When Sins of a Solar Empire 2 launched from early access in September 2024, its premium edition and content pass promised something no other game in the series had delivered: a singleplayer campaign.
The Times of War DLC would for the first time give you an authored story and set of missions for each faction. Originally announced for release in “Fall 2025”, there are players of the series who have waited nearly 20 years for this, and they’re still waiting because there’s no sign of the DLC yet. Nor Harbinger, the expansion bringing a fourth playable race to Sins of a Solar Empire 2.
“They’re definitely still on the road map,” development lead Brian Clair tells me, “but we’ve shifted them around a bit.”
Clair and I spoke ahead of Sins of a Solar Empire 2’s 1.5 update, which overhauls the AI of NPC factions and adds a suite of diplomacy tools. However, it doesn’t bring Harbinger or Times of War. “They’re both high up on the road map,” Clair says. “We’ve promised this stuff to people who bought the premium edition with the content pass, so we have a duty to deliver.”
The team had “originally planned to do the campaign first,” Clair explains, but Stardock will instead work on Harbinger next. “The reason for that is we want to have the fourth faction in the campaign, and it would be really hard to have them in the campaign before we actually had the assets made,” Clair says. “It just made logical sense to swap it.” Clair says Harbinger is set for release in late 2026, with Times of War now due in 2027.
That’s a hefty delay and one that leaves players who have paid money for a DLC potentially waiting three years for its release. Though, signs of Stardock’s progress toward the campaign are trickling down into Sins 2. In the Paths to Power DLC, released in March this year, Stardock added scenarios. These mission-driven maps gave players objectives and special victory conditions, something that hadn’t appeared in any previous game in the series. “That was actually the foundation for the campaign,” Clair says. “We’re going to need to use all those systems to make the campaign happen.”
While that may be the first step in building a campaign, there is still a long way to go. Even now, adding a new scenario is a fiddly business. “You fire up VS code, and you’re hand writing out the JSON to bring this together,” Clair says. “As a developer, I can do it, but it’s really going to slow it down.” It’s much worse for modders. Next year, along with the push to complete Harbinger, Stardock plans “to build a tool to streamline [scenario creation] and not just for us, but so modders can use it too.”
Then, with Times of War, Stardock wants to share the tools it makes to build its campaign, so modders can tell more complex stories than those possible in single scenarios. “What they’re going to be getting when we tackle the campaign in full is the ability to bring all those together into a coherent whole and add in more to it, cinematics, custom victory conditions depending on your story path, that kind of thing,” Clair says.
Sins has an active modding scene, twisting its real-time space operas into different shapes. Some original, some, er, more Star Trek adjacent. So, while such a long delay is frustrating, the prospect of modders getting their hands on the tools to create their own campaigns alongside all their current tools is an exciting one. Now if only someone were to mod in a Tribble faction, then I could allow my excitement to reach fever pitch.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
