When Paradox announced their post-apocalyptic North American grand strategy game Afterworld, I made the obvious comparison to Fallout. For this I should be chained to the fender of a war rig and pelted with scoops of radioactive dogfood, while being slowly driven through a pack of three-headed coyotes. In a new dev diary, Afterworld’s content designer and “elder lore keeper” Luke Bean has gone into some detail about the game’s setting, explaining that Afterworld owes more to study of the Bronze Age collapse than any Vault Tech malarkey. The continent’s diverging tribes are also apparently far more estranged from and mystified by the “ancients” than their peers in Bethesda’s RPGs.
“The people of this world aren’t Americans exactly,” Bean began. “They are people who remember the Americans. America was an ancient empire to them, sort of the way the Roman Empire was for us, and they live in the shadow of that history. The people know that there was this 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 to them is if the ancients could do anything they wanted, why’d they all die? They must have wanted to die.”
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Aside from scrounging pre-Fall tech 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’s left of present-day Canada, though Paradox say this area won’t be a focus for the core game. The fate of the rest of the planet is unclear, though Mexico is apparently a total write-off. As for us Limeys across the pond, who can say?
“A lot of the story is also them rediscovering the culture and history of the past,” Bean continued. “Trying to figure out how they relate to this empire that’s vanished. Are we Americans? Are we some sort of new Americans? Are we some sort of new country? Are we going to adopt new religions? Are we going to revive old religions? What bits of the past ideologies are useful to us?” He compared this process to writing “the Bible of a people”.
As for any Bethesda or Black Isle comparisons: “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 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.”
Image credit: Paradox Interactive / Paradox Development Studio
The game’s factions include the remnants of the US Pacific Fleet, made up partly of the descendants of Hawaiian civilians evacuated during the Fall. You can also expect a few surviving American Indigenous nations, together with groups descended from Amish people and Mormons.
Exactly who you meet where will depend on the progress of the apocalypse in your particular game. Before each campaign begins, 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, and different regions can feel very different, game to game, depending on what has happened in the years leading up to game start.” If you find this prospect intriguing, Julian spoke to Paradox about it in more detail during an Afterworld showing at Gamescom.
Bean doesn’t quite frame it this way, but I like the idea of a game of Afterworld being a kind of critique of present-day USA, with players forming societies that emphasise or de-emphasise, rescue, reinvent or bury particular aspects of the culture. Or perhaps wash their hands of it all entirely: as Bean notes, “your tribe can have doom cultists in it who want to end the world more thoroughly.” I don’t think it’ll be some somber academic work of speculative anthropology, mind. There’s a definite comicbook undertow to the planned presence of, for example, factions dedicated to trains.