History CrapsackWorld / VideoGames

* ''{{World of Warcraft}}'' has this with Tirisfal Glades, the starting place of the Forsaken. It seems like a perpetual cloudy night, demons and Scourge roam the forests, and their very capital city is a bunch of tombs. The music is even the same for when you die and your spirit is trying to get back to your corpse. The Plaguelands are even worse. [[Mordor Icecrown]] turns it UpToEleven

* ''{{World of Warcraft}}'' has this with Tirisfal Glades, the starting place of the Forsaken. It seems like a perpetual cloudy night, demons and Scourge roam the forests, and their very capital city is a bunch of tombs. The music is even the same for when you die and your spirit is trying to get back to your corpse. The Plaguelands are even worse.

** Lets put it this way, the actual heads of the faction tend to be reasonable, but nearly every number 2 is TheStarscream. Garrosh Hellscream will likely take control of the horde, and wants nothing more than to charge at the enemy with the entire horde in a fuel of rage, and literally wants to just charge and ignore anything that smacks of tactics. King Wrynn is equally as crazy and determined, and arguably in charge of enough of his faction to force a war no matter what. The few races that aren't burned from a history of dark magic and demons have done other spectacular things to either doom themselves. Only the Taurens lack a significant fraction of their race that's trying to doom the world, and their leader is on his last legs.

* Go on, just pick ANY ShinMegamiTensei game. The first one starts fairly nice for the first hour or so, then promptly gets doused in nuclear fire, leaving a pockmarked hell, and even before that happened, demons were attacking damn near anything, and after the world goes to hell, ItGotWorse, courtesy of a replay of The Great Flood. By the end of first game and by the time of the second, it seems to have gotten slightly more tolerable, only to utterly crush your hope when it get revealed that YHVH HIMSELF is planning to destroy everything the demons haven't raped to extremes that make the first game seem like Sunday school, and regardless of ending, a hell of a lot of dead people/demons pile up trying to save what's left of the planet. In ShinMegamiTenseiNocturne, the world is reduced to a demon filled embyro like state, and most options you have to fix things still leave it mostly crappy or can make it even worse. StrangeJourney takes place in a CrapsackWorld, and dending on what ending you get, the whole planet can join in on the fun. In short, if its a SMT game, pack a lunch, cause the crapsackiness is gonna be around for awhile.

*** Actually AirEx (Air Exchange) was removed because they wanted to take the story in another direction, it's removal had nothing to do with time constraints. It was actually cut 2 years before HL2 was released, with the last AirEx map having been modified in 2002.

* KnightsOftheOldRepublic 2 has the Republic basically shattered, with the protagonist being one of the last surviving Jedi in the galaxy. Pretty much every planet visited by the PC is either deserted or in a state of high tension, where there's basically no authority to keep things in order.

* [[FinalFantasy13 Cocoon.]] Oh, God, Cocoon. It looks all sparkly and pretty, but look past that, and it would make 1984 look like a Sugarbowl. People living in fear? Check. Run by a currupt Beaurocrat? Check. Willing to murder an entire city to kill two L'Cie? Check. [[spoiler:The entire population set up as a mass HumanSacrifice?]] Check.

* [[FinalFantasy13 Cocoon.]] Oh, God, Cocoon. It looks all sparkly and pretty, but look past that, and it would make 1984 look like a Sugarbowl. People living in fear? Check. Run by a currupt Beaurocrat? Check. Willing to murder an entire city to kill two L'Cie? Check.

* Earth's pollution in ''RunSaber'' has reached the breaking point, turning it into unhabitable for humans. And then appears a MadScientist with promises of cleansing it, only to end up exiling humanity into space colonies and filling it up with mutants and parasites under his total control. Most of the locales are abandoned ruins run over by monsters, and while the ending does end on a high note, it's still pretty much a barren Earth humanity is returning to. And that's assuming the good doctor did take care of pollution before enacting his master plan...

* In ''[[{{BreathOfFire/DragonQuarter}} Breath of Fire V]]'', the entire population of the world lives underground due to the surface having been rendered uninhabitable. Not too bad, until the logistics of proper air control is brought into question. Their solution? Genetically engineer little girls to suck up the pollution (Who then die). Oh, and everyone has a D-Ratio, essentially an unchangeable classification of how valuable you are as a person. A 1/8124 is doomed to a life of menial labor. And the main character has a Dragon inside him, just waiting to bust out like something out of ''{{Alien}}''. And this is not a story element, the player can accidentally cause this to happen in an irreversible way to force the game to be restarted. There's a reason the New Game+ option in this game doesn't require the player to beat it.
** Paying no attention to a game mechanic that is constantly displayed is not 'accidental'.

* ''{{Rift}}'': So a bunch of [[OurDragonsAreDifferent dragons]] ([[EldritchAbomination so to speak]]) are in the process of [[{{Futurama}} ripping the world a new space-hole]] for their own crazy reasons. This ''[[RashomonStyle could]]'' be because [[TheGodsMustBeLazy the gods fucked up big-time]], or it could be because people were building [[ArtifactOfDoom artifacts of doom]]. As if ''that'' weren't bad enough, either [[GoddamnOrks a bunch of crazed heretics or a bunch of delusional religious zealots]] are [[SympatheticPOV trying to thwart your attempts to save the world]]. And to ice this cake, if you play Defiant, this is all a vast ''improvement'' on your [[TheBadGuysWin starting]] [[TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt point]]...

