Frostpunk: 1886 will let you zoom in on your people to see them suffer

'We don’t want to judge the player’

11 bit studios is in the process of converting its 2018 city builder Frostpunk to Unreal Engine, significantly improving the graphics while also adding new content to the dark alt-history game. One of the benefits of the new engine is that Frostpunk: 1886, which is expected to release in 2027, will allow players to zoom in on the individual citizens of the city of New London to see how they’re handling the brutal cold and harsh policies players implement to survive the endless winter.

“We plan to bring the camera closer and to improve the amount of animations of these people, so if a player wants, he can observe those people, how they are reacting and what they are doing,” 11 bit studios game director Maciej Sulecki told Polygon in a video interview. “I think this will bring a lot more emotions to this game.”

The idea to bring the camera closer came from 11 bit’s first game, This War of Mine, a brutal survival game focused on noncombatants living in a city under siege.

“We have a very good view on our civilians in This War of Mine and all of those animations, how they react, their comments, work very well,” Sulecki said. “We were able to create this bond between the player and those civilians.”

That bond is meant to add further weight to the decisions Frostpunk players make to keep New London running. In the original game, players could implement policies that led to brutal totalitarian rule or turned the society into a fantatical theocracy. While Sulecki wouldn’t provide any details, Frostpunk: 1886 will include a third radical path that players can fall into by making choices to control their society and push citizens to work more efficiently.

“We are creating situations with tough moral decisions that players can make,” Sulecki said. “We don’t want to judge the player. We’re just showing him the consequences of his decision and we give him the opportunity to judge himself.”

The developers are working to boost replayability by adding more maps to the eight included in the original Frostpunk. The expanded game will also launch with an endless mode for players who just want to test themselves against the frigid storms. Mods will also be supported at launch.

The Frostpunk: 1886 team and the Frostpunk 2 teams are working closely together, sharing ideas to decide what concepts should go in which game. Frostpunk: 1886 is set in the immediate aftermath of the storm that blanketed the world in ice, while Frostpunk 2 is set 30 years later as humanity has started to adapt to the cooler world.

“In the second game, we switched a little bit from [focusing on] nature to human nature,” Sulecki said. “We are showing that people are the enemies, how they are reacting to each other, the group dynamics. The player has to try to prevent those conflicts or solve those conflicts. You cannot defeat human nature. You just have to adapt and try to survive.”

11 bit studios’ obsession with winter as an implacable foe began with This War of Mine, where the change of seasons was used to ramp up the difficulty in the late game and force players to make some hard decisions to survive. The team did extensive research about surviving war, and learned that cold was one of the greatest dangers.

“Players started to search not only for food or water, but for something that you can put into the heater like books,” Sulecki said. “For us, it was really a simple mechanism but it presented the player with the dilemma, should I burn books? During the game, a player could craft some chairs and after the cold hits, a player might chop that furniture up to burn as fuel.”

While the developers started working on This War of Mine using historic research on World War II and the Bosnian War, Russia had invaded Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula by the time the game was released in 2014. After that, Sulecki said he only needed to turn on the TV to find references, which just solidified the studio’s desire to make meaningful games.

“Unfortunately, the world is getting worse and worse and the tension is constantly rising,” he said. “It’s really strange for us as developers, but it’s important to show people that the world can change.”