Stellaris just announced a new major expansion that will put your dad in the Matrix

Stellaris, Paradox's venerable space 4X, is getting a new expansion this year. Called The Machine Age, it's launching alongside the game's 3.12 Andromeda update in the second quarter of 2024 and it will be plugging your loved ones into the supercomputer, buddy. No ifs, ands, or buts.

Announced yesterday, The Machine Age promises to be a «major expansion» that seriously buffs up Stellaris' many possible robo-dystopias. It'll add new civics, species origins, government forms and a new end-game crisis, in case you were tired of all the other ways it's possible for the galaxy to go horribly, horribly wrong.

Which all sounds good to me. It's been a while since I last sunk serious hours into Stellaris, so maybe this has been changed by other patches and updates, but I always felt like the machine ascension pathway your empire could take felt like a little bit of a cul-de-sac. It was pretty powerful—turning your society of fleshy meatbags into perfect, immortal machines has its benefits—but once you were there you were kind of just, well, there. 

So a major expansion focused on what happens after you've pretty much become The Culture (but everyone's a Mind) sounds great to me. Plus, it sounds like one of the new origins lets you turn your society into a kind of massive cyborg cult, which is precisely the kind of thing I'd like to get in at the ground floor on.

As with most Stellaris DLCs, the trailer doesn't tell us much about the actual substance of the expansion—Paradox saves that for the announce post—instead it's a tone piece focusing on the specific sci-fi vibe the studio is hoping to hone in on. Like I said, this time we're going for dad-in-the-Matrix, a negative externality of cybernetic apotheosis that's been relatively under-remarked upon in Stellaris up until now.

Here's Paradox's full list of what you can expect from The Machine Age: