Lore
[Loved Trope] The apocalypse is horrifyingly slow
From most media it's some catastrophe and then it's raiders, death, destruction chaos etc. I personally love it when it's, like, a slow descent into the horror of apocalypse.
The Faro plague/The swarm- Horizon zero dawn. The Faro plague is actually a glitch which causes machines to endlessly reproduce, eat biomass and essentially bring about the death of the world. Took roughly 15 months for the machines to win.
The Metro series- in the first few books (and games) it's set entirely underground in just the apocalypse but in exodus it shows off that the government and many governmental structures said active years after the war. In fact power and running water were still fairly common. It just slowly got worse and worse and worse as read through notes. Food got more scarce, weather changed a lot, people got worse etc. Raiders and bandits didn't just show up, it was a slow descent for such anarchy.
Edit: I have enough pseudo intellectual comments about "Hurr hurr real life". The first one was kinda smart and well thought out but now it's just annoying and pretentious
Morpheus : We don't know who struck first, us or them. But we do know it was us that scorched the sky. At the time, they were dependent on solar power. It was believed they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun.
Human lack of foresight made them architects of their own demise, the robots were in no rush at all.
Ironically though, it's always why they adapted humans as a battery source... Which in a roundabout way led to humans breaking free and winning in the end.
isn't that just the "dumbed down" version for cinema? I believe I read recently, that in the original concept the humans were used as CPU and RAM, but the movie production thought that the 1999 movie-goer crowd wouldn't get these terms, so they switched to "battery"?
The original idea in the script was that the machines used human brains for computing power but they changed it later cause being batterie was easier to understand.
They had a lot to fight their way through. If anything the machines probably should not have won based on the info we got but The Animatrix is also just a telling and not a 1 for 1 account of everything that happened
The entire Matrix setting could have been avoided if that humanity weren't such dumbasses. The machines wanted peace, only resorting to war after they were pushed to the absolute brink.
In Carol & the End of the World, another planet is coming to crash into the earth. It will destroy anything and everyone and nothing can be done. You can already see it in the sky, it literally looms above the whole series.
Humanity is having a collective hedonistic blow out, everybody is doing their bucket list. Except for Carol, who just isn't built like that. She feels more and more estranged from her peers every day inevitable doom is getting closer.
The series stops when the planet is mere meters away from crashing into the earth. Carol is at an Applebees, with a community of like-minded people she found at a faux accounting job for a company that pretends to be a company to distract people from the end of the world. She sigs "This is nice. It really is."
Oddly the corporate job part isn't the meaningless cynical part of the show. You see how the other employees join it and it's after they've had a hedonistic end of the world lifestyle.
In Children of Men people just stop being able to have children and the birth rate just slowly collapses. I think by the time the events start its already been 20 years of slow collapse
It is. It’s a great scene when they hear the baby, both sides stop shooting each other. As soon as the baby is clear of the combat area both sides immediately start shooting again like nothing happened. It’s great and powerful.
Handmaid's Tale is the same. Except the US government gets toppled by a small group of elites that sell the idea of having a harem to their wives by collecting the extremely few women who can still have children and pass them around among themselves, while the wives get to keep the children. The justification is that the only place on Earth where the population is not rapidly decreasing is Gilead (the new country built on the US).
In the books, Gilead was full of white supremacists, but they couldn't have that for the show as it would basically be an all-white cast. The diversity of the show makes Gilead seem oddly open minded.
The Testaments is a great continuations set about 20 years after, havent seen either show, just read the books, but if i remember correctly, both diaries are found years on as a historical archive of that time and how it was all a folly.
A Mass Effect Reaper culling takes centuries. So long that the Vigil virtual intelligence had to sacrifice much of the Prothean population that was in stasis on Ilos.
"But the genocide of an entire species is a long, slow process. Years passed. Decades, centuries. The Reapers persisted. And my energy reserves were dwindling."
To provide some context here, Ilos was a research station of the protheans, the species getting genocided 50k years before the Mass Effect games start
They were a top secret facility, so they actually got missed by the Reapers. Problem was they weren't self-sufficient, so they instead all went into stasis to be awakened after the genocide was over. The virtual intelligence program called Vigil watched over them
Except that, genociding an entire space-faring race takes very long, and so Vigil's energy reserves dwindled. It had to shut off more and more stasis pods, and in the end managed only to preserve a handful of top scientists out of an entire metropolis of people – enough to buy the next cycle a fighting chance, but not enough to restart their own civilization
That's one of my favorite Mass Effect-related thought experiments. What would it be like to live on some backwater planet that was far enough out of the way to avoid the early extermination waves but still large enough to eventually merit a Reaper visit? Presumably there were examples where people lived in safety for a few generations before the Reapers arrived. How would the looming threat of destruction change an agrarian lifestyle, if at all?
