PA games: why the desert?

victor

victor

Antediluvian as Feck
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I understand why post-apocalyptic movies such as Mad Max have to take place in the desert. I mean, it can't be profitable for any producer to have to nuke a city to get the right feel. But why do PA games have to take place in a desert, or somewhere nobody wants to be? STALKER might be an exception, if it ever comes out (it'll probably be crap). I mean, about every PA game I can think of takes place in Arizona or California or some desert somewhere. But why? Can't developers use the fact that they could just make a blown up city in the game? What's the deal? Why would people who just survived a nuclear hell move to Death Valley? It doesn't make much sense. At least stay in the green zones, people.
 
Part of that would be that almost all the atomic testing took place in Nevada, and everybody has seen videos of the desert getting blown up.

Besides, I think it would be harder to survive in Death Valley, than it would in some beautiful orchard.

There were a few that weren't based in the desert BTW. Waterworld, and Nemesis come to mind.
 
Similarity, for starters; a desert is harsh and inhospitable environment for life where only a few specially adapted ogranisms can survive, and then only in few numbers - just as we suppose it would be for people after a nuclear holocaust. It seems fairly natural to combine the two. Then there's the fact that a major theme and attraction of post-apocalypse novels/movies/games is that they're usually about a solitary struggle for existence in an empty yet hostile world, which comes across great in a barren setting and doesn't come across at all in a small middle-of-nowhere town full of orchards and farms. And most importantly, as Dove said, all the tests took place in the desert, and the footage captured people's imaginations so stories were written from those images - which kind of started a tradition of setting post-nuclear stories in desert environments, which carried over to movies, which carried over to games.

It just seems to be reasonable as well, especially for people who live on the fringes of desert areas - people can survive in that environment, they just choose not too because there are much, much better and easier places to live. If every major city and the area around it was a radioactive pile of rubble though, you'd be more likely to take your chances in the desert than live in the surburbs and hope you miraculously develop an immunity to radiation poisoning.
 
Logan's Run, for instance, used a post-apocalyptic setting that everyone assumed that the world was all desert.

The desert cliché also tags along in another sci-fi element, the alien presence in the desert. Not many PA universes of a post-atomic nature involve aliens to a significant amount unless it was done by the aliens themselves.

I think forests are entirely capable of surviving after a nuclear apocalypse of a limited scope, so therefore they can be represented, and who knows what kind of fauna now lives in there...
 
Ahh, Transarctica... a beautiful game, but with very little coverage in the internet...

And may have decided to leave the big cities due to:
a. Radiation
b. Enviromental hazards (eg. Look mommy, is htat a skyscraper falling?)
c. Large amount of dead, rotting bodies (ideal environment for diseases and such)
d. Anarchy (some just like to shoot people)

If I was faced with these, then I would leave the city before long (although if it was Poznan I would strongly reconsider my decision)
 
I guess the setting is a big deal to me. As long as it has a good plot and theme to it, we'll be able to see cities when S.T.A.L.K.E.R. comes out tho..in Janurary ugh..unless they push it back again..
 
Dove said:
Besides, I think it would be harder to survive in Death Valley, than it would in some beautiful orchard.

There were a few that weren't based in the desert BTW. Waterworld, and Nemesis come to mind.
Click to expand...

Then why would people go there? I didn't take Waterworld as an example, because of it's untraditional PA, as the entire world looked exactly the same (water, well everywhere). I take back the fact that ALL games take place in the desert, but many do.


I'm not saying they should stay in big cities, that's equally stupid, but there are several things between big cities and deserts. And radiation wouldn't be much more significant in a forest. The winds would've dispersed it all over the continent, and wind contributes a lot to spreading radiation. There's obviously going to be more wind in open flat areas such as deserts than areas with lots of trees.This is just immediately after a nuclear war, however. Immediate radiation dies out pretty fast (at least with conventional nuclear weaponry, I'm assuming they didn't use cobalt bombs).

People live in the desert today, but they're very dependent on contact with the civilized world and the cities. That contact would be severed after any major disaster, and those people would have maybe a few weeks to live before they run out of food (at least most of them). The only advantage I can see with a deserted area is the loneliness, less people around you usually means you're safer.

And the fauna wouldn't have changed much in a forest after a nuclear war. Radiation kills rather than mutate, and if it does mutate, those mutations are random, and makes the individual sterile at best. You'd probably find no fauna at all.

The whole desert thing is a trend that survived from PA movies, and should die out in games, that have so much more potential.
 
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