Age of Ruin

A video popped up on my feed from YouTuber Riloe. His video talks about a game whose name I don’t remember, but it’s a post-apocalyptic extraction shooter where the NPC enemies are too busy fighting each other to worry too much about you. Here’s an imbed of the video:

The genre description looks promising, the aesthetic is (mostly) great, and based on the gameplay footage in the video the game seems competently designed. Apparently a lot of former triple-A creative staff are involved in the project. That could be a good thing or a complete disaster, but I’ll circle back to that.

The video takes a little bit to get to the point, which is that the developers want to convey the message that War is Hell not just in background explanation, but through diegetic plot conveyance, aesthetics, and gameplay. The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask accomplished conveying a sense of trauma and recovery through it’s story and mechanics, so games that make you feel something aren’t new. I’m sure you can think of half-dozen other examples off the top of your head. But I’ll circle back to messages in games in a bit as well.

I hope this game succeeds for the same reason I hope games like Angels Fall First succeed: This is a big project for an indie team, and a success, even if it takes a while to happen, shows that small teams can make great things. Triple-A is dying, and I’m not really interested in yet another pixel art rougelike. Any positive development for indies or smaller studios is a welcome one.

Having said all that, it’s time to talk about the problems I have with the game. In the previous blog post about making interstellar space ships seem plausible, I mentioned that, as a writer, you generally want to have as few snags for the reader’s willful suspension of disbelief as possible. Things should make sense on the face of things. To see what I mean, I’ve transcribed the first part of the video where Riloe lays out* the premise:

Europa. Eurasia. Eurusa. Roving battalions of mechanized military factions engage each other in an eternal conflict whose meaning has been lost to time. The politicians who started the war are dead. AI algorithms direct fire teams like board game pieces. Towering mobile gun platforms become deities for the communities of soldiers at their feet, embedded in trench lines for generations. Mega cities are razed and then rebuilt overnight by 3D printers; the original shape and meaning of structures and monuments becoming warped, skewed by the hellfire around them. The line between weapon and man has been blurred. War itself is a symbiotic organism of flesh, steel and gunpowder. You are in the middle of it all and you’re not on either side…

One question: How?

The blurb mentions an “eternal conflict” that’s all-consuming in scale. Based on what’s presented, warfare seems to be continuous with no breaks, and few safe zones, all across the globe. That premise immediately broke my suspension of disbelief.

War is really expensive. Conducting a war relies entirely on an excess of men and economic output. If a country doesn’t have the resources to go to war, they don’t. After God washed Pharaoh’s army out to sea as the Hebrews were making their exit from Egypt, Amenhotep II signed every peace treaty that crossed his desk. The kind of total war depicted in the video only seems plausible because the First and Second World Wars are still within living memory. Because of the absurd mythologizing surrounding WWII in particular, the actual costs in material and human life hasn’t percolated into the consciousness of the general population. Assuming, of course, they could even conceptualize the scale of destruction in the first place. With the advancement of technology, each individual soldier, each individual military asset, becomes more and more expensive and eats more and more into the excess a civilization can produce.

A war like what’s depicted in the vide would last perhaps half a decade before the countries involved could no longer sustain the conflict and one side or the other was forced to sue for peace. Yet we’re expected to accept this war is “eternal,” and all-encompassing. How do these countries even feed their people if war is everywhere all the time and cities keep getting knocked over and rebuilt?

That question gets asked sometimes about Mordor from Lord of the Rings. It goes completely unremarked upon in the films, but taking a look at a map of Middle Earth, Sauron had control over a solid chunk of the Eastern part of the continent. Mordor was just a province close to Gondor. With a gigantic chunk of land under his control, it makes sense that Sauron could feed his orcish armies with farmland and pastures. Tolkien mentions as much in the books.

The question of food also raises the question of how any of this awesome-looking stuff gets built. Right this very moment, the United States is having trouble fixing its existing military hardware, let alone building fresh equipment in any significant quantities. The conflict in Ukraine has shown that even expensive whiz-bang wonder weapons get blown up about as often as tanks from the start of the Cold War. Without a way to replace this stuff, it’s gone for good.

The pseudo-Orthodox aesthetics of some units in the game are also jarring, but not in the way the developers intended. What I’m assuming is a stand-in for Russia features units with disembodied body parts hanging off various bits of armor. This kind of depravity is far from unheard of among militaries throughout history, but you don’t really see too much of that kind of thing coming from countries that take their Christian faith seriously.

That also brings up the issue of what kind of person carves body parts off of dispatched enemies and carries them home as war trophies. People like that are generally a liability to professional militaries. The question of why a professional military with the capacity to field power armor and giant walking gun platforms would tolerate a soldier mutilating bodies and bringing the bits back to base only reinforces the issue this whole thing has with maintaining the willful suspension of disbelief. It leads to a situation where the writers are forced to explain themselves.

The entire vibe is likely cribbed from an art project and failed miniature wargame called Trench Crusade, which in turn is cribbed from Warhammer 40,000. In every case, the body parts strewn about is an attempt to score points for being edgy. To me, it’s just tiresome.

But all of what we’re seeing is in service to the message the game is trying to convey: War is Bad. As I mentioned earlier, I do think the message will be conveyed by the game quite well, assuming it comes to fruition. This could just be the way Riloe is presenting things. After all, he does refer to a shooter game as an “anti-shooter” because it consciously casts the act of shooting someone as a necessity rather than anything heroic. But to me the message comes across as condescending. Pretty much everyone is already on the same page. Everyone knows that real war is bad and should be avoided if possible. It seems like the developers and/or Riloe have some trouble separating fiction from reality and think others have that problem as well. Thus the need to constantly reinforce a message everyone else has already gotten.

The topic is also done to death in games. There’s not much to that particular dead horse after Hideo Kojima got done beating it with the Metal Gear series. Thus, casting a message that’s easily in the top ten most common messages in games of all time as deep or profound strikes me as hollow.

I have no clue what the future will bring for this game. I was being completely sincere when I said I hoped it succeeded, even though the premise deserves criticism. Sooner or later, it’d be nice to have the time and resources to independently develop a game for Age of Ruin.

*The game is in development, and the story is subject to change. I’m using what’s presented as a springboard to talk about broader ideas.