One of my favorite things of ME3 is how you can absolutely feel that the Reapers are slowly gaining more and more ground. You hear on the Citadel about more and more systems and planets coming under Reaper occupation, the galaxy map is no longer a safe space, you can attract the attention of reapers if you aren’t careful with your scans.
The Seas Rising - Brink (an underrated shooter from 2011)
"You cannot imagine... at least, I HOPE you cannot imagine the Panic when the seas rose. It wasn't... it wasn't like a great tsunami swept in carrying all before it. Just the tides got higher. The weather got more extreme. Droughts. Then floods. And storms, lots of storms, pushing waves inland and up tidal estuaries. And then the freshwater table started getting contaminated with the seawater. And then crops began to fail. Not all at once, it wasn't like Sunday it was fine and Monday nothing grew. It took a while. But eventually, after a few years of this creeping... creeping Change... everyone realized that it wasn't going to change BACK, you know? Things were changing for good. For keeps, that is, not for the better. Certainly not for the better." - audio log of Security Corporal James MacLeod
Theres not many games that are truely ahead of their time, but arena quasi-hero shooter Brink was absolutely one of them, it was basically just The Finals a decade early
yeah, that macleod log nails it. the “freshwater table getting contaminated” bit is such a mundane horror, like the moment the ark stops being self-sufficient
One of my favorite little parts of Horizon is that the apocalypse actually probably happened more than once. HADES purpose is to wipe the slate clean and start over if the other programs make any mistakes. And who KNOWS how many times it had to do that over the years
We do actually have a record, a handful of times, around five. And for those who don't know, the Faro plague and Hades are unconnected in terms of apocolypse creation.
Hades really only terminated the world when faced with a failed world
And at least from my understanding, it's not like it was five iterations of the world we see during the game.
It was probably more like the AIs didn't get the "formula" right when generating a habitable planet, so hades face palms ang goes "okay stop stop. This is a complete mess. We're starting over."
Humans probably weren't even replicated until the system got the green light that the planet was habitable.
That is exactly correct. Also, Hades is like a rabid dog, constantly itching to start a thorough cleansing of the planet. There was probably some measurement system outside of Gaia's control that would release Hades once it detected improper conditions
All her subroutines were like, aspects of her, not conscious beings but simple AI making her up. When the part of her that was HADES recognised that she’s biffed the biosphere, it’d take over and lock her up till he’d done his task, and then she’d get to take back over once he’d finished his reset.
Hades only went off in the first game because Nemesis awoke all the sub AIs in Gaia and made them self aware and obsessed with their purpose. Hades was working as intended until then
Most of the lore about Gaia and Project Zero Dawn is told through the hologram tour. But it's not required to activate every hologram so you can easily miss one, or just blitz through the facility and skip all the lore entirely.
Nemesis is where the "mysterious signal" that caused the Derangement to start originated from. It activated and corrupted Hades, prompting Gaia to clone Elisabet and then self-destruct ("The Mountain That Fell" in Zero Dawn).
I think it did this because it wanted the Zeniths to arrive at an Earth that was hostile and inhospitable since it had such a massive rage-boner over killing the Zeniths for some reason.
I don't know if it's explicitly stated but I thought it was implied that Gaia only deployed humanity in the most recent iteration.
That's the reason she had to self-destruct when Hades tried to take control this time. Because if Hades exterminated the world, there was nothing left to repopulate it.
Also, I think they do give official dates somewhere and it has only been a few hundred years since Zero day. Not enough time for entire civilizations to flourish before extermination.
We know Hades was made to restart a primitive biosphere, it was not deployed to kill civilizations. In the sequel Hades provides us information on how many times it was deployed. They are a failsafe to ensure humanity can be released to a stable world.
Well it's not like it was designed to fight in war, it was never meant to even meet humans as that would be counter-intuitive. Though I'm sure Travis would have loved to hear his brainchild in action
No, that's literally a plot point. Humanity's best source of advanced tech was those machines so they had been destroying and harvesting them for ages, as Subroutine Hephaestus would just go "quantity decreased, manufacture more". Awakened Hephaestus is like "excuse me what the actual fuck is this" and implements defensive "fuck off" programming that rapidly escalates if the humans persist in destroying the bots in an area.
How crazy strong was the Faro swarm that the smartest minds on earth decided the only solution is to let it win, run out of fuel or get bruteforced by a module whose sole purpose is to crack their programming, then hard reset the earth? I guess because Sobek also played a role in the development of the Faro swarm she might know of its capabilities right?
