Frostpunk 2’s developers didn’t want it to be a ‘jackass simulator’

Image via 11-Bit Studios.

What’s the purpose of letting players be cruel?

“Well it’s fun,” most developers would say. That’s a valid answer! Games with moral choices like Baldur’s Gate 3 give players the freedom to be good or evil because those are valid choices in the context of each adventure. Games are about acquiring power, and what is a villain if not one who lusts for power above everything else?

But 11-Bit studios has won praise time and time again for thinking about cruelty in a different way. In This War of Mine and Frostpunk, it explored the dark choices people make in times of crisis. Frostpunk 2 carries forward that tradition, bringing players back to the frozen city of New London after it survived the events of the first game.

Now those choices come in a different context. In Frostpunk, players struggled to survive a blizzard consuming the entire planet. In Frostpunk 2, players must now decide what society will look like on this new snowy earth. Multiple factions (some moderate, some fanatical) lobby the player on different paths for the future. Each one contains the potential for immense harm.

It’s 11-Bit’s hope that players don’t become desensitized to these choices—or that if they do, it helps them reflect on how people in power become so cold. The studio was determined—as Game director Jakub Stokalski put it—to not make the game a “jackass simulator.”

Related:Preserving the Past With Charles Cecil: Game Developer Podcast Ep. 46

Frostpunk 2’s Zeitgeist system measures moral values to force choices on the playerStokalski is himself something of a fanatic—a fanatic for meaningful game design, that is. He’s given talks at events like Game Developers Conference about how developers should be taking advantage of what he calls a “new language” to explore ambitious ideas. “We have a unique opportunity to build playgrounds for players…but also to explore experience with more nuanced [values],” he said, gesticulating for emphasis. The power he said, is how developers can build values into game mechanics.

In Frostpunk, those mechanics are embodied in what 11-Bit Studios calls “the zeitgeist system.” It’s a system that interacts with the core survival mechanics of the game, which include faction sentiment, tension, heating needs, health, cleanliness, food supply, and crime. Keeping all of those elements in balance while exploring the Frostland is the basic element of the game.

While variables like temperature drops and population growth can drive those numbers, the zeitgeist system upends players by forcing them to bounce the different faction’s needs off each other. Each faction is given different values. The Evolvers want society to adapt to the new frozen world, while the Faithkeepers “seek ascension through technology,” and want to build a “perfect” mega city in New London.

Related:Group photo: The editors of Game Developer discuss their favorite photo modes

The Evolvers frown on laws and tech tree updates that ease life in the city at the expense of expansion, and the Faithkeepers despise expansionary improvements. They express their approval or disapproval after the player completes certain quests, passes laws, or researches advancements in the tech tree.

The “council” system is one Stokalski said 11-Bit is particularly proud of. It’s a space for the conflicting values to directly clash, and push the player to wheel and deal for different votes, which keep the push-and-pull of managing New London moving along. “You end up basically [making] a parliament—which I hate by the way,” he joked. “We are really making an effort to frame all of our political stuff in a way that is speaking to the core of what politics are, which is negotiating a common future, rather than the technicalities of [real-world] parliaments.”

Image via 11-Bit Studios.

There are two fun design advantages the system offers. First, it opens the door for players to undo laws, something they couldn’t do in the first Frostpunk. If they committed to an oppressive decision, there was no turning back for them. Factions demanding players revisit laws drive the upgrades that shape the state of the city are constantly upended.

Related:How Petals preludes Texas Chainsaw Massacre with a simple photo mode

The second has to do with the vote count itself. Most policies start with a mix of voters opposed to a law and in support of it, with the remainder “uncertain.” Players can secure votes from factions by making promises, or just let it ride and see where the votes land. Instead of just spitting out a result, 11-Bit created a display that shows the votes being tallied up—creating visual tension as players wait to see if a vote succeeds or fails. It has the same energy as watching a dice roll in Baldur’s Gate 3.

Just like real-world politics, there’s a bit of exhilaration in watching the fate of society be decided before you.

How do you build your own Zeitgeist system?Experiencing Frostpunk 2’s Zeitgeist system is a thrill. One can see the hard work 11-Bit put in to keep the state of New London in constant tension. Even when things are going well and everyone is in harmony, there’s a sense that any second something will go wrong and the player be back at the table, scrambling to secure votes, or weighing whether they can afford to crush a protest.

It also sounds like it was hard as hell to make. Frostpunk 2 has been in development since 2020 (not counting early prototyping in 2019). 11-Bit switched among three game engines during the process. And because of how the studio operates, each early prototype and vertical slice needed a great deal more polish than what other games usually target, in order to express the “mood” the team is going for.

Even after the game direction and tools were set, the Zeitgeist system needed constant testing, as every new feature added complexity that upended existing work. Stokalski explained that 11-Bit did not hard-code certain kinds of decisions in for the factions, wanting every reaction and demand to be as emergent as possible. “It’s about making sure whatever is driving the variability in your system is actually built into the system itself, rather than trying to play whack-a-mole with all the different problems that can happen,” he said.

Image via 11-Bit Studios.

If the team ever wanted a faction to react a specific way to a decision, a custom quest would be created that would make clear to the player this was a hard negotiating point.

Making the system fun and coherent also sometimes showed the limits of Stokalski’s passion for the “new language” of game design. Making the Zeitgeist system meant sacrificing many of the organic oddities that can spring out of relationships between ideological factions in the real world. The game doesn’t express how the strange rules of legislative bodies like the American filibuster can shape the process for what kinds of laws can be passed.

It also can’t fully capture the intentional hypocrisy of a “law and order” party turning on law enforcement agencies when they are investigating its constituents and preferred candidate.

But that’s the cost of making sure a game like Frostpunk 2 is compelling, and not just a half-hearted attempt to simulate reality.

Cruelty in Frostpunk 2 is not the pointStokalski neatly broke down why enabling player cruelty is such a useful tool in game design: cruelty often represents player freedom, while pursuing the moral high ground sometimes means turning away from features or content in a game. “You only do evil stuff if you’re doing it for fun,” he observed.

He doesn’t mind those systems (they’re just not the ones he wants to make), but he said if a game wants to explore morality, it would benefit from remembering “no one wants to be an evil person.”

“You don’t set out to do evil things because you want to be evil, you set out to do these things because you are driven by a certain set of values,” he said. “The trick is these values are not the same for everyone.”

So in Frostpunk 2, doing evil deeds like starving a population, enabling torture, or condemning a faction to death are meant to emerge from whatever values are driving the player’s strategy of managing society.

That would be the major difference from making it—as Stokalski called it—a “jackass simulator.”

About the Author

Senior Editor, GameDeveloper.com

Bryant Francis is a writer, journalist, and narrative designer based in Boston, MA. He currently writes for Game Developer, a leading B2B publication for the video game industry. His credits include Proxy Studios’ upcoming 4X strategy game Zephon and Amplitude Studio’s 2017 game Endless Space 2.