Summary

The Voyage Trilogy is an ambitious game project set in Northern Norway, combining strong cultural roots with global potential. The trilogy consists of three interconnected experiences:

• The Voyage: Arise – a narrative-driven single-player survival game set in a post-collapse Northern Norway, released episodically.

• Pathways to Power – a strategic game focused on diplomacy, power struggles, and regional influence.

• The Voyage: Online – a persistent multiplayer world centered on construction, trade, and evolving societies.

These titles are tightly interwoven, with player choices carrying consequences across games.

The journey begins with Arise, powered by the advanced Multibrain platform; an AI-driven system that enables dynamic NPCs and living, responsive environments. Episode 1 will feature a detailed 1:1 recreation of the Møysalen area in Northern Norway, Sortland county, offering 5–10 hours of narrative gameplay content. Exploration, skill progression, and items will carry forward to upcoming episodes. The Voyage: Arise is fundamentally about surviving, forging bonds, and remembering. The world is designed to feel authentic, not through spectacular effects, but through consequence. This is a place where stories must be earned.

The project blends interactive storytelling with real-world applicability, representing a unique technological and cultural contribution from Norway to the global games industry.

The market for story-driven, visually striking games with strong identity is growing rapidly. The Voyage: Arise aligns with this trend by combining a Northern Norwegian narrative with modern game design and an episodic format. Its cinematic approach, grounded in familiar landscapes and cultural reference points, gives the project clear relevance both nationally and internationally.

• Rarely seen in the medium: Few titles explore modern Nordic environments through a realistic post-collapse lens. The Voyage: Arise fills a clear gap in the market by offering an authentic, atmospheric, and thematically rich post-collapse experience.

• Cultural specificity: From regional dialects to architectural detail, every element in Arise is rooted in real Nordic experience; not fantasy. This includes infrastructure such as oil rigs, hydroelectric plants, and weatherworn coastal communities.

• Emotional tone: Arise replaces power fantasies with quiet endurance. It is about surviving with the world, not mastering it.

Stronger partnerships with media and institutions: Cultural depth opens opportunities for public funding, collaborations with museums and the tourism sector, and increased media attention.

Franchise potential: The world of The Voyage is designed for long-term expansion, across episodes, media formats, and physical merchandise.

Cross-sector collaboration: The cultural grounding enables partnerships with actors in education, cultural heritage, and regional development.

Strategic Outcomes

By anchoring The Voyage: Arise in Nordic reality, while deliberately avoiding mythological clichés, we position the game clearly and confidently within an overcrowded survival genre.

This distinct Nordic identity carries significant commercial value. Games such as S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Death Stranding, and Firewatch demonstrate that strong, place-specific worlds with aesthetic coherence foster deep player loyalty and extended engagement.

Core Elements of Gameplay

• Survival with consequence: The player must manage hunger, thirst, temperature, and injury. The environment is unforgiving and demands planning, adaptability, and attentiveness.

• Narrative-driven exploration: Dialogue choices, reputation, and relationships with factions shape the journey. NPCs remember what you say and do, and communities evolve in response to your actions.

• Emergent behavior: Powered by the multibrain system, NPCs are not scripted; they learn, react, and adapt. Every interaction is unique.

• Moral complexity: No group is purely good or evil. All carry motives, wounds, and fears. The player must navigate a layered and morally ambiguous landscape.

• Player identity: Using the MetaHuman™ tool, players create a custom character shaped by voice, background, and appearance. How you survive is up to you. Stahlhafen Sergeant Gunther Berg (MetaHuman NPC)

Dynamic Ecosystems

The environment evolves in tandem with the game world.

• Weather, lighting, and temperature follow seasonal and geographic logic

• Regions change based on player actions—overhunting, pollution, restoration

• Factions grow or collapse, borders shift, and local economies transform dynamically

Areas may become stable, lawless, abandoned, or reclaimed—all emerging from player-driven conditions, not pre-scripted events.

Ethical Consequences

Choices resonate across time and space.

• A lie told in Episode 1 may come back to haunt you in Episode 3

• A town saved from famine might develop a new political regime

• An NPC you spared could later rise as the leader of a major faction, or disappear entirely

These consequences are not always immediate or obvious, lending emotional weight and rewarding reflection, replayability, and moral risk-taking.

Reputation and Memory

Thanks to the multibrain system, key NPCs do not follow fixed scripts; they remember you.

• How you treated them

• Whether you lied, helped, betrayed, or ignored them

• What factions or ideologies you aligned with

• What gear you wore or symbols you displayed

These memories evolve over time and influence not only the current episode, but also future encounters and later chapters.

Items with History

In The Voyage: Arise, objects are not merely loot; they carry stories.

• A rifle used in a pivotal assassination may cause NPCs to avoid you

• A house you rebuild may still bear traces of its former occupants and their choices

• Certain items may unlock unique dialogue, reactions, or consequences

Objects thus become active participants in the narrative, deepening immersion and player agency—without the need for external tracking systems.

Gradual Immersion

• The player is introduced step by step to the story, systems, and moral subtleties.

