Quote: middle east war that we have today is prolonged to 2125

Ok, this is what through me off... prolong means to draw out, to lengthen. So, the context in which you used the word is wrong, by saying that the war was prolonged until 2125 from today means that it lasted that long.

You should be able to circumvent this misunderstanding by coming up with a little bit more of a back story such as that a treaty ended the current war in, let's say 2012, but due to an act of terrorism supported by a country/faction (which ever you may have) the treaty was broken in 2125 causing said nuclear holocaust.

Either way it does sound like a pretty cool story, though I can't really seem to find anyplace for time traveling. I also feel you are getting close to Fallout 3 territory, but no one said you can't have similar environments, right?

I would like to ask though, what genre do you plan on this game being in? FPS/RTS/RPG or what?

- Austin

Quote: Original post by _Austin

Quote: middle east war that we have today is prolonged to 2125

Ok, this is what through me off... prolong means to draw out, to lengthen. So, the context in which you used the word is wrong, by saying that the war was prolonged until 2125 from today means that it lasted that long.

You should be able to circumvent this misunderstanding by coming up with a little bit more of a back story such as that a treaty ended the current war in, let's say 2012, but due to an act of terrorism supported by a country/faction (which ever you may have) the treaty was broken in 2125 causing said nuclear holocaust.

Either way it does sound like a pretty cool story, though I can't really seem to find anyplace for time traveling. I also feel you are getting close to Fallout 3 territory, but no one said you can't have similar environments, right?

I would like to ask though, what genre do you plan on this game being in? FPS/RTS/RPG or what?

- Austin

Hehe sorry, english is not my primary language, well what i have on the world´s background is something like this...
-Terrorrist atacks were very frequent at the time against what we can call "freedom countries"
-those acts resulted in retaliation fro countries like USA or England
-The retaliation was very bad planned, and ended up killing civilians
-So the middle eastern countries joined forces on a nuclear atack against the USA and the allied countries, most situated in Europe and asia.
-all of that resulted in a nuclear war, adding that in the background many of the middle eastern countries have developed secret nuclear researches along the years.

can be compared to Fallout 3, but in the end it is not a total apocaliptic scenario, what i want is a divided world as i stated before, with a good part of society privileged due to their "know how" and will to save humanity and on the other side people that survived the attacks and ended up in third world countries as refugees, overpopulating the area.

The time travel concept it´s the only way to save humanity, researched by those privileged people on huge research installments, that could hold a very large amount of people, those beeing spread all arround the world, while the main plot evolves in one specific installment. The idea is that the world doesn´t have enough resources to afford to mankind, and in a daily basis hundreds of thousands die of starvation or other effects that a nuclear war could bring, so the only option to save everyone is for somehow avoid the war to happen, and the only option is time travel.

I have many chapters sketched already, in very distinct events in history, from the 20th century to the 22nd, many scenarios that could have influenced in the result of a nuclear war in the 22nd century, but thats pretty much sketched yet.

Im still working on a background story for the time travel, like how it was created, by who and when, but fow now im still focusing on finishing the world background picture.

I am thinkign on a Co-Op Third Person shooting game, but here, you don´t have a fixed partner, there is the main character and on every mission that takes you to a diferent time you by some event find a partner that will help you to the end of a chapter, and that character will be in the role of the chapter, participating deeply on the story.

Thx for the feedback guys.

I see no reason that time travel is the only option for humanities survival in the story you outlined. If the story takes place some twenty years after the nuclear holocaust, and there are still people alive. Then there are still resources to keep humanity going, at some point it would balance out.

By some estimations there was hundreds of times more radiation fallout in the Chernobyl disaster than in the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. And now twenty plus years later the Chernobyl area, while still radiation contaminated, is teaming with plant and animal life. There has been much research into the effect of radiation fallout in the Chernobyl disaster, some of which has caused a change to projected nuclear war damage models.

But if you think your story requires a situation where humanities only hope is time travel...Then it would be more plauseable if it were biological in nature...Some sort of highly contagious super disease...Something more like 12 Monkeys than Mad Max.

Quote: Original post by MSW
I see no reason that time travel is the only option for humanities survival in the story you outlined. If the story takes place some twenty years after the nuclear holocaust, and there are still people alive. Then there are still resources to keep humanity going, at some point it would balance out.

By some estimations there was hundreds of times more radiation fallout in the Chernobyl disaster than in the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. And now twenty plus years later the Chernobyl area, while still radiation contaminated, is teaming with plant and animal life. There has been much research into the effect of radiation fallout in the Chernobyl disaster, some of which has caused a change to projected nuclear war damage models.

But if you think your story requires a situation where humanities only hope is time travel...Then it would be more plauseable if it were biological in nature...Some sort of highly contagious super disease...Something more like 12 Monkeys than Mad Max.

