- Afterworld is the first Paradox grand strategy game with an original fantasy setting in a decade
- Director Dan Lind says this brings a level of "design freedom" that would be possible in few real-world settings
- He also wanted "to do something different" after working on historical games for so long
The recently revealed Afterworld stands apart from the rest of the recent Paradox Games portfolio. It's the studio's first title in a decade to take place in an original fictional setting, this time post-apocalyptic North America, rather than a real-world historical one.
The game is being directed by studio veteran Dan Lind, who has been working at Paradox for almost twenty years. He started out on Europa Universalis 3, working his way up to eventually become game director of the supremely popular Hearts of Iron 4 — a massive-scale WW2 sim.
In an interview with TechRadar Gaming at the company's Stockholm HQ, Lind explained that not being tied down by history allows for a whole new level of "design freedom."
"I worked for like 15 years on just Hearts of Iron and history, so you want to do something different," he said. "That was a big motivator."
He also thinks that Afterworld, which features a map based on just part of one country rather than a chunk of the globe, will be able to fill a specific niche in Paradox's offering.
"Looking at our games, I think there's a niche in between a couple of them that we're not tapping," he explained.
"I think there's another different, fresh grand strategy game experience that you can have at a bit of a smaller scale, but with more detail basically. Also having worked with 'crunchy' games such as Hearts of Iron, I wanted to see if we could find a way to make the game easier for people to get into."
He continued: "It's kind of a bit 4X like this, and you can start scaling the mechanics over time. It makes it so much easier, right? It's hard to do that with a historical setting, unless you're doing something like a migration era, but this game can also tap a lot of those ideas."
He also revealed the surprising origin of his pitch for the game, which he's wanted to bring to life for over two decades.
"I think the first draft for this was super long ago. I'm not sure; it might have been like 2011 or something," he began. "We used to do these brainstorms at the pub, where the idea was to just come up with a bunch of games."
The team would sift through all of them at the end of the night, deciding which were "a terrible idea" and which were "actually an interesting idea."
"This was a good idea. I had one that was playing DNA chains through primordial soup, which we rejected, but this one was something that was pretty cool.
"I've always believed that you could do grand strategy games at slightly different scales. It doesn't always have to be big; the entire world. It can be just as interesting, but you've got to add details in the other direction as well.
At that point, it was a different scale. It was even smaller; I would say it was maybe the size of three states or something like that. When I was working on Hearts of Iron and a bunch of other stuff, I always had this in the back pocket as something I wanted to try and get back to."
Naturally, the idea evolved over time as Lind became "more and more interested in things that were...less board game, more simulation," leading to the current scale and focus on deep societal simulation.
"Now I'm shifting it more to groups of people, but not country level."
Afterworld is set to launch for PC in the future.
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