We're Doomed: Fate Of The World Sequel Announced
The problem(s) of the century
When a wide-eyed young lad named Quintin Smith played Fate of the World, he learned that we're all doomed but hopefully you and I will die before the world's fully trashed. That's my understanding of his lesson, anyway. It was a fascinating strategy game about big problems facing the world over the next century - dwindling resources, changing climate, growing population, famine, revolution, extinction, and so on - and how they're all tangled in complicated ways.
Creator Red Redemption shut down a few years back, but another studio have picked up the rights to Fate of the World and announced a sequel with a few folks from the original onboard.
Soothsayer Games are calling it Fate of the World Online [official site] because, well, it'll support online multiplayer. Former Red Redemption CEO Klaude Thomas and game director Matt Miles Griffiths are among the folks working on it. Soothsayer say, forsooth, that they may or may not crowdfund the game.
As for what to expect from the sequel, Soothsayer say:
"The key new feature is the move to a multi-agent system where you, as a national premier, have to diplomatically engage with other world leaders, as well as participate in simulations of real-life conferences and voting blocs, such as the UNFCCC COP, G-77, and LDCs.
"This means we can offer a multiplayer version of the game, which will be much faster to play thanks to innovations like an accelerable real time game engine and a new approach to in-game diplomacy. On the data model side, we'll be covering elements that just didn’t feature in the original, such as detailed land usage and ocean simulation, and the environmental decay of natural resources.
"Our demographic model will broaden, too; this time, to make a game that let players examine our society and its interaction with our environment in a way no other game does."
Oh good - more things that can go wrong and leave us all doomed.