Everyone who has played a game in the Civilization series remembers seeing their country nuked by Mahatma Ghandi. In this historical strategy series, players attempt to guide a nation through the ages from its humble beginning to its role as a globe-spanning superpower. Anything can happen along the way, including being irradiated by one of history’s greatest peacemakers.
After five installments in a series that attempts to capture the spirit of humanity’s ascent from darkness, developer Firaxis has announced an unexpected follow-up. Instead of beginning in the dirt and building to the heavens, Civilization: Beyond Earth begins with a voyage in the sky, one that will send colonists to begin anew in another star system. Slated for release on PC, Mac and Linux this fall, Beyond Earth surely will remind fans of Firaxis’ 1999 classic space exploration game Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, although the developer seems eager to distance itself from that comparison.
While the gameplay mechanics will be similar to the previous Civilization games, this time you’re not a human in a predictable human world. You’re an alien on an alien planet. You don’t know this place, nor do you belong here.
“You start out and you’re all alone,” said Dennis Shirk, a producer of the series. “So you’ve got to learn everything all over again.”
Interstellar Oregon Trail
In the game’s fiction, humanity has endured some rough times on Earth due to an ambiguous event known as The Great Mistake. We survived but were greatly hobbled, and Earth just wasn’t the same anymore. As civilization recovered, we sent our best and brightest to create a new home.
This is where you come in.
The game begins with something Firaxis likens to “interstellar Oregon Trail.” Ordinarily in a Civilization game, you select your leader from a series of historically-based archetypes like Genghis Khan or Hiawatha. But since Beyond Earth takes place in the future, the player is given more freedom to affect how events play out.
That begins as you select not only a leader whose disposition will affect your Civilization forever, but also which culture your ship will launch from, what types of colonists you’ll bring, and what type of ship you’ll launch. From that point on, how the future plays out is up to you.
“A lot of our pre-production was spent looking at futurist writers, and looking into transhumanism and post-humanism,” said Anton Springer, one of the designers. “Not just science fiction writers, but scientists talking about where humanity is going. We’re leaving that answer in the hands of the players.”
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Image: Courtesy Firaxis Games
Stranger In a Strange Land
Upon arriving on the planet, players will find a game that’s very similar to Civilization 5, the last title in the series. The gameplay will be largely the same as you explore territory on a grid of hexagonal tiles, build and improve cities, and navigate complex diplomacies with other factions.
The original Civilization games gave the player a wide range of choice in how history would play out, yet remained bound to historical context. Beyond Earth wants to remove as many constraints as possible, and make each game more unique.
“When you cast off the shackles of history, you can go to an amazing number of unknown places,” said lead designer Will Miller. “That’s with technology, with the aliens that you discover, the planet that you land on. You suddenly can go in a million new directions each time you play.”
To that end, there’s a new factor in the game: the planet, and its ecology. No longer are you merely navigating relationships with other world leaders while you exploit the planet’s resources, but you’re also attempting to live in balance with the local environment. Humanity hasn’t yet tamed this world, and ticking off the wrong species could spell disaster for a fledgling state.
The developers gave the example of something they call the siege worm, huge roving monsters plucked out of Dune. At the beginning of the game, they are completely indifferent to your species. You’re just another bug to them, but the catch is that their indifference can cause them to trample your cities or farms. If a siege worm is coming, you face a tough choice: Deal with the potential damage and stay on its good side, or attack it and risk the wrath of all wormkind.
It’s important to note that these alien species don’t much care about your national boundaries, either. To them, a human is a human. So if a neighboring faction is slaying siege worms, you’re going to catch the worms’ ire as well. Worse, the more you interact with these species the more they adapt their strategy and strength. All of this adds an additional wrinkle of complexity to interstate diplomacy. If your strategy depends on playing nice with the locals, you’ll need to find some way to make your neighbors exercise restraint.
You Really Are Alone
Finding that balance is important in the early game, when you’re a fragile community. The game’s early moments, when it’s just you and your new home, will be about survival, not dominance.
“You really are alone on this planet,” says Miller. “It’s a story about survival, not just expanding your empire. You actually have to figure out how your people are going to survive.”
Before long other factions will arrive, and the classic diplomatic dance of the Civilization series begins. Factions constantly vie for the upper hand, through war or cooperation, all the while adapting to an uncertain future on a new world.
Beyond Earth‘s lead producer Lina Brink says that players will navigate a “technology web” that will be less linear than the previous games’ “technology tree” systems. A tree-like structure makes sense for a historical game, she says, because we understand how technologies begat other technologies throughout history. In Beyond Earth, players will be able to make their own way through a web of choices that can lead anywhere.
“The tech web carries with it certain affinities that describe where humanity will go,” she said. “So you have affinities like Harmony. They are out to be at peace with the planet. You have Supremacy. They look more to robotics to be able to survive anywhere no matter the environment. And you have Purity, the guys that are looking back at Old Earth and the culture and trying to stay very true to humanity’s roots.”
As you advance you’ll gain access to ever more impressive technologies, including the ability to launch satellites. The “orbital layer” where these satellites are launched is something like a second map, where nations vie for orbital space rather than terrestrial ground. Only one satellite can occupy a certain part of the map, so competition will be fierce.
This becomes a new battleground, as players can fire on each other’s satellites and race to re-occupy territory vacated by a satellite in a decaying orbit.
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Image: Courtesy Firaxis Games
Seeing The Past In Our Future
The historical Civilization games take players through seven thousand years of human history, but events never quite play out accurately. Despite the historical dissonance, Civilization has a way of teaching players how history unfolded by putting placing them in world leaders’ shoes and helping them understand the logic of those leaders’ decisions–even the leaders are sometimes despicable.
Civilization: Beyond Earth wants to do the same thing for humanity’s future.
“When you start the game, it’s from a positive place,” said lead designer Miller. “The apocalypse has happened. We survived it, and now we’re looking for a solution. Once the game starts, Beyond Earth tells a story from roughly where we are now into an uncertain future. No matter which path you take – becoming indigenous to the new world, becoming almost sentient computers, or sticking to humanity as it exists now – those choices and paths are all very optimistic.”
“It’s a human story that transcends time,” he says. “The story of civilization, from the stone age to the modern age, probably has a lot of echoes that will hopefully play out when we do eventually settle on a new world.”