What's the point of allowing players to 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 gaining power, and what is a villain if not someone who craves power above all else?
But 11-Bit Studios has received praise time and again for thinking about cruelty in a different way. In This war of mine AND Icepunkexplored the dark choices people make in times of crisis. Frost Punk 2 continues this tradition, returning players to the frozen city of New London after it survives the events of the first game.
Now these choices present themselves in a different context. In Icepunkplayers struggled to survive a snowstorm that consumed the entire planet. In Frost Punk 2Players must now decide what society will be like on this new snowy land. Multiple factions (some moderate, some fanatical) push the player to follow different paths for the future. Each holds the potential for immense damage.
11-Bit hopes that players won’t become numb to these choices, or that if they do, it will help them think about how people in power become so cold. The studio was determined, as Game Director Jakub Stokalski said, not to make the game a “jackass simulator.”
Frost Punk 2The Zeitgeist system measures moral values to force player choices
Stokalski is a bit of a fanatic himself, a fanatic of meaningful game design, that is. He gave speaks at events like Game Developers Conference on how developers should take 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 the experience with more nuance [values],” he said, gesturing for emphasis. Power, he said, is how developers can build value into game mechanics.
In IcepunkThese mechanics are embodied in what 11-Bit Studios calls “the zeitgeist system.” It’s a system that interacts with the game’s core survival mechanics, including faction sentiment, tension, heating needs, health, cleanliness, food supplies, and crime. Keeping all of these elements in balance while exploring Frostland is the core element of the game.
While variables like temperature drops and population growth can determine those numbers, the zeitgeist system turns players on their head by forcing them to bounce the needs of different factions off each other. Each faction is assigned 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” megalopolis in New London.
Evolvers disapprove of laws and tech tree upgrades that make city life easier at the expense of expansion, while Faithkeepers despise expansive improvements. They express their approval or disapproval after the player completes certain quests, passes laws, or researches tech tree advancements.
The “council” system is one that Stokalski said 11-Bit is particularly proud of. It’s a space where conflicting values directly collide and force the player to make deals for different votes, which keeps the push and pull of running New London moving. “You basically end up [making] a parliament, which I hate by the way,” he joked. “We are really making an effort to frame all of our politics in a way that speaks to the core of what politics is, which is negotiating a common future, rather than the technicalities of [real-world] parliaments.”
Image via 11-Bit Studios.
The system offers two fun design advantages. First, it opens the door for players to override laws, something they couldn't do in the first Icepunk. If they committed to an oppressive decision, there was no going back for them. Factions that ask players to revisit laws drive updates that shape the state of the city and are constantly being overturned.
The second has to do with the vote counting itself. Most policies start with a mix of voters against and for a law, with the rest “undetermined.” Players can secure the votes of factions by making promises, or just let it slide and see where the votes end up. Instead of simply spitting out a result, 11-Bit created a display that shows the votes being counted, creating visual tension as players wait to see if a vote succeeds or fails. It has the same energy as watching a die roll in Baldur's Gate 3.
Just as in real-world politics, there is a certain excitement in seeing the fate of society being decided before our eyes.
How do you build your own Zeitgeist system?
Experience Frost Punk 2The Zeitgeist system is exciting. You can see the hard work that 11-Bit has done to keep the state of New London in constant tension. Even when things are going well and everyone is in harmony, there is a sense that at any moment something it will go badly and the player will return to the table, fighting to secure votes or considering whether he can afford to stifle a protest.
It also appears to have been tremendously difficult to make. Frost Punk 2 has been in development since 2020 (not counting initial prototyping in 2019). 11-Bit has changed game engines three times along the way. And because of the way the studio operates, each early prototype and each vertical slice needed a lot more polish than other games typically aim for, to convey the “feel” the team is going for.
Even after the game’s direction and tools were in place, the Zeitgeist system required constant testing, as each new feature added complexity that disrupted existing work. Stokalski explained that 11-Bit didn’t hard-code certain types of decisions for factions, wanting every reaction and request to be as emergent as possible. “It’s about making sure that everything that drives variability in your system is actually built into the system itself, rather than trying to play whack-a-mole with all the different issues that can happen,” he said.
Image via 11-Bit Studios.
If the team wanted a faction to react in a specific way to a decision, they would create a custom mission that made it clear to the player that this was a difficult point to negotiate.
Making the system fun and coherent also sometimes showed the limits of Stokalski's passion for the “new language” of game design. Creating the Zeitgeist system meant sacrificing a lot of the organic weirdness that can arise from real-world relations between ideological factions. The game doesn't express the strange rules of legislative bodies like the American obstructionism can model the process that determines what kinds of laws can be passed.
Furthermore, it fails to fully capture the intentional hypocrisy of a “law and order” party. activating the police forces when they are surveying their voters and preferred candidate.
But that's the cost of ensuring that a game like Frost Punk 2 It's compelling and not just a timid attempt to simulate reality.
Cruelty in Frost Punk 2 that's not the point
Stokalski made it clear why enabling player cruelty is such a useful tool in game design: Cruelty often represents player freedom, while pursuing moral superiority sometimes means stepping away from a game’s functionality or content. “You only do evil things if you’re doing it for fun,” he noted.
These systems don't bother him (they're just not the ones he wants to make), but he said that if a game wants to explore morality, it would benefit from remembering that “no one wants to be an evil person.”
“You don't do bad things because you want to be bad, you do them because you're driven by a certain set of values,” he said. “The trick is that those values aren't the same for everyone.”
So inside Frost Punk 2carrying out evil actions such as starving a population, allowing torture, or sentencing a faction to death are bound to emerge from the values that guide the player's strategy in managing society.
This would be the main difference from turning it into an “idiot simulator”, as Stokalski called it.