Paradox Interactive has officially announced Afterworld, a post-apocalyptic grand strategy game about wasteland tribes jostling for dominance of a procedurally generated North America. The reveal follows leaks earlier in the week, and game director Dan Lind called it Paradox Development Studio's “first non-historical setting in a decade.”
This is the first world we’ve gotten to build from scratch in a long time, and the first one we've had the pleasure of destroying before the game starts. The old world is still out there in fragments, waiting to be found.
Rock Paper Shotgun, which assembled a breakdown from 10 minutes of B-roll, described the feel as closer to 11 bit's Frostpunk and Proxy's Zephon than to Fallout's retrofuturism, with a spoonful of Mad Max on top.
A run starts with a choice of origin, prologue and formative “Traumas” that set your tribe's initial resource make-up and priorities. One example plays as Shelterfolk — bunker survivors, essentially — who turned cannibal during a lean season and are somewhat prone to demagoguery. You then pick a place to settle and start scrounging for food, water and fuel, but this is not a Civ-style first city: the expectation is that you relocate often in response to threats and resource pressure.
The map is very large and divided into fog-covered regions that can become territories. Roaming turns up encounters with other tribes, buildings and terrain features that hand you Ideas, which unlock technologies for research. Pre-Fall technologies recovered from the ruins give a serious edge, and Paradox's press release notes that “the same power that ended the old world could end the new one too.”
Expansion also means writing your society. Tribes cultivate customs, beliefs, political systems and laws — introducing townhall democracy, banning drinking, organising wayward youth into work crews, outlawing slavery — while processing chaotic influences from the societies beyond your borders. Named characters inside the tribe carry distinct stats, captain war parties and serve in office.
Religion is its own system. You can define some philosophies as orthodox and others as false, but your people retain agency over what they believe and separate into groups of agreers and doubters. Rival tribes carry clashing values and mythologies that interfere with diplomacy and trade.
The headline objective is to unite the rival tribes under one banner and found a new American empire, which multiplies resource and supply problems exponentially. Afterworld includes co-op and PvP, and Paradox has not attached a release date beyond “coming soon.”