trying to figure out how to make a premist of "protagonist characters enter a nation like nazi germany to combat the nazis with guerilla warfare" without conveying fascist sentiment ('we're the best and foreigners are dangerous!')

hmm

like conceptually it's a really great game but a lot of games that are about "go somewhere and destabilize" end up coming off as fascist or interventionist in uncomfortable ways but guerilla warfare mechanics are so _fun_

my current thinking is that this is essentially strangereal if belka won--imagine if the meteor fell on erusea and then belka detonated nukes on erusean soil--they have better weapons, better economy, better everything, and they're occupying your home now. so you cut off the head

war's weird because so much fascism is "they are attacking our HOMELAND" and yet a lot of war is also, y'know, that, so all I can really think is making clear this is the only option due to power dynamics in play, and minimize the amount of nationalism in play

I just want to create a worldspace where you're a bunch of extremely well equipped military people going into a space with even better equipment and total occupation (checkpoints and the like), but there are only 4-5 of you in co-op. There are mechs, b.o.w.s, and zeppelins.

like envision a world where umbrella actually got the virus to work properly so military forces routinely deploy weaponized monsters against other forces.

it needs to be guerilla warfare because a lot of the problems I wanted to solve with this design are ghost recon/watch dogs/gtav/mgs problems

I was showing a friend the other day how, in watch dogs, if you break sight and no one can find you, and you get in an enemy car, they will instantly recognize you. In mercenaries, if you get in an enemy car, allies will shoot you and enemies won't, which is WAY cooler.

i wanna fuck around with solving things like "why the 5-star alert system from gta sucks," and "how to solve the open world sniper-is-best-tactic" problem, and a lot of these solutions naturally ended up with guerilla warfare, so I want to play as a spec ops guerilla

the game itself is really fascinating to me, aesthetically very cool from the images I've got in my head, and a lot of the ways I find myself thinking through systemic interactions ends up with an open world game like nothing else out there

but it can't be fascist.

oh no i figured it out