This post does lead me on to the question, why is time travel the only option for these people? What, in their time, makes it so they have no other option but to travel back in time?

- Austin

Chernobyl was an accident at a power plant, not a nuclear war. To point to the recovery of Chernobyl -- so far insufficient for the return of human inhabitants -- and make claims that a nuclear war wouldn't be a disaster for the entire planet is seriously misguided.


Even a Small Nuclear War Could Change the World --- New Study Shows Distant and Minor Nuclear Blasts Could Cause a Global 'Nuclear Winter' (Dec. 12, 2006)

'Nuclear winter' may kill more than a nuclear war (March 2007)

Nuclear autumn --- The Cold War may be over, but even a relatively small nuclear exchange by rogue nations or terrorist groups could wreak havoc on global climate, threatening civilisation as we know it. (13 October 2008)

Small Nuclear Exchange Would Make Global Ozone Hole (Apr 7, 2008)

There's really no need to fabricate a nuclear holocaust scenario for 2150 when climate change will wipe out most people by that time.

On the topic of backwards time travel (we're all forward time travelers), the idea that "agents" could be sent back in time to make "corrections" to the time line, rests on the assumption that there is only one time line. What if such "corrections", instead of fixing the future, result in splitting off entirely new time lines? If a "time agent" kills his grandpa, it doesn't necessarily mean that he blinks out of existence right then and there ala "Back to the Future". It might as well mean that he's sent the world at that moment into a new time line, one in which his birth is an impossibility but one that he finds himself in nevertheless. In other words, it might not be that "corrections" repair the future, so much as they eliminate the possibility of that damaged future. This means that "time agents" are stranded in those pasts where they've gone to do their work.

At any rate, whatever temporal metaphysics you think up, it might help to track how it compares with other speculations, and of course, keep it consistent.

Quote: Original post by _Austin

Quote: Original post by MSW
I see no reason that time travel is the only option for humanities survival in the story you outlined. If the story takes place some twenty years after the nuclear holocaust, and there are still people alive. Then there are still resources to keep humanity going, at some point it would balance out.

By some estimations there was hundreds of times more radiation fallout in the Chernobyl disaster than in the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. And now twenty plus years later the Chernobyl area, while still radiation contaminated, is teaming with plant and animal life. There has been much research into the effect of radiation fallout in the Chernobyl disaster, some of which has caused a change to projected nuclear war damage models.

But if you think your story requires a situation where humanities only hope is time travel...Then it would be more plauseable if it were biological in nature...Some sort of highly contagious super disease...Something more like 12 Monkeys than Mad Max.

This post does lead me on to the question, why is time travel the only option for these people? What, in their time, makes it so they have no other option but to travel back in time?

- Austin

in the background story i wrote the reason why time travel is the only option left´, but to sum it up... its mainly because everyone is dieing from the effects of a nuclear war, such as starvation, high ammounts of nuclear polution spread out in the atmosphere, a high rate of newborns dieing from mutations or cancer. Well, the main reason is that the society doesnt have enough time for a long-term way to fix the problem, and they need a drastic way to solve the problem. Making time travel the only hope left in society and leaving no windows for mistakes.


thx for the feedback guys, i already changed quite some paragraphs on the original story and also wrote more in a day than i wrote during the whole month.

And again, sorry about my english

Quote: Original post by LessBread
Chernobyl was an accident at a power plant, not a nuclear war. To point to the recovery of Chernobyl -- so far insufficient for the return of human inhabitants -- and make claims that a nuclear war wouldn't be a disaster for the entire planet is seriously misguided.

That is hardly what I ment to say. Nuclear war would absolutely be devistating, no question about it.

The OP has stated that his story takes place 20 years after a nuclear war killed 70% of the human population and wiped out all resources. And because there are no more resources, the survivors only option is time travel.

I'm simply pointing out that the scenario does not add up.

If all resources were wiped out in the war then there would be nobody left five, let alone twenty years later. If the war was as devistating as the OP claims then there would be no more rainforests to survive twenty years later.

Chernobyl is an example of how areas that recieved massive amounts of radiation fallout can act as a resource twenty years later. Humans cannot live there permanetly now, but they can certainly visit much of the area without excessive radiation protection. Heck for over a decade after the accident reactor number 3 at the power plant was still operational with workers trucked in and out each shift.

If, as the OP states in his scenario, the rain forests are still around twenty years later. Then there are resources left. Humanity survived for several hundred thousand years, through an ice age no less, just on the resouces naturaly found around them. If the rainforests survived the war, the nuclear winter, the fallout...then its reasonable to assume that some number of human survivors could live off the resources found there.

