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Klang Games' SEED is an MMO about social collaboration in a vast living world, and it has grown a lot since we first saw it, both narratively and in terms of interconnections and consequence. Here we sit down with co-founder and CEO Mundi Vondi to discuss the latest developments, the complex life of the Seedlings, violence in the current global context, or the Björk collaboration.
"Hi Gamereactor friends, today we're gonna talk about a game we've been following for a few years now that recently got, you know, bigger and more interesting and released a trailer around GDC so thank you so much for joining us, Mundi You know, we talked about SEED at Gamescom 2018 I think, then in 2019 it was slightly different, it was different and now it grew bigger, more beautiful, and I think more interactive, more interesting, as I said I don't know if it's closer to release now, but what can you tell us about the progression from those years to the build we saw at the recent trailer?
So it's still the same vision, but I think just like the concept of building a multiplayer simulation like this has just led us to places we maybe didn't expect and so I think as we look towards the future there's maybe a little bit more clarity around how this is supposed to work I think the vision has always been, you know, something exciting that we've all been excited about but achieving it has always been a bit of a mystery and that's maybe why it's taken so long because we've just had to kind of really fumble in the dark, so to speak, to find the experience but we're really starting to see the fruits of that labor now and players are really having fun in there, building cities and simulating societies and so I think what we wanted to make sure with the trailer and kind of like how we're coming back into the limelight now we kind of went into a bit of a stealth mode after, I guess, 2019 or so when we last spoke because we had kind of pivoted a few times we had marketed a version of it called Seed Pioneers that had more of a kind of survival theme and then we swung back and we went more into a kind of a live sim direction so we removed some of the survival mechanics and now ended up kind of combining the two again so it is again like a live sim but has survival elements and yeah, so the tone is like it's not so black or white I think that's kind of what has been something that we are really excited about is actually creating a tone for the game that is quite white and includes both, you know, a kind of utopia and a dystopia and everything in between I don't know if that answers your question You mentioned labor and fruit but this is not about agriculture this is called SEED but it's actually not about nature and growing your labor, right?
So what can you tell me about the social aspects specifically?
This is about the Seedlings and how they interact with each other how players can sort of modify those communities and build new things for them So as it is right now, what can you tell me about the social aspect specifically?
So for the first time, I mean, players will be able to build societies with more than a thousand people together so what we've always aspired to do with SEED is to create that type of playground where more players can play together than before and I think that's what we've kind of had to navigate in all of its glorious complexity finding a way for so many people to play together is the true kind of challenge of SEED but what it does, it does bring a very deep social cohesion, so to speak So people that do play SEED for real, they are sending countless messages and you're not playing with your hands stuck to WASD and the mouse so you're doing a lot of communication and players are, of course, debating how to run their societies what to produce in the factories or what laws or policies they should enact who they should vote as the next leader and we're only just beginning to explore a far greater area there So yeah, I would say it's pretty damn social It is a game about collaboration and competition there aren't really any other threats at the moment there are not any monsters in there at the moment it's just other people so it's all about how do people work together or against each other and create those emergent stories that come from that and so what we've tried to do is keep it as open-ended as possible to allow people to really surprise us I always say that more than half of SEED is built by the players because without them it's almost like a canvas there's nothing there really and then that's when the game really comes to life There are no monsters, but there is violence I don't know if you keep this, players can kill siblings, if I'm correct or each other What can you tell me about this, about violence in this game?
We're actually just introducing Law & Order in the following months now so we did want to put it in the trailer before actually having some of those mechanics in the game I want to be completely honest It is a cinematic trailer to show what we aspire to achieve but yeah, we want to have violence in there I think that may sound very counterintuitive to social simulation where you want everybody to work together in harmony but if we look at games like Sims Online for example or Habbo Hotel that had really strict non-violence policies you end up with different type of violence violence that you can't really fight against so of course Habbo Hotel had a really tragic story there and Sims Online, the players used peeing on each other's lawns to harass one another and actually had one of the most sophisticated cyberbullying mafias in gaming history in Sims Online so I think in some ways violence is a necessary evil what we've always wanted to avoid is a situation where you have an admin that can be a tyrant and nobody can do anything about it that's kind of the situation in most guild systems, in most MMOs so violence can also be used for good if that makes any sense that didn't sound right not in today's climate anyway well if you want to bring down the government of your society you should be able to do that by force but it's also about self-policing and so having law and order and actually consequences to your actions is kind of where it all boils down to so if you think about most MMOs or multiplayer games you can kind of do whatever and there are no real consequences you respawn, you don't really..."