Agile Development Cycles

• Shorter production rounds allow for faster iteration and more efficient use of resources.

Sustained Engagement

• New content every 8 months keeps the experience dynamic and responsive to player feedback.

Narrative Layers

• Later episodes reframe earlier choices and events, rewarding players who invest over time.

We are building on Unreal Engine 5.6, leveraging its full suite of advanced capabilities:

• Nanite for high-fidelity environments and efficient terrain rendering

• Lumen for dynamic global illumination and atmospheric lighting

• World Partition for seamless streaming of expansive, continuous game worlds

• Control Rig and Animation Blueprints for responsive and flexible character animation

• Chaos Physics for destructibility, environmental effects, and realistic physical interactions

All central characters in The Voyage: Arise are developed using MetaHuman Creator, enabling:

• Realistic facial animation and performance capture

• High-quality, custom character rigs with minimal manual adjustment

• Faster prototyping and iteration during the character design phase

Ultra Dynamic Sky is a weather system designed to be more dynamic and natural than most existing solutions, offering a high degree of flexibility and customization.

Features

• Set the time of day and see all aspects of the sky update in real time

• Fully dynamic with customizable clouds, moon, and stars

• Built-in lighting system with synchronized sun, moon, and sky illumination

• Adjust cloud coverage from clear skies to overcast

• Animate a day/night cycle with a single click

• Dynamic aurora effects

• Multiplayer-ready

• Supports volumetric 3D clouds, 2D dynamic clouds, static skies, and even volumetric aurora borealis

• Includes a full weather system – Ultra Dynamic Weather – adding rain, snow, lightning, and more to the scene within seconds

• Enable simulation mode to calculate the real-world positions of the sun, moon, and stars based on latitude, longitude, date, and time

With RealityScan 2.0, we can generate photorealistic 3D models from still images. Powered by advanced artificial intelligence, this technology enables a level of realism that was previously reserved for only the largest studios. We use drones and professional photography equipment to capture the necessary image data.

By combining Unreal Engine’s streaming system (World Partition), the node-based terrain generation tool Gaea, and DEM data from hoydedata.no, we are able to recreate Northern Norway at a true 1:1 scale.

This means players will have vast landscapes to explore!

SpeedTree is the industry standard for vegetation in games and film. The Voyage: ARISE uses this technology to generate realistic plant life based on recognizable species native to Northern Norway—such as birch, spruce, cloudberry, and more. We have access to a comprehensive asset library consisting of game-ready 3D models, animations, sound effects, VFX, textures, and more. This library significantly reduces production costs, as a large portion of the game's visual and auditory content is already available and ready for implementation. Our resources include full access to the Quixel MegaScans and Leartes Cosmos libraries.

We ensure realistic movement and animation by using Cascadeur , a cutting-edge AI-powered software that dramatically boosts productivity. Combined with Unreal Engine’s Metahuman Animator, Rokoko SmartSuit Pro II, and Rokoko HeadRig , we achieve lifelike facial and full-body animations with high fidelity.

Music We are collaborating with the Norwegian post-rock band Spurv, who will compose a dynamic soundtrack inspired by the moods and landscapes of Northern Norway. The music is more than background – it carries meaning.

Environmental sounds and musical motifs are embedded into the score to provide players with subtle cues about what’s nearby. A fleeting flute phrase or soft chimes might hint at the presence of birds, while low-frequency drones, deep bass drums, and uneasy, muted strings may suggest a moose is approaching. A sudden burst of dissonant string harmonies or a sharp brass note could signal that an eagle is circling overhead.

These audio cues are woven seamlessly into the music, never breaking immersion. Instead, they create an intuitive link between sound and environment – allowing the player to sense what’s coming before they see it.

Writer and Narrative

We are proud to have author Heine T. Bakkeid on board as the writer for Episode 1 of The Voyage: Arise. Bakkeid is a renowned Norwegian novelist with deep roots in the north, and his involvement brings literary depth and a distinctive narrative voice grounded in the region’s nature and culture.

The Voyage Trilogy targets adult players (18+) worldwide, with a particular focus on mature, narrative-driven PC gamers in regions that value meaningful storytelling, exploration, and survival mechanics. The core audience aligns closely with demographic profiles common to survival games, narrative RPGs, and culturally rich indie titles.

The first episode will launch as a standalone PC game using a traditional sales model, with optional add-on content:

• Narrative expansions and new episodes

• Cosmetic upgrades and visual add-ons

• Sponsored quests and in-game items (e.g., branded content, events, regional elements)

• Marketplace for user-generated content (with revenue sharing for creators)

• Merchandise and licensing opportunities

Later episodes will feature a fully integrated in-game marketplace where players can buy, sell, and trade goods and services through natural interactions in the game world.

The project is led by a core team of three individuals responsible for operations, administration, and project management, supported by a technical development team of 8 specialists in game design, AI systems, programming, and 3D modeling. In addition, the project engages freelancers and creative contributors in areas such as composition, storytelling, rigging, design, and animation. In 2026, the team is expected to consist of approximately 16 members.