Firestorm (series)

''This article refers to the series of video games. For the original 2004 entry in the series, see Firestorm (video game).''

Firestorm is a series of  and  created by Black Sands Entertainment. The series is set during an alternate 21st and 22nd centuries, and its "cassettepunk" aesthetic are influenced by mid-to-late 20th Century East Alutran culture, with a combination of optimism for radical social change intertwined the pervasive fear of a  following the events of the Third World War and the increasing fragility of the postwar international system. The game is primarily set in the Serpentine Valley of East Alutra, though future expansions of the original game and subsequent entries to the series have brought more of the continent into the setting.

The series eponymous first entry was released in 2004 by Black Sands, which saw subsequent releases of the Sands of Time and Deserts of Glass expansion packs in 2005 and 2006, respectively. [Section on games released in the series between 2006 and 2016]. In 2016, Black Sands was joined by Lathadun developers Laaghey Studios to modernize the original game, creating Firestorm: Blackest Wastes, which expands the scope of the setting from the Serpentine Valley into portions of the former Sedic nations. Considered officially to be an expansion pack similar to SoT and DoG, many in the series' fandom differentiate between "Classic" and "Blackest" versions of the game.

While the of the game is owned by Black Sands, the studio has released the developers kit and a number of assets from both versions of the original Firestorm game to the public, owing to a vibrant community of  that has grown around the series since its creation in 2004. The game also enjoys a large competitive scene, with Firestorm tournaments taking place across the world, generally having evolved out the East Alutran culture.

Origins
According to series creators [DEV NAMES], the series has its roots in the pen-and-paper system Glasslands and the cooperative strategy board game Shelter, which were published in the late 1980s. The former has the players take the role of characters living in a post-apocalyptic landscape, in which players act as morally-ambiguous explorers, scavengers, and mercenaries. The latter is a game where players are military figures constructing, populating, and defending an underground bunker complex from a hostile forces while managing the internal politics and resources needed to keep the complex safe and maintained.

Firestorm initially began as an attempt to create two separate games based on each of these systems during in 1998-99, though budget concerns and limits to the company's existing Sandbox Engine architecture made the series' longtime Creative Lead [CREATIVE LEAD NAME], who was working on the Glasslands project at the time, propose a merger of the games and a shift of the layout from their original three-dimensional action RPG concept and Shelter's two-dimensional "ant farm" layout into an isometric overhead perspective. This was owing to the contemporary success of similar strategy games using this perspective that was popular across the worldwide gaming community in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The series was originally set to exist in the base setting of Glasslands, but recent developments in the Brotherly Wars which wracked the developers' home region for decades, [specific event(s)], spurred [CREATIVE LEAD] to create a more politically vocal message for the game. This has been summarized by the series' recurring tagline: "Must the son pay for the sins of his father?" The move was initially criticized by Black Sands, though [Creative Lead] has gone on to state that the original intention of the game was "to deliver a hopeful tone, that even in moments of incomprehensible darkness and inhumanity...that people can always redeem themselves and bring each other from the edge...but that peace and prosperity are a fragile thing to be cherished and protected."

Setting
Firestorm takes place in a fictionalized East Alutra in an scenario that diverges from reality during the Ordrish Revolution, where the conflict expands in 1980 following the arrival of Velorenkyan forces in Gladomyr in response of the Myrish invasion of the Mogone. As a result, the conflict dramatically enflames relations between the capitalist and radical nations, leading to an unspecified near-miss incident involving combat over Republic-era Ordrish nuclear weapons that causes an intervention by the World Forum to stop the conflict and restore the Ordrish border before other countries struggling with the era's economic malaise implode in the manner Ordrey did in 1975. The resulting disruption in global trade leads to the proliferation of nuclear energy around the world, feeling that the reliability of fossil-fuels based economies have come into question in an era of polarizing political tensions that could potentially interrupt the global fossil fuels trade once again. An "atomic golden age" begins as a result, with a strage socio-technological status quo emerging where advanced robotics, cars and other vehicles,, , the , and other technological marvels exist alongside  computers and changing forms of self-expression in an environment of socio-political paranoia about the future. This also coincides with an intensification of the time's, most notably in the Serpentine Valley.

The political tensions of the pre-war world culminate in an opening of outright hostility between Martland and Aquizreiki involving the deployment of tactical nuclear missiles, though it is uncertain who fired first. Following this, an unspecified Sedic nation (most likely Ordrey) was struck by one of the belligerents, which prompted a mass retaliation which included much higher-yield nuclear devices as well as space-based kinetic weapons. This in turn caused a cascade of geopolitical dominoes that sparked a massive conflict between the two main competing power blocs which remained intact and involved in the Brotherly Wars, causing a failure of the world economy, the immediate implosion of the international system and the World Forum, and a number of conflicts and uprisings the world over. This even is known in the setting as the "Seven-Hour War". The game's worldspace itself has not yet cross westward into the Alutran Steppe beyond the Penguinnes or north of the Aarnieu River, but item descriptions as well as some dialogue with non-player characters indicate that not every society had fallen, and there may still be continuing nations elsewhere in Alutra outside of the area explored in-game.

Pre-War conditions
[Creative lead] describes the world in 2071 as a "gilded age" where on the surface, people in East Alutra and the wider world lived in a period of technological wonders and personal freedom, but had lives built on foundations of social distress, political turmoil, the rise of nationalism and radicalization, and economic stagnation. Landmarks and items from the pre-war era found throughout the series appear to indicate a period, mentions of food and fuel shortages, the destabilization of numerous countries, worsening , and a culture that was failing to address its ills to the detriment of all within it. In the Serpentines, an atmosphere of pervasive violence carried on throughout the 21st Century, and very few areas were safe from ethnic or political strife. Most people would carry some form of personal protection, with the presence of in  that the player can salvage being a particularly shocking example of the pervasiveness of the ongoing Brotherly Wars, referred to as the "Always War" in-game. A sense of cynicism and disdain for institutions and authority in general can be seen the most strongly among characters who were adults which have clear memories of the pre-war world. Many of the most stable remaining buildings in the urban areas of the wastelands are veritable fortresses made of reinforced concrete in an apparent Neo-Fundadismist style, while some cities have areas which are cordoned off from each other by security perimeters and concrete walls, some of which have automated defenses such as robotic machine gun turrets.

Blackest Wastes began to show the worsening conditions for the wider world in the era, with the Sedic nations, which appeared to have unified under a government called the "Fraternity", had fallen behind other nations economically, as evident by a number of imported goods that can be found in the worldspace, with higher technology artefacts and items tending to indicate foreign design while domestic hardware seems to have stagnated. National Futurism appears to have displaced Noyonism on the national stage there, though a disproportionate numbers of avowedly Noyonist communities exist which claim to predate the conflict and have roots as far back as 1974. In contrast to much of the world following the divergence, Ordrey and Lathadu in particular appeared to have taken a path where development of energy still utilized the region's coal deposits, as evident in the presence of hyper-advanced coal-fired engines and a unique resource called "alphamen", described as a "high-efficiency liquefied coal fuel" which can be scavenged by the player and power some items and structures in the place of other energy sources.

Few references exist as to the state of the world outside of East Alutra prior to the Seven-Hour War. Among them include [REFERENCES TO WIDER WORLD]. [IMPLICATIONS].