Double Fine - Kickstarter - MASSIVE CHALICE

[TheLastBaron]

I used to play Pokemon competitively a lot when Diamond and Pearl came out and such a large part of that is breeding Pokemon to get the right nature/moves/IV's.  I had to breed over 70 Eevee's to get the one I waned and who's to say that he even wanted to become a Vaporeon, I chose that for him too.  I'm a monster.

[SecretAsianMan]

Oh! Maybe you have the kids put through heavy fighting training from a young age. They'll become great fighters, but later they'll be shitty parents because of their shitty childhood and their offspring will again have all sorts of problems. Put them up for adoption? They'll need really good parents, otherwise they'll grow up resentful of not knowing their biological parents. But the new parents probably won't be great fighters, so the kids still won't grow up as best possible fighters, they'll want to paint or something.

 

And maybe your father is a great hero. That's some pressure to put on a child. It could affect him in a number of ways.

 

Man, the idea that some of the kids could in fact reject their family legacy and in essence decide not to go into the "family business" sounds really interesting to me.  Or maybe other differences that could impact the game in a larger way.  Like if one hero was a great fighter, but his son turns out to be a brilliant strategist, which would probably translate to some kind of buff in game mechanics.

[sclpls]

Mostly. And also general gross traditions of class struggle. The idea of defining humans by the achievements, social standing, and genetics of their family is just really repellent to me. I don't think Brad Muir is a secret racist or anything, I think he just thought of a neat gameplay mechanic, based on the idea of a conflict happening over a large time-scale, but the unfortunate real-world implications of that mechanic have always been not so great.

 

It's actually a part of the world of Harry Potter that turned me off as well. At least to my memory: I read the first 5 books years and years ago, so I'm open to the idea that I completely wrong about it. But the idea of the sorting hat, of certain families always going to certain houses, and the idea that the people are largely identified by their house identity is kind of weird to me, especially in such widely-read children's literature. Maybe it got more nuanced than "Gryffindor is virtuous, Slytherin are bastards, who-gives-a-fuck about Hufflepuff, etc." later on, but that sort of always distanced me from it.

 

For what it's worth, none of the mechanics are set in stone in terms of how raising children work. One of the possibilities Brad mentioned was that different households represent different types of character classes (warriors, archers, mages, etc.), and you assign your heroes to become lords of various households, and then the children born into that household are raised to become that sort of character class. So if the game went down that route it would fall more on the nurture side of the nature vs. nurture debate, and wouldn't really have much to do with eugenics or trying to create genetic advantages and would be more like a sort of worker placement type Euro game mechanic.

 

It is interesting how strategy games sometimes have these unintentional messages in their game mechanics. If you sit down to deeply analyze the mechanics of a lot of city builders and 4x space games you'll often find these unexpected endorsement of conservative politics (3MA had a good episode about this, wish I could remember the episode number...). Rob Zacny did a piece talking to one of the Paradox developers who made a good point about how historical WW2 games are sort of morally problematic because people are going to like playing the Germans since they have the smaller scale, but more powerful military units so they have this underdog appeal.

 

http://www.pcgamesn.com/not-here-make-friends-part-3-dark-side-historical-strategy/page/0/1

[Dewar]

Yeah, I think there's a fine line that all fantasy has to walk between evoking historical flavor and buying into it. We touched upon this in the "Is Game of Thrones Sexist" thread. In the case of Massive Chalice, the medieval fixation on pedigree turns into eugenics when systematized in a video game.

 

I think the best way is to take a page out of the Crusader Kings II book again, with no trait or combination of traits having a clear advantage over others. It would be easy to breed a glass cannon, specialized to the hilt at one thing, but a well-rounded individual would happen only through luck and foresight. Upbringing would play into this by operating the same. That way, there's an interesting choice between breeding a better hero through genetics and building happy families through love matches, with the confluence of the two being an exciting and fulfilling event.

