Inspired by Heinlein’s
Orphans of the Sky, Iron Tower Studio’s
The New World stands as a turn-based generation ship RPG with a style that should turn the heads of sci-fi purists and Fallout fans alike. With striking concept art and the team’s highly detailed updates in mind, I chatted with lead designer Vince D. Weller on the project’s finer points.
Erik Meyer: The New World draws inspiration from Heinlein’s writing and the Fallout series, so from a setting and atmosphere standpoint, what must-have elements do you take from these predecessors, and what do you see yourselves adding to these iconic works?
Vince D. Weller: From Heinlein we borrowed the concept: a colony ship flying through space for hundreds of years, many generations destined to live and die on the ship, all in the name of an idea nobody remembers or cares about, with eventual mutiny and loss of purpose.
As for Fallout, it was the first game (for me, at least) that shifted the focus from killing and looting to dealing with people and exploring different ways of adapting to this new post-apocalyptic reality.
From this perspective, there isn’t much we can add there as it’s a direction rather than a formula, so we’ll continue exploring this direction further and focusing on factions, choices, and dialogues.
EM: The fact that the game world is a generation ship gives you a certain freedom as storytellers to repurpose the habitat and the cultures/religions/daily lives of the populace to your own ends. You can create factions that arise from the needs of spacefaring people, so what unique challenges come with fleshing out NPCs, locations, customs, and the quirks therein?
VDW: We prefer to stick with realism whenever possible. As Joe Abercrombie of The First Law fame said, “Now some folks might say, “hey, it’s fantasy, it doesn’t have to be real,” but I’d say the exact opposite. It’s happening in a made up place, so it has to be more real than ever.”
Thus, our main challenge is how to make the factions and characters (motivations, beliefs, agendas, goals, etc) realistic and believable in the context of the ‘made up’ setting. To do that, we turn to history: the French and Russian revolutions are a handy guide to class warfare, reigns of terror, and post-revolution factions, the early days of Deadwood are a good blueprint for our container town, plus the fascinating story of SMS Königsberg, New England’s Puritans, etc. It’s quite a mix but the same could be said about the AoD world.
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