The sense that I've gotten from reading your posts, going back to 2012 and especially over the last year, is that simply running a galaxy is a lot more complicated than pointing everything in this direction or pointing everything in that direction. Running a galaxy exists in the gray areas[, am I interpreting this right]?
TL;DRThe speakers agree the setting was meant to be morally gray with no evil empire or perfect politicians, and more extreme candidates were kept limited to steer the game's direction while still hinting at storylines.
I mean, that was always one of the core tenets that Chris wanted when going in. It was like, we did not want the evil empire. We did not want everyone good. There was a lot of gray. You kind of liked people. You didn't like people. It was just tough... nuance to decision making.
Yeah, one of my favorite comments I like to see in any of the Imperial articles is when people start to debate policy positions, about how, oh, I really like this candidate because of this, but I really don't like that about that candidate. So I like that there are no straight white knights or straight terrible [candidates], there are shades of gray all around, because if there's a perfect politician out there, I've never met or I've never heard about him. So I wanted to make sure that we had a bit of that diversity of opinion, even within candidates, trickle on down through everyone.
And I mean, we had some of the more extremes in the earlier ones. There was, I can't remember his name, but there was the guy who was the real hardcore, I hate Tevarin, human first type dude.
Oh, yeah. Calvin Derry.
He didn't get past the primaries, right?
He got to the second round.
Yeah, he didn't get past the secondary.
But it became one of the things, again, going back to what we were saying earlier: yes, the community is picking, but we wanted to keep it a little hemmed in, just so it didn't take us in a direction where we're like, I'm not sure if the game would necessarily want to go that way. So that's why we kept them the way we did.
And if you go back and look at those primary candidates, those are touching on storylines that we want to have in the universe for you to come across, even though they're not the main political views. That human first initiative we want to have as a thread going on. I mean, he made it that far in the election process. So there's a lot of people who agree with that, even though it's a controversial stance. So we want that to come out when you're exploring the verse, running into people who feel this way.