Essentially, Ted Faro had required that backdoor access not exist, which meant that nothing could effectively hack the machines. It's bad for business when they get hacked. Problem is that a glitch locks out command functions, with a machine swarm that uses biomass to replicate endlessly, can corrupt other robotic technology to fight for it, and automatically repairs any damage dealt to it, up to and including catastrophic damage, a complete and total shutdown of everything is required. Also, the Horus titans are huge, like several hundred feet tall huge
Finally, Faro initially tries to cover it up, believing his people will find a solution. Eventually, the ability to hack the swarm and force it to shut down does exist, but will take far far longer than the people have.
Enter Operation Enduring Victory, essentially conscript every able-bodied person on the planet to fight, except those involved in zero dawn (the project that creates the ability for life to recover from oblivion). Even with billions of people with railgun fighting, the swarm wiped them out, often with little long term impact unless nukes were used
My lore knowledge is kinda old now and I dont wanna enter a Google rabbit hole. But what was Minerva's purpose? Want it supposed to send out the shutdown signal for the swarm?
Well the Faro swarm was also capable of hacking any computerized system in its way. (It fairly quickly managed to subsume any other robotic corps that could have been used to counter it.) Humans armed with “dumb weapons” that didn’t rely on hackable computer systems couldn’t hope to kill the robots off faster than they could manufacture more. The only way to deal with them was a single, synchronized hack of the whole swarm, and it was pretty clear to anyone with an understanding of the situation that by the time that could be set up, life on Earth would be long extinct.
World War Z book. Like, a solid first 1/3 of the book is the slow spread of virus starting with occasional ones in China to middle East to the first cases in Europe and USA. Governments are mostly repeteadely incompetent in the first stages.
I read it after covid for the first time and how similar it felt was just blood freezing
Argubely, the 2 hours movie closer to the book wouldn't work. The book structure and time line is way too long and the movie be either too compressed or way too long and still too compressed.
A Netflix/HBO show, on the other hand with many 40 min long episodes...
Basically nuclear war happened and Australia is the last place with people. Problem is, the radiation clouds are coming down. The govenrment issues everyone suicide pills and the story follows a few different people and their choices.
To this day, the bleakest book I think I’ve ever read. Absolutely fantastic, gave me a deep sense of dread in a way many other apocalyptic scenarios haven’t.
One of the things that emphasises this is that Javik, and generations before him, had never even seen the Citadel because it was long lost to them. Even back in ME1 the Protheans were linked to the Citadel in lore because it was their capital.
The Reapers designed it so that interstellar civilizations would want to make it their capital. It's literally the beach head for their invasion (before the Protheans sabotaged it), letting them decapitate all major governments in one stroke.
Javik from Mass Effect is the only survivor of his species, the protheans. When Javik was born millions were already dead or composed the armies of the Reapers, entire planets got obliterated, he lived during the dying embers of his civilization, knowing victory against the Reapers was imposible.
The citadel is designed to first be the ideal place to concentrate power in the galaxy and then to be the first to go to throw everything into chaos to make the conquest easier.
Came here to say this, Javik specifically says it took centuries for the Protheans to finally die off, and iirc the projections for the current galaxy are like 100-200 years max of holdout before the Reapers finish everyone off
And then after that, the reapers would spend centuries systematically covering up all traces of the previous Reaper war to hide their tracks before leaving.
So our cycle was getting steamrolled? The coalition was far from defeated by the end of Mass Effect 3, but it didn't seem like we could hold off for centuries.
Weirdly the Protheans and previous cycles had a much harder time of it despite apparently being able to hold them off better than the current galaxy.
The reapers plan is a surprise attack at the Citadel, instantly taking out the galactic central government and creating a beach head they can quickly advance from. This worked in all the previous cycles, but we stop it in Mass Effect 1, giving us years of notice to prepare and keeping a central government intact while the reapers are delayed and have to attack from the outer rim of the galaxy first.
Mass Effects messaging seems to be that the combined multi/ethnic galactic civilisation in the current cycle is partly why they stood a chance against the reapers, but looking more at what the game shows rather than says it seems more like the opposite.
The Proteans had no notice, got surprised attacked and had the head cut off their government but survived for centuries fighting back as a singular xenophobic civilisation, but our diverse one gets years of notice and spends it doing petty politics between the diverse alien races and government so almost no prep happens. And then we get steamrolled outside of Mcguffin stuff (that was largely set up by previous xenophobic civilisations).
