The Tomorrow Children Director On How To Deal With Griefing

It looks like Dylan Cuthbert, President of Q-Games and Director of The Tomorrow Children, is on a revealing spree. After revealing more details on the alpha and admitting that the studio is kind of “going on a limb” with the game, he shared some gameplay information on the dedicated Neogaf topic.

Because of the social nature of The Tomorrow Children, some users legitimately expressed concers regarding the potential griefing; Cuthbert explained why it shouldn’t be a problem.

You can move to a different town.
Also there will be ways to report players and if they get reported enough they will get deported by the ministry to a different town where there are other players like themselves!
However before that happens, you will naturally have been down-voted by a number of people (and people who are already down-voted will have their ability to down-vote affected so they can’t spread grief).

If your silhouette has turned black you will be caught by the police and thrown in jail.
So don’t worry, griefing in this game has a lot of fun solutions and we’ve thought through a lot of this! We obviously don’t want to remove all forms of griefing but there are definitely some interesting demerits to that style of play.

Interestingly, players can also embark on the role of bounty hunters:

That’s actually part of the game. I’m pretty sure some people will make it their “job” to hunt down the rogue elements, you’ll earn from the state for doing that too. I think we will add “wanted” posters to the town too for certain IDs that are particular bad and there will be equipment to help you track them down bounty-hunter-style. You can be the secret police.

So don’t worry too much about it, the game is simply a ton of fun even when people grief - and yes, we have plenty of griefers on our test team! (and on our dev team!)

This sounds fantastic. Too often games forcibly remove all kinds of griefing, but this also means in most cases restricting gameplay opportunities in a significant way. Obviously, there should be ways to counteract such behavior, and it looks like this is the case with The Tomorrow Children.

Stay tuned for more, as the alpha should start soon and it’s likely that we’ll get some new information.