Two former developers of EVE Online have been working with their studio Klang Games for over a decade to make an MMO where it isn’t just the world that’s persistent, your characters are too. Klang Games turned up at GDC this week to debut a new trailer with a song by Björk in the Future Games Show and to give me an overview of the current state of Seed.
Back when we first saw Seed in 2017 it was ambitiously name-checking inspirations like The Sims and Dwarf Fortress. That hasn’t changed much, as its third co-founder, CEO Mundi Vondi, adds titles like RimWorld to the cocktail of obsessively deep simulation touchstones while showing it off. It’s an MMO where your “Seedling” characters continue operating in the world even when you’re offline.
Klang Games’ society simulation covers everything from taxes and rules enacted by its player-run societies to all the individual bones in your character’s skeleton, Vondi says, with things like building and decorating individual homes and stores somewhere in between.
I didn’t ask about all the possibilities of biblically-accurate bones, but the developers at Klang were quite happy to recount some of the society-level drama that makes its EVE Online DNA quite apparent.
We live in a society
Societies are the backbone of Seed. Players within a society will be working together to build it up, whether as its lawmakers, business owners, or individual citizens collecting resources. They envision that societies could be run by Twitch streamers with big communities, or my own small group of co-op crafting game friends, or even PC Gamer, why not?
Societies with tons of members may develop into cyberpunk-y megalopolises full of buildings with resources gathered from the world by thousands of players’ Seedlings, intricately managed by laws made by its leaders, while smaller groups (like my friends) may have little hamlet societies where we’re just trying to level up our crafting skills high enough to build a water purifier for the first time.
Importantly, someone like me won’t be stuck choosing between slotting into cushy urban living and roughing it with my pals. If I’ve got multiple Seedling character slots on my account I can have those characters living in totally different societies with their own lives and jobs.
Klang describes how one society in Seed’s current closed beta had an administration change thanks to a bread dispute—history is cyclical, I suppose. One member was shorting the bread market, upsetting many other citizens. The society government stepped in, imposing a temporary 100% tax on bread for five minutes to bankrupt the bread shorter and normalize the market. Despite solving the immediate problem, the citizens of the society disagreed with the heavy-handed control and voted their governor out in the next election. Yup, that screams EVE Online to me.
The appeal seems pretty obvious for players who are already into things like RimWorld or Dwarf Fortress. The grognard grind of skills, resource collection, job assignments, and individual character health is something strategy and sim players collectively love.
Klang says it’s also trying to attract the players it refers to as “caretakers,” people like Sims 4 players who want to care for an individual character, follow their life, and tend to their home. They envision something with the longevity and player retention of EVE Online but more approachable and less combative—bread market warfare excepted. Klang suggests that an individual player might make a living decorating homes for others to earn in-game currency, as just one example of what a “caretaker” might enjoy carving out as their place in a society.
Though you can zoom in quite closely to follow your Seedlings and meticulously decorate their homes with plants and furniture you’ve crafted (or bought from other players) I’m not sure yet if I’d recommend a direct move to Seed for all lapsed Sims players, though the Venn diagram of interest overlap may be pretty sizeable.
Klang also shared that Seed will have a mobile app version so players can check in on Seedlings while away from the main game. Details are still being nailed down, but I might be able to pull up the app to check my characters’ needs, reassign them to new activities, or see selfies they’ve taken.
Players can chat with their Seedlings too, interesting in theory, but powered by generative AI which I suspect is going to make conversations ultimately kind of boring. Klang suggests that as Seedlings live and take on new experiences they’ll begin to have more interesting conversations with each other and with you, the player. What I saw briefly demoed though, and what I’ve seen in other games like Inzoi, has always felt uninteresting in the way generative AI text always seems to be.
For now, Seed is still in a closed beta state, letting in players gradually to keep testing out the society simulation. Klang says that it will be inviting more players into the testing pool soon but news about a wider launch isn’t happening just yet.
