@derekmetaltron Thank you, that is the point. The four different characters have some variations each on how the story goes when you’re looking through their eyes, but you will never understand the whole plot if you don’t play all four paths through it. And who knows, perhaps you’ll be inspired to play it again once you have read all four points of view, even if it’s just to see if something makes much more sense all of a sudden when you can connect the dots between the paths.
@Drazen I have yet to decide to what locations this story brings the characters. Asia will make an appearance, being largely ethnically the same as it is now, mainly due to the sheer numbers of them in the region with very little immigration from Africa or Europe. It would be extremely hard to tell asian nationalities apart from one another due to regional interbreeding (if you’ll excuse my use of the term) between Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Mongols, Thai, Vietnamese, etc.
Europe would be the stronghold for caucasians, but some countries like the UK, Italy and Spain have inevitable mixing of different heritages, especially from African and Middle-Eastern immigrants. America would have caucasian populations surviving mainly in Canada and the largely rural areas of USA.
Now, what results as the largest ethnicity is those of mixed ethnicities. They may feel strongly towards on ethnicity or another, but the fact remains that mixed heritages have made skin colours much darker over the century. Or lighter, depending on your point of view.
At the time of the story, issues of skin colour and gender are largely a thing of the past. Not because of civil rights organizations or a sudden global agreement that it’s a silly discussion to have in the first place, but rather because of new issues taking a much larger precedence. Augmentations have come along, plastic surgery is highly sophisticated, true VR has come along. Large corporations have slowly been creeping up and seizing more and more power over the course of the century and that alone has changed society in a very big way.
Imagine the status someone has right now for having the newest and coolest gadgets, whether it’s Google Glass or iPhone or whatever. This guy who has them obviously has the money and the connections to get those things. Now change it up a bit, instead of gadgets we would recognize, it’s all about augmentations, the latest and greatest things within VR, that sort of things. It’s all about having a status symbol, since with augmentations nobody has an excuse over physical disability or poor hand-eye coordination to not do something and the quality of the augmentation is everything. There are deep chasms between classes, no opportunities to rise to the next class without a massive amount of ambition or augmentation that makes you up-to-par.
But the fact of the matter is that human society in the developed world is a game between corporations. The class system divides people, making it easier to market things to each class differently and make everything overpriced. This will eventually be part of the story in the rich route, the realization as you get to have a look deeper and deeper into the corporation that they may advertise how they seek to improve lives and give new opportunities at the same time as they make sure in ruthless fashion that nothing threatens the balance they have created in society.
As answer to your other questions, there is no artificial uterus on the market. It serves no purpose to the corporations to have such a thing when it’s much easier to subliminally shape the society into what they want it to be through marketing to families. Of course, if you drop to a lower class standard, you will be more than probably shunned by your family for bringing shame to them, much like you would end up shunning your family if they were of a lower class than you end up as. Strictly speaking, there is no real love in the world anymore. You may think there is and you may think that you love someone absolutely, but love is just a word that’s been corrupted just like everything else in society.
Moralism and ethics are all long gone in this world I’m building. There are those who subconsciously still have that kind of inner compass to guide them, but they are few and far between in the big cities and especially in the arcologies. It’s all about number one.
Wow, that was long.