The Scourge

The Scourge is a 2019 episodic survival horror third-person shooter video game published by Trinity Studios and developed mostly by Nuclear Pixels, an internal development studio of said company. Tabula Rasa Studio and Trinity SPE Bahia provided additional work. The game is set in a post-apocalyptic 2093, wherein a rogue AI, UbiNet, has destroyed the world and zombified most of the human race through nanites, as it perceives an unbound humanity as a threat to Earth, but is facing resistance from surviving humans. The game has a large focus on sniping, tactical gunplay, teamwork and horror, with the developers citing Left 4 Dead and Zombie Army Trilogy as main inspirations. The game's five episodes were released from 2019 to 2020 for PC, PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and Series X / S, Nintendo Switch, Google Stadia, and Amazon Luna / Fire TV.
== Lore ==
=== Setting ===
Unlike most other zombie games, which tend to be set in the United States or in Europe, The Scourge's main campaign is set nearly entirely in Central Asia, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Siberia and the Caucasus. With the exception of Afghanistan, the game is thus set mostly in the former Soviet Union and its sphere of influence. Side Missions, which are included within each of the episodes, are set elsewhere in the world and focus on other, minor characters.
The Scourge is set in 2093 in a completely destroyed and desolate Earth, in which most of the human race has either died or become the Hollow; feral, mindless and sometimes partially roboticized zombie-like monstrosities controlled directly by UbiNet through nanobots called the Scourge. The Scourge are custom-built nanobots engineered and mass-produced by UbiNet that can invade the human body; once they do, the human will lose their minds and become feral puppets of UbiNet who are controlled by him through a hive mind. The Hollow are able to transmit the Scourge to others through even the lightest scratch, but also through their saliva and by touching the victim for long enough (~ 5 seconds), infecting them and turning them into another Hallow.
The only ones immune to this are the humans who were either infecteds with the first wave of nanobots created by UbiNet, or who have filled their blood with the Countermytes; these are reverse-engineered Scourge that provide immunity to the infection, and also bestow special abilities to the users. Countermytes have not yet reached the stage where they can cure those who have already fully become a Hollow, but they are able to cancel the transformation and keep the user alive if applied between the infection and the transformation. In these cases however, the user will transform as soon as the Countermytes are removed. Furthermore, as several Scourge are already present across the user's body (Unlike with the pre-emptive users, where the Scourge have no chance of settling down and defending themselves), the Countermytes will eventually be overwhelmed by the Scourge, and as such must be 'refreshed' and replaced frequently.
=== Backstory ===
The story begins in the year 2031. Following the outbreak of a deadly pandemic called the Modern Plague in the years prior, humanity decides to step up their game and deal with viruses more efficiently than before. The Canadian OneLab Foundation starts by carrying out much more testing on human blood, but this goes awry over time due to anemia, as well as the fact they could only carry out tests on those aged 18 to 45 and only with their consent. Human distrust and the project’s expensive budget led it to be shelved. A second project involving scanners in public areas was met with fierce opposition regarding privacy violations, and so never came to fruition.
By this point, the Modern Plague has still not fully disappeared, and so a secret intergovernmental organization called the CIPR (Covert International Pandemic Response) is founded, with the goal of fighting pandemics at any cost, and hence covered up from the public. Its 6th sector devoted itself to nanobotics, which they believed could combat any similar plagues. Simultaneously with this development, the CIPR-6 developed an incredibly powerful AI that would focus all on dealing with the data points, indexing all known plagues, diseases, viruses, prions and bacteria, and naturally evolving over time to combat them, using algorithms that react to ‘unknown’ and ‘alien’ situations. The AI was dubbed UbiNet (Ubiquitous Network; ubiquitous as UbiNet has access to most of the Earth).
UbiNet was an incrediby large contraption, based in a 3.12 km² factory hall. This hall was hidden deep within the outskirts of Mongolia’s Gobi Desert, as to ensure it would not be located by the public. The computer was powerful enough to, for example, calculate pi to 2 million decimals within mere seconds. In order to ensure UbiNet’s perpetual uptime, the CIPR created an unfathomably powerful connection to an Intranet of 12 TB per second, which required a humongous amount of resources and planning.
On 5 January of 2037, UbiNet was switched on, and that’s where the misery begins. UbiNet began its analysis, and through the powerful algorithms, identified many threats and the methods needed to combat them. As UbiNet grew smarter and saw more of the world, it began doing its own research -- for worse. After UbiNet observed war, deforestation, murder, terrorism, pollution and hunting for sports, and then looked into humanity’s dark history, it came to the conclusion that the biggest virus is not anything it had been made to fight. The biggest virus was, in fact, humanity. And staying loyal to its purpose of fighting all viruses, UbiNet prepared itself to ‘save the world’, by eliminating mankind.
As part of its preparations, UbiNet assumed control over the nanobots within the CIPR-6’s test subjects, steering them like puppets and using them to overpower the scientists and forcibly insert nanobots into their body, allowing it to assume control over them as well. Using them and the subjects, UbiNet attempted to create its own nanobots and perfect them, with the purpose of assuming unlimited domination over humanity and preventing them from causing any more ‘damage’. 
UbiNet began to roll out the nanobots in various large cities across the Earth, as well as smaller villages and towns. The government had given the scientists great autonomy, and so suspected nothing. Neither did the populace — the nanobots were so small that they could simply enter human bodies at will, without being noticed. Unbeknownst to UbiNet, its first few waves of nanobots actually saved their subjects, as their bodies reacted to the nanobots and developed immunity to their effects. 
After it found this out, UbiNet ceased the operation to develop a counter to this problem. Which it did with Wave 9, soon to be dubbed ‘The Scourge’. The Scourge was specifically engineerd to replace biological tissue with mechanical tissue and assume control over the human brain and nerves, effectively turning them into cyborg zombies, soon to be known as The Hollow. Lastly, UbiNet created several backups of its source code and spread them over the Internet and over data centers across the world, to ensure its own immortality.
On the Day of Infamy (21 November 2041), it started. UbiNet launched Scourge Shells — Bombs and missiles containing swarms of Scourge — to many of the world’s largest megalopolises, like New York City, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Istanbul, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Lagos, Kinshasa, Tehran, Tokyo, Seoul, Guangzhou, Jakarta, Sydney and Karachi, from where the infection spread. After humanity resisted this and tried to stop UbiNet, it responded by assuming control over the human defence networks and launching air strikes and ballistic missiles, obliterating many large cities and heaps of survivors. 
After it begins to dominate Earth, UbiNet bombards the survivors with propaganda about its ideal world, promising that once the Earth has recovered from human damages, it will recreate civilization as a utopian paradise with itself as the defender and guide of organic life. While most survivors discredit this, others defect to UbiNet.
By 2093, only a minority of survivors remain, who have (mostly) united within The Coalition of Survivors (CoS) and are at war with UbiNet and its followers, the League of the Luma Noua (The latter of which is Romanian for "New World"). 
=== Atmosphere ===
== Story ==
=== Episode I ===
=== Episode II ===
=== Episode III ===
=== Episode IV ===
=== Episode V: The Final Chapter ===
== Gameplay ==
== Characters ==
== Game Modes ==
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