Multigenerational mayhem: Exploring Massive Chalice's bloodline system

Double Fine’s second Kickstarter-backed game Massive Chalice launched its 1.0 version to the public on Monday, going live on Steam and as an Xbox One Games for Gold title. The game offers a unique multigenerational take on turn-based combat. Players must arrange marriages and train their heroes' offspring in order to maintain a line of champions that can keep the monstrous forces of the Cadence at bay until the titular Chalice can restore peace to the land.

Project Lead Brad Muir explains that his team’s decision to build an entire game around this bloodline system began with an admiration for the permadeath feature in XCOM Enemy Unknown. By using permanent death and tweaking the odds so that player's squad members are likely to be killed or wounded on a regular basis, the game can naturally refresh itself and simulate changing tactics by forcing adjustments to the player's squad. 

“If you mess up, say you lose your high-level sniper, now you have a sniper-shaped hole in your squad that you have to fill," says Muir. "You have to get a rookie in there, and that puts stress on the other parts of your squad, and you play the game in a different way. Forcing players to mix up their squads like that was the number one goal of Massive Chalice's aging system.”

Muir says that he idea of offspring and bloodlines was a natural byproduct of an aging system. They were the most natural ways to and add and remove characters from the player’s squad. Muir’s first prototype can be seen in a streamed video from early in development:

He describes it as a janky simulation built in Unity, but many of the core design pillars that would make it into the shipped game were already in place. Using a map of Game of Thrones’ Westeros as a template, Muir and his team introduced the idea of keeps -- locations that would house special characters who rear and train up the next generation of heroes for the campaign.
 

As design progressed, Double Fine supplemented the keeps with other building types to give players more ways to “spend” their heroes and enhance their bloodlines. Muir says the team also strived to make sure that the bloodlines system didn't overshadow the rest of the game. Development resources were too limited to do create something so invovled and intricate, and developers definitely didn't want players obsessively min-maxing the genetic makeup of heroes to engineer a super race.  Muir speaks frankly about the potentially dark implications of the game’s core system -- after all, when you’re arranging marriages to make better heroes, you are essentially engaging in something akin to eugenics.
 

“That’s really scary," concedes Muir. "If we gave you too much insight into the system, you'd be able to see all the recessive genes, and you'd be like, ‘Well, this hero isn't slow, but they’re carrying the slow recessive gene, so forget them.’ That was something we wrestled with." 

Muir and his team had to be aware of the darkest social implications of this kind of system, and what it could startegies it could be training players to follow. They wrestled with design of this system, and he's willing to admit they didn't perfectly hit the mark. "The beginning of the game is most like eugenics in my opinion, when you have a group of characters and a blank slate to do whatever you want,” concedes Muir. 

To discourage players from coldheartededly cranking out übermensches, Muir and his team eventually complemented the genetic system with a personality system. The strength of heroes is thus the result of nurture as well as nature. Traits move down the bloodline from parents, but can also be imparted by a powerful mentor character stationed in a building called the Crucible.

This mentor character trains up new generations across the land, imparting personality traits along with experience. This allows for situations where characters may be genetically desirable heroes with negative personality traits.Or they might be weak and sickly, but have strong personalities that could change the tide of battle. (Muir laughs as he recalls how these mechancics led to a particular campaign in which there were several generations of heroic drunkards.) 

One particular social implication Muir had to deal with was May-December relationships. The game allows for a wide variety of marriages, which means that there are inevitable instances where players might place heroes in marriages with huge age gaps between the partners. “We talked about that one a lot.," says Muir. "It feels creepy, but ultimately, we decided that the player is in charge, and they get to decide where their lines are. Are you willing to put the 15 year old girl with the 80 year old man because it's the best thing for the nation right now?”

“This is a creepy thing this system is capable of, but we never force you into it," says Muir. "There’s also one random event in there -- you're not guaranteed to get this, mind you -- but if you make a May-December marriage, there is a random event that can fire where these people aren't getting along because of their age difference. That can kind of screw with your bloodlines.”

“I wish we had more of that, honestly," says Muir. "I like that that it might happen to you if you choose to go down that path. It's like the game is aware of its own creepiness.”

The challenge of designing how marriages work didn’t end there. Early on in the Kickstarter campaign, Double Fine decided to allow same-sex relationships in Massive Chalice. That presented its own suite of issues. 

Muir’s thankful that this was a challenge they could grapple with over the whole development cycle--and ultimately, he’s not sure they 100 percent hit the mark with this part of the system either. “One of the ideas people were pulling for was that you make a same-sex marriage, and they just adopt kids at the same rate that a hetero couple would have kids," he says. "But talking with some of my friends that are gay, they said, ‘that's weird because you're treating it identically. You don't want to erase the queerness.’ That really resonated with me, it is a different process, and it should be designed differently.”

The ability for same-sex couples to adopt hetero babies can be unlocked via a reaserch system -- but there's an opportunity cost, because this same research system can be used to discover new tactics or weapons. This means that it's inherently harder for same sex couples to have children, and requires trade-offs that other couples won't face.

“It's close to being the ideal solution, but I think that penalizing you on the research is not particularly fair, especially if someone wants to try the all same-sex playthrough," says Muir. He muses for a moment, trying to figure out if that’s even possible. Finally, he declares that they probably should have made a special achievement for anyone who accomplishes that task. 

The last major component of the bloodlines system are relics -- objects heroes pass down to their descendents when they die, or when they forsake their bloodline to dedicate themselves to research projects for the good of the realm. It's another method to hand experience points down from generation to generation.

According to Muir, these changed not just as a result of design testing, but because of the community feedback from Kickstarter funders who were eagerly following the development process. Relics started out as a  objects inspired by Catholic relics -- skulls and knucklebones and odd body parts that would be augmented with talent trees of heroes. But when Double Fine's backers thought of relics, they thought of named weapons from Middle-Earth like Anduil or Sting -- weapons that were passed from hero to hero over decades and centuries.

NOT seen in Massive Chalice. Photo by Paul Koudounaris/Thames & Hudson for The Guardian

“We went back to the drawing board on that,” Muir admits. “We weren't far into design, and that was the one area where our intuition as designers was not going to make people happy.”

In the adjustment, they did preserve Muir’s original mission for relics: creating a system that forced players to deal with permadeath, to readjust their squad based on the loss of their most powerful heroes, and to keep players focused on managing that power down the family tree.

Muir’s goal was to shake up how players interact with their core squad, and to make them deal with death. Now that Massive Chalice has launched, we can see that this goal has expanded to a range of systems that make players deal with birth and family life as well. And even if, by his own admission, it’s not perfect in how it grapples with these issues, these systems interact with the player’s social values in a number of surprising and interesting ways.