The Bloodlines DLC is the result of listening carefully to the feedback you’ve all made over the last six months. You have shown us that the game is at its best when the relationships and drama between characters come to the fore, and no group of characters are more salient than your family. We also wanted to add some specific features that have been requested pretty frequently, and which we feel would naturally enrich the game. Bloodlines ties these elements together under the theme of dynasty and legacy.
You can pick up Bloodlines for $7.99 / €6.59 / £5.79
In this dev log, I want to focus on the first feature of the DLC, the new family designer. But before that, here’s a preview of how configuring a new start will change in the base game, in the 1.0.3.0 patch that accompanies the DLC: an across-the-board change that’ll improve things for players of the base game and DLC alike.
You can read the full patch notes of the Bloodlines + base game update here.
Base Game Changes to New Game Configuration
This is the new House configuration screen, in which you define the details of your house, and its traits. In contrast with the previous system, your starting traits are now split into two separate lists: one for your house, and one for your starting character. You are no longer forced to choose whether to have a strong starting character at the expense of a weak house. Instead, the strength of both your starting character and house will depend on the difficulty setting. A harder difficulty means fewer points, but remember: you can (should?) take a few negative traits to give you the points to buy positive traits you want.
You’ll notice several new things about the screen. First, you can now define your Succession Rule and manipulate how many Family Customization Points you have. These are both features that are tied to the DLC and will not be available in the base game (more on both later).
One thing I’ll draw your attention to is the “Load Config” button at the bottom of the screen. This will allow you to load the setup you used in a recent game, which means you no longer have to configure your house and starting character from scratch every time you start a new game. Some players want to “reroll” the starting galaxy a few times; we want to support that.
This is the new Starting Character configuration screen. You can now choose to start the game at a younger age. Another new element is that you can now choose how well rounded your character will be in terms of their secondary skills.
One nice quality-of-life feature is that you can now randomize different parts of your starting character separately. If you’ve defined your character’s stats but want to try some different portraits, you can randomize the latter without losing everything else.
Family Designer
The Family Designer will give you the freedom to start the game with the family you desire. Want to start the game as a single young upstart, looking to build a dynasty from scratch? You can. Want to roll your own family and friends and conquer the galaxy? You can! Want to build the Space Lannisters and scheme your way to ultimate power? You can, and more.
You can also add members to your starting houses that are not related to you. This allows you to build starting houses with trusted inner-circle friends and advisors who aren’t kin. (Internally we’ve been calling these people “Duncan Idahos,” for any Dune fans among you.)
Although the Family Designer is mostly focused on your own House, you can use marriage ties to influence your relations with foreign Houses at the start of the game.. When you add a spouse to one of your family members, you can select the type of House that character came from. Your spouse can be the relative of a lowly noble, or they can be the relative of a duke. That duke will then be generated and added to the game when it is created. When adding parents or (adult) children to your family, you can also define them as having married outside of the family, similarly establishing relationships to foreign houses.
This could create political opportunities for you down the line, since those foreign House heads are now kin to you, and will view you more favourably. But having ruler relatives is about to become more important for a different reason… but more about that in the next dev log.
Same sex marriages are supported, whether it’s you or your other family members getting hitched. If you add children to those marriages in the family designer, they will be the natural offspring of the character that is your blood relative, and the stepchildren of that person’s partner.
Lastly, the family designer also comes with tools to generate families for you if you just want to jump right into the game. Or perhaps you want to see what kind of weird random family you can manage to take to galactic pre-eminence.
One limitation of the designer is that it does not allow for “historical” information. For example, you cannot define a long dead ancestor for the house. Similarly you cannot define a divorced spouse from which your first child was born - all your children are assumed to be the children of your other spouse (unless you are in a same sex marriage, as covered above). The tradeoff is simplicity, both in understanding how the family is laid out, and of the toolset to generate it. We still think you can put together some pretty interesting custom families, even if not every conceivable Space Family is quite covered.
Balancing Families
One challenge with the new Family Designer is how to keep the game balanced. As fun as it is to roll your own family, or one that mimics a family from your favorite book or tv show, we also want to prevent the player from rolling a family of superheroes that spoil the challenge of the game. To manage this, you will have a number of Family Customization Points which you spend on family members. Older (i.e. more skilled) characters, characters with lots of traits, and characters that establish links to other houses are more expensive. You can build a balanced family, or one that is very good in one or two areas. You can build a family with a set of children that will grow and flesh it out, or you can sacrifice the next generation for some highly skilled members in the here and now. The system should allow for multiple viable builds and strategies. We can’t promise this system is perfectly, unassailably balanced, but we did spend an entire week bashing out families to try and break the game, so we’ve taken care of the worst exploits.
Back to that Family Customization slider you saw in the House Configuration screen: one way you can get a larger family is to give up some of your House trait points. You can also do the reverse: start with a very small family, and instead invest in a stronger set of House bonuses.
However, despite the need to make balanced starting families, we didn’t want to restrict you from building whatever family you wanted. So on the Custom difficulty setting you can give yourself a lot more Family Customization Points, allowing you to build whatever family you wish, as long as it respects the house’s size limit (but there’s also a new house trait that gives your house a bonus to your house size limit). And yes, we did try building Space Starks and Knock-off Atreides to make sure you’d be able to as well.
More Info To Come!
There are of course more things to explore in Bloodlines, but the family customization was worthy of its own separate dev log. I didn't want to spill the beans on everything just yet, and want to give you a chance to find all the new features in Bloodlines yourself. The next dev log will be coming soon, and will be about the other features in the DLC: child upbringing, managing inheritance, and bloodline upgrades!
Make sure you pick up Bloodlines, and let us know what you think on Discord or on the Steam forums!
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