 

I was wondering if anyone would bring up Crusader Kings. It's my most played game on Steam and I've done all sorts of crazy backstabbing and selective breeding to build up the ultimate bloodline. I relish the thought of not only getting to do that with multiple houses at once, but then also taking those chess pieces into turn based strategical combat. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see more personality than cattle or Pokemon there (Crusader Kings occasionally has some pretty interesting character based events) but I don't know why so many seem adverse to the "eugenics" thing.

[TheLastBaron]

What about a game like Football Manager where one of the main aspects of the game is managing teams in the future where  the players you're scouting are all regens (generated by the game) and you're sifting through a bunch of really young kids looking for ones that you might be able to grow into superstar players.  There isn't any breeding aspect, but you're going through a list of players and picking them based on future stats.

[vimes]

If the game ends up being only about cross-breeding heroes it would be extremely disappointing.

But after listening to the design talk, I don't feel like it's going to be like that: Brad Muir is obviously enthusiastic about the whole 'Song of a Family of Heroes' motif, but, given his reaction to the adoption idea and the way the discussion went, I'm thinking his underlying motivation is not so much about the bad ass epic than it is about creating stories that interesting characters whose personalities and life choices are entirely forged in gameplay systems that mixes biased simulation and player choices... and I expect there are a bunch of influences within DoubleFine to bring him novel ideas on how to achieve that, and on how to infuse meaning and 'ideological' bias inside the systems to make the result thought provoking (or at least, not completely archetypal).

 

I mean, just the adoption mechanic would a brilliant gameplay vehicle for the 'hereditary vs education vs experience' thematic. And if you generalize that to 'where does the kid come from' (infidelity, adoption because of same of sex, infertility or wound in battle) you open a bunch of doors for the player to make decision about

• how he can choose his heir: are there conflicting criteria? does the orphan origin matter? Can your 'life partner' have anything to say about it?Do they have to be aware of it? Can they discover it later? Do your decision influence the relation in the couple afterward? Can he/she adopt a kid without your consent? Or cheat on you, with you only discovering the child isn't yours when he can't use a relic from one of your ancestors?
• if/when/how to reveal the orphan origin and the simulation's response to that: how the orphan will react to the revelations: will he cut the ties with his surrogate parent? Will he go on a search for his blood relative and possibly come back with chocking new bloodline to explore ? will he turn into an adversary like Mordred in the Arthurian Tale, joining the demons? will he just disappear to grow beet like Patrick R. mentionned? Will this change his stats? The stats of his relative? Will this changes the view of the people on the hero and the realm in general?

And even if you the systems are not 'aware' of the orphan status, it should still 'color' the player's perception of how this character performs within the gameplay systems: an orphan who slays a dragon to get the relic of an ancestor he isn't related to doesn't have to be acknowledged as a special case by the simulation, it will automatically mean something different for the player.

 

In any case, the field of possible is huge at that point - which is a good way to fire up the imagination -  and I'm cautiously confident they'll pick an interesting angle, rather than the eugenic one.

[Patrick R]

Yeah, Brad Muir's reaction to the question of same-sex marriage in the game is why I'm confident that he's not some weird regressive eugenics freak*. AND answered my question at the beginning of this thread, about what (beyond simply mitigated risk) is gained by Double Fine crowd-sourcing it's games.

 

If somebody did think about it during that whole thing, they would've probably just killed it because it is such a controversial issue. They'd probably not want to have it associated with the game at all. And then they'd give me a PR company line that I'd have to tell in every interview, and it'd be super, super shitty. And then any gay gamers who are coming to the game and playing it and wanting to see themselves represented would just be really disappointed.

 

Pretty sweet.

 

*I'm gonna write a punk rock song called "Eugenics Freak" now.

[TheLastBaron]

Brad is playing Final Fantasy Tactics on Twitch right now

 

http://www.twitch.tv/doublefine

 

I'm assuming most people will see this after the stream is over (I'm already an hour late), but you can watch the recorded broadcast.

