. He comes from a salvaging community on an old space station and left to explore the wonders of the galaxy, ultimately joining your empire. In order to make him feel like an engineer, we incorporated yellow signal colors for relatability.

Petter: Borin is charming. His dream has always been to leave his Salvager enclave and travel across the stars. But he still has his mechanical skills and repairs all friendly fleets that are in the same system as him. Also, if you are lucky he might build you a robot that can join your empire. He is a quite warm, and almost spiritual, character for a materialist compared to the other Materialist leader, Xondar, who thinks flesh is weak. Again, trying to show how different the same ethic can be.

Vas the Gilded:


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Frida: With Vas the idea was to give her a unique and extravagant look. It was important her love for luxury was shown in her design, with extravagant clothing and accessories. Through the development of her outfit she quickly became similar to a certain Princess, so it took a few iterations to find a unique shape of her headpiece. Her pose is also calm and dignified, hinting at her expertise as a diplomat.

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Petter: Vas is one of the characters from the workshop that was pretty much the same the whole way through. But she was a bit more “courtesan”-ish for a while but now she is more noble and “senatorial”. It was our QA Daniel Teige that came up with her.

Q’la-Minder, the Ruthless Governor:


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Frida: Q’la-Minder is all about ruling and exploiting others, with a strong focus on industry and wealth. Personality-wise he is a bit of a submissive, butt-kissing worm. We took inspiration from the Harkonnens of Dune, designing him to be as slimy and unappealing as possible to match his character, reusing one of the species from the Aquatics DLC.

Petter: Q’la-Minder is truly revolting, but still quite lovely in a twisted kind of way. He is great to place on planets where you really want to squeeze the most of the working population. They won’t be happy. But they will work.


Legendary Paragons

Petter: The Legendary Paragons are encountered as you explore space and encounter new worlds. There are four Legendary Paragons in the game, each with their own unique abilities, relics, and stories waiting to be uncovered. The Legendary Paragons in many ways represents the different aspects of what Stellaris is: Exploration, War, Ancient Mysteries and Colonization.

Frida: Speaking of Colonization, one of the Legendary Paragons we'd like to introduce is Azaryn, the melancholy plantoid who is the last of her species.

Astrocreator Azaryn


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Here are a few thoughts on Azaryn from Linus (Content Designer): With Azaryn the initial design goals involved the terraforming mechanic, as well as themes of loss. Early on, she was called simply the 'Sad Plantoid'. Her path is one of redemption, and to achieve it, she will need the help of a larger civilization like yours.

Terraforming can be a powerful tool, and we wanted her gameplay to leverage that. Though it's still an expensive endeavor, Azaryn's terraforming has multiple unique points to it – but we'll leave you to discover those for yourselves. To balance those perks, the finite nature of her abilities come into play. Her power comes at a great cost to her, and may only be utilized a few times until dire consequences follow.

That finite, fleeting nature is something we hope will help to convey her humanity, her personality, and her story. It ties into a big part of what Galactic Paragons is about; to bring characters to the forefront of the experience, looking beneath the galaxy's grandeur, all the way down to the relatable, and letting their stories feed into your own.

Frida: Not to spoil too much of her story, Azaryn will begin to deteriorate and we provided four different states where her portraits change based on your progression.


New Recruitment window!

Frida: We now have a new window type used for recruitment, moving away from the standard diplomacy screen.

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New Event window!

Frida: We’ve also created a new type of event window, where the leader portraits are displayed to the side of the event art, making it clear that this is an event tied to your leader and that it’s clear which leader it is. From my point of view, it helps to engage with the written content, having the character present beside the text.

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Some final words

We all here at Arctic hope that you will enjoy Galactic Paragons. And that the many characters will be great seeds for stories in the galaxy.

That's it for today's Dev Diary! We're looking forward to your feedback and thoughts and we'll be back soon with a new Diary on Origins, Civics and Tradition Trees.

And don't forget to catch our Galactic Paragons First Look stream, with Game Directors Stephen Muray (PDS Green) and Petter Nallo (PDS Arctic) tomorrow, starting at 1515 CEST on
twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive!

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Until next time, stay stellar!

Frida and Petter and Linus
 
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I do yes but I'd imagine that some of those systems will make their way into the game with the patch releasing alongside the DLC.
If it's just some extra council positions and leader traits I'm missing out then it's not that big of a deal. I'm not that big on leader characters anyway.
From the last Dev Diary:
For those who choose to forgo Galactic Paragons, your level system will look fairly similar, with a few changes.
  • All leaders will be capped at level 10
  • Leaders will always get trait every 2 levels (starting from level 1), for a total of 5 traits
  • Every trait will be randomized from Common trait pool
  • There will be a new tiered trait system: Common traits and Negative traits will have 2 tiers each

As you see, the Free Patch leaders will still be more powerful than before (having a total of 5 traits), but the Galactic Paragon leaders will achieve a power level of over 9000!

