What if both parents determined the child?

[Jotari]

So back when Genealogy was made the mother determined whether the child character existed or not. The father contributed growths and skills and later hair colour but the child belonged to the mother so to speak. This makes a certain degree of sense if you know nothing about biology and as such was continued into Awakening. But then Fates turned it on its head by making it so the father determined the child. So this has me thinking, if they do a second generation again, which way will it go? Well the obvious answer to me is to make both characters determine the child. So what exactly does this mean? I'll take Holy War as an example. Sety has been confirmed in canon to be Levin and Fury's son. Now imagine if in gameplay the only way to get Sety was to pair Levin and Fury. If you paired Levin with someone else you'd get a different child and if you paired Fury with someone else you'd get a different child. Each child is unique to the two parents that created them.

Now the obvious problem here is that it would lead to phenomenally more child characters than the current method. But there's a big way of curbing this that would also satisfy a problem older players have with newer games. Moving back to a limited support pool. Each character can only S support with three or four others. To stick with the Holy War example, Levin can only pair with Fury, Syliva or Tiltyu. Now this would mean in terms of gameplay a lot more rigidness in the generation system but in terms of plot you could get something much more tightly focused. The child would be an actual character in the world with a solid history and role. They wouldn't have to insert generic stop and swap conversations with the non dominant parent. Sety would always be prince of Silesia no matter what with a relationship with both his parents. And while it would limit the shenanigans you can do with breeding characters, it would massively expand replayability as even on two playthroughs you wouldn't be able to see every characters that exists. It could be a lot of fun pairing different characters just to see what unique child could come of it. Though I could imagine some people wouldn't like that as it might feel like the game is locking off content from a single playthrough.

Anyway that's just some thing I've been thinking about at the moment. What do you think of this possibility and the benefits or pitfalls that might occur from doing so?

[Mackc2]

They would never write a dozen or so character that a majority of the fanbase will not see in their play through, and a dozen is a low ball. An easier fix would be to add unique child support conversations for the non-determining parent, like in awakening Lucinas support with mum would be different with Olivia than Sumia, it would also help to characterise each character better instead of bloating the character pool 

Edited November 12, 2017 by Mackc2

[Kahvi]

Sounds interesting. It always bothers me how the previous characters dont' have much to do with their mother/father. Your suggestion might fix it but it would take more work from the devs. Especially if all characters can marry (almost) any other character. They could of course make the children incredibly flat but at that point, why have them at all?

But if they would think the whole thing through well enough, it could be a great addition. I just hope they'd integrate the child character's better into the story than in Fates, but that's going off-topic.

[Jotari]

2 hours ago, Mackc2 said:

They would never write a dozen or so character that a majority of the fanbase will not see in their play through, and a dozen is a low ball. An easier fix would be to add unique child support conversations for the non-determining parent, like in awakening Lucinas support with mum would be different with Olivia than Sumia, it would also help to characterise each character better instead of bloating the character pool 

Unless support pools for the parents are limited like I suggest then creating unique supports for non dominant parents and children just isn't feasible. It might work for just Lucina who has less potential parents and more narrative importance. But for the other gen 2 units, taking Awakening as an example, 13 potential fathers among 12 children equals (minus the 12 generic ones that are there already) 144 more support conversations. Which doesn't sound like a lot on paper but when you're dealing with a tonne of different characters it really is. I'm not sure exactly how many support convos there are in Awakening but I estimate the generic conversations if counted separately would make up about a quarter of the total number.

Edited November 12, 2017 by Jotari

[Nobody]

Sounds like a bad idea tbh. Too many resources going to children, and too many characters that the player would never be able to see. It would probably affect the rest of the game as well.

Like, if there were 5 male characters that could marry 5 female characters each, that would result in TWENTY FIVE children, and you'd only be able to see 5 of them each playthrough. That's insane and a huge waste of resources and development time.

