"It's not in the top five reference points": Afterworld isn't just a Fallout grand strategy game, say Paradox, it owes a lot more to the Bronze Age

When Paradox announced their post-apocalyptic North American grand strategy game Afterworld, I made the obvious comparison to Fallout. For this I should be chained to the fender of a war rig and pelted with scoops of radioactive dogfood, while being slowly driven through a pack of three-headed coyotes. In a new dev diary, Afterworld's content designer and "elder lore keeper" Luke Bean has gone into some detail about the game's setting, explaining that Afterworld owes more to study of the Bronze Age collapse than any Vault Tech malarkey. The continent's diverging tribes are also apparently far more estranged from and mystified by the "ancients" than their peers in Bethesda's RPGs. "The people of this world aren't Americans exactly," Bean began. "They are people who remember the Americans. America was an ancient empire to them, sort of the way the Roman Empire was for us, and they live in the shadow of that history. The people know that there was this time full of powerful and myster