Idea for a post-apocalyptic open world video game where the player can only thrive via mutual cooperation with other survivors. The goal is not to accumulate materials to ensure the player’s survival, but to help a new society flourish. The player’s survival is guaranteed from the beginning, as there is ubiquitous vegetation (mutated, but safe to eat) that covers the landscape.
No, the goal of the game is not to survive, but to thrive, to situate oneself into the emergent social order by committing as many loving acts as possible. The player’s creativity is stimulated by encouraging them to discover more and more inventive ways of rendering service to NPCs, whose makeshift societies grow and thrive based on an algorithm, whose variables are based on the player’s choices. A random element can be introduced. For example, where survivors decide to build the first huts of their new cities will greatly determine the success of their population growth. The player can become increasingly favoured by various communities throughout the wasteland, and disfavored in others despite their best efforts. When the player’s fame levels are high enough, they will receive random gifts from NPCs. The synchronicity factor increases as their service quotidian increases.
Players will often be forced into positions where it’s increasingly difficult to discern how to best serve; they will need to weigh the needs of the vocal few with the silent many; they will have to upset people in one village to help those in another; they will have to kill someone’s son in order to save someone’s daughter; they will have to destroy amusements in order to promote necessities; they will have to make the right decisions even when no one is watching.
RPG elements will be key. The player selects skills to improve as they level up, skills like carpentry, hunting, climbing, fishing, foraging, cooking, healing, intellect, diplomacy, charisma, athletics, resistance to cold, resistance to disease, how long they can go without sleep, musical arts, visual arts, and yes, combat. The player will be asked to enter certain quarantined leper colonies, and their resistance to disease will play a factor in how long they can remain safe there to fulfill a quest, or they can look in remote caves for the reclusive scientist who may have a vaccine. Players will have to choose between toppling a local monopoly, bargaining with the self-proclaimed landlords, or inciting collective actions. They will investigate accusations that a popular mayor practices witchcraft, by any number of methods, one of which involves sneaking into an ancient necropolis where the player witnesses a blood sacrifice. The player will either drive out this religious minority, destroy them, convert them, or compel the rest of this burgeoning society to adjust their beliefs to encompass these strange rites. New inventions will make life easier, but their exhaust will cloud the skies; players will have the choice of helping scientists discover renewable sources of energy, or help an anti-technology religion gain through various propaganda cues. Crops will be threatened by rodents that have developed sentience due to severe nuclear mutation, and the player will have the choice of seeking out their cave and fighting them, laying various kinds of traps around the crops, or peacefully driving the rodents elsewhere using advanced communication techniques. In all cases, there are several secret ways to resolve such conflicts; all with various and unpredictable long-term consequences.
There will also be something about telepathic dolphins teaching people how to astral project.
The game resists the temptation to contrive a villainous profiteering clan, some dominant empire or xenophobic enemy over the horizon, that threaten these peace loving societies. There is no external conflict in this meta sense. All conflicts have multiple perspectives, and occur between disparate emergent groups that evolve in tandem. There is crime in the new emergent society, and some bad apples, but there are no marauders laying waste to villages. The theme of the game is that only mutual cooperation ensures mutual thriving, therefore, how can there be an organization of survivors who resist mutual cooperation? Perhaps a simpler word is love.
When the player dies, which can happen at any time, but will always happen when the in-game avatar reaches a certain age, their world survives. If the player dies suddenly, in combat or due to disease, they are given the choice of a number of NPCs with a similar skill level to commandeer. If they reach a certain age, and must retire from questing, they can choose a number of NPCs to mentor, and pass on their knowledge. In either case, they world continues to grow, and the player continues bettering the world until their new avatar dies, and so on.
The game only ends when the world has been improved to such a degree that the NPCs are able to solve their problems without the help of the player. The player is then rewarded with one of a vast number of ending cinematics which are generated by extrapolating hundreds of years into the future. The player’s avatars may be commemorated as heroes, and their actions remembered in the new literature. The player is impressed with the idea that the choices they made in the game, even the most minute, will have drastic consequences in the distant future, and seemingly minor quests, like for example the one involving the sentient rodents, may end up shaping the future of the world. Will you use communication and technology to solve the world’s problems, and drive history into a future where rodents and mankind explore outer space together? Or will you emphasize artistic merit and craftsmanship to solve the world’s problems, driving history towards a timeline where every corner of the planet is transformed into a living art gallery. Will the future have a large or a small population? Will it build tall glass buildings, or squat huts? Will there be advanced forms of spirituality, or mechanical tech that relies on renewable resources? Will the children be taught how to astral project in middle school, or will they learn how to make films on excavated iphones? All of these questions will be answered by the player’s actions.
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