[B_E_P_I_S_M_A_N]

From a game development perspective, that would be a total nightmare to write for, and, as @Nobody pointed out, you would never get to see all of the children in one playthrough.

While not biologically accurate, having one parent determine the child's existence altogether and the other determine stat growths and hair color is much more feasible than trying to write a scenario for all of the different possible combinations.  It's just not feasible to take this route.

However, I wouldn't be opposed to having both male and female units have children tied to them.  In other words, most mothers have children tied to them, but some fathers have children tied to them as well (think Chrom or Robin, but on a broader scale).  Not all fathers would have a child tied to them, though, in order to prevent too many 2nd-Gen characters.

[Jotari]

1 minute ago, B_E_P_I_S_M_A_N said:

From a game development perspective, that would be a total nightmare to write for, and, as @Nobody pointed out, you would never get to see all of the children in one playthrough.

While not biologically accurate, having one parent determine the child's existence altogether and the other determine stat growths and hair color is much more feasible than trying to write a scenario for all of the different possible combinations.  It's just not feasible to take this route.

However, I wouldn't be opposed to having both male and female units have children tied to them.  In other words, most mothers have children tied to them, but some fathers have children tied to them as well (think Chrom or Robin, but on a broader scale).  Not all fathers would have a child tied to them, though, in order to prevent too many 2nd-Gen characters.

From a development perspective it wouldn't actually be that major. Consider the example of Genealogy again. I that game we have seven mothers and thirteen fathers among our fertile breeding stock of the first generation. If every one of the women could partner with three men it would result in twenty one different children.  As it stands the Genealogy system gives you fourteen characters from these mothers due to its use of siblings. Throw in the replacement characters and you already have twenty eight. That's enough wiggle room to even let some of the women have four partners so the men aren't shafted as much. And you might say the replacement characters aren't really characters pe se but they are. They're similar but they do have differences to their mainstream counterparts. Likewise some of the different incarnations of this hypothetical could be similar since having the same parent would give a similar set up. Like for example, if one of the parents is a king, all of his potential children will follow the same general arc of what it means to be a prince or princess but will vary slightly on what influence their mother has on them.

[Azure Sen]

Pretty much what Nobody said, such a system would be a logistical nightmare and a huge drain on resources unless drastically limited (we're talking two marriage options per first parent to make it feasable), and even then it's still wasted effort given that there are people like me who rarely if ever change pairings and you'd only get a handful of those characters a  playthrough regardless. Realistically the best thing to do would be unique second parent-child supports, which would overall be a much smaller drain on resources given that IntSys does it frequently for DLC.

13 minutes ago, Jotari said:

From a development perspective it wouldn't actually be that major. 

It actually would. For each new child you'd have to create unique art assets, including portrait and model variants for every possible hair color,  add in a significant amount of scripts and voice acting clips just for those children (since even the generic supports are given separate script entries in the files), and properly balance their classes and growths so you don't accidentally end up with a glut of super-powered and/or too-samey units depending on your preferences. All of which is a huge waste of time and money for units most people won't even see. 

25 minutes ago, Jotari said:

If every one of the women could partner with three men it would result in twenty one different children.

Which would give you somewhere in the neighborhood of 252-504 additional supports to write and program in, depending on the number of supports the children get. 

[YingofDarkness]

I'm going to echo everyone else and say that it would be too much. Just making those extra kids (which may or may not ever be seen) would be a huge strain on the budget alone. All of them would require art assets, voice clips, supports need to be written for them, and then there is their backstory and motivations that need to be written as well. It is too much work and money being put into parts of the game that a lot of people aren't going to really see.

Preferably if you are going to want to make the kids relationship with the mother/father they aren't attached to less generic it would be better to create a generic template about what the conversation will be about, and then change some lines here and there to reflect the unattached parents personality better. Even with these small changes the romantic support pool would have to be trimmed down quite a bit to make it feasible.