[Patrick R]

For what it's worth, none of the mechanics are set in stone in terms of how raising children work. One of the possibilities Brad mentioned was that different households represent different types of character classes (warriors, archers, mages, etc.), and you assign your heroes to become lords of various households, and then the children born into that household are raised to become that sort of character class. So if the game went down that route it would fall more on the nurture side of the nature vs. nurture debate, and wouldn't really have much to do with eugenics or trying to create genetic advantages and would be more like a sort of worker placement type Euro game mechanic.

 

It is interesting how strategy games sometimes have these unintentional messages in their game mechanics. If you sit down to deeply analyze the mechanics of a lot of city builders and 4x space games you'll often find these unexpected endorsement of conservative politics (3MA had a good episode about this, wish I could remember the episode number...). Rob Zacny did a piece talking to one of the Paradox developers who made a good point about how historical WW2 games are sort of morally problematic because people are going to like playing the Germans since they have the smaller scale, but more powerful military units so they have this underdog appeal.

 

http://www.pcgamesn.com/not-here-make-friends-part-3-dark-side-historical-strategy/page/0/1

 

Yeah, all I really know about Massive Chalice is what was said on Dota Today and the Kickstarter video, so it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of this gets addressed.

[Twig]

I wasn't gonna back it 'cause I don't generally back video games if they're obviously going to make their goal, but goddamn, the more I hear about this, the more excited I get.

 

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

 

I might back this.

[Chris]

We've talked a lot about nature vs. nurture, adoption vs. true bloodlines, etc., and we have a lot of really cool ideas I think. I don't expect this to be Eugenics: The Game.

[sclpls]

I watched a bit of the videos Brad & co. put up on twitch with them playing XCOM and Final Fantasy Tactics while answering fan/backer questions, and they were really entertaining.

[Dewar]

I was planning on watching those yesterday, but I got distracted. Maybe tonight after I've watched the E3 pressers from Sony and MS.

[dibs]

We've talked a lot about nature vs. nurture, adoption vs. true bloodlines, etc., and we have a lot of really cool ideas I think. I don't expect this to be Eugenics: The Game.

We can still hope though. Amirite!

[thestalkinghead]

i like the idea of breeding in any game especially the idea of selective breeding for traits and features, i would play a game entirely based on that, so i think it's cool that this will be a feature in the strategic part of the game, also the relic idea is cool, it turns something that would just be a 100% devastating loss into a 50/50 loss/reward thing

[TheLastBaron]

http://www.twitch.tv/doublefine

 

I love streams of people who are really good artists, I wish there were more.  Super rad!

[TheLastBaron]

There's going to be a stream tonight of Shadows over Camelot, I'm pretty stoked.

[Dewar]

I own that game. I'm looking forward to watching the recording this weekend.

[TheLastBaron]

So I just got an email to design my house and sigil and such and man it's too much pressure.  I can't think of a motto or anything.  I bet other people are going to come out with really good stuff too and I won't even want to play as my own house when the game ships.

 

Edit: Yup, I checked the DF forums and people are super creative with how they use the tool.

[tberton]

As a representative of Idle Thumbs, you know what you must do. House Goldgame, motto is "We've taken the money and we're not giving it back" and the sigil is a puffin.

 

Alternately, House Phaedrus, motto is "We are Phaedrus", sigil is a telephone.

[pkirkner]

I'm also feeling the pressure. My first two cracks are the talon-ed frog:

 

 

And the Crocodile Chalice:

 

 

Still have some work to do.

[Bjorn]

Cthulu-frog. 

 

I approve!

[clyde]

The taloned frog is visually appealing, but not recognizable. That is not a problem for me. I like that it looks like a panda with mandibles and a frog-hat.

[Dewar]

Ooh, I haven't been watching the team streams as religiously as I had originally planned. Does this mean we're nearing launch?

[tberton]

Nah, the game is still a while away.