Civilization: Beyond Earth (Fall 2014)

[Qalbert]

http://www.polygon.com/2014/4/12/560...ment-sid-meier

Sid Meier's Civilization series is leaving home.

This fall on Linux, Mac and Windows PC for $49.99, Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth will take the strategy game beyond the confines of its home turf to an alien world that players will colonize and where they will forge a new future of humanity.

Polygon spoke with four of the upcoming game's developers to learn about the game, the challenges a new venture like this poses for those creating it and how escaping Earth's gravitational pull will change the long running series.

THE GREAT MISTAKE

From its very first incarnations, the Civilization series has always been grounded in human history. Since 1991, it's tasked players with building empires that would survive and thrive the test of time. Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth focuses on on the past, but on the future. And it needed a reason to be different, a narrative justification to take the franchise where no Civilization game has gone before.

Firaxis calls it The Great Mistake.

"The state of Earth a couple hundred years from now becomes rather dire," lead designer Anton Strenger told Polygon. "There's a series of events which we call The Great Mistake."

In the science fiction that forms the foundation of Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth, our home planet is no longer what it used to be. Humanity's future among the stars flows from those events, but Firaxis is making a choice. It knows what happens — everybody there knows what happens, so they can work from a common foundation — but Firaxis isn't going to tell players everything.

"Internally, we've written out exactly what those events are, but for the player, we're leaving it vague and allowing their imagination to fill the gaps," he said.

According to Strenger, the deliberately ambiguous narrative is way to both engage and empower players who will determine humanity's fate.

"We don't take such a strong stance on narrative for the game because we want this to be a really repayable experience, a really customizable experience," he said. "A lot of the gameplay systems we're putting in really address that.

"Players create their own story. If we, as designers, go in and say, 'This is the backstory of why you're here,' I think that's a missed opportunity for the players. I think our philosophy as a studio is to show restraint when it comes to narrative. You'll see the same thing in XCOM. Until the very end in XCOM, you don't really find out about why they're there — and even then, it's kind of left up a lot to the player's imagination."

There's another narrative reason that Firaxis is taking a vague approach to the narrative underpinnings: In the context of Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth, players will literally determine what we become after Earth, and the future of humanity is grounded in a fierce geopolitical struggle that begins back home. Players will need to choose sides.

"We came up with, as designers, this geopolitical series of cataclysmic events," he said. "There's a nuclear exchange that a lot of nations fell under."

Producer Lena Brenk, whose job it is to provide the development team what they need to finish the game, believes that too much story would be counter to the spirit of the franchise, within which Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth sits comfortably.

"If you think about it," Brenk said, "in Civ historically, it's similar. The player has the reference of history and [can] fill in the gaps with their imagination and what their play style looks like. They know the rough outlines. They probably are not all historians. They probably don't all know the specifics and details, but they know the rough outline of what happened with Genghis Khan or who he was.

"We're trying to provide something very similar, except here for the future, where we give rough outlines and the player fills in the gaps with their imagination because that will really be the place that they remember: the choices they made and how that impacted their playthrough."

Leaving Earth allowed the developers to move "outside of the historical context," she said, which excited many on the team. But doing something so different, even if it was founded in Civilization's core principles, also provided its own set of challenges for developers to overcome.

FROM THE FAMILIAR TO THE STRANGE

Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth's artists loved the challenge because it was so new.

"You should have seen the art team and how excited they got," Brenk said. "Not looking up historic reference and drawing a concept from that and designing the units from historical references, but instead really designing a unit — or, in the parameters that the gameplay team told them what the perimeters would be, of course. But dreaming up how the future would look is a great opportunity for an art team, that they really jumped at to stretch their legs and do something different there."

It wasn't always that easy, though. According to lead designer David McDonough, it's easier to begin with geocentric history. You don't have to teach players what gunpowder is or why it's important. Players already know why it's important to sail across the ocean. When it comes up in the game, they get it. Transport Civilization to the future and off-world, and suddenly a developer's job isn't just to introduce something familiar and move on. Now, it's about teaching players.

"In the future, we have to teach the player a lot about what's going to happen to them," McDonough said, "while at the same time making room for them to decide for themselves. I think the feeling that we shot for in this game ... is starting from the familiar and moving forward into the strange. But strange in the way that's enticing, that's simultaneously a little scary and too good to pass up.

"When you play the game, you'll see all these opportunities to grow the very identity of humanity. You'll pick several of them and try to nail them down and try to beat the over civs to it. And then you'll start over and pick a different one."

The decisions players make about what humanity becomes won't take place in a vacuum. The strangers in Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth's strange land have competing values, differing ideas about the proper path forward. And players will come face-to-face with those competing values as they build their civilization.

"Every time it's a different story, a different imaginary tale about who humanity grew up to be over the next 5,000 years on this strange, alien planet," he said. "[It's about] starting from a place of safety and taking a journey that's both dangerous and invigorating into a strange new future and the revelation of wonder along the way, the feeling of gradual mastery as you start to take control of the planet and feel like you've found your footing, reacting to the different choices that you're AI opponents make. Friends and enemies start to take on a whole new