Paradox Interactive’s post-apocalyptic North American grand strategy game bağlantı”>Afterworld is not simply a “Fallout GSG,” according to its developers, who say the title draws far more on the study of the Bronze Age collapse than on the Fallout franchise.
The game’s setting, as detailed in a new dev diary by content designer and “elder lore keeper” Luke Bean, places its people in the shadow of America as an ancient empire. “The people of this world aren’t Americans exactly,” Bean said. “They are people who remember the Americans. America was an ancient empire to them, sort of the way the Roman Empire was for us.”
bağlantı”>Strategy game mechanics in Afterworld revolve around defining your tribe with or against the North Americans who came before, including what remains of present-day Canada. Paradox says this area will not be a focus for the core game.
“The people know that there was this time full of powerful and mysterious science,” Bean continued. “They think of the ancients – us – as people who could do anything they wanted with science. And so the central mystery of the past to them is if the ancients could do anything they wanted, why’d they all die? They must have wanted to die.”
bağlantı”>The obvious comparison to Fallout was one Bean directly addressed: “Fallout is a cool game, but it’s not in the top five reference points. Fallout is doing this sort of retro-futuristic take on the post-apocalypse in America, that’s very different from Afterworld’s sort of Bronze Agey mystical cyberpunk ruins take on the post-apocalypse.”
The game’s factions include remnants of the US Pacific Fleet, made up partly of descendants of Hawaiian civilians evacuated during “the Fall,” alongside surviving American Indigenous nations and groups descended from Amish people and Mormons.
bağlantı”>The Bronze Age collapse shapes how each campaign begins. Before every game starts, Afterworld simulates 100 years of calamity. “The Fall ended the world with a war,” Bean said, “but it wasn’t just a war, and it’s a little different every game.”
“Map generation chooses from several different regional disasters that represent strange things happening during the Fall, or happening before the Fall. They leave very different scars on the world,” Bean said.
The fate of the rest of the planet beyond North America remains unclear, though Mexico is described as a total write-off. Paradox spoke to more about the game bağlantı”>during an Afterworld showing at Gamescom.
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