"so in SEED there are going to be really dire consequences you can be extradited from your society even resulting in...
so if you misbehave in the collective then that can be the outcome so this way we aim to see a much better behaved player base and I think without consequences you kind of inevitably get this very toxic behavior you see in a lot of multiplayer games today yeah, you mentioned consequences which was something I wanted to ask about so that's fantastic but there is another thing you mentioned which is, you know, this was this cinematic trailer sort of the story trailer, right?
so how do you deliver the narrative here being an MMO with many players and many siblings at the same time and also what can we expect to do like when we start a game like is it very guided from the get-go does the narrative play an important role right there or how do you handle both things you know, delivering the narrative and what players have to do when they start a game well, so a lot of it depends on how you start the game so if you start with a group of friends and you want to build a society from scratch then you kind of deploy together in the middle of nowhere and you just must... you have nothing and it's actually quite hardcore so I would maybe say then the survival is at its very peak you know, you must find water and food and set up shelter and make sure to cook the food and clean the water otherwise you start to get infections and you'll get injuries from chopping even trees because you're unskilled labor at that point so it's quite hardcore but really like engaging and I think that's quite fun and then we do put a lot of kind of helpful guide rails or guard rails for you then so that we tell you what you need to do to progress to the next kind of phase of society what we saw is that we would kind of have people start society and then they would kind of unlock our suite of political tools and it would be so overwhelming that they wouldn't really..."
"they would very often just get stuck at that point and so we needed to kind of breadcrumb players through that a little bit so what happens then is that quickly after starting society and doing a few objectives you now have to elect who's going to be the camp leader and so it immediately starts getting political even in a small group and then the camp leader must choose who's going to be the housing manager and so it starts to really kind of grow in complexity and your goal at that point is of course to survive and build the foundation of that society but also to then start recruiting more people in and then as you hit new and new society phases you're going to get more and more space for more and more Seedlings so whether those Seedlings come from new players or from the already existing players as players can of course manage multiple Seedlings that's up to them and then of course for a more casual experience you can join an already established society that has apartments and education systems and healthcare and all the rest and enjoy a more life sim like experience there that revolves around career growth relationship building and such things and of course in that scenario you can build also a business let's say that there's not a lot of cafes in that society you can build a cafe and so what you do is very open in many ways it is of course a sandbox and so we do give you objectives that the Seedlings want so the Seedlings are going to want something kind of to fulfill their bucket list or life goals they will want a partner, they will want a house and so we give you those types of objectives and they can be smaller objectives as well they may want a thing or two but those are meant to just help you know at a glance what you can do to improve your situation because it is quite..."
"those objectives do not go beyond the most casual core loop which is the life sim loop so if you want to go into business, start your own company that's all on your own you just have to want to do that and then it creates of course like society not everybody is supposed to be running a business or going into government yeah, does that answer the question?
yes, yes, yes and I guess as everything happens real time if you want an even more casual experience you just relax and watch everything happen is there a big intent on that?
like for it to be very good for spectators and for streams and for players to just watch what's going on in this world where there's so many things going on yeah, we think streamers are going to have a great time you know, playing with their community because I think we've seen examples of that in Minecraft where kind of streamers flood some servers with like a hundred players I think it's awesome I wish there was more games that could kind of support that type of experience I don't think Minecraft even supports it that well I mean, it's of course super cool and immersive but like SEED is really made for that so I think it's a very awesome thing to kind of like, if you have a streamer playing SEED kind of join into the community you know, live in there see that community being streamed I expect streamers to feature oh, look at this new, I don't know, club that's been built here in my city or like talk about how they're going to raise taxes on some exports that type of dialogue between the streamer and their audience I think is something that SEED will very uniquely deliver on yeah, fantastic and finally, I mentioned Björk I don't know if I mentioned her but of course the music was very fitting to the last trailer so can you tell me about this how you managed to get her in the trailer and how has it been received by both the community and the developers I mean, of course, everybody loves Björk so it's been received exceptionally well and we're of course nothing but humbled and honored to have gotten her to agree to this we actually ranked it as cinema in Iceland and pitched SEED to her her and a few of her friends in the audience and it was just all really fun and great yeah, and it came together really quickly I think what she saw in SEED is something that we all see which is just, could SEED be a platform where we experiment with politics and economies and maybe get a better understanding of how to deal with the rampant corruption and chaos we're seeing in the world so I think we all have these big bold ideas and opinions about economies and politics but we just shout it into the void a lot of the times and we don't ever get a place to test things out and so we try to be really true to the situation that humanity is in and try to reanimate that in SEED and I think for her, using technology for good has always been one of her catalysts and so I think that's what got her excited about SEED I've known her actually for a few years of course being Icelandic, it's not the biggest country and so the creative industry is quite small there but it was just amazing to get her on board That's fantastic, that's a beautiful message and of course we being based in the Nordics we've always been very close to Icelandic people as well and have people in our team as well so that's a beautiful message to wrap this up but when can we expect to get our hands on SEED?
We want to play, we want to experiment with these societies When is the next milestone or playable build that we can look forward to?
We are running a closed beta so if you do go to our website, if you do go to Discord you'll find all of the relevant information or seed.game to sign up for that and we are constantly letting in more and more players especially if you group up and you apply to start your own society then you have an even faster track because we're really trying to find these atomic groups to get going and see how they take off and really make sure that we're paving the way for them there so that's already happening and then maybe something big happens this summer but I'm not allowed to talk about that Maybe, well we met for the first time at Gamescom so that happens in the summer but I don't know, perhaps around those dates we can learn more about SEED Thank you so much for your time Enjoy the rest of the development I think it's a very interesting project It's always been so my hat's off to you guys at Klang and looking forward to playing the next builds Hey, thanks so much for having us on and excited to see you in there Take care, bye "
