When Paradox announced its grand North American post-apocalyptic strategy game Afterworld, I made an obvious comparison to Fallout. To do this, I would have to be chained to the wing of a war platform and pelted with globs of radioactive dog food, while being slowly led through a pack of three-headed coyotes. In a new dev diary, Afterworld content designer and “former Lore Keeper” Luke Bean detailed the game’s setting, explaining that Afterworld owes more to the study of the Bronze Age collapse than any Vault Tech malarkey. The continent’s divergent tribes are also seemingly much more estranged and mystified by the “elders” than their peers in Bethesda’s RPGs.
“The people of this world are not exactly Americans,” Bean began. “These are people who remember Americans. America was an ancient empire to them, much like the Roman Empire was to us, and they live in the shadow of that history. People know that there was a time full of powerful and mysterious science. They think of the ancients – us – as people who could do anything they wanted with science. And so the central mystery of the past for them is that if the ancients could do anything they wanted, why did they all die? They must have wanted to die.”
In addition to salvaging pre-fall technology from the ruins, you’ll spend a lot of time in Afterworld defining your tribe with or against the North Americans who came before. This includes what remains of present-day Canada, although Paradox says this area will not be the focus of the base game. The fate of the rest of the planet is unclear, although Mexico appears to be completely wiped out. As for us, the Limeys on the other side of the pond, who can say?
“A lot of history is also about rediscovering the culture and history of the past,” Bean continued. “I’m trying to understand how they relate to this empire that’s gone. Are we Americans? Are we some kind of new Americans? Are we some kind of new country? Are we going to adopt new religions? Are we going to revive old religions? What elements of past ideologies are useful to us?” He likened this process to writing “a people’s Bible.”
As for any comparisons between Bethesda and Black Isle: “I’ve seen some people wondering if Afterworld is a Fallout GSG,” Bean continued. “Fallout is a cool game, but it’s not in the top five benchmarks. Fallout offers this kind of retro-futuristic vision of post-apocalypse America, which is very different from Afterworld’s kind of mystical Bronze Age cyberpunk ruins that tackle post-apocalypse.”
The game’s factions include the remnants of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, composed in part of descendants of Hawaiian civilians evacuated in the fall. You can also expect a few surviving Native American nations, as well as descendant groups of the Amish people and Mormons.
Exactly who you meet and where will depend on how the apocalypse progresses in your particular game. Before the start of each campaign, 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 in each game. Card 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, and different regions can feel very different, from game to game, depending on what happened in the years before the game began. ” If you find this prospect intriguing, Julian talked more about it in detail to Paradox during an Afterworld presentation at Gamescom.
Bean doesn’t quite put it that way, but I like the idea of an Afterworld game that’s a sort of critique of today’s United States, with players forming societies that emphasize or de-emphasize, salvage, reinvent, or bury particular aspects of the culture. Or maybe wash your hands of it altogether: as Bean notes, “your tribe may contain cursed cultists who want to end the world more completely.” I don’t think it will be a dark academic work of speculative anthropology. There is a certain comic book side in the planned presence, for example, of factions dedicated to trains.
