I'm gonna write up cliff notes on the journals / story setup for those who don't want to read them. This is basically just backstory from the journals and very early parts of the game.
- We've fucked up the Earth; we did her dirty and now she's having massive earthquakes and tsunamis that are making it inhabitable.
- Countries come together to build two spaceships capable of interstellar travel; the Flores (main ship) and the Caravel (scout ship). The Flores can hold 500,000 people max. The Caravel is a scout ship with Outriders in it (elite soldiers) that are going to scout whatever planet they find first before the Flores lands.
- They find a suitable planet (Enoch). On liftoff, the Caravel malfunctions and blows up killing all the Outriders. In a desperate move, they try to build a new Outriders team filled with mostly mercenaries.
- The Flores finally reaches Enoch after 83 years of travel. You're sent down with your squad to scout the planet.This is the start of the prologue.
- The Anomaly storm happens and you're one of the lone survivors. You're put in a cryopod.
- You awaken 30 some years later in the middle of a war between two opposing factions — the ECA and the Insurgents / "Exiles". The latter feel like they've been done dirty by the ECA because they helped build the First City and were basically discarded after. The ECA is more practical, they know the First City can handle only a fraction of the 500,000 people that were awakened on the Flores.
- Important note on the backstory while you were asleep 30 years: They had a decision to make about those 500k people. The Flores was running ou of power and couldn't support the crypods anymore, but they knew the city could only support 50k so they had two options, 1) Awaken everyone and deal with the dire consequences (famine, slums, disease, crime, etc), or 2) Let them die a peaceful death in their pods. They went with door #1
- The First City is a mess and then the nuclear reactor its powered by melts down. They create Rift Town.
- Ok now back to your awakening. You awake and learn all the stuff above that happened, including the fact that the anomaly storms rendered every piece of electronic unusable, like an EMP.
- Now here's the big hook... there's a SIGNAL! A digital signal that's being broadcast. This shouldn't be possible because the storms knocked out all the electronics. Even more perplexing is the fact that this signal predates your arrival to Enoch... what could it be? An advanced alien race? Time travel shenanigans? A top secret mission before the Flores?
That's the whole setup.
