Where in the World does this Game Happen?

[MightyKeb]

*Reads in awe.*

[Richard LeMoon]

Oh, also, I am the one that did the comparison.

https://gunsoficarus.com/community/forum/index.php/topic,6219.msg106143.html#msg106143

500+ meters tall. 2000+ meters long.

This thing was a floating town.

 

[GeoRmr]

Looks like present day Detroit tbh fam.

[Richard LeMoon]

Well, there is this image from the factions page.



A Squid in New York, you say? Possibility of being in the Americas increases.

[Lady Veronica]

The largest issue is still the deserts. People can move. Climates can not. At least not too far from their origin.

Climates are based on lots of things, and if the poles changed like you said possibly happened earlier, then they can change absolutely. Pars of Antarctica used to be a tropical forest, for example. Change the Ecuador, you change deserts to forests and forests to deserts. Hawaii was just a ball of solidified lava, now its a tropical holiday destination. Climates are dynamic, just like everything in the world.

Oh, also, I am the one that did the comparison.

Sorry, I didn't check. Really nice work on that by the way.

Didn't see that picture of the Chrysler building though, cool stuff. Still, I took this question to the devs, and I got a response. We are both wrong, although we were right about some things. It seems Muse is purposely throwing all these different locations in to confuse us, because they still haven't claimed one region to be the map. The Alliance map is the only known place left in the world that can sustain life, although people haven't traveled too far so even that isn't for certain. The map has almost no specific correlation to any part of the world, reason being that there was so much war in literally every part of the world everything changed. Seas were made and deserts of both ice and sand swept the globe. Basically, nothing is the same, at least in the known world. A point that was also made was that there was no Berlin in this world, removing the possibility of Labyrinth ever being that. Though it was a great city of some population, and possibly the last stand for that people. It is also mentioned that there were two world powers that started the war, then there were potentially more who joined in. Nothing was mentioned about alliances dragging people in like in WW1, just that two world powers started to have a little fight. Another note, the Vastness (area where the Mercantile Guild come from) is thought to be a site of detonation for one of the many doomsday devices (but no one knows for sure). So that's pretty cool.

So, with that in mind, we can't zoom in on any one piece of the globe, but with the little details we have, we can narrow it down to a few places. America being a solid possibility, especially the eastern seaboard seeing as that is the most likely place to find the Gothic-like architecture found in Labyrinth, not to mention the Atlantic being near. It definantly can't be anywhere that doesn't speak English, Portuguese, Spanish, Afrikaans, Albanian, German, Czech, Hawaiian, Latin, Italian, and a lot of others. Basically anywhere Europe touched, except France, Iceland, India, the like. That being said, I'm pretty sure we can forget about the Midwest of the entirety of North America, because there is nothing out here and really no incentive to ever put anything here. Grass is terrible.

Who knows what happened to the poles, the continents and pretty much everything. It could all be different, after all, we only know of one absolute doomsday device in our timeline. That would be the Nuclear Bomb, who knows what a crazed pre-nuclear society came up with to blow up the world.

[Richard LeMoon]

The map has almost no specific correlation to any part of the world

This has been my assumption from the beginning, really, like most alt-Earth games. They take place in pretty ambiguous places. In reality, it could even be in currently non-English speaking places, since signage is pretty easy to change post-invasion.

Pole reversals don't have any direct effect on climate, though. They just switch north and south. There is a hypothesis that a pole reversal is either caused by or would cause magma flow changes, creating more volcanic activity. This could explain the volcanic maps in Alliance. Pole shifts have also weakened the Earth's magnetic field to as low as 5% of what it is today, making it very vulnerable to solar flares. This could explain why there are not really any complex electronics in the world, as any flares would destroy them.

SOOOOooooooo...... maybe one of the doomsday devices helped cause the Earth to have a weak magnetic field, preventing the advancement of electronics past basic diesel engines and overbuilt dynamos.

[Lady Veronica]

it could even be in currently non-English speaking places, since signage is pretty easy to change post-invasion.

Yeah, it is easy to change signs, but it isn't really possible to completely change a city's architecture without completely leveling it first. Something I don't think would have been possible in a span of just fifty years, nor would it be economically or politically viable. So, I guess France can be in the mixing pot as well. Oh well.

 why there are not really any complex electronics in the world, as any flares would destroy them.

maybe one of the doomsday devices helped cause the Earth to have a weak magnetic field, preventing the advancement of electronics past basic diesel engines and overbuilt dynamos.

I forgot to mention some other details in the email from Muse, but the old world never advanced their tech past mainly steam because they simply hadn't gotten any further technologically and their industrial revolution favored steam over combustion. So a lack of old world super advanced tech is explained there, but it was mentioned also that there has been many technological improvements since the war, so it may still be possible that they haven't been able to create electronics because of some pre-existent magnetic weakening. Just thought I would throw that in there.

[IntrepidFusion]

Does it help to know that there are Canada Geese in Northern Fjords? (irl, Canada Geese have made it to Europe)

[Lady Veronica]

Now that is something I didn't know. I could never tell what those birds were, nor did I ever pay attention to the audio. Well, lots of things could have happened to land them in Europe or wherever. Like massive climate change(which is shown to have happened during the war, that much is certain), humans shipping them over because birds, or maybe this really is North America. I mean, there is that Chrysler building. It would just be really cool for a whole new alternate world to not take place in New York. So many books and TV shows have done that, just stop already.

