Frostpunk 2 Preview and Q&A

It’s been over two years since Frostpunk 2 was announced by 11 bit Studios. Finally, the Polish developer invited Wccftech and other outlets for a press preview conducted remotely. The presentation began with a pre-recorded look at the new Utopia Builder.

The developers clarified the sequel takes place around thirty years after the events seen in the first game. Having survived the worst of the Great Storm, 11 bit Studios wanted to explore what came next. In Frostpunk 2, the scale will be much bigger, as what might have been the whole city after a successful playthrough of the previous installment is now just the central district of a burgeoning metropolis.

Not only will players get to build several districts, but the time scale is also going to be much wider, going up to years over the course of a long playthrough. As a result, the whole economy had to be adjusted to work on a supply and demand system.

That’s not to say resources won’t have to be well-managed. It is entirely possible to bungle it up and struggle with cold, hunger, and disease. However, the focus in Frostpunk 2 is more on the society side.

Since the Great Storm, two groups have risen with opposite mindsets: the Engineers, who value industrial and technical solutions to the city’s problems, and the Foragers, who survived outside the cities and are skeptical of relying on technology to solve their problems. When players build the Research Institute, they’ll be able to side with one or the other community in the so-called Idea Tree. For example, the Foragers would like to produce more food using human waste, while the Engineers want to use chemicals to make the soil more fertile.

Each community will have a reaction to the player’s choices as a leader. Ultimately, players will build what 11 bit Studios described as the most important location in Frostpunk 2: City Hall. This is where laws are established, and the player will need to gather support from the various factions in the council. Needless to say, making a promise and breaking it will erode trust. Laws can also be changed over time if needed. The developer then fast-forwarded the playthrough to two years later, when two new factions of extremists emerged, the Icebloods and Technocrats. Dealing with social tensions will be critical to the city’s long-term survival.

Following the presentation, 11 bit Studios answered a few questions about Frostpunk 2 in a press roundtable. The game still doesn’t have a concrete release date.

[WCCFTECH] The game has been confirmed to support AMD FSR 3 on PC. If you’re able to discuss it, I’d love to hear how long it took to implement and what level of performance you are seeing with it.

The implementation of FSR 3 was quite simple. It worked from the get-go. But the thing is that yes, we are using it and love it. Really. It’s amazing. It’s improving quality a lot and it’s especially useful for that kind of city you just saw in the presentation with a lot of details, not in singular buildings but in the urban clutter. FSR is helping us bring those details and clarity to the to the surface.

The dynamics of the council and group voting are very interesting. Did you look at any political science scholarship for guidance on this aspect of the game?

The quick way to answer is yes, we do our research. There’s actually a lot of influences that we have, even internally. I’m a psychologist, we have a sociologist and people with law degrees on the team, so we have a lot of context. I guess I wouldn’t say specific subject matter knowledge, but a lot of context. But yes, we did a lot of research on this. Specifically to the voting and the way the council works, there was one particular thing that we really wanted to try to make sure. We are making a game about the very heart of what politics is about. We try not to make a game a political game in the sense of simulating voting mechanisms. Who’s the whip, who’s the chairman? Whatever. These are the technicalities of ruling and of setting law.

What we want to specifically focus on is what this law setting is at its heart, which is really a discussion about a possible future for all of us, and in the case of the game and the inhabitants of the city. This was our guiding light in terms of why the council is there, what it’s for and how it works. We use it to showcase this very heart of negotiating a future among people of different backgrounds and clashing with the ideas about that future. The council is the arena for that clash.

Can you talk about failure conditions in Frostpunk 2? Is it all now related to the rise of dissenting factions in the game? Is the weather still measured?

It is measured. We did not forget the world is still frozen over, and it’s still very possible to just freeze to death. It is still a survival game in the sense that you can still mismanage your way into failure to starvation, lack of heat, et cetera.

Weather is definitely in the game, it just wasn’t a factor in the demo that you just saw, but it’s still there. Temperature is a factor, storms are a factor, et cetera. We’re not talking too detailed about this because the concept of the game really is about a different storm altogether.

This is really about this clash of ideas of what we define as the future, what we believe should be the future where the world is a blank slate and we can rebuild it however we see fit.

And this realization that you can really get quickly inconsiderate about the consequences of what you truly believe is the right choice for your people. You just might be missing that different people are thinking and looking at it a slightly different way, and what are the consequences of this?

We still want to say that this is a society survival game. We very much still want to stay within the framework that we created but really continue building on top of it rather than doing the same thing with Frostpunk 2. This was us asking, what does society survival truly mean? In this case, the answer is that true survival is surviving society itself.

For instance, what is more important to us is not to prepare ourselves to avoid freezing to death. What is important is to see and to show the ideas of how to adapt to the winter. Maybe my way of adapting is better than your way, and if you are pushing your way, then you are pissing me off.

This is more important, not the weather itself, but it is there, and it’s vivid. It’s hostile.

Are the two paths from the first title, Faith and Order, going to affect your starting position in this game? Are there going to be any knock-on effects from those choices?

This is a question about the scenario, which we are not going to answer in detail now. We can just assure you that scenario and expecting our fans to know what’s been going on in their favorite city on Earth is very much a thing on our minds.

The thing is that we are 30 years later. So, as you can imagine, people still remember Faith and Order. This really becomes a question of what this new generation built on top of these hard choices you had to make in Frostpunk in order to survive. What do they want to build now?

For Utopia Builder, can you tell us what other options we have for starting communities and map options?

We can’t really say anything in very much detail. We’re still work in progress on that. What we can say is that the whole point of making a mode like Utopia Builder is to have varied starting conditions, right?

An interesting tagline for it we have internally is this multiverse of dystopias, I guess, which really works if you truly have a range of options. The setup that you saw in the presentation was just one possible setup. There will be multiple starting setups as well as the factions that you can get during a playthrough.

What are the failure conditions?

To sum up, you can definitely freeze. So, the survival fail state is still very much present, although less front and center compared to the social failure situation. Really, this is well encompassed in this tagline that we have: ‘The city must not fall’. This notion is that every great civilization really starts crumbling from within. This is the true danger, this is the true enemy, the true risk if you do not manage the diverging ideas and the social landscape of the city.

But of course, as we said before, survival is still there. So if you do not fulfill basic needs, you will fail as well.

Can you get voted out? Can you lose your seat in the City Council??

Definitely. It’s one of the possibilities. Good question. And yes, it doesn’t always have to end in just a complete breakdown, but you can be just a lousy leader who gets voted out.

What is the goal you’re trying to accomplish? How do you win?

I guess there are two points to this. What we did not show very well on the Utopia builder is a choice of the end goal that you’re building out for yourself.

For the Utopia Builder, sorry, Conrad says that we can’t answer it in detail. But I guess what we can say about the Utopia Builder is that you are working toward fulfilling your ambition, and it’s a slightly different story for scenarios.

Thank you for your time.

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