BLANK SLATE
Going post-apocalyptic and getting political: Frostpunk 2 advances the agenda
Much like The Alters, there’s a driving question at the heart of Frostpunk 2. It’s just a single word apart, but that makes all the difference. “The big question,” says design director Jakub Stokalski, “is: what now?” It’s something the developers are asking of the first game’s Frostlands setting, and the people who inhabit it – who, as Stokalski points out, have by the end of the original Frostpunk essentially survived the end of the world – but also of themselves, as they attempt to follow up the first game’s enormous success with a pair of new directors at the helm.
This is a moment the studio has been preparing for, however. Przemysław Marszał, who was that game’s co-lead and art director before becoming CEO, explains that it was specifically conceived as “a game that we could more easily make a sequel to”, a decision made even before development on This War Of Mine was completed. “We already knew we wouldn’t make This War Of Mine 2. Or maybe not that we won’t, but we’re not planning to. Because we didn’t have anything more to tell.”
For a Frostpunk sequel to get the greenlight, the team needed to prove that there was more to tell. Not only establishing that there was design space left in the Frostpunk concept, but figuring out what would be communicated via these new mechanics. “When we were setting out to develop a sequel – or even ask ourselves whether to – there was this question of, can we say something worthwhile?” Stokalski says. “And also, something that can be said best in this unique language that games possess, that other media don’t. If we did not find any of those, we probably wouldn’t have made a sequel.” Art director Łukasz Juszczyk agrees: “Silence can be golden, right? It can be smarter not to say anything.”
Obviously, given that we’re sitting here for an hourlong demo of Frostpunk 2, the pair eventually hit on an answer, the first part of which becomes apparent the moment we lay eyes on the game. It’s set 30 years after the original, and advances its concerns accordingly. “Usually, you’d say that Frostpunk is a post-apocalyptic game, but when you think about it, it really isn’t,” Stokalski says. “It’s more of an apocalyptic game, right? It’s happening as the world is ending.” So what if they were to make something genuinely post-apocalyptic, that looked beyond the questions of survival that have driven all of 11 Bit’s recent work to ask instead: what now? Where next?
The part of the game Stokalski and Juszczyk show us is its new ‘Utopia Builder’ sandbox mode. At its outset, the screen is a field of white, with just a small cluster of civilisation visible at its very centre. Small as it looks, Stokalski explains that this city “is about the size of what you’d have at the end of a Frostpunk 1 playthrough”. Here, though, it’s destined to be just the central district of a much larger metropolis. If The Alters is taking what made 11 Bit’s previous work tick and pushing the camera in closer than ever before, then Frostpunk 2 is taking the exact opposite approach.
“We really felt a change of scale was needed to support the core themes of the game,” Stokalski says, explaining how, instead of building tents, you now plan out entire districts. Juszczyk, at the controls, paints them onto the white powder underfoot, their contents falling into place in an organic, cobbled-together jumble that recalls the character of European cities, as opposed to the planned US-style grids of most city builders.
“Time is another thing that got the scaling-up treatment,” Stokalski adds. “The game no longer plays out across days, but weeks, months, even years in longer playthroughs.” With that in mind, “it makes little sense to ask you to stockpile, say, five wood, so we also changed the economy system that supports the game. It’s no longer stockpile-based; now, everything is supply and demand.” Each district you add brings its own flow of input and output, constantly feeding and taking from its neighbours.
For all that the sequel might have zoomed out, though, it also seeks to bring you closer to your city’s inhabitants. We’re taken briefly inside a single citizen’s head, thoughts clouding around his next dreaded shift in the biowaste hothouse. This worker’s name is Newton Wolf, and he is eight years old. Clearly, three decades hasn’t been enough to shake off the old habits when it comes to child labour; if anything, given that those hothouses are powered by human waste, things have got worse. However, we have an opportunity to change that by introducing laws – another process that’s been made more intimate for this sequel.
“In most strategy games, there’s this power fantasy that ‘I can do everything – I am the ultimate creator’,” Juszczyk says. “Not here.” And so, rather than unilaterally setting rules for their city, now you have a parliament to contend with. Opening up the Council Hall, we find a chamber whose radial seats echo the shape of the settlement itself, where a hundred delegates cast their votes by lighting lanterns, glimmers of hope in the dark. “After 30 years, the convenient excuse for any decision – you know, ‘We have to do it or we are all going to die’ – is really no longer valid,” Stokalski says.
"IN MOST STRATEGY GAMES THERE'S THIS POWER FANTASY THAT I CAN DO EVERYTHING I AM THE ULTIMATE CREATOR' NOT HERE"
In line with 11 Bit’s definition of a “truly postapocalyptic game”, this is our chance to forge a better world. Keep in mind the name of the mode we’re being shown here. “We started thinking, ‘When is utopia possible?’” Stokalski says. “Well, never, really. But if it ever was, it would be when you have a blank state. This is the moment to try to build a better future.”
Just as we’re starting to think that this all sounds terribly optimistic, Stokalski continues. “The trick is, though, that even though the world might be a blank slate, the people are not. They have been deeply touched by the ordeal of survival, by everything they had to do in order to survive the end of the world.” In a way, this isn’t too far from The Alters’ view of humanity and the ways in which we’re all shaped by our pasts, just blown out to enormous scale, its varied characters rendered as entire communities. In this demo, we get to meet two of them: the Engineers and the Foragers.
The former are the descendants of, surprisingly enough, the engineers who worked on the generator that powered your city in the first game. “And it’s ingrained in them that technology is what enabled them to survive,” Stokalski says. “If it wasn’t for the generators, they wouldn’t be here.” The Foragers, meanwhile, had no such luxuries. “They were the ones who survived without the help of generators, out there in the Frostlands, at horrific cost, with horrific sacrifice.” This experience hardened them, producing a libertarian-meets-Spartan mindset.
