“Although this somewhat mirrors our ocean today, the world in our fiction is one more attuned to the tie between the health of the ocean and the health of our planet.” “When our game begins, some areas of the ocean are under significant pressure and disruption, while others are showing revitalization following increased global action to mitigate human impact,” Angst said. With that sense of realism, E-Line Media considered the very real threats the ocean is facing. Hudson also noted that this process means being able to shift ideas while in development - being “agile.”Ī screenshot from Beyond Blue Image: E-Line Media The further into the future you go, the less confident you can be about landing an accurate prediction in such a huge possibility space.” But the further out you get, the less you’re able to predict from a stable state it’s a bit like the butterfly effect, where the ripple effects of small changes grow bigger and bigger over time. “So if you do enough research, you can be pretty confident about projecting 5, 10, or even 15 years forward. “Life and technology usually make iterative leaps - even if something seems mind-blowingly new, you can usually trace back a number of smaller steps that led there,” Hudson said. Legion game director Kent Hudson told Polygon that it’s easier to develop these near-future worlds, “because you get to start with total knowledge of the current state of the world and iterate from there.” Watch Dogs: Legion, the upcoming Ubisoft hacker adventure game, is set in a future London - somewhere in the near-future. Instead, the team focused on the fantasy of Neo-San Francisco, where “espers, sapient robots, and hybrids are like colorful sprinkles on some ridiculous cake in ROM, a fun sweet thing to have around in an otherwise largely deceitful and unhealthy world.”Ī promotional image for Watch Dogs: Legion Image: Ubisoft Toronto/Ubisoft “Dreadful, we’re already pretty much living it now- it’ll just be more streamlined,” James quipped. James noted that MidBoss had chosen to move away from what San Francisco might actually look like in 40 years, when the city “might be completely wiped of what remaining charm it even has left,” a place where tech makes life more boring and streamlined. The high-tech world - with colorful, advanced beings - worked for the game, but the team didn’t want the scenery to be too bleak. But by moving only 40 to 50 years in the future, the city of Neo-San Francisco, where the game is set, will still feel familiar in some ways. In a world set 200 years from now, the options feel limitless. Because it’s set in the near future - one that’s within this generation - James said the team had to balance how high-tech the world feels. On the surface, it’s visually reminiscent of “the future,” one that looks high-tech and advanced. MidBoss’ 2017 release, 2064, certainly hits those design goals. He continued: “The visual goal of 2064 was to present a future that looked a little bit like today, just with more cybernetics and genetically-altered people walking around, and maybe a few pieces of tech retrofitted into older building structures.” Neurodiver main characters ES88 (left) and GATE (right) Image: MidBoss We asked game developers and creative teams about the process of creating future worlds. Video games have to be built in ever-changing technology, and yet science fiction games about the future manage to encompass all of these themes, imaging worlds across the spectrum. It’s not always about flying cars and cybernetically enhanced bodies, but, of course, that’s cool, too. That’s what makes designing the future so hard the definition is always changing. Other times, these worlds are set so far in the future that they’re nearly unrecognizable. Sometimes these are near-future worlds, ones that are only slightly off from our own. Science fiction is a study of future worlds. Follow along as we deep dive into the great unknown. What does the future hold? In our new series “Imagining the Next Future,” Polygon explores the new era of science fiction - in movies, books, TV, games, and beyond - to see how storytellers and innovators are imagining the next 10, 20, 50, or 100 years during a moment of extreme uncertainty.
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