The breeding revamp sounds very intriguing, but I'm also a little nervous about how it will actually play out. If breeding can only be accomplished by having high enough fame, new or less active players will struggle to breed a single new beast, if any at all. The early stages of the game would just involve tons of grinding to finally get more than two beasts, and that would be frustrating.
Your approach supposes that breeding is a core element of gameplay, and it’s impossible to play without it like in other pet games. This is not the case.
Talking of new players, the first baby will be free. Also it’s possible to get new Beasts without breeding by fulfilling the tasks and matching the conditions of the wild Beast factions.
We by all means will try to avoid earning fame through the grind. There won’t be activities like “gather 10 wood - get 1 fame”. Fame is supposed to be earned in big bulks for significant achievements.
It's common in pet sites for some players to get bored after a while, and decide to clean all the pets off their account so they can start fresh. Like resetting a game. But BeastEon would penalize them for doing so. If selling beasts or getting rid of them in any way is portrayed as a negative thing, then players will be stuck with the same beasts they had at the very beginning with no opportunity to get rid of them without being guilted by the game.
The possibility to reset a game is planned. The game won’t penalize you as a player in this case. You start playing as a different Beastlord. Your previous Beasts won’t disappear from the world, but you will have no relation to them.
But yes, if players do something bad they will receive unpleasant consequences. Chasing away a member of your manor or sending it away to another manor against its will is a bad thing. Leaving unwanted Beast in your manor but treating it badly is a bad thing as well. It will hate you. While it lives with you, it can spoil your property, seek revenge, and become a big headache until you resolve this situation somehow. Why is that? Not for a purpose to frustrate players or add unnecessary complications. We’re trying to make a game about the interaction between players and pets and not about collecting of pixels. There’s a lot of great pet collecting games already without us :)
We may create an extremely complex neural network, model the needs, desires and goal-setting for Beasts. But if players don’t get any negative response from their Beasts, they won’t feel any consequences of their actions and choices, and this whole dynamic complex system won’t have any purpose. No matter what you do, everything stays well. Players will perceive Beasts not as personalities with AI but only as extremely predictable pixels which always provide the same result no matter what you do with them.
One would also expect that after playing the game for a while, a player would eventually breed beasts that were genetically superior to their starters, and that it would be more advantageous to build fame and train skills on these new beasts than stick with the starters. This would make the starters obsolete, but again, the game would penalize the player for trying to get rid of them.
You don’t seek to obtain genetically stronger-faster-smarter Beasts but rather those who do a certain task better and fit your gameplay style. There are a lot of specializations in the game. A pet can’t be good in all of them at once. For example, aggressiveness is useless or even harmful for an artist but important for a fighter while it’s vice versa for sensitivity.
Your task as a Beastlord is to find your Beast an occupation where it will excel. There won’t be Beasts who are great in everything, but there’s a specialization for everyone.
I understand your concerns about pets being treated resonsibly, but taking care of real-life pets isn't a game with any ulterior goal beyond simply giving the pet a happy life. (Unless you train them for competitions or something.) In a game, I'd want to have choices and possibilites, and limiting me to a small handful of beasts where new ones were very difficult to obtain and old ones could not be gotten rid of seems very inflexible.
This is closer to the goals of a collectible game where a player tries to get as large variety of different pets or items as possible instead of managing and developing those that they have. We’re trying to create a game in a different genre, namely creature and society simulation. We plan to provide a lot of choices and possibilities within this genre :) Giving a happy life to your Beasts is one of your primary goals as a Beastlord. You will need to manage the needs of each Beast and plan how to develop its personality and specialization. You will have a possibility to get more Beasts if you decide to play more and cover more specializations within your manor. Beasts are supposed to resemble live creatures, just not domestic ones who depend on their owner completely. They are intelligent and more or less autonomous beings.
