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The overarching goal of Streets of Rogue 2 is to overthrow a corrupt president and take the reins of an entire county. Standing between the player and that goal is a system of Mayors who control individual cities across the world. The developer has designed this as the backbone of the game's progression: the player gains influence by dealing with city-level leaders and works upward toward the President. Like the rest of the game, exactly how a Mayor is taken down or won over is left to the player.
Mayors
Each city is run by a Mayor who answers to the President. The developer has stated that Mayors come in different varieties, each with their own dialogue, quests, and worldview. Mayors are intended to be substantively different from one another, with archetypes including a cultist mayor who has a massive following and even hosts podcasts, and a sewer-dwelling cannibal mayor whose primary source of protein is other NPCs. Each Mayor archetype must have its own unique dialogue and the kinds of quests it doles out.
How much individual identity a Mayor has is still an open design question. Rather than one repeated mayor archetype, the developer wants mayors to belong to different factions, and has floated going further and making them actual characters with their own personalities and dialogue. That decision has not been made, and no individual Mayor has been named publicly.
Mayor Dungeons
A Mayor's dwelling is described as a huge multi-floor chunk that functions as a dungeon. These are heavily handcrafted set pieces that require meticulous design from the team. Mayor offices appear in the dungeon system alongside cave dungeons, cannibal hideouts, and house basements.
Taking Down a Mayor
The methods of taking down a Mayor (or alternatively, gaining their favor) are intended to be quite varied, and to come with their own repercussions. The developer has framed this as a major design pillar where the first game offered a glimpse and the sequel takes the idea much further: a Mayor may be hostage-taken, defeated in combat by a combat class, deposed via political and social manipulation, hired as an ally, or sidelined while the player builds a counter-power base. The right approach often depends on the Mayor's archetype and the tier of the city they govern.
Mayor Hat
The Mayor Hat is an in-game item that has appeared in alpha demo patch notes. Players cannot sell the Mayor Hat, and if a Mayor falls down a hole, the hat will not be permanently lost: it teleports out of the hole until a proper solution is implemented.
City Attributes
Cities are tracked through a small set of attributes. The developer describes the layer as not yet fleshed out in either design or code, so the effects below are intent rather than shipped behaviour.
Attribute | How It Moves | What It Affects |
|---|---|---|
Influence | Earned by performing certain actions and completing certain quests inside city limits. | Crossing thresholds unlocks things such as buying property in the city, or speaking to the Mayor without pushback. The developer has considered renaming it, though alternatives like Notoriety imply wrongdoing and would not suit a player trying to be a good citizen. |
Prosperity | Derived from the city's buildings, how many of its job and home slots are filled, and how much damage has been done to city property. | Intended to change how effective city services such as police and ambulances are, shift the number of criminals, move the cost and quality of goods and services, and affect the player's chances in a presidential election. It is also meant to govern how quickly the city repairs itself. |
Faction Influence | Reflects the power a given faction holds inside the city. | Planned to carry gameplay consequences, and to be displayable as a filter on the world map. |
City Management
After the player gains a city's Mayor powers, a strategic management layer is planned to become available. Through it the player can enact Laws and Proclamations that influence a city's prosperity, the satisfaction of its residents, and its standing with the various factions, with manual placement of buildings also intended. The developer has framed this as a longer-term feature rather than a near-term priority, so it remains in development. The factions a city answers to and the difficulty of governing it scale with the World Tier of the region, and faction reputation itself is handled through the wider Gameplay Systems.
The President
The President is the final goal of the main campaign and the figure all Mayors answer to. Toppling them requires building enough influence across multiple cities, though, as with everything in the game, the developer has framed the path as deliberately open-ended. Specific in-game mechanics tied to the President have not been published in detail. The developer has also floated additional or alternative win conditions beyond a straight takeover, such as brokering an alliance between two deeply hostile factions or ridding the county of its nuclear waste plants, along with an endgame that would let a player keep going after claiming the presidency.