While Blizzard summons Diablo, Crate Entertainment ushers in its Grim Dawn, and Grinding Gear Games follows the Path of Exile, Soldak Entertainment has been, relatively quietly, soldering away on its ambitious, not enormously attractive action RPGs, including Din’s Legacy and Zombasite. But it’s Drox Operative—an action RPG with spaceships—that concerns us today, as the developer has just announced a sequel.

Cast a glance at Soldak’s previous games—say, by downloading a demo from the developer’s site—and you’ll notice the words “dynamic, evolving” cropping up frequently. That’s Soldak’s thing: action RPGs set in “dynamic, evolving” worlds, be they fantasy or spacey in nature. Zombasite, for example, features a greater-than-usual degree of randomisation, and a town-building element in its fantasy version of the zombie apocalypse.

Meanwhile, as Soldak explains in the Drox Operative 2 announcement post, one of the features of this series is to let you “essentially play an action RPG inside a universe of alien races playing a 4X game.”

“As a Drox Operative it’s NOT your job to manage an empire, you are after all the captain of a single starship. It IS your job to pick the winning side and maybe even help them conquer the galaxy if you’re being nice, more importantly though is to rake in as many credits as possible, well that and build the deadliest ship in the known universe.”

So, a space trading game meets an action RPG meets a 4X? Enhancements over the original game will include, according to that same post, “better graphics”, additional treaty and component types, and, slightly alarmingly, the ability to “protect or exploit primitive races.” Picard would have a few things to say about that, I’m sure.

There’s a Steam page for Drox Operative 2, and a release date of May 27, though that’s when it’ll be launching in Early Access. The full release is scheduled for early next year.

Thanks, Blue.