** ''DragonAgeII'' is even worse in this regard. As the game goes on the player sees the Chantry completely collapse as the mages get tired of the oppression they suffer under the templars and rise up, [[HeWhoFightsMonsters becoming just as bad as the templars feared]]. [[GreyAndGrayMorality Both sides are filled with fanatics who believe]] [[WellIntentionedExtremist that their way is the only way and anyone who stands in their way deserves no mercy.]] Compromise eventually becomes totally impossible as the actual reasonable people are killed off one by one by accident or to spark the war.

* ''{{Rift}}'': So a bunch of [[OurDragonsAreDifferent dragons]] ([[EldritchAbomination so to speak]]) are in the process of [[{{Futurama}} ripping the world a new space-hole]] for their own crazy reasons. This is either because [[TheGodsMustBeLazy the gods fucked up big-time]] or because people were building [[ArtifactOfDoom artifacts of doom]]. As if ''that'' weren't bad enough, [[UnreliableNarrator either a bunch of crazed heretics or a bunch of delusional religious zealots]] are [[GoddamnOrks trying to thwart you at every turn]]. And to ice this cake, if you play Defiant, this is all a vast ''improvement'' on your [[TheBadGuysWin starting]] [[TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt point]]...

* ''Homefront''. The central story of the game takes place in 2027, after the American economy has fully collapsed, the Middle East is on fire, which causes gas prices to nearly hit twenty dollars a gallon and North and South Korea have joined forces and annexed Japan and a host of other nations. Also, a massive thermonuclear weapon has been detonated, shutting down America's electronic infrastructure and the Korean People's Army has seized the entire US west of the Mississippi River. Which is irrevocably toxic thanks to said thermonuclear weapon. And a variant of the bird flu is killing off citizens left and right.

** It still fits this trope. It is revealed in the released Prototype 2 trailers that [[spoiler: New York [[ItGotWorse gets worse because it became a corrupted zone with more monsters than humans]]. Alex apparently wants to spread the virus and the hero in Prototype 2 intends to kill Alex. How is this better.

** The Sacrifice comic reveals that carriers are people who are immune to changing into a zombie, but can still spread the virus to others unwittingly, which is what the survivors in both games have been doing! On top of this, when the military "saved" the survivors in Left 4 Dead 1, they only saved them to see if they can develop a cure for the virus and planned to kill them if they couldn't get a cure. The survivors barely manage to escape (with the help of a few soldiers who were wise enough to listen to them) and get on a train heading south as Bill explains his plan to get them to the Floria Keys, where they can live in peace without zombies (they can't swim) or the military trying to kill them.

* AirForceDelta Strike: Earth is under constant, unrelenting assault from the OCC, who use just about every cool, technologically advanced weapon imaginable from artillery-wielding rolling tires, to [[CoolAirship giant flying battleships]], to multi-shot [[WaveMotionGun rail-guns big enough to ''fly into'']]!

* AirForceDelta Strike: Earth is under constant, unrelenting assault from the OCC, who use just about every cool, technologically advanced weapon imaginable from, artillery-wielding rolling tires, to [[CoolAirship giant flying battleships]], to multi-shot [[WaveMotionGun rail-guns big enough to ''fly into'']]!

* ''{{Nier}}'' has magic infecting an unsuspecting world via the inverted GoldenEnding of ''{{Drakengard}}''. As a result, seasons and even the daylight cycle have been utterly broken. Wildlife is disappearing, and contact between the few remaining human settlements is being eroded by the ever-increasing hordes of monsters known as Shades literally lurking in every shadow. The few humans that survived are slowly succumbing to a disease known as the [[TheCorruption Black Scrawl]]. Humanity as a whole is slowly facing extinction. The titular [[ChronicHeroSyndrome Chronic Hero]] is doing [[SideQuest whatever he can]] to brighten people's days, but even he can only offer bittersweet closure, not any actual good news.

* ''DragonQuestVI'' When you first arrive at the Dread Realm/Dark World not only is everyone in this world weakened to the state where the human inhabitants can barely lift a glass of wine, they are also forbidden by [[BigBad the big bad]] from having any hopeful or pleasurable thoughts at all. This got to the point where many of the villagers would contemplate suicide just to escape this hell. Later in the same realm we see a group of villagers willing to kill elderly men and women for the treasure of a sage, [[spoiler: which turned out to be an empty chest anyway, this was all a plot by the [[BigBad archfiend]] to spread a rumor of said treasure to lure everyone into looking for it, then watch as they all [[DespairEventHorizon kill each other over an empty box.]]]] Then there is the prison where humans who had so much as hope were sent, seemingly just for the pleasure of torturing them, who are given very small rations of sustenance, beaten on a regular basis, and have daily hangings in front of the other prisoners.

* ''DragonQuestVI'' When you first arrive at the Dread Realm/Dark World not only is everyone in this world weakened to the state where the human inhabitants can barely lift a glass of wine, they are also forbidden by [[BigBad the big bad]] from having any [[DespairEventHorizon hopeful or pleasurable thoughts at all.]] This got to the point where many of the villagers would contemplate suicide just to escape this hell. Later in the same realm we see a group of villagers willing to kill elderly men and women for the treasure of a sage, [[spoiler: which turned out to be an empty chest anyway, this was all a plot by the [[BigBad archfiend]] to spread a rumor of said treasure to lure everyone into looking for it, then watch as they all kill each other over an empty box.]] Then there is the prison where humans who had so much as hope were sent, seemingly just for the pleasure of torturing them, who are given very small rations of sustenance, beaten on a regular basis, and have daily hangings in front of the other prisoners.