Far Cry New Dawn's Lush Post-Apocalyptic World is Based in Science

Far Cry New Dawn is out, and while I haven’t picked it up, I have to say I really admire the post-apocalyptic vision that it paints, as so many games default to a dreary and gray wasteland where color and life are scares. Even the fallout series, colorful in just about every other respect, defaults to dead forests, empty fields, and dry, dead roads. By comparison, New Dawn is bustling with life: trees, flowers, and other plant life are growing on just about every surface, and animals are abound.

Turns out, this wasn’t just an artistic choice, as associate narrative designer James Nadiger told GamesIndustry that he and his team actually consulted a meteorologist to figure out if a lusher post-apocalyptic world was possible… and how it might look:

"So we've leveraged a bunch of real world things to create an apocalypse that's clearly an after the end of the world scenario but with an environment that's lush and inviting. When plants come back, animals come back, predators come back, and that sets up a classic Far Cry open world…

…I don't remember the exact number [of bombs we based on] but if there's too many bombs, there's no chance for anyone to survive or for plants and animals to recover. You can recover from radiation or nuclear disasters fairly quickly—if you look at things Chernobyl, or at Hiroshima or Nagasaki, where bombs went off, radiation came out, but life continued to soldier on."

So basically in the world of Far Cry, enough bombs dropped to end civilization, but not all life. That sounds like a pretty optimistic future as far as I’m concerned: is it too late to move to Hope County and start building my own bunker?

Either way, it’s cool to think that this colorful apocalypse actually has a basis in science.