The storms start off small in the vehicular survival game Pacific Drive. Raindrops fall on the windshield, as lightning cracks ominously in the distance. In a few minutes, the pristine Olympic Peninsula will shake with nature’s full terrible force.
Hollywood has long portrayed extreme weather, and 4-D screenings of the summer hit “Twisters” bludgeoned viewers with wind and water in gyroscopic seats. Yet video games have the power to truly envelop an audience in severe meteorological conditions. Players traverse a virtual environment thrashed by the elements, and are made to feel at the center of an awesome might.
Video games that feature extreme weather — including The Long Dark (2014), The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017) and Death Stranding (2019) — owe a debt not just to movies but to George R. Stewart’s landmark 1941 book “Storm,” regarded by some as the first ecological novel. He begins his story with a cosmic view of Earth and a gestating storm before cataloging its on-the-ground devastation. He gives the turbulent weather front a personality and even anatomy, writing about the “long arms of rain” that “ran miles ahead.”
Many decades later, game developers are rendering atmospheric conditions with similarly obsessive detail, requiring players to battle extreme weather alongside other more conventionally animate foes. But virtual weather is largely smoke and mirrors, with game makers using technological tricks to offer a convincing illusion.
Alex Dracott, the creative director of Pacific Drive, wanted to make the game’s setting truly feel like the Pacific Northwest, which meant focusing on the quality of light, the severity of downpour and the density of fog.
Dracott and his colleagues created a plethora of base-line effects: haze, rain, cloud cover. On top of those, the team added “weather overrides” for more intense conditions that might affect gameplay, like wind rocking the car. Finally, the team built big set-piece moments that tend to occur at the end of a game level — when supernatural elements cause the world to tremble.
“We actually ended up with a pretty cool thing where the dynamic elements were like paintbrush strokes,” Dracott said.
The rain itself is a small miracle of technological trickery. Because of limits on computational processing power, the rain only ever falls within a 20-meter radius around the player, like a wet bubble. When players are driving quickly in their station wagon, the angle of the rain is adjusted so it matches their velocity. While they steer the car, droplets on the windshield swerve naturalistically across the glass.
As a teenager in Portland and then as an adult in Seattle, Dracott would take long drives through the region’s teeming wilderness in a vintage station wagon. Pacific Drive is an attempt to rekindle the emotional core of this experience. “There is something both isolating and comforting about being warm and dry in a car during a storm,” he said.
Video games are adept at creating visceral responses of varying intensities: calm, stress, excitement and oftentimes terror.
One of the most engulfing and formidable takes on extreme virtual weather in recent years is the multiplayer shooter Battlefield 2042. At various moments in the 2021 game, tornadoes and sandstorms rip across maps in near-future versions of locales such as Shanghai and Doha, delivering not just chaos and destruction but the eerie calm that follows thereafter.
Unlike in Pacific Drive, the extreme weather in Battlefield 2042 needed to affect tens of players online concurrently, a significant technical challenge — and physically, not just visually.
“We wanted you to get sucked in, pulled up and spat out,” Rickard Antroia, the principal game designer, said.
The solution was a mathematical calculus called vector fields that enable the simulation of fluid and wind-like forces. The beauty of vector fields, Antroia said, is that they can be made to fit any shape: the giant cylinder of a skyscraper-size tornado or the vast boxlike shape of a sandstorm that rolls ominously across a desert. The latter sucks players through its front and spits them out of its back, all while swathing them in billions of billowing dust particles.
The storms in Battlefield 2042, a game Antroia describes as a disrupted world “breaking at the seams,” feel both prophetic and, in an odd way, poetic. Storms that are terrifying at first are quickly normalized during the endlessly repeating series of online skirmishes.
After a few hours, the storms are something you come to look forward to, and even learn to exploit. One tactic involves riding to the top of a tornado before flying across the map using a wingsuit, unleashing a hail of bullets on those staring at the monstrous whirlwind.
As extreme weather continues to intensify in the real world — Hurricane Helene dumped rain far inland, killing at least 200 people — players should expect to grapple with more of it in their game worlds. Exoborne is a forthcoming multiplayer shooter set in an apocalyptic United States that the video game’s creators say is “transformed by extreme forces of nature.” Wood & Weather promises to let players manipulate meteorological conditions that can permanently alter the game world.
The city-building survival game Frostpunk 2, which was released last month, makes subzero temperatures an inescapable, omnipresent force, affecting disease levels, tensions among the citizenry and population growth. The game does not spatially envelop the player in the same way Pacific Drive and Battlefield 2042 do, but it is no less immersive, coloring almost every action and decision in the game.
The first Frostpunk ended with a brutal snowstorm that a player needed only to survive rather than defeat — what Jakub Stokalski, the sequel’s co-director, calls a “boss fight.” In Frostpunk 2, the world has begun to thaw a little.
Stokalski does not think the series fits neatly into the “cli-fi,” or climate fiction, genre. To him, Frostpunk is more broadly concerned with societal survival — large-scale, collective responses in the face of dire circumstances.
Yet in the way clouds swirl and the icy tundra darkens — as the player looks down upon the weather, landscape and city from an elevated perspective — the Frostpunk series keenly evokes Stewart’s novel “Storm.” In video games, it is one thing to feel at the center of a bludgeoning bout of extreme weather. It is another to see a front rip through an entire community. Survivors are left reeling, building new lives amid the wreckage of the old.