[Jotari]

2 hours ago, Azure Sen said:

Pretty much what Nobody said, such a system would be a logistical nightmare and a huge drain on resources unless drastically limited (we're talking two marriage options per first parent to make it feasable), and even then it's still wasted effort given that there are people like me who rarely if ever change pairings and you'd only get a handful of those characters a  playthrough regardless. Realistically the best thing to do would be unique second parent-child supports, which would overall be a much smaller drain on resources given that IntSys does it frequently for DLC.

It actually would. For each new child you'd have to create unique art assets, including portrait and model variants for every possible hair color,  add in a significant amount of scripts and voice acting clips just for those children (since even the generic supports are given separate script entries in the files), and properly balance their classes and growths so you don't accidentally end up with a glut of super-powered and/or too-samey units depending on your preferences. All of which is a huge waste of time and money for units most people won't even see. 

Which would give you somewhere in the neighborhood of 252-504 additional supports to write and program in, depending on the number of supports the children get. 

Well 1, there wouldn't be alternate hair colours at all and 2, Fire Emblem does that for characters already. For the system I outlined above it wouldn't be any larger than the total cast of Genealogy of Holy War. Which is actually pretty small compared to Fates or New Mystery of the Emblem. The only difference is that it would end up in a significantly smaller playable cast than most games. And I think it would actually significantly reduce the total number of supports since the number of support partners each unit can have would be dialed back to what it was like in the GBA era. Now would the work be wasteful? Well yeah if you view it that way. I personally wouldn't see it as all that wasted for the benefit of a more dynamic plot and I reckon they could spin the marketing to make it seem like an interesting feature rather than wasted content.

Edited November 12, 2017 by Jotari

[NekoKnight]

I'm going to throw my vote in with others and say write unique non-determining parent supports and limit the number of potential partners.

Another issue of creating completely unique  children is the question of who they would support. If many child characters won't even exist in a given play through, how will you be able to support them with each other?

[Lau]

I think that only canon couples should have playable child units. It just makes things a bit easier, and allows the child to have an official design which takes from both parents, and the backstory can be more fleshed out.

Although, people tend to prefer the whole mix-and-match pairings...

[Shadow Mir]

No. Just no. There's no way in the seven hells this would be anything other than an ill-conceived idea, ESPECIALLY from a development perspective.

[Alastor15243]

While this wouldn't work as much with the Fates or Awakening incarnations of the child system, since every mother had two children in FE4, maybe they could've had it so that the male characters could each had one of them, so every male character was like Robin or Chrom? Like Erinys would have Fee and Lewyn would have Ced, and Ced would have a completely different sibling depending on who Lewyn married?

[X-Naut]

It would be more feasible to attach children to parents of both genders, which could add interesting scenarios where families have different numbers of children and some parents may not have a child attached to them, but provide unique benefits to their spouse's child.

[Shadow Mir]

2 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

While this wouldn't work as much with the Fates or Awakening incarnations of the child system, since every mother had two children in FE4, maybe they could've had it so that the male characters could each had one of them, so every male character was like Robin or Chrom? Like Erinys would have Fee and Lewyn would have Ced, and Ced would have a completely different sibling depending on who Lewyn married?

Except there are way more men than women (13 vs 7), meaning you wind up missing out on some kids no matter what you do - and people were pissy over losing the opportunity to recruit ONE kid if you were playing as a male and stole a bride in Fates.

Edited November 14, 2017 by Levant Mir Celestia

[Alastor15243]

6 minutes ago, Levant Mir Celestia said:

Except there are way more men than women (13 vs 7), meaning you wind up missing out on some kids no matter what you do - and people were pissy over losing the opportunity to recruit ONE kid if you were playing as a male and stole a bride in Fates.

Seriously? It's that big a disparity? I knew there were more men, but really? I don't remember leaving that many male characters single...

