Leading up to Frostpunk 2's launch this week, co-director Jakub Stokalski has given more insights into what to expect next from their acclaimed survival city-builder series and how they realized a feature they wanted in the game since day 1.
Frostpunk 2 Director Talks Modding and Gameplay Changes
Games Like Frostpunk Benefit from Having a Vibrant Modding Community
As previously confirmed by developer 11 Bit Studios, Frostpunk 2, its upcoming city-builder survival sequel, will have official full mod support at launch. With the game being built on Unreal Engine 5 (UE5), enabling mod support on Frostpunk 2 became much easier, according to co-director Jakub Stokalski who spoke with Polygon in a recently published interview. Stokalski mentioned that enabling mod support was something they have wanted to achieve ever since work began on the first Frostpunk installment. However, with the original game being built on 11 Bit Studios’ proprietary Liquid Engine, making mod tools available was "just not warranted" at the time.
"It’s something that we actually were wanting to do even since Frostpunk, but weren’t really able to. We built Frostpunk on our proprietary engine, which allowed us to do a lot of cool custom things," Stokalski explained, "but the investment needed to make it available to the players was just not warranted. This decision is a lot easier now, because Unreal is an established game engine with a known pipeline for this type of stuff." And with Frostpunk 2 enabling full mod support, Stokalski believed it will help with the longevity of the game and maintaining sustained interest from its player base.
"Strategy games, and PC games in particular, benefit from having a vibrant modding community," he said. "People enjoy playing with the games — not only by playing them. That’s a great thing to support, period." Stokalski added, "The community for Frostpunk and Frostpunk 2 seems to be very invested not only in the game, with the way the game works, but in the world of the game. There’s people coming up with fanfiction, like writing different scenarios, playing scenarios on Reddit in correspondence form. So just having the opportunity for those who would like to have a go at trying to expand this world to what they imagine is exciting for the whole team."
While enabling mod support was a relatively easy task this time around, the co-director shared it was coming up with the "whole concept of the game" that was one of the most difficult parts during development. "In a way, this proved to be a very hard design challenge," he said.
"It was like trying to tread this fine balance of realizing the vision about diverging ambitions and taking away a bit of the player fantasy, while still not making them hate it, basically, and feel constricted and not really being able to do anything,"Stokalski remarked, "which, I’m sure real-world politics is a bit like that, but we did not want this level of realism in the game. It was very, very hard."
At the very heart of the Frostpunk series is its narrative experience, said Stokalski: "On top of all of that is the fact that Frostpunk 2, as Frostpunk was, is at its very heart, I think, a narrative experience. Story is one thing, but a narrative in the sense of me as a player, pouring my agency into what the game allows me to be, and having the experience that comes out of it be an experience that is narratively coherent."
Frostpunk 2 releases soon for the PC on September 20, and puts you in the shoes of a steward of a city built around a steam generator.
