Afterworld strategy game will let you deal with the elderly and sell children

Paradox Interactive is working on a new strategy game called Afterworld, set in a post-apocalyptic North America. Like other titles from the studio, this game offers players nearly unlimited freedom in building their own society, including the ability to make deeply unethical choices without any artificial restrictions from the developers.

Game director Dan Lind talked about the unexpected scenarios that might emerge as players work through the game. According to him, a lot depends on how a player adapts their society to external circumstances and the resources available in a given territory.

A lot of it will come from the kind of things that you have to adapt your society to. One story could be like, "oh, I found like this huge colony of only the elderly or something, and I took them in, and we worked with a lot of tech that meant people lived for a long time, but they're not able to contribute work-wise, and society is struggling...

So now we figure out ways where they can, say, jump off cliffs at a certain age for the betterment of everybody, or something like that, right? The story becomes 'whoa, how did you end up there? Why do you have this kind of society? Well, it was because this thing happened and I had to make this thing illegal, so nobody could use this resource, and now we're all vegetarians or something. Those are the kind of stories I think you're going to get from this."

Beyond managing your own civilization, Afterworld also involves dealing with territories ruled by other powers, including powerful ancient tyrants. These figures control large stretches of the wasteland and can subjugate players with military force if they aren't prepared for a conflict.

The studio behind Crusader Kings and Hearts of Iron just revealed its first non-historical title in a decade. Lind noted that interesting stories can also come out of political intrigue with these tyrants.

I also think you're going to get interesting stories when it comes to the big political space where it's like, "well, I decided to betray this tyrant in this way, so now I have to manage all of New York" or something like that.

Lind believes the stories players create will make for great water-cooler conversation, and confirmed that Afterworld won't stop users from engaging in cannibalism or selling members of their society to other groups.

One of the rules that we have is that we shouldn't judge the player for their terrible choices. The game will, for sure, in the sense that your population is not gonna necessarily just like you doing terrible things.... Unless you have a terrible population.

Maybe you managed to get them to that point, or you found some people like that.

Lind said this freedom is one of the main things that sets Afterworld apart from other games in the genre.

It's expected of the setting, right? People don't expect people to behave normally and with a moral code in the apocalypse [...] but as you develop, you can take it in different directions. There's certainly an advantage to having a society that is not doing too many crazy things if you want to grow.

The director admitted he can't wait to see what players achieve once Afterworld launches.

For all our games, that's the fun part. Someone's like, "Whoa, you did that! That's crazy!" Right?

A release date for Afterworld hasn't been announced yet. The game is coming to Steam.