The design feels very European, especially with the emphasis on politics and collective action versus the rugged individualist ethos of other games in the genre. I asked Lars for his thoughts on it. "I definitely think that there's a very European, maybe even Scandinavian thing about Seed and the way it was about being part of a society, rather than just looking out for number one. Obviously, the strong focus and cooperation and belonging to a society was also designed to make people want to roleplay." He cited the politics as another nudge for roleplayers, saying, "As soon as people have something to vote about, they also have something to argue politically about. I definitely think that the fact that Seed was made by a Danish team meant a lot in terms of how the game was designed. I also think the fact that our main story writer was a woman played a role."
I asked what led them to that focus on the collective whole, and if they thought it wound up being a detriment to the game in the end. "Well, again, when people are encouraged to cooperate, rather than compete, they have a lot to talk about," he answered. "That is a good basis for roleplaying, as they could also have very different attitudes toward different questions, based on the persona they have chosen for themselves." However, he cites the game's "pseudo-economy" as a problem. "In Seed, you could barter all you wanted, but the in-game currency, APs, could not be exchanged from person to person. This was designed to keep all trade going through the elected people (that could exchange APs)." While this was an interesting way to create economy in theory, he says, "it basically just made a lot of things difficult for us, and made it impossible for players to 'set up shop.'"
The state-building dynamic centered on "rings" - guilds - players could join. Rings could vote on issues and try to install their members into the game's budding government, which was going to be an important part of the game. The players managed to get started before the game's demise, Lars says. "People made rings and voted for their ring members. This would, I think, have evolved into something like political parties. We were planning to include voting for 'issues': voting for or against proposed changes to the game world. Once such change could have been introducing a real currency. Another could have been changing the way the political system worked. We were hoping to eventually have the players define a political system for their own game-world, maybe a 'president' with a short term, or a representative democracy (like we have in Denmark). The players were beginning to exploit these ideas a bit, but didn't get a chance to take it very far."
That led into my next question: What happened? They had a unique concept, they had a core of players and they had some buzz. "What happened, or, rather, what went wrong, was that we released a game that quite simply wasn't sufficiently finished. This caused way too many of our beta players to leave us, and this caused us to bleed money too fast."
In the meantime, "we were [too] thinly stretched to operate and develop the game all on our own. We tried to fix those too big problems by searching for a publishing partner to help us out and to buy us some extra time to finish. While I think we were getting close to a deal, we ultimately didn't." I asked if he felt Seed's demise was inevitable. "I don't think it was inevitable," he answered. "I think we made some mistakes along the way, the biggest one being that we released too early. We had to, for financial reasons, but we probably shouldn't have, even if it seemed like the only possible option at the time. It is definitely a mistake I will never make again. I [would] rather simply fold a game and a company than release too early again."
As he'd said in his farewell post, he still didn't think a roleplay-centric, non-combat MMOG was a bad idea. I wondered why. He cited their buzz before E3, as well as "a community of 25,000 people and 15,000 signups for the open beta test. This was before E3, and this was without spending one dollar on advertising. ... I'd say that alone speaks volumes of how much a roleplay-centric MMOG is in demand. And there aren't any of them out there now that Seed is gone. All the others focus on other things, typically combat.