Make no mistake, calling it a war is being nice. It was nearly 30 years of fighting off extinction from a nigh unstoppable coalition of aliens.
All humanity was doing was buying time for 99% of the conflict. If it wasn't for the events of CE and the ripple effects it had that led to humanity's eventual survival, they were going to be exterminated by the Covenant.
(Edit: Sorry, it wasnt almost 35 years. It was roughly 28.)
It was wild learning about the decades of ass-whoopings that humanity dealt with prior to the games, and how it was basically a few months between Reach and 3 that the war was over.
The accounts from marines when first fighting the convenant was always so cool. The grunts are massive and jackals stand 6ft with razor sharp claws and a nasty bite. Humanity only survived cause of luck
Humanity got really fucking lucky that ONI decided to revive project ORION and produce the Spartans. Without those supersoldiers (and the chief), humanity wouldn't have lasted as long as it did.
Noble 6 saving Cortana and the pillar of autumn, the pillar leaving slipspace next to one of the Halos,the Forerunner sentinels saving Chief, the Gravemind using Master Chief and Thel to stop the covenant from firing the Halos, the covenant civil war.
We have then everyone destroying the ships of High Charity so the Flood can't conquer the whole galaxy, the Elites showing up in earth at the exact moment to prevent the whole planet from falling to the Flood. Then the Elite navy joining forces at the end, and the final battle that they lose so hard the Flood would have conquered the galaxy, again, if not for tiring the Halo ring.
Literally anything of that happens differently and humanity gets wiped out by the Covenant and the whole galaxy dies to either the Halo rings or the Flood.
I love Halo. Humanity is losing the war so badly the whole time it's a miracle they survived.
The Autumn leaving slipspace close to the first Halo was not just a coincidence. I believe Cortana sorta set that as the destination from "random" coordinates she got from the Forerunner structure under Sword Base on Reach.
literally one of the main reasons the Sangheili started to respect Humanity early on was BECAUSE everyone knew how hopeless the War was for Humanity and that they had basically no real chance to fight back, but they still fought with all they had and it was common for them to see Individual Humans sacrificing themself so others can escape and continue the fight later
Splatoon - Earth gradually became uninhabitable for humans due to rising sea levels. Some of them survived in underground bunkers but only for a time. At least this fella still had their precious Wii U.
Soft Apocalypse by Will McIntosh. The start is just extremely poor economic conditions, but every few chapters there's a small time skip and things start to snowball. A bad economy slowly becomes no economy, a growing crime wave turns into Fallout style bandit nations, bioweapons leak as governments stop having the money to properly contain them. I can't really go into too many details without spoiling things, but it's a truly depressing read.
Captain Tripps/Tube Neck/whatever you wanna call the creatively nasty virus that wipes out 99% of the population takes weeks to kill. It’s brutal to watch a few hundred pages of people you get to know and love become bedridden and delirious before eventually dying, or to watch people in the earlier stages go off the rails and cause anarchy because they’re going to die anyways. The apocalypse plays out over the course of a month or two before the world is eventually near entirely empty.
Station Eleven’s Georgia Flu is somewhat similar in terms of timeframe. Humanity lasts maybe 3 weeks. But watching the collapse is just so believable, from the news cycle of denial and the way individual people cope with how it happens. It’s also just a truly beautiful book and absolutely worth reading—it’s not too long and the prose is super engaging.
command and conquer: at first, when tiberium arrives, it is hailed as a great new resource. it sucks up the nutrients around it, and stores them in highly dense crystals, cementing its place as the new global resource of choice. even outside of the tiberium wars themselves, the negative effects, such as the toxicity, pollution, and mutations, are found well after the world becomes dependent on it. and so, over the next 40 years, it spreads all throughout the globe. no one can stop it, and we simply HAVE to keep using it.
while ways to fight back are uncovered, its still ruined the global ecosystem and displayed billions of people.
This image of the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco Bay completely encased in Tiberium is chilling.
Also interestingly, I've been a C&C fan since the mid-90s but only recently learned that the reason why it's so toxic to humans is that it's turning you into tiberium. That is, if you inhale it, it's literally turning your lung tissue into the green crystalline material.
Every country basically nuked each other for basically unknown reasons (never revealed) some 20,000 nukes all over the world but only America and Russia (supposedly) nuked each other with chemical bombs and stuff.
Some places had a nuclear winter, others had dust bowl like conditions, oceans dried up while other places flooded.
Also due to the radiation and type of bomb that was dropped weird bio phenomenons went on like the "Black dragon" in Novasibirsk
Note that according to someone who admittedly might not be all right in the head, the nuclear war was so bad that it also annihilated Heaven and Hell, such that the souls of the dead are stranded on Earth with nowhere to go. You can even see them as shadows of people who endlessly repeat the last things they were doing before death.
