Hi! Long time follower / lurker of Defender’s Quest 2 updates, and it’s great to be able to see more of the story and get a better sense of the world that you guys are trying to create. Love updates like these, not just as a behind the scenes look but also to get an idea of how the plot and general themes of the game will be.
I get that most of this is exposition and backstory and is unlikely to make it into the game as is, and that it’s still a work in progress, but as much as I love the general concept, there are a couple of things that don’t quite seem to make sense about Ennekar or the whole domed cities thing. Having overpopulation and sending out people to die is very grimdarky, and as a concept it’s neat, but why not just population control by things like instituting a one-child or no-child policy or limiting the amount of children per family by social class, or even just having mandatory sterilization? And then kicking out parents or families that go against this rather than just letting people rampantly overpopulate the city? Seeing as such measures do work in the real world (China and Singapore’s one child policy and stop at two campaign respectively), enforcing them in such a contained environment as a domed city sounds like it might be would be even easier.
Also things like the miner society might work in general, but what about women who don’t want to have children or can’t for whatever reason? Or girls who are more masculine in build and nature and not intelligent or just can’t match up to their peers? And with the miners, if a lot of them have a short life expectancy and are dying young, I’m actually more surprised it doesn’t look more like polygamist societies such as the FLDS where you did in fact have a lot of young men being pushed into doing hard menial labor when young, left uneducated, and then kicked out of the group (see: FLDS lost boys). The concept doesn’t answer what happens to men who are older or discontent with the role they are given, also.
I know it might seem like a lot of nitpicking, but it does feel sort of irritating to play a game or a story and then think ‘well wait a minute, why didn’t they just -’ about one part of it and not have it answered. DQ1’s story was certainly delivered well, and I’m absolutely hoping DQ2 has the same kind of feel to it in terms of how it draws the player into the world.