Blog

Massive Chalice, released by Double Fine Productions in 2015, tackled one of tactical strategy gaming's oldest challenges: save scumming. By introducing a generational gameplay mechanic—where warriors age, marry, have children, and eventually die—the game encouraged players to accept a precious character's death rather than constantly reload saves to try and avoid it.

Dark Clouds Behind the Innovation

Before diving into the brilliance of the generational mechanic, it's important to acknowledge Massive Chalice's context. The game was admittedly light on content, with what many players recognized as placeholder-quality character models and lite story. But this was Double Fine's strategy to survive a difficult financial period.

During this era, founder Tim Schafer split the studio into multiple smaller teams working on different projects simultaneously through their "Amnesia Fortnight" prototyping process. They would focus resources on the winners while quickly terminating underperforming projects—a harsh but necessary reality that saw casualties like the now infamous Spacebase DF-9. Massive Chalice survived this crucible, which speaks to the strength of its core concept even if the execution was limited by budget constraints.

The Save Scumming Problem and it's perils

Tactical games like X-COM may not seem like it, but they are actually very emotional games, let me explain. You see, in Tactical games, soldiers are a limited resource which you can't easily replace, they aren't just temporary cannon fodder, you actually train and watch them grow from rookies to veterans, together you scrape through brutally difficult times with low ammo and life threatening wounds, you build memorable narratives around legendary battles that your crew won against all odds, and it truly stings when you can't save a precious vetran despite exhaustively trying everything. You actually begin to remember each one by name. This attachment is one of the genre's greatest strengths.

Given all that, what do you do when you are about to lose one of your precious vetrans that you've invested so much time, effort, and emotion into? Why you reload the game and try to save them of course! and you do that over and over ad nauseam. This is called Save scumming and it creates a very grindy and overly cautious gameplay, because once you tasted the death defying powers of save scumming, the temptation to optimize further grows. You begin aiming for perfection, reloading on every little thing to get that flawless outcome. And it's a self reinforcing addiction because your'e even rewarded for it due to your veterans becoming super soldiers with all that accumulated perfect battle experience. Meanwhile, they become too valuable to lose so rookies never even get a chance to be developed! The result? The game becomes excessively grindy and loses dynamism as recovery from setbacks gets reduced to a single-minded quest for perfect execution.

Massive Chalice's Revolutionary Solution

Massive Chalice solved this through forced generational turnover. Your heroes don't just risk death in combat—they inevitably age and die of natural causes over the game's 300-year timeline. Warriors marry, have children, and their genetic traits pass down through bloodlines. Veteran's will die, but their children carry forward the bloodline.

This simple mechanic drastically changes the game:

• Death becomes acceptable. It would have happened anyway, better move on and think about the next generation.
• New characters have inherent value. They're not "worse versions" of veterans—they need investment, but their evolved bloodline gives them the potential to surpass your previous champions.
• Long-term thinking replaces short-term optimization. You're managing dynasties, not individual warriors
• Save scumming loses its appeal. As one player put it:

  Finally got around to playing this one a few months back, really enjoyed it for what it was. Only got squad wiped once. It felt shitty but since it's generational, you know you can bounce back stronger.

So instead of, for example, fixating on keeping Colonel Jenkins alive forever, you become invested in the Jenkins bloodline. Will his daughter inherit his accuracy? Can you breed that trait with another family's toughness?

The Attachment Trade-off

But Massive Chalice's solution wasn't perfect. By making death inevitable and routine, it reduced individual character attachment—the very thing that made X-COM's moments so emotionally powerful. When everyone's temporary, it's harder to care about Jenkins in the first place.

The limited production values of Massive Chalice exacerbated this problem. Due to the high turnover rate, characters begin to feel like temporary grunts and the Massive Chalice's generic character models with virtually zero personality only made it worse. The mechanical solution was brilliant, but it came at the cost of the attachment that defined the genre.

CSE's Innovation: Reincarnation and Waifus

So now that you understand how important attachment is in a tactical game, imagine the emotional investment when we replace generic characters like Jenkins—and the entire squad for that matter—with sexy Waifus!

But now it would suck even more if those Waifus died. However Cosmic Succubus Evolution will make it bearable by introducing a reincarnation mechanic!

You see, Space Succubi don't truly die—their ancient spirits return to the Astral Plane, a realm administered by their goddess Neximeida, and they can reincarnate back after a while as long as you, ahem, skillfully bred, an enticing enough body for your Waifu to return into. Oh and it will need a reincarnation ritual conducted by a talented priestess. So this is how CSE expands on Massive Chalice's foundation by incorporating generational progression while preserving character attachment:

"Like an orgasm, the ancient spirit enters the Syulibae's body during the reincarnation ritual. Merging of minds feels like opening a third eye that sees many lifetimes of experience. But afterwards, the minds remain separate, merging slowly over a lifetime and return to the Astral as one."

This mechanic gives us the best of both worlds:

• Death still matters. You lose immediate combat power and must retrain the reincarnated warrior from youth
• Characters stay unique. Personalities and bonuses from spirit-linked traits return, maintaining emotional investment.
• Breeding becomes strategically meaningful. You're not just enjoying a Hentai mini game—you're cock-smithing and evolved bloodline to reincarnate into!
• Generational progression continues. total power progression doesn't reset to zero even as individuals cycle through life and death

The reincarnation system transforms death from a permanent loss into a temporary setback with interesting strategic implications. Do you rush the reincarnation to get your veteran back quickly but in a suboptimal body? Or do you carefully breed the perfect genetic vessel over multiple generations, accepting the wait?

Holistic Integration, Not Bolt-On Features

What sets CSE apart is its holistic design. Reincarnation isn't just a mechanic—it's woven into the game's lore and systems. Breeding, relationships, and rituals are integral to both the story and gameplay, creating a cohesive experience that feels natural and immersive.

Everything fits together like a puzzle. Massive Chalice showed us that generational gameplay could solve save scumming. Double Fine proved you could make players accept death by making it inevitable. CSE internalizes all this, adds X-COM Apocalypse's deep simulation and tough battles which will forge bonds between you and your Waifu's, adds reincarnation to preserve the feeling of attachment and lets you take it to the next level by dating, breeding and evolving them to produce the next generation via unapologetic adult content! These aren't just bolt-on game systems, they are synergistically and holistic designed to maximize the experience!