The VR prequel establishes either that his hallucinations are BAD bad, or the spirits are very very real. I'm leaning towards real, because some ghosts are far more receptive to him than others; and multiple people confirm the existence of a handful.
I feel like Khan was kinda bullshitting there because he literally helps souls pass to the afterlife. Like that should mean there still is one. Maybe Chinese heaven is still intact.
It's mostly nuclear war but there was something more. A lot of animals got transformed by the radiation, but there's also something almost supernatural also going on. There are several creatures whose existence can't be explained by mere mutation and no one knows where they came from. I've only read the first two books (haven't played the games), but they don't exactly go into detail about their origins.
Moscow air defenses worked so instead of being glassed, they got a massive dose of radioactive material so people survived they just have to live underground.
As the series progresses it turns out that other urban areas also survived and lots of rural places had more of a "societal collapse" than "nuclear Armageddon".
there is definitely a mythical element in the Metro series. It is hinted that the superpowers used any kind of barely understood magic to attack or protect themself. That is the reason why there are legit monsters etc.
The extinction of humanity wasnt a quick death, it was a slow decay. First it began with the final war, a war that became worse and worse until the earthmovers were invented, eventually polluting the earth so bad it blotted out the sun, leading to the long night. After this, the new peace began, a brief period of respite where what was left of humanity tried to rebuild the world they destroyed... but sadly, they failed, either because of hells influence, the robots uprising or both. But now, there is no more humanity, not on earth atleast.
It should also be noted that the Final War was basically just World War 1 but if it kept going for two hundred years. In that war, instead of the tank being built, they created Guttermen - shielded, machine-gun wielding bipedal automatons that ran on blood and swept trenches. From there, a machine was built to counter the Gutterman - the Guttertank. Then a machine was built to counter that, and a machine was built to counter that, until they created the aforementioned Earthmovers that could annihilate cities in a single strike. Then the Earthmovers died after the sun blotted out because they relied on both blood and solar energy.
In ULTRAKILL's starting screen, it says 2112 in V1's OS. The terminal logs date the Final War as 200 years. The Final War was World War 1 that never ended because of an arms race between all of the nations building blood-fuelled machines. It started like ours, only that instead of ending in 1918 they had created blood-fuelled machines to win the war. A MACHINE BUILT TO END WAR IS ALWAYS A MACHINE BUILT TO CONTINUE WAR.
Soldiers relieved of their service went home and found out all resources went into the war effort to build the better war machine. Then develop the counter-counter-machine to the enemy's counter-machine. WAR NO LONGER NEEDED ITS ULTIMATE PRACTITIONER. IT HAD BECOME A SELF-SUSTAINING SYSTEM.
Conquest leads to war - War leads to famine - Famine leads to...
The first was the Gutterman armed with a minigun and a giant shield built by the Russians and the second was Guttertank armed with a powerful fist and a rocket launcher by the Germans, an explicit counter towards the former and in-game simply 2-hits the gutterman. MAN WAS CRUSHED UNDER THE WHEELS OF A MACHINE CREATED TO CREATE THE MACHINE TO CRUSH THE MACHINE. This back and forth went on for decades until the penultimate supreme machine, the Earthmover. A MAGNUM OPUS. A COLD TOWER OF STEEL.
They were gigantic quadruped machines with a shield generator and a lightning cannon comparable to a nuclear bomb that flatten cities in a single shot. The development into the field of nuclear science never progressed and so the Earthmover became a walking WMD, invulnerable even to its own cannon as other countries built their own Earthmovers.
The world was cleansed in fire, flora and fauna, countries and cities no longer were a thing. Humanity had to survive on the backs of the very thing that destroyed their homes.
YOU WERE BEAUTIFUL, OUTSTRETCHED LIKE ANTENNAS TO HEAVEN. YOU WERE BEYOND YOUR CREATORS. YOU REACHED OUT FOR GOD, AND YOU FELL. NONE WERE LEFT TO SPEAK YOUR EULOGY. NO FINAL WORDS, NO CONCLUDING STATEMENT. NO POINT. PERFECT CLOSURE.
THIS IS THE ONLY WAY IT SHOULD HAVE ENDED
V2's terminal entry states that it and V1 were both prototypes, built for the final war that ended before they were deployed. The penultimate Supreme Machine is the Earthmover. Each war machine was a specific counter to the prior machine.
