I don't know about you, but my plans for the apocalypse involve hiding in a comfy bunker and playing hundreds of hours more of Paradox grand strategy games like Crusader Kings 3. And now I'll be able to play out the apocalypse during the apocalypse with the studio’s first new grand strategy game franchise since 2019's Imperator: Rome, Afterworld. Set in a not too far future North America that has been devastated by an intentionally vague cataclysm, it combines RTS and grand strategy elements as you rebuild the world in any image you desire – from terraforming to cannibalism. And that's an enticing proposition.
Heads up: what you're seeing is an alpha, and there were several things that we weren't allowed to show yet, like combat. It's undeniably rough around the edges. Honestly, one of my first thoughts was that this seems really early to be showing Afterworld to the public. There is a general shape of a game here, where you settle the wasteland, interact with rival factions, and deal with simmering internal conflict inside your own borders. But a lot of it really doesn't work yet and the balance is all over the place. And that’s OK of course; games are difficult and time-consuming to make. But just keep that in mind as I discuss what I saw.
I was told by the devs that they were getting it in our hands now so they could collect feedback while they still have time to act on it, before systems get fully baked. And I get that. But I will have to be kind of brutally honest that the build I played wasn't in a shape where I'd want to spend hundreds of hours with it. I hope they take all the time they need to make it the best it can be. I'd be a little bit concerned to hear they were planning to release this any earlier than Q4 next year.
But with that important caveat out of the way, let's take a step back and talk about what Afterworld actually is. It begins with selecting an origin for your starting band of survivors, similar to Stellaris. And if you've played other Paradox games, that's definitely the closest point of comparison. Just like ships in that game can fly around within a system, your military units and explorers – called rangers – have exact positions within the map's many provinces and can maneuver and fight individually.
The only origin that was available in this preview was the Shelterborn, who are basically Vault Dwellers from Fallout: having hidden underground for the last 100 years or so, they are now forced to deal with a surface world they know nothing about after their life support systems start to fail. The circumstances around which we left the shelter were played out in a brief choose-your-own-adventure-style sequence that can differentiate your new society as anything from nostalgic reclaimers seeking to restore Old America to bloodthirsty cannibals who see strangers as dinner. This sets your starting traditions, values, and customs.
Traditions are sort of a band's base stats, or how good they are at various aspects of post-apocalyptic state-building. Survival helps with the short-term task of simply not dying in the unforgiving surface world as you scrabble for resources. Hearthkeeping is more about making a nice place to live in the long term.
Values represent a band's feelings about certain ideologies: Reclamation is about rebuilding America as it was (or as they imagine it was based on legends). Wanderlust is about maintaining a nomadic lifestyle rather than settling down, which is fully possible in Afterworld as base settlements and certain buildings can be packed up and relocated. A band might feel positively, negatively, or not care about any number of the dozens of existing values.
Finally, customs are the story-based explanations of where your traditions and values come from. The Nostalgic custom, for instance, makes you feel positively about Reclamation and gives you a small bonus to Hearthkeeping. A band gains more customs over time either through accumulating pride, which works more or less like experience points, or by developing traumas as the result of negative events like losing a war or being struck by a disaster. Afterworld is an absolute soup of similar nouns, but you can basically get by remembering that traditions are what your band can do, values are how your band feels, and customs are how you acquire both of the above.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/afterworld-the-first-hands-on-preview-a-probably-too-early-taste-of-paradoxs-next-big-thing
