Songs of Conquest Finally Available on Console and a Preview of Bleak East

Songs of conquest has been one of my proudest achievements in gaming in recent memory. It may not be on the level of Palworld, Helldivers 2, Manor Lords, and Black Myth: Wukong, but Lavapotion has still managed to do something that seemed out of reach for years: it has managed to create a spiritual successor to Heroes of Might and Magic so worthy of the title that—for me, at least—it has usurped the old gold standard to become the new face of the genre. That’s a historic feat.

Lavapotion’s work is far from over, however, and at Gamescom 2024 I sat down with lead SoC designer Carl Toftfelt and lead programmer and studio co-founder Niklas Borglund to talk about the future of their hit strategy game.

At the forefront was the imminent SoC release on console – the game will be released very soon on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. Basically, Lavapotion is waiting for Microsoft and Sony to complete the game authentication process on their respective sides and then everything will be ready.

The duo brought the console to Cologne for me to play with, and much like the Steam Deck’s controls, adventuring, building, and conquering feel very intuitive on the PS5 – if you know where the respective buttons are, which was a bit tricky for me, a DualSense user who rarely wields a DualSense. The game’s pixel art style translates very well to the larger screens, with all the text associated with buildings, abilities, etc. being perfectly legible.

Toftfelt admits he had some reservations about playing the game with a controller, but he’s gotten used to it. He points out that it’s especially handy for heated matches: “It’s quite nice to be grouped in front of a computer…” “…but it’s a lot more relaxed to just pass the controller around,” Borglund concludes.

With PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S covered, that leaves just one big hardware group open, and the developers have been thinking about bringing the game to Nintendo Switch as well. “We’re dreaming about it on Switch,” Toftfelt says. “Maybe one day.” The team believes they can get the game running on Nintendo’s console, but it would take a lot of effort to optimize things.

The console release will be followed by a free update for all, which will focus on improving the undead mechanics, as well as an undead-focused DLC with a new campaign – but not a new in-game song. The upcoming mini-campaign will instead be stylized as a “tale of conquest” to differentiate it from the larger stories, the “songs of conquest.”

This update will be great news for fans of the undead fantasy genre, as it brings tech to enhance your Risen as well as a new carrier with the ability to continually spawn Risen – this will be your new go-to necromancer archetype when you want to flood your enemies. Artifact sets will 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 gameplay experience that we were missing until now,” Toftfelt says. Initially, the developers didn’t want to create an undead faction “that was all about resurrecting skeletons,” as Toftfelt puts it, “but then we thought, ‘ugh, this is such a fun gameplay experience.'” Songs of Conquest’s story is written in such a way that it makes this classic way of playing the undead difficult, but the team eventually found an approach that worked – and that’s what players will get to experience in the upcoming DLC.

Lavapotion naturally had some internal debates about what to include in the DLC and what to include in the free update and discovered that by making everything part of the free update, they were actually giving players the tools to painstakingly rebuild the paid campaign in the map editor. Their conclusion was, “We’re okay with that.”

The team has not yet been able to commit to a release date, but estimates it will be out within the next two months.

We also discussed the eternal struggle of finding a balance between a strategy game for its most experienced and novice players, and for its newcomers. It’s a tough road to walk. “I had a meeting with some very advanced players who were saying, ‘This thing needs to change,’ and I said, ‘No, new players are using this. They already think it’s good, if I make it better, they won’t use anything else,’” Toftfelt says.

They also called for changes to the AI ​​to make the game more difficult, but after studying how these players approached the game, the developers once again had to flatly refuse. If they had followed these suggestions, few players would be able to beat the AI ​​opponents. Nevertheless, the developers emphasize that all this feedback is essential to them, especially because these die-hard fans love the game so much. It’s just that the way they experience it is not always as compatible with that of others.

Toftfelt and Borglund wanted to give me a sneak peek at Bleak East, a major expansion for Songs of Conquest currently slated for release in Q2 2025. They showed me some artwork for a new faction included in the pack, the Roots. Think of them like the Ents from Lord of the Rings, but much scarier. The Roots use whatever they can find in the forest as “skeletons” for their bodies—and that often includes actual skeletons, so you’ve got a lot of trees walking around with broken bones sticking out of their bodies or skulls on display.

“We asked ourselves what’s actually in the forests: mushrooms!” Toftfelt says. “If you look at real old-growth forests, not all the newly planted ones, they’re completely overgrown. So that’s what we’re looking for. And then we have a little bit of an undead element: they find bodies and try to repurpose them to create what we call vessels.”

I also got to see the expansion’s second faction, the Viking-inspired Vanir, in action, but I promised not to say too much about them just yet.

“It’s really fun to work on something completely new like this again,” Toftfelt says as we take a look at the Vanir army. Apparently, the Vanir were supposed to be one of the base game’s factions at one point, but others ultimately took priority to tell the main story, so the team was just hoping that Songs of Conquest would be well-received enough to allow them to integrate them later via DLC – a hope that was granted.

“We’ve had a really good reception,” Toftfelt says. “It’s really cool to talk to someone and say, ‘I’ve spent thousands of hours playing your game.’ I have games like that too, and I’m really happy to see that you’ve played this game.” love these games, so it’s really cool that someone else is saying that about your game.”

“I recently saw a game that said ‘inspired by Songs of Conquest’ and I thought, ‘Wow, this is where we are? This is crazy!’” Borglund adds. “That’s one of the things we said when we started making this game: ‘Let’s bring this genre back.’”

They brought it back to life.

Songs of Conquest is currently available on PC via Steam and will soon be released on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. There is currently a roadmap of updates and DLC for the game that guarantees new free and paid content until at least winter 2025.