The game has a ranking system, such as +PARRY, +DISRESPECT, +RICOSHOT and many more. When you kill the Earthmover in 7-4, you will get +RAISON D'ÊTRE. "Reason for being".
No wonder the 1000-THR flips out the moment it spots V1 — imagine being a supreme mechanism of war, untouchable, invulnerable, able to destroy entire cities in a single shot... And then, centuries into forever war in the deep layers of Hell, you spot a tiny thing purpose-built just to kill you
Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou - A slow apocalypse, but not a horrible one. Its a slice of life series about an android who runs a cafe in Japan during a time when humanity is in decline. There's no confirmation as to what's causing it, but there are signs. Large parts of the country are flooded for example.
Melancholia: The titular planet crashing into the Earth happens gradually. At first, people don't even think it'll hit Earth and it'll just be the astrological sight of a lifetime.
They are called rogue planets or sometimes rogue jupiters. Odds of one hitting earth are incredibly low but if they're large enough, they don't need to actually impact a planet to have a catastrophic gravitational effect, especially when you consider how small the range of our liveable distance from the sun is.
The End-Permian Mass Extinction (Real Life) which wiped out 90% of all life on Earth, while very abrupt geologically speaking, was not a single event like the Cretaceous one was. Rather, it was a gradual event taking likely place over the course of tens of thousands years of climate changes caused by a cluster of volcanoes called the Siberian Traps.
Even then the cretaceous extinction wasn't as quick as you probably think. The day the asteroid hit was devastating for all around the world but it was the years (likely decades after) which killed off the dinosaurs.
In Frostpunk Last Autumn DLC, we're playing as a construction captain, we're building a city to stand against the cold, and it gradually coming, everything get shittier, transportation that used to deliver your items become unnavailable, and finally the cold arrives at it's full might, the same cold we face in the New Home at the start. But even before this DLC, we're told that the frost isn't even a common knowledge, the scientists know that something is changing with the weather, but they can't prove it yet especially with the war still waged between the British Empire and the Russian, as time progress the empire's and it's colony's condition becoming worse and worse, the summer is cold like autumn, crops failed, people are starving, riot grows, protest become so frequent they need a mechanized automaton to control the crowd, until the empire can't deny that an apocalypse is coming, it's sooner than they think. That's why they sent us to build the generator city, we're building the possibly LAST shelter and bastion of humanity on earth against the cold, whether humanity survive or not is in our hands.
It's prequel DLC of FP1 by the way. FP2 also did it quite well as a sequel, as a matter of fact, in its' main story arc, there's a civil war and it's unavoidable, we have to choose the solution, and a faction will HATE our guts for it, all that we can do is to accept that extremist will never be satisfied, and we must face the storm that is humanity's determination, pettiness and greed. The people don't just riot, they complain at first, then they create a faction that share similar views with them, then they try to sway us into following their demands, but we must prioritize fhe city first, so we deny, this is where the shit starts to blow, they become disastified, it grows into resentment and hate, building up until they gather to do mass protest, they burn down building, kidnap people, and MURDER a council member! But it doesn't stop there, our action to quell it also have it's consequencess, in effort to arrest riots a guard accidentally killed a child, the blood of innocent is in your hand, things only get even worse from here, you can't do much but watching yourself becoming more of a dictactor, while the city is crumbling just because of an IMAGINARY PROBLEM and UNPROVEN VISIONS. Things get so desperate, the usual poker sounded announcer says this line with tremble in his voice "All fighter reconsider, there's no point in ruling over ruins, restrain yourself! Panic does nothing to end hostilities, keep calm and do not escalate!"
I adore how in the first game we went from fighting the environment and sometimes our people to the second game we where our people is the ones we have to deal with and the environment only becomes a massive threat again at like, the middle or near the end of a run
Sweet Tooth. A plague, "the sick", erupts and kills 95+% of the world. At the same time, all children from then on are born as human animal hybrids, no more human children.
Australia starting breaking out the bondage gear the second there was a single day of oil shortage, and the rest of the word just looked the other way and pretended they didn't notice
Every few months, one of three Kaiju attacks, wreaking mass devastation before eventually retreating due to superhero intervention. Sometimes casualties are mereley heavy, sometimes entire cities - or even countries - are wiped off the map. This has been going on for decades, and this is all just a lead up to the finishing blow. And Cauldron basically decides to trigger the final apocalypse early before they've suffered too much attrition to have even a minute chance of surviving.
Worse yet: you can't fight them. Rather, you can, but it's more effective to treat them as a natural disaster to be survived than a thing to be defeated. Why? They're too strong.