Maybe Canada is the ultimate battleground that the war went to as a sort of no man's land. I mean, I live here and all, but you can fit the entire population inside of Mexico City like three times. It is also pretty centered for global assault, and if the Empire that started the war owned the country, then there would be lots of cause to attack the poor maple syrup polar bears that live here.

How did you find that out by the way? Did you do some sort of call matching?

[IntrepidFusion]

Pretty sure I screenshoted a Northern Fjords flock once but I can't find it, I'll take another.  The birds are silent but their texture is that of Canada Geese if I recall correctly.

edit: Got some screenies.

[Helios.]

you can see deserts even in more temperate climates if there is a rain shadow, think the cold deserts of the gobi. the huge mountain ranges that the yeshans live in could be the reason for the deserts even if the land was freezing cold.

we know that this world is designed around the eventual destruction of the ecosystem after a ww1 style battle dragged on for decades, rather than only a few years.this obviously insn't western or even eastern europe: this world is in a fictionalized world. we don't have to worry about wich parts look most like our world

[Lady Veronica]

edit: Got some screenies.

Yeah, those are Canadian geese. I like the pink by the way.
At least we know they somehow got placed in this last surviving piece of earth. Majestic animals they be, Very bitey though.

we know that this world is designed around the eventual destruction of the ecosystem after a ww1 style battle dragged on for decades, rather than only a few years.this obviously insn't western or even eastern Europe: this world is in a fictionalized world. we don't have to worry about which parts look most like our world

Like I mentioned before, I got some official word on this and it is actually an alternate earth that contains similar if not exactly the same landmasses and cultures in their respective places. The bulk of the changes happened in the industrial revolution and machine age, where steam was favored over combustion. There are other things as well, such as Berlin never existing, so we can assume that all if not most capitals and landmarks are different in some way, but still similar. I would say we should treat this more of a fictional parallel world, rather than a total fabrication. There is some stuff on the website as well that outlines how there was a strict period of warfare for fifty years sometime after the turn of the 1900s and another period of fifty years called the red death(some virus) right after it. The game itself takes place some two hundred years after all that rubbish. Also, I found some signs hanging around Labyrinth that are really interesting and prove that whatever civilisation that held the city before everyone died did, in fact, speak English. Here are some pictures below, and a little lore treat for all you hungry hungry hippos.


This is cool, It says Jerroefur Coats as far as I can tell.


Zoomed out version, shows the title and picture.


Some kind of military propaganda poster as far as I can tell, it might be just the way the sign is shaded and broken but he does look a little Asian. Perhaps this city was either originally the home of the ancestors to the Yesha empire, or was taken over by them, possibly explained how burned and blown up it looks. That would also explain how the other coat sign looks new in comparison.


Another sign suggesting an originally Asian population. Perhaps this was a festival of some kind. Or maybe this is just an Easter egg in disguise, I can't tell. Who watches anime?


A sign for Covell Casino, I knew there was another shop sign somewhere, this one was kind of hiding though.


Finally, I found this tank kind of interesting. There are a few of them on the King of the Hill map at the globe, these are particularly interesting because we actually have these in our timeline. They are the Mark V British tanks from WW1. The WA on the side is an identifier of some kind, probably to a fictional government or unit of some kind. This suggests a reliance to some degree on combustion engines and that the events that led to this tanks creation in our timeline would have to be very similar to produce the exact same tank. Very cool little tidbit for y'all.


Here is a comparison, just so you can see how precisely the same these two are, both in our world and Muse's.

[The Mann]

Interesting theory about the tanks but how do you explain this?
 

[Lady Veronica]

OMG Yes XD!! I saw that while scouring away at the map and, it's just so perfect. IGN needs to give this game 10/10 just for that at this point.

If we want to at least "try" and explain this, well, here we go.

Towards the end of the war, there were many casualties on both sides, piling in numbers unthinkable even in Holocaust standards. Nations had to adapt. They could produce more machines than they could produce men to man them. There was one hope, seen by the invaders of this desolate city, a technology so immense that it could animate, snow men. These brave soldiers would be trained by only the best ninjas in the secret dojos beneath the earth so that in any situation, these small men are ready to battle. Since this technology uses snow, it was probably the Norwegians and by extension, probably the Angleans who made these fluffy water commandos.  This really led to major destruction and utter flattening of entire cites now unmarked as all that remains is gravel in their wake. Here, in the final years of the war, this great city fell under siege by a rogue legion of these men, now seeking on furthering their own agenda for the betterment of snow man kind (in honour of the great Frosty the Snowman), but their efforts proved fruitless. Too many fell, and by the time victory had been achieved, only one snow man remained. This is that snowman, and he is ready to fire his tank at you without warning, because he, he is the lone survivor. He, Is, Legend.

That or somebody left a model snowman on top a tank for absolute lols, but I suspect the former theory to be the most concrete and likely in this scenario.

Also I found this in the Fjords at the tower with the bridge:

[TimTim LaBaguette]

nice finds !