“I’m saying this on camera and millions of people will believe it”: How Suzerain Stories: The Neutral Lens lets you shape the news
The original Suzerain, a political strategy game presented as a visual novel, cast you in the role of Anton Rayne, the newly elected President of fictional country Sordland. You had to tackle political turmoil as the leader of a country coming out of years of authoritarian rule, while also dealing with an economic crisis, and threats from the powerful nations neighbouring your borders. In the Kingdom of Rizia DLC, you left elected politics behind and, instead, sat in the inherited throne as King Romus Toras. Though your absolute power was tempered by anti-monarchists, breakaway states, and corrupt vassals.
The stakes in new DLC Suzerain Stories: The Neutral Lens are significantly smaller. You are just a journalist, Ilias Moris, the anchor on international news program The Neutral Lens. The decisions you make don’t restrict trade in ports, pass laws that limit freedoms, or send citizens to war. Instead you’re picking what question to ask in an interview or where to send your reporters for a scoop.
But how much impact decisions the press can make on the world is exactly the point.
Moris and his team gather information to construct their reports and they then choose how to present the facts, choices which may have far-reaching consequences. “Just like with any of our games, we really want to put you in that situation and then experience it,” Torpor Games’ CEO Ata Sergey Nowak says. “It’s like, ‘Well, if I say this, in that country, those people might now believe this, but the world might believe that if I depict it this way'”.
That change of perspective, from a behind-closed-doors politician to a public-facing broadcaster shifts the tone of all your actions. “When the cameras are on, the context is completely different [even if] the gameplay feels like it’s just another choice like any visual novel,” Nowak explains. “You’re like, ‘Oh, I’m saying this on camera and millions of people will believe it.”
Choices you make in how you depict a story are where you will feel the most pressure.
“You can be very dry and factual – ‘This is what we know and this is what it is’ – but the game also goes into [how] that doesn’t make it really exciting for viewers,” Nowak says. “You can be more sensationalist, you can be more edgy. All these things are in some shape or form represented in different interviews, but also the choices you make in the game.”
Beneath those choices, is a needling reminder that in shaping the story, you are changing it. The title – The Neutral Lens – was picked to be “provoking”, Nowak says. Of course, no journalist’s story is truly neutral; the moment one fact is selected or omitted, the story gains an inflection of the teller’s intent. And you will see the impact your framing can have. One question the team are exomploring, Nowak says, is “as a journalist how much can you really change things? We’ve interviewed journalists, we’ve interviewed the media regulators as part of our research and that came up. How much does journalism truly change the world is something we’re exploring.”
On the question of changing the world, in a more game-y sense, The Neutral Lens won’t be considered ‘canon’. Although The Neutral Lens is set in the same world as Suzerain and Kingdom of Rizia, your choices won’t impact your campaigns in those games. In those earlier releases, your choices were reflected in eachother – with references to what that President of Sordland has been up to appearing in Rizia’s newspapers and vice versa. The Neutral Lens won’t use your save file’s timeline, but that doesn’t mean you won’t report on some of those large events.
This will be true of any DLC Torpor releases under the ‘Suzerain Stories’ banner. “We want to keep these experiences more open,” Nowak says. “They are actually more independent and more free. That’s their point. Whereas the main country experiences, you can save game transfer your playthrough from each to the next and they all affect each other at different levels, are more restrictive – but of course more detailed and branching. In Stories we’re like ‘No, no, this is open ground. We want to be able to play with stuff.”
While Nowak stresses that Stories is a smaller experience than Suzerain and Rizia, he says that also gives it a focus you won’t find in the larger games. “Neutral lens is a very expressionistic experience,” he explains. “It’s the least strategic experience, the least game experience we’ve ever made. It’s way lighter than Suzerain, way more focused. It’s purely about depiction and the cast around you, the people who manage the studio and the people you interview, of course.”
Though, you will still be able to make strategic choices in how you run your news room. The Neutral Lens programme has a tight budget, but you can choose where to establish foreign correspondents. Having reporters on the ground means you get stories you would otherwise miss, and from sources that may be more trustworthy. “You get to pick and choose what to cover from those bureaus that have done the investigations, that have done the reporting, and you’ve funded those operations, and they bring you interesting things to cover,” Nowak explains. Otherwise, you may be receiving your stories directly from the spokespeople of the factions at the centre of events.
This all sounds wonderful, but it is bringing back memories of the time I played the boardgame Fit To Print, and bankrupted my small woodland newspaper because I ran full-page spreads on village fetes and forgot to leave places for any money-making adverts. (An experience I didn’t share when applying for this job.) Hopefully, Suzerain Stories: The Neutral Lens won’t let me overspend quite so much that I have to sell all the studio’s camera and run all our bigshot interviews with President Anton Rayne and King Romus Toras as black screen radio shows.