Revision 4

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.

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 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.