For those who choose to embrace the Galactic Paragons, the leveling system will give far more flexibility:
  • Leaders get new trait pick every level
  • Players can choose the trait from a randomized pool that is based on class, veteran class and ethic.
  • On level 4, leaders will get to choose from Veteran Class which give access to different types of Veteran Traits (every class has 3 Veteran Classes, which are centered around different bonuses and their leader actions). Each veteran trait has 3 tiers.
  • On level 8, leaders will get a one time Destiny Trait pick. This powerful trait represents a leader finding its destiny within the galaxy.

sounds like you're essentially just getting a slightly changed version of the current system without the DLC
 
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Currently no but we are looking into this idea , no promises though.

I do hope you guys can find the time to include it, it seems like a very natural fit for the DLC. And I know that, at least for me, a big part of my hype is my Chosen One God Empress of the Galaxy finally being as special as she is in my head.
 
I do hope you guys can find the time to include it, it seems like a very natural fit for the DLC. And I know that, at least for me, a big part of my hype is my Chosen One God Empress of the Galaxy finally being as special as she is in my head.
as an immortal he is pretty much guaranteed to find his destiny at least
 
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Worrying over scripted content seems baffling to me. I mean, Stellaris has always had scripted content since its very inception (anomalies, for starters), and it seems that this DLC is going to bring both emergent, non-predefined leaders, with compelling emergent narratives thanks to destiny traits, and pre-scripted ones with different unique abilities attached to cool unique art.

I mean, those two things can and will coexist, so where is the harm? Master of Orion 2 also had predefined leaders and it rarely got repetitive (albeit I would like to have a wider variety of legendary paragons if you ask me). Not to mention that this is far from being a narrative-focused DLC. Heck, the thing I am excited about the most is the whole "civics changing how the council works", with all the bazillion differences between governments that it will imply.
 
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I do hope you guys can find the time to include it, it seems like a very natural fit for the DLC. And I know that, at least for me, a big part of my hype is my Chosen One God Empress of the Galaxy finally being as special as she is in my head.
Just don't get your hopes up for a quick inclusion.
If they do it, it's definitely not going to make it into the release, and almost certainly not before 3.9 comes out.

The DLC was probably "done" by the time it was announced.

Adding stuff in the last week usually ends up like this.
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First of all: Big kudos to the Art and UI people! Great work!

The new eventinterface with leader "sidebar" is really neat! I hope we get to see it implemented more broadly than just with renowned or legendary leaders.

This could be custom tailored to existing events that regards leaders. Image eg. the leader-centric events in the Horizon Signal event chain with this. So when your scientist on that research vessel starts acting weird, you would have his picture posted next to the event text.

You could also imagine this implemented even more broadly: Whenever an event targets a science vessel with a leader, the portrait of the leader is shown. Whenever an event targets a planet with a governor, the portrait of the governor is shown, etc.

Would be really nice to have modding support on this feature - allowing modders to create events that uses this UI and allows modders to scope to the portrait of rulers, governors, generals, admirals or scientists related to the scope of the event.
 
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I'm noticing a theme from these Dev diaries and it seems to be "Sorry Gestalts!" ☹️ The rest of it looks really great and nice. Just a bit disappointed that it seems like there's really nothing for Gestalts in this DLC at all, the only thing Gestalts are getting is the individualist empires' mechanics with the best parts removed. It would be really nice to see the Custodians go back and make this a more fleshed out DLC for Gestalts.

I enjoy playing gestalts, and at first I echoed your sentiment. But I am beginning to look at this in a new perspective - I could be wrong, but please consider this:

With the node-system for gestalt "councils" we get a system that is unique to gestalts. You may regard it as a downgrade of the non-gestalt council, but it does not have to be that way. It could prove to be a genuine side-grade with unique traits and a distinct gestalt "feeling" rather than a downgrade.

I would have loved to see gestalt civics influencing what kind of nodes were available. But instead it seems gestalt civics will influence node xp-gain. This could prove to be a fine implementation if nodes have various options to branch out or specialize as they level up.

Even if the DLC version of the gestalt nodes turn out to be a little thin, Paradox Devs has now provided a great system and interface for modders to work with. As a modder I can really see a potential for using the node system to model the concept of a gestalt consciousnes developing and evolving over time.

