Songs of Conquest has been one of my favorite success stories in gaming recently. It may not be on the scale of Palworld, Helldivers 2, Manor Lords, and Black Myth: Wukong, but Lavapotion still managed to do something that seemed out of reach for years: It managed to craft a spiritual successor to Heroes of Might and Magic so worthy of the title that – at least for me – it usurped the old gold-standard to become the genre’s new face. That’s a historic feat.
Lavapotion’s work is far from done, though, and at Gamescom 2024 I met with the lead designer of SoC, Carl Toftfelt, as well as lead programmer and studio co-founder Niklas Borglund to speak about the future of their successful strategy game.
On top of the agenda was the impending console release of SoC – the game will come to PS5 and Xbox Series X|S very soon. Basically, Lavapotion is waiting for Microsoft and Sony to complete the authentication process for the game on their respective ends and then it’s pretty much good to go.
The duo have brought the console build to Cologne for me to play around with and, just like the Steam Deck controls, adventuring, building, and conquering feels very intuitive on the PS5 – if you know where the respective buttons are, which proved a little tricky for myself as someone who seldom wields a DualSense. The game’s pixel art style translates very well to the bigger screens with all the text associated with buildings, abilities, and so on being perfectly readable.
Toftfelt admits that he had some reservations about playing the game with a controller, but he warmed up to it. He emphasizes that it’s great for hot-seat matches especially: “It’s kind of cozy to be bunched up in front of a computer…” “...but it’s much more relaxed to just pass along the controller,” Borglund finishes his sentence.
With PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S covered, that leaves only one major hardware group open, and the devs have been thinking about bringing the game to Nintendo Switch as well. “We have been dreaming about this on Switch,” Toftfelt says. “Maybe one day.” The team believes that it can make the game work on Nintendo’s console, but it’d take a lot of effort to optimize things.
The console release will be followed by a free update for everyone, which focuses on enhancing the mechanics of the Undead, as well as an Undead-focused DLC with a new campaign – not one bringing a new song into the game, though. The upcoming mini-campaign will instead be stylized as a ‘Tale of Conquest’ to differentiate it from the grander stories, the titular ‘Songs of Conquest’.
This update will be great news for fans of the Undead power fantasy because it brings tech to upgrade your Risen as well as a new Wielder with the ability to continuously generate Risen – this will be your new go-to necromancer archetype for when you want to flood your enemies. Artifact sets are going to be another addition in this update.
The mini-campaign will tell a story from the perspective of the Undead and feature some faces that may be familiar to players of the main story, but I won’t say more than that. “It’s a player experience that we’ve been missing so far,” Toftfelt says. Initially, the devs didn’t want to make an Undead faction “that was all about ‘raise the skeletons’,” as Toftfelt puts it, “but then we were like ‘ugh, but it’s such a fun player experience.’” Songs of Conquest’s lore is written in such a way that it made this classic way of playing the Undead difficult, but the team eventually found a take that worked – and that’s what players can get their hands on in the upcoming DLC.
Lavapotion naturally had some internal debates about what to include in the DLC and what in the free update and discovered that by making all assets parts of the free update they were actually giving players the necessary tools to painstakingly rebuild the paid campaign in the map editor – their conclusion was: “We’re okay with that.”
The team couldn’t commit to a release date for this just yet, but estimates it would be out in the next two months.
We also talked about the eternal struggle of balancing a strategy game for both its most skilled and hardcore followers and its newcomers – it’s a difficult path to walk. “I had a meeting with super-advanced players, who were like ‘This thing needs to change,’ and I was like ‘No, new players use that. They already think it’s good, if I make it better they’ll never use anything else’,” Toftfelt describes.
They also demanded changes to the AI to make the game more challenging, but after looking into how these players were approaching the game, the developers once again had to put their foot down and firmly say “No” – if they had gone with these suggestions, few people would be able to beat AI opponents. Nevertheless, the devs emphasize that all of that feedback is vital to them, especially because these hardcore fans love the game so much – it’s just that the way they experience it is not always so compatible with how others do.
Toftfelt and Borglund wanted to give me a little sneak peek at Bleak East, a major expansion for Songs of Conquest currently scheduled for Q2 of 2025. They showed me some of the art for a new faction included in this pack, the Roots. Think of them like The Lord of the Rings’ Ents, but much spookier. The Roots use whatever they find in the forest as the “skeletons” for their bodies – and that often includes actual skeletons, so you have lots of walking trees with broken bones protruding from their bodies or skulls being featured prominently.
“We thought, ‘Well, what’s really prevalent in forests? Fungi!’,” Toftfelt explains. “If you look at real old forests, not all those newly planted ones, they’re completely overgrown. So that’s what we’re going for. And then we have a little bit of an Undead element: They find bodies and try to reuse them to create something called Vessels.”
I got to see the second faction of the expansion, the Viking-inspired Vanir, in action as well, but I promised not to say too much about them yet.
“It’s just so fun to work on something brand-new like that again,” Toftfelt says as we check out the Vanir army. Apparently, the Vanir were supposed to be one of the base game’s factions at one point, but others eventually were prioritized to tell the main story, so the team simply hoped that Songs of Conquest would do well enough to enable them to bring in later through DLC – a hope that was fulfilled.
“We got a really nice reception,” Toftfelt says. “It’s such a cool thing when you talk to someone and they say ‘I’ve got a thousand hours in your game.’ I have games like that as well and I love those games, so it’s such a cool thing to have someone else say that about your game.”
“I recently saw a game that said ‘inspired by Songs of Conquest’ and I was like ‘Wow, that’s where we are at? That’s crazy!’,” Borglund adds. “That was one of the things we said when we started making this game: ‘Let’s revive this genre.’”
Revive it they did.
Songs of Conquest is currently available on PC via Steam and will soon be out on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. There is currently an update and DLC roadmap for the game that guarantees new free and paid content at least until Winter 2025.