The tabled motion, then – to make education mandatory for all children in the city – is something of a hard sell. While the Engineers naturally support the idea, Stokalski explains, “Foragers would say that the responsibility for each child lies with the parents”. With a 50/50 split between the two factions, as the player you have a few options. The first is negotiation, making backdoor deals to change other laws or guaranteeing their next proposal will be voted in (see ‘Campaign promises’). Alternatively, you can just roll the dice.
After all, while these factions might have a distinctive character, they are nonetheless made up of individuals. There might be a couple of unannounced swing votes, or a renegade who breaks the party line, here represented by one of Frostpunk 2’s few uses of randomisation. In this case, the gamble pays off – the first time in living memory that a 52/48 split has been worth celebrating. We’re told, however, that the consequences will run deeper than this one moment of triumph. And so, to illustrate that point, our demo jumps ahead two whole years.
In that time, the city has gone from a speck in the snow to a sprawling, bustling thing that almost fills the screen. Basic survival problems have been solved, at least for now. “No one is cold, no one is hungry,” Stokalski says. “There’s some disease, but nothing major.” Of course, it’s not simply case closed. The city’s size might bring new issues of squalor and crime, while further complications emerge from the ways its population has evolved. In reaction to the choices the player has made over those unseen years, two new communities have emerged, splintering off from the preexisting factions: the Icebloods and Technocrats.
Both are still relative minorities among the populace, but with enough members to be represented in the council chamber, meaning you can no longer rely on a simple flip of the coin to pass laws. Which proves difficult as, faced with a coming storm that will tip the city back into survival mode, Juszczyk proposes undoing that law of two years before, putting the children back to work.
The Icebloods, having taken the Foragers’ credo of human adaptability to its Darwinist conclusion, are all for this idea. It would be easy to paint them as the baddies, but Stokalski promises this game has “no comic-book villains” – and besides, they’re not the ones we’re about to make enemies with. The Technocrats are ultrarationalists who “believe you can figure everything out,” he explains. “That you can calculate everything if you have the right algorithm. Even things like who you should marry, how many children you should have, etc.” That equation does not include, you’d imagine, children shovelling excrement – and indeed, the Technocrats aren’t best pleased when we negotiate with their more moderate cousins to get our proposal passed.
“To them, what we just did is unacceptable. It was the last straw,” Stokalski says. “They’ll go out into the city, try to gain influence in different districts and convince the people that theirs is the right way to survive and build a brighter future for ourselves.” We’re shown a heatmap overlay that works much like the first game’s more literal temperature meter, instead dedicated to charting tension within the populace. If this is a kind of social thermometer, it seems the mercury is about set to burst the glass. Our demo ends before we can see how this plays out in the longer term, but according to Stokalsi, unrest “can ultimately be the city’s undoing, and lead to its downfall. This is the ultimate enemy in the game.”
It’s a fairly grim view of humanity for a game that started out with the aim of building a utopia. (Of course, people are always where these things fall down.) But it’s core to what the game has to say, the big idea that convinced 11 Bit a sequel was worth pursuing. It’s what Kisilewicz calls the “insight”, something that’s required for any of the studio’s games to be greenlit, as it aims to produce what it has often called “meaningful games”.
That latter term is one that Marszał feels has become a little overused, and perhaps strayed a little from its original intention. Ultimately, he says, 11 Bit just wants to make entertainment that can connect to people’s real lives and experiences in some way. “We believe you will enjoy playing our games,” he says, laying out the studio’s new mission statement. “But we don’t care if you become a better player. We care if you become a better person.” Frankly, we’d like to think we sat down to our demo already reckoning that child labour was a bad idea. How we might rebuild society after a global crisis, though? Well, that feels like a terrifyingly relevant thing to be thinking about right now.
For The Alters, meanwhile, the insight is into the role that regret plays in human nature – and it’s an attitude 11 Bit is trying to carry over to the games it publishes, too, which are gradually growing in number. We ask Marszał how this philosophy scales across multiple projects. “Let’s meet again in a year and see where we are,” he says with a laugh.
After a quiet few years, the studio is about to enter a period of proving out its ideas. It’s publishing The Invincible, out in November, and The Thaumaturge, in December, as well as another unannounced game early next year, before the arrival of its homegrown offerings. “Of course, this wasn’t the plan,” Marszał says, acknowledging that it has created “huge pressure internally”. But assuming it all goes to plan, and the way 11 Bit has rebuilt itself proves a success, what then?
The aim is for the company to reach a regular cadence of “three or four titles a year, internal and external”, he says, with its internal teams sticking to the same format and carrying their knowledge onto similar projects: the Frostpunk team continuing to specialise in strategy, the Project 8 team focusing on thirdperson narrative games, and The Alters team on, well, “Cut loose, go crazy, no constraints”. But the boundaries needn’t be quite so firm, Marszał adds: “What if, for example, the Project 8 team, which will gain experience in this narrative thirdperson approach, took the Frostpunk universe and made a game in that style, in that universe? I’m not saying we are doing that – I’m just showing you the possibilities.” He thinks for a moment, then laughs again. “Maybe we’ll find a good idea for that game.” Which is, ultimately, what the entire approach boils down to for 11 Bit: asking the right questions, and the search for a good idea.
P> ;>EB>O> RHN PBEE >GCHR IE:RBG@ HNK @:F>L% ;NM P> =HG M <:K> B? RHN ;>