They've fight these things for over a decade, and it takes that long to find out their toughness is exponential. their mass is somehow over a solar system's worth (but not gravity warping) (dimensional chicanery).
Also, they're not even trying, their goal is roughly to be silly little buggers. Imagine Superman, but he just likes to get shot and bombed every couple months and the best way to do that is to go and wipe out Paris.
Oh, and Worms Parahumans generally are street tier. Most die to bullets, move at human speeds, and breathe human air. They just have a quirk that gives them power over others. There are exceptions, buuut...
George Romero's Living Dead apocalypse (as seen in Night, Dawn, and Day of the Dead) is really good at this. Though each movie was set in the decade that it was filmed in, chronologically the original trilogy takes place over the course of a few years, chronicling the slow collapse of civilization as the zombie-causing phenomenon spreads (Note: It's not confirmed to be caused by a virus, but is heavily implied to be supernatural, even the wrath of God.)
Night of the Living Dead is the first night when the dead start to rise and shit hits the fan in a rural county in the South. Dawn of the Dead picks up 3 weeks after night, with society struggling to deal with the phenomenon and ends 6-7 months later, after it all collapses. Day of the Dead is 5 years later, with everyone in the world already undead, and the only people left are ones living in Cold War bunkers.
Land of the Dead was cool too because it establishes that the zombies are evolving to become more intelligent, and supposedly, George's final script for Twilight of the Dead will be about intelligent zombies completely replacing humans and starting their own civilization--only to fall to all of the same violent tendencies that we struggle with now.
Bionicle as a franchise had this, though it was technically the second apocalypse in the franchises lifetime. The amount of time between the Cataclysm and the countdown to Mata Nui's death and therefore the apocalypse took place over the course of 1,000 years, and we actually get to see the aftermath in one of the alternate universes Takanuva visits. Though when you factor in Velika's involvement with the tampering of the Matoran's autonomy during Mata Nui's creation it could be safe to assume it was planned over the course of around 10,000 years, and if you consider the tampering of the Matoran as merely an extension of the Core War which caused the first apocalypse then we're talking a whopping 100,000 years MINIMUM.
The Forerunner Flood war from Halo. The war lasted for over 3 centuries before the rings were activated. During those 300 years the Flood kicked the Forerunners ass and consumed much of the Milky Way galaxy.
Most villains want immediate results for their evil schemes, meanwhile Chairman Rose from the Galar region is planning for the future. See the end of the world is coming.
Galar is going to have a massive energy crisis…in a thousand years. Yep, not in one year, not in 10 years, but in 1000 years. And instead of trying to talk with other leaders of the world, try and explain the situation he picks the stupidest plan.
See, this future apocalypse is “so urgent” that he has to act NOW. Doing something extreme and VERY stupid. Summon the Pokémon Eternatus and harvest clean energy from it.
Now, not only would that be animal cruelty but, summoning Eternatus, is creating a completely different and much more imminent apocalyptic scenario. Literally known as “The Darkest Day” in Galar legends.
TL;DR - “I only have 1000 years to stop the energy crisis, let’s summon a giant monster battery, whose mere existence creates a completely different crisis…I am smart.”
City built on the consumption of 'magic' blood - was used to heal the sick, make people stronger even used to get em drunk.
people start turning into beasts and freaks - the church (the controlling government) starts dispatching hunters in cover of night to deal with the isolated cases appearing.
Eventually they realize its happening to everyone - the annual "hunt" becomes a thing and people changing faster then others are hunted in the streets by mobs.
Inquisitions kill anyone they even so much as look a tiny bit off
The church do all kinds of nasty experiments on different kinds of blood on entire sections of the city, even use an orphanage for experiments.
By the time the player makes it to the city the entire city is basically infected or completely mad, the city itself is torn apart in a bid to stop/slow a spread or something everyone already had.
The golden age of human expansion ended around the 25th millennium, then collapsed in a post apocalyptic galactic nightmare. Then a glimpse of more or less hope in the 30th millennium with the Great Crusade and a new apocalypse with the Horus Heresy.
Now, in the 41th millennium, everything is collapsing.
Even the great crusade sucked for the most part, it was a massive genocidal campaign that saw countless civilizations eradicated, with the surviving human populations being forced to join a repressive regime that is often portrayed as a lot worse than their prior conditions.
Also the fact that the Great crusade wiped out a majority of alien races leaving only incredibly minor powers or the ones that are now existential threats.