 

But at any rate i didn’t mean in that game specifically, I meant in a hypothetical game with equal numbers of men and women but in a retro style with de-emphasized supports like Genealogy.

Edited November 14, 2017 by Alastor15243

[Jotari]

5 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

While this wouldn't work as much with the Fates or Awakening incarnations of the child system, since every mother had two children in FE4, maybe they could've had it so that the male characters could each had one of them, so every male character was like Robin or Chrom? Like Erinys would have Fee and Lewyn would have Ced, and Ced would have a completely different sibling depending on who Lewyn married?

 

5 hours ago, X-Naut said:

It would be more feasible to attach children to parents of both genders, which could add interesting scenarios where families have different numbers of children and some parents may not have a child attached to them, but provide unique benefits to their spouse's child.

That's an interesting alternative I hadn't considered. I think it pretty likely they'll go with that if they hit up the generation system again. Although if everyone can have a child it'll mean a smaller Gen 1 cast than what we're currently getting.

3 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

Seriously? It's that big a disparity? I knew there were more men, but really? I don't remember leaving that many male characters single...

 

But at any rate i didn’t mean in that game specifically, I meant in a hypothetical game with equal numbers of men and women but in a retro style with de-emphasized supports like Genealogy.

Well one of those guys is Ardan who...is only going to get some if you're feeling real generous.

Edited November 15, 2017 by Jotari

[ninjagriffin]

On ‎11‎/‎12‎/‎2017 at 8:21 AM, Jotari said:

So back when Genealogy was made the mother determined whether the child character existed or not. The father contributed growths and skills and later hair colour but the child belonged to the mother so to speak. This makes a certain degree of sense if you know nothing about biology and as such was continued into Awakening. But then Fates turned it on its head by making it so the father determined the child. So this has me thinking, if they do a second generation again, which way will it go? Well the obvious answer to me is to make both characters determine the child. So what exactly does this mean? I'll take Holy War as an example. Sety has been confirmed in canon to be Levin and Fury's son. Now imagine if in gameplay the only way to get Sety was to pair Levin and Fury. If you paired Levin with someone else you'd get a different child and if you paired Fury with someone else you'd get a different child. Each child is unique to the two parents that created them.

Now the obvious problem here is that it would lead to phenomenally more child characters than the current method. But there's a big way of curbing this that would also satisfy a problem older players have with newer games. Moving back to a limited support pool. Each character can only S support with three or four others. To stick with the Holy War example, Levin can only pair with Fury, Syliva or Tiltyu. Now this would mean in terms of gameplay a lot more rigidness in the generation system but in terms of plot you could get something much more tightly focused. The child would be an actual character in the world with a solid history and role. They wouldn't have to insert generic stop and swap conversations with the non dominant parent. Sety would always be prince of Silesia no matter what with a relationship with both his parents. And while it would limit the shenanigans you can do with breeding characters, it would massively expand replayability as even on two playthroughs you wouldn't be able to see every characters that exists. It could be a lot of fun pairing different characters just to see what unique child could come of it. Though I could imagine some people wouldn't like that as it might feel like the game is locking off content from a single playthrough.

Anyway that's just some thing I've been thinking about at the moment. What do you think of this possibility and the benefits or pitfalls that might occur from doing so?

That sounds like a great idea, I would love it. 

[Shadow Mir]

2 hours ago, ninjagriffin said:

That sounds like a great idea, I would love it. 

I don't know why you're so supportive, since to be blunt, there's more holes in that idea than there are in a block of Swiss cheese... Just think of the developmental burden - I wouldn't be surprised if other parts of the game suffered just for the sake of shoehorning in children that might not even be seen.

Edited November 16, 2017 by Levant Mir Celestia

[Jotari]

43 minutes ago, Levant Mir Celestia said:

I don't know why you're so supportive, since to be blunt, there's more holes in that idea than there are in a block of Swiss cheese... Just think of the developmental burden - I wouldn't be surprised if other parts of the game suffered just for the sake of shoehorning in children that might not even be seen.