I admit that there are some apparently weird choices (and I deliberately say "apparently", because we dont know everything about the content of the DLC yet):
- Why no renowned gestalt leaders?
- Why not the option to integrate individual leaders into the hivemind? Picard of Borg and Kerrigan of the Swarm are examples of fiction exploring that concept.

But all in all I must say that this DLC is looking really great - also for gestalts.
 
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The AI cannot recruit any renowned or Legendary paragons.
Will there be a setting that allows AI empires to recruit paragons, or a setting that disables paragons?
(for those who prefer playing without special advantages over the AI)
 
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The AI cannot recruit any renowned or Legendary paragons.

Good, we won't be able to see them anyway, so why would we ever want to? The AI has already a lot of system to manage, adding those leaders would only :
  1. Increasing tasks, thus slowing the game;
  2. Increasing bug chances.
And we would get nothing in exchange.

And for the people that are worried about having an edge over the AI, you can always increase the difficulty if you think you're having an easy time.
 
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Will there be a setting that allows AI empires to recruit paragons, or a setting that disables paragons?
(for those who prefer playing without special advantages over the AI)
You can always reject those leaders. or not buying the DLC.
 
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The concern with static content is understandable.

It does feel like static content is creeping further into the limelight and that the current Stellaris team wants to craft narratives and storylines to present to the players rather than let randomness do its thing.

When Stellaris was first released, randomness and emergent narrative was a huge selling point. It was the first and is currently the only Paradox game with random map generation and (mostly) symmetrical starts. While we’ve always had static anomalies and some recurring star systems, these were always secondary to player-crafted narrative. Contrast with paragons which are front and center on your leadership council.

For better or worse, it’s definitely part of a larger directional shift for Stellaris. I don’t think paragons specifically are the end of the world, but I get why the overall trend doesn’t sit well with some.
 
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Wow that's some great character art, kudos to the artists.

However I must confess I'm not a big fan of fixed content. Stuff like Knight of the Toxic God, Become the Crisis, etc - it tends to get old pretty quick compared to purely mechanic civics/origins like Void Dwellers, Barbaric Despoilers and others that you can apply to a variety of concepts.
The biggest appeal of Stellaris to me is that it acts as a framework to play out my own stories and the more content is specific the less I feel I'm allowed to do that.
Hope we'll get another big pack of mechanic-focused content in the future, as that's my favorite. Also I'm always bummed when a cool portrait or shipset is reserved for AI use only.

Again great job but I think I will sit this DLC out.
I like the fixed characters and don't like the toxic god or fear of the dark, I think it makes a lot more sense for characters you encounter in the galaxy to be fixed rather than origins you're supposed to be playing with yourself. I did like MSI though.
 
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Worrying over scripted content seems baffling to me. I mean, Stellaris has always had scripted content since its very inception (anomalies, for starters), and it seems that this DLC is going to bring both emergent, non-predefined leaders, with compelling emergent narratives thanks to destiny traits, and pre-scripted ones with different unique abilities attached to cool unique art.

I mean, those two things can and will coexist, so where is the harm? Master of Orion 2 also had predefined leaders and it rarely got repetitive (albeit I would like to have a wider variety of legendary paragons if you ask me). Not to mention that this is far from being a narrative-focused DLC. Heck, the thing I am excited about the most is the whole "civics changing how the council works", with all the bazillion differences between governments that it will imply.
I agree 100%. Unfortunately, some people apparently love to complain and worry themselves without any rational, logic reason. And all that while seeing a few inofensive fixed features as some sort of threat for Stellaris's future. :(
 
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By having more control over the creation of your empires. For example, I would kill for a feature that allow me to create a Federation composed only by Aquatics/Plantoids/Necroids/whatever right at the start of the game. How to do that? Simple: by updating the Common Ground/Hegemon origins in a way that let us choose between randomic chosen empires for our Federations/Hegemonies (like normally happens when we choose one of these two origins) or empires chosen and picked by hand (including player-created empires).
I agree, giving players more control over the precise composition of the galaxy and their own empire would be a good thing. Things like more galaxy settings, home system editors, improvements to Common Ground and Lost Colony, and similar things have been suggested many times. But that's not what fixed Renowned Paragons does, nor is it what people are complaining about!
 
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My big issue with static content was extremely story-specific origins like Knights of the Toxic God at the expense of generic versions.

We got the Knights origin but no way to play as a generic knightly order, which was disappointing.

But it seems Paradox was aware of this specific complaint since we’re now getting a Crusader Spirit civic:

 
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