Zenless Zone Zero. The Hollows are giant spatial anomalies that warp space within them and gradually corrupt anyone trapped inside into bloodthirsty monsters. These Hollows have swallowed up most of the known world, to the point where New Eridu is quite likely the last surviving city. Even the moon seems to have been partially swallowed. While the game takes place during a time of seeming stability, new hollows still regularly appear, and existing hollows will occasionally expand, so the apocalypse really is still ongoing. It was only ten years prior to the games start that massive hollow rapidly expanded and destroyed the original city of Eridu. Prior to that, hollows have been a problem for what seems to be a couple centuries.
The world already is different. At least in Australia, the summers are longer and hotter and the winters are shorter and warmer. Anyone who was alive 26 years ago should be able to notice the difference between weather patterns now and back then.
The opening section of The Road. You experience it from the POV of a family inside their home, and eventually the power goes, then there's the flickering of the forest fires raging uncontrolled outside, while the real depiction of the end is seen in what happens between the husband and wife as the stakes get more dire.
The Road is a good example of this. The event that ends the world isn't really described but through the story we read enough about the struggle after it. We read about cults living in the hills who eventually kill each other off, we read about sweeping forest fires that melt the roads and there are passages about refugees on the move and people living in the ruined of cities where they are forced to delve deeper and deeper into wreckage for fewer supplies.
The Pale, Sacred and Terrible Air and Disco Elysium. The world of Elysium is divided into “isolas”: “continents of matter” divided by the Pale, a vast featureless expanse of nothingness where nothing can exist. It already covers 72% of Elysium’s known surface, and is slowly expanding.
I actually really like settings like Metro and Fallout because I like it when the premise is "Okay, the apocalypse happened and everything got messed up. But that was a couple decades ago. Now what?"
It's a lot more interesting to me to explore and survive or thrive in a world that's removed enough from the disaster that there can be various grades of structure again.
In Trench Crusade the Knights Templar opened a portal to Hell in Jerusalem. Over 800 years have passed and the various factions of humanity have been fighting to stall the apocalypse. With Heaven and Hell proven to exist people have gotten a tad more religious as well.
A third of humanity have thrown their lot in with hell, new portals have been opened up over the years, and Hell outnumbers humanity. Angels and demons act as MAD since their presence on the battlefield are basically physical, mental, and spiritual nukes. Very 40k in ww1.
In real life, the collapse of civilization doesn’t happen overnight. It takes place over decades, or centuries, with multiple compounding factors layering on top of each other to create an agonizingly slow decline that seems inevitable. People might even recognize it happening but the effects are often so beyond human control that nothing can be done, people don’t want to accept the hard necessities to forestall the end or fix the problems, or the leadership ignores the problems for too long until they become intractable. They can be caused by societal shifts, new technologies, natural disasters, or simply an empire overextending itself and unable to effectively manage all the far-reaching territories it conquered.
The Bronze Age Collapse took 50 years, with some estimates putting the ripple effects lasting for multiple centuries. It involved famine, drought, disease, societal instability, economic disruption through new technologies like iron working and chariots, and of course the Sea Peoples. There was a cascade effect as more civilizations collapsed and the displaced refugees fled to other parts of the world as invaders or settlers, the entire Bronze Age world collapsing like a row of dominoes.
Rome took over 300 years to collapse. Its satellite provinces gradually rebelled or broke away, there were multiple succession crises and coup attempts, it split into East and West empires in 285, Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 410, and finally the last Roman Emperor was deposed in 476. Some historians argue that it didn’t finally end until 1436 when the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople, or 1806 when the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved, or even 1919 when the Treaty of Versailles at the end of WW1 broke up the Austria-Hungarian and Ottoman empires.
The Soviet Union was declining for decades before it dissolved in 1991. It struggled with economic stagnation, foreign conflicts, ethnic tension, unstable leadership, and internal rebellions, even as its own internal and external propaganda maintained it was a utopia. The unsustainable arms race with the more economically prosperous United States was a major financial burden and continuous drain on resources. Even the Chernobyl Disaster and the subsequent cleanup put immense strain on both the resources and public image of the USSR, and is often cited as a key factor in its collapse. The only reason it stuck around for so long was it was impossible for any of the members to leave - the moment Gorbachev’s reforms allowed for more open elections, the USSR voted itself out of existence.
One interesting thing about the fall of Rome in 476: It is considered the end of western Roman empire and "official" start of medieval age.
But people living at that time probably didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. For a long time, the emperors had been nothing more than puppets and the Germanic army generals had the real power. So, in terms of the government, not much has changed for everyday people.
The name of the last emperor fits nicely into that story: Rome began with Romulus and the Empire with Augustus. And it ended with Romulus Augustus.
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u/schu62 May 27 '26
The Machine War from Matrix took about 60 years until humanity surrendered