Games of Throne: Noble Houses fight apocalyptic invasion in Massive Chalice

“It’s like the eighth book, when the White Walkers invade and everyone joins together to fight them off,” says designer Brad Muir. I can’t decide if he’s being optimistic that everyone would join together, or pessimistic about an eight book being needed. Regardless, the point is clear: Massive Chalice is a game that’s taking direct inspiration from the world and style of Game of Thrones.

Quick background: Massive Chalice is an upcoming PC game from cult developers Double Fine. It was Kickstarted last year, and has had a playable beta just released to premium backers. It’s a hybrid strategy/tactical role-playing game, very similar conceptually to the recent XCOM games. Half of the game is spent in turn-based combat, half of it setting up your characters and planning your strategies. It’s that it’s a fantasy game that takes place over centuries, and the inspiration it’s taking from Game of Thrones, that is exciting to me as both a gamer and GOT fan.

It’s got history, it’s got genealogy, and it looks like that gorgeous Thrones intro….

Chief among those advantages: Massive Chalice lets you build noble Houses like Game Of Thrones, right down to having House words. “If you wanna talk about Game Of Thrones influence….” says Muir, introducing the mottos to me. (If you’d like to see how their Houses were created, check out the Bloodline Editor.) 

Each of those Houses exists across the game’s 350 year timespan, fighting, marrying, taking over castles, dying, adopting, and so on. And every single one of those events adds to both the emotional and pragmatic history of each House. Your initial batch of heroes may start a set of the equivalent of Game of Thrones’ Great Houses, and they may amass powerful weapons. But they can still be weakened by their members.

The Houses also have a genetic history, where each character has certain traits that they’ll pass off to their children. Muir says it follows a fairly simple high school-level genetics map of recessive and dominant genes, but he’s keeping it under the hood so that players won’t be able to simply make their characters have superhuman. “We try to not use the word breeding.” Some of the skills are quite clever, like an overconfidence which makes the game show their chances of hitting enemies as higher than they actually are. Regardless, you might end up with a situation like the Lannisters, where a Jaime has great combat skills but isn’t so great for long-term leadership, and a Tyrion is the reverse. (Massive Chalice doesn’t take place in a gender-segregated world, so Cersei could fight as well.)

“I want [players] to embrace the fact that their favorite characters get old and die,” says Muir, describing another parallel between Massive Chalice and our favorite TV series. The weight of history dominates the game as it does Game of Thrones—who married who? Were their children able to carry on their legacy? Could the family defend their lands? Muir described situations where the semi-random effects of the game’s genetics could make the most recent scions of a House significantly weaker as individuals than their counterparts, but the House might have an epic weapon that makes them still effective fighters—history embodied by a simple gameplay item.

Massive Chalice also has a similar aspiration as Game of Thrones in that it doesn’t want to deal with conventional fantasy tropes, although it does so in a very different manner than George R.R. Martin’s story. For example, the three main character classes of the game aren’t traditional warrior/mage/thief, but instead are a bow-wielding hunter, a bomb-throwing alchemist, and perhaps the oddest of all, the “caberjack” who wields a mini-battering ram. This was the most—or really, the only—thing I was concerned about when I saw Massive Chalice. There is a sort of universal appeal to the idea of family swords, and I’m not sure a caber can fill the same role. Maybe over time I’d get used to it, though.

Muir’s idea for the game’s enemies, though, is far more interesting. “We wanted to stay away from….stay away from traditional fantasy enemies,” he said, so no orcs or dragons. Instead, the enemy, called The Cadence, is a Neverending Story-style slow swallowing of the world. “All of the enemies are based off of strange effects of time. Because that’s really the enemy that you’re fighting, is time. And The Cadence is really supposed to represent entropy.” So, for example, an enemy called a Lapse takes experience away from a character when it hits. Others will cause petrification, unchecked growth, or decay.

While the specifics of that are different from Game of Thrones’ White Walkers, I think the idea is somewhat similar. The undead hordes from Beyond the Wall aren’t specifically described as entropy, but the way that the long, supernatural winter they bring with them is described/foreshadowed by Old Nan and others indicates that the White Walkers bring with them a freezing death to civilization in Westeros, if not all humans. Whether Game of Thrones ever actually gets to the point where it becomes a desperate struggle against overwhelming supernatural forces is unknown, but it makes it seem like that’s a possibility—and Massive Chalice taps into the same idea.

Finally, Massive Chalice may also bring in Thrones fans based on its aesthetic. Much like Endless Legend, it utilizes a “building block” style that seems to take inspiration from the Game of Thrones intro. This may be true, but it also happens to coincide with an overall trend in game styles. Five years ago, the trend in retro-looking style was for games to look like Super Nintendo games, two-dimensional and pixellated (here’s Braid, for example.) The throwback look has moved forward, however, to the late-1990s Playstation era.

As Brad Muir puts it: “The low-poly art style came from a bunch of stuff. We’ve been working on it for a year and a half and I feel like high quality textures on low-poly has become a lot more popular in [that time].” (To translate: “low poly” is the number of two-dimensional shapes combined to become a three-dimensional object. Six would make a cube. Low-poly. High-poly. Texture quality indicates the detail of the “paint” over the shape.) In other words, there’s a kind of synergy between the popularity of Game of Thrones intro style and shifts in video game aesthetics. This is something I hadn’t even considered before I went to Double Fine to talk to Muir, but it’s hard not to see the two-way connection now.

I’m also delighted to see the influence of Game of Thrones in video games overall. The depth of the world and multiple types of stories being told in Martin’s books and on HBO’s series lend themselves to multiple kinds of games, like the strategy of Crusader Kings 2 or the tension of a Telltale adventure. I can’t wait to see how GOT-style history and genealogy manifest in Massive Chalice.

Double Fine is releasing playable early versions to Massive Chalice backers, so a wider release on Steam doesn’t look too far away.

• Published on 11/04/2014 at 10:00 AM CDT
• Last updated on 11/04/2014 at 10:00 AM CDT