Obviously if the war wiped out all resources then how are the underground bunkers built? How is time travel even developed? How do they even have the resources to power the thing?

Of course none of that even dives into the illogical nature of the way the OP is useing time travel. Afterall that is the purpose behind going back, to save this one single timline...which if they could prevent the war in the same single timeline then there would be no reason to go back in the first place.

Quote: Original post by MSW

Quote: Original post by LessBread
Chernobyl was an accident at a power plant, not a nuclear war. To point to the recovery of Chernobyl -- so far insufficient for the return of human inhabitants -- and make claims that a nuclear war wouldn't be a disaster for the entire planet is seriously misguided.

That is hardly what I ment to say. Nuclear war would absolutely be devistating, no question about it.

The OP has stated that his story takes place 20 years after a nuclear war killed 70% of the human population and wiped out all resources. And because there are no more resources, the survivors only option is time travel.

I'm simply pointing out that the scenario does not add up.

If all resources were wiped out in the war then there would be nobody left five, let alone twenty years later. If the war was as devistating as the OP claims then there would be no more rainforests to survive twenty years later.

Chernobyl is an example of how areas that recieved massive amounts of radiation fallout can act as a resource twenty years later. Humans cannot live there permanetly now, but they can certainly visit much of the area without excessive radiation protection. Heck for over a decade after the accident reactor number 3 at the power plant was still operational with workers trucked in and out each shift.

If, as the OP states in his scenario, the rain forests are still around twenty years later. Then there are resources left. Humanity survived for several hundred thousand years, through an ice age no less, just on the resouces naturaly found around them. If the rainforests survived the war, the nuclear winter, the fallout...then its reasonable to assume that some number of human survivors could live off the resources found there.

Obviously if the war wiped out all resources then how are the underground bunkers built? How is time travel even developed? How do they even have the resources to power the thing?

Of course none of that even dives into the illogical nature of the way the OP is useing time travel. Afterall that is the purpose behind going back, to save this one single timline...which if they could prevent the war in the same single timeline then there would be no reason to go back in the first place.

this is all worked on the background, i just decided not to add in the posts here, but ill clarify.

well, it wasnt the war that killed everyone, the 70% that died were a sum of the casualties of a nuclear war and the late effects of one, this is all very explained in there.
And the reason why there are still survivors is because the world is divided, not the whole planet was destroyed by the war, there are some minor regions that aren´t affected by the effects, and those regions ended up beeing used to create self-sustained instalations to acomodate some of the population, and those same regions help the ones that were left behind by growing resources themselves and sending some to the cities that were not affected also, but grew in population because the survivors moved to those places, i want to create a scenario that is very familiar to us even today, a mirrored world, where the privileged do what they can to help the less affortunate. I didn´t quite wrote the whole thing here, its much more explained in the original text like why there are not enough resources, or how those huge facilities were built and how they sustain themselves. Remember that the effects of a nuclear war can last for decades, and that is what i´m looking for, like the couple of years after war the effects couldn´t even be seen yet, but htat evolves on the years after and everything explaining itself during that. There is a big time window from the start of the war to the big effects caused by it, over 20 years, the reason of time travel, how they got to it and why it is the last chance of save mankind is all going to be explained, besides i´m not saying if the time travel concept fails on the day after that the world will be finished, its a long term effect so maybe even 100 years after that there will be a little left of society, but day by day that ammount will grow smaller. And that is what i want to expose in there, a rooting society, not a destroyed one. I want the story to be very deep, i thinked a lot of ways where the game can work on a long term such as the maincharacter participates during the nuclear war, lives thru the effects of it and go back to change what has been done on several events that lead to it, maybe even going back on events that are seen today in our society, who knows, maybe that mumbai event we saw in india during that last week can lead to a nuclear atack 10-20 years from now? This is where i want to get.

one more thing, the objective of time travel is to avoid the nuclear war as a whole on that time line, as if it never happened.

Quote: Original post by dskhury
one more thing, the objective of time travel is to avoid the nuclear war as a whole on that time line, as if it never happened.

Yes, I understand that. You are describeing a common time travel paradox of a single timeline.

Scenario A: The war occurs, humanity is doomed, timetravel is considered the only option.

Scenario B: The war is avoided, humanity survives, no reason to use timetravel to prevent a war that never happened.

The people the timetraveler leaves behind in scenario A do not suddenly find themselves in scenario B...And scenario B has no history of the war, so they would have no reason to send the player through the time machine...and the fact that the war occured in senario A, means that the timetraveler will NOT prevent it from happening.

Now if scenario A and B were DIFFERENT timelines and the time machine simply allowed the timetravler to cross from scenario A to B... Then the only way to save everyone in Scenario A is to send them ALL through the time machine to live in the scenario B timeline...but that presents a whole bunch of new problems.