Fates had almost seventy playable characters (seventy one in fact if you count the two Corrins and two Kanas as separate, which you would for development purposes), many of which you'd only see as enemies or not at all in Birthrights/Conquest. It'd mean a smaller playable cast but no larger an actual development burden than what we've seen before.

Edited November 16, 2017 by Jotari

[Shadow Mir]

14 minutes ago, Jotari said:

Fates had almost seventy playable characters, many of which you'd only see as enemies or not at all in Birthrights/Conquest. It'd mean a smaller playable cast but no larger an actual development burden than what we've seen before.

On what grounds do you say that it won't be a larger developmental burden? Because far as I'm concerned, you're deceiving yourself if you think that.

Edited November 16, 2017 by Levant Mir Celestia

[Jotari]

Just now, Levant Mir Celestia said:

On what grounds do you say that it won't be a larger developmental burden? Because far as I'm concerned, you're deceiving yourself if you think that.

Because the total number of characters would still be in the same region meaning it would require the same number of artwork, modelling and balancing aspects. It would just mean the total number of characters you can play as at any one time would be limited, similar to Genealogy of Holy War (which did go the route of making approximately a quarter of its cast inaccessible on any given playthrough while simultaneously allowing you to field everyone you currently possess). What it would be a bigger burden on would be the writing as an intricate system of making each character have a place in the world while simultaneously having them not exist would be difficult. But putting a larger amount of effort into the writing is something I'd actively encourage for the series.

[Shadow Mir]

9 minutes ago, Jotari said:

Because the total number of characters would still be in the same region meaning it would require the same number of artwork, modelling and balancing aspects. It would just mean the total number of characters you can play as at any one time would be limited, similar to Genealogy of Holy War (which did go the route of making approximately a quarter of its cast inaccessible on any given playthrough while simultaneously allowing you to field everyone you currently possess). What it would be a bigger burden on would be the writing as an intricate system of making each character have a place in the world while simultaneously having them not exist would be difficult. But putting a larger amount of effort into the writing is something I'd actively encourage for the series.

And you fail to see the problem with that!? For (EFF!)'s sake, people got pissed over knowing that you lost the opportunity to recruit ONE kid in Fates if you were playing as a male and married a female that's not Anna, Reina, Scarlet, Flora, or a child. Do you seriously think that people would take losing access to multiple units no matter what you do well?? Because I sure as hell do not.

[Jotari]

7 minutes ago, Levant Mir Celestia said:

And you fail to see the problem with that!? For (EFF!)'s sake, people got pissed over knowing that you lost the opportunity to recruit ONE kid in Fates if you were playing as a male and married a female that's not Anna, Reina, Scarlet, Flora, or a child. Do you seriously think that people would take losing access to multiple units no matter what you do well?? Because I sure as hell do not.

Okay A), calm down,

B), I never saw anyone complaining about that and didn't even know it's a thing so I think you're exaggerating,

C), Choosing between two different units is something the series has done since the very start with Samson and Arran. It's not a tradition that's repeated in modern games but they don't shy away from doing it in the remakes, most recently being Shadows of Valentia. And while a lot of people inevitably buy all three routes of Fates, the game that you buy packaged will deny you half the cast until you pay more and you will not see them during your first ~40ish hours of playtime until you beat one route and start a new file.

D), I personally wouldn't be upset with it. You might and that's fine. It's more than possible the majority might (the comments here would suggest that), but we can't say for sure because we don't know. It would probably depend on purely how well it's executed. I personally would enjoy a more dynamic story and cast at the expense of not seeing everything on my first few playthroughs, some other people might enjoy it too. You can't pass judgement on that opinion.

E), Will this ever realistically happen? Doubtfully. But that doesn't stop us from speculating the pros and cons of such a thing and how it might appeal to different people.