This post is unrelated to "bronzage", the French word for tanning. If you want to relax on the beach, don't forget to apply sunscreen. And get the hell out of this website!
Once upon a time, there was a drunk person I don't know who made a popular Reddit post. Okay I need to be more specific, since this happens a lot. So I'm talking about this post:
Upfront Biases: Very dunk. All actual game design experience is from university, I'm now an architect and I design buildings which are not games. But there's probably a building near you, they're often nice.
Most sword/dragon/castle games are in set like old timey France or England. Historically, magic was rare & demonic and politically, there literally the same fucking states that exist today. Kings bought armor, knights, and archers, and everyone else farmed or watched goats. No disrespect to goats.
Meanwhile in 1600 BCE: Centaurs, cyclops, and Sirens - those were real shit to Homer and who ever was crazy enough to go further than their porch. Even the old testament bible was like: god be crazy (actual quote). And yet the silk road already existed, a city built a statue so big we now have the fucking word "colossus", and an entire fucking phantom civ of "sea peoples" nearly ended all civilization and no one knows fuck-all about 'em.
So back to game design: A player that can change the damn world with heroic action, be part of the cosmos, written in the fucking stars?!!! - That's all pre-Roman shit. A few dozen hoplites scaled a fuckign cliff in India and the whole place surrendered! That's some RPG shit!!! The whole scale of a video game, it's like 4 big cities and a bunch of farms; that's not England, it's the Hittites.
And tech - by like the 14th century, swords and valor were trash verse money and armor. Bronze age was when that fucking mattered. And about magic and shit - the walls of Jericho got fucking blown up by a meteor that ended some other forgot city! War of roses was brats with steel compared to the shit that happened between Egypt and the sea people, who again, just fucking vanished into the fog after ending whole empires!!! Speaking of Egypt the Pharaoh had an actual knife made from an meteor?!!! SO MUCH BETTER THAN FUEDAL FUCKIGN ENGLAND!!!
All that to say, my inebriated postulate is that early history is a better place to make a game than medieval Europe. Plus like every game ever has done that, find some new ground, it's fresher there. Maybe blame it on fantasy literature (all the same gripes), but seriously, get over your chivalric bullshit, and make games in places that actually felt magical.
My wine is empty...rant concluded.
I mostly agree with the tipsy architect: Bronze Age is underrated.
Comparison with better known time periods
Disclaimer: as much as I am a low-tech enthusiast, I don't think we should go back to technology of that time period (…as long as we have the choice not to), simply because we couldn't access the Internet, use bicycles, or live in a low-mortality, healthy, and relatively peaceful society.
All well and good, but I often hear on the other side how RPG players are so used to medieval fantasy that they would get lost in other settings, and constantly ask "can I ride a local horse" or "can I use money".
Well, that's where computer RPGs come in! The game presents all the mechanics, including the setting-relevant stuff, instead of the player having to dig through the game book or whatever.
But that's not a satisfying answer. Tabletops RPGs are cool because they enable a parallel to ancient people who also used paper-like sheets and some kind of dice. But as far as I know, they didn't use electronic computers.
As a game designer, if you really want your players to delve into Bronze Age for an analog game, I guess simplify the mechanics and settings a bit. No, don't simplify all the way to a Chess variant, I already made a post about it.
The thing is that medieval fantasy also isn't the literal Middle Ages (hmm, some history revisionists in my local neighborhood might need to be reminded of that). Otherwise, your adventurers would be staying on their farm or not that good at archery or get sick and all that. The same goes for making a fantasy and/or a _-punk world of any other time period.
By the way, "the Middle Ages" is a huge time period. Are we talking about western Europe, and if so, are we after the 12th century with the proto-enlightenment and universities and stuff? How about 10th century with the crusades, if earlier, is the Roman Empire still there? Can I use a trebuchet? Can my priest character get married? Does my boat have a compass? That's the same kind of questions facing Bronze Age settings. In the end, every time period outside of living memory will have those problems. Better embrace it and choose a really early one, with 99% of its institutions/countries not surviving up to today, along with all the advantages listed in the inebriated postulate.
Conclusion
In the end, I think a Bronze Age aesthetic is very cool. You have chariot warfare, early board games, meteoritic weapons, badass warriors, and epic invasions. The only bummer is that it's hard to really differentiate from prehistory and Antiquity. You could extend it to the early Iron Age during which dark stuff like the homeric stories happened (the "heroic ages"), as suggested by the drunk redditor.
Another less known aspect of bronze age civilizations: their collapse (also enables cool settings)
On that, don't forget to perform feats of wonder for/against some random god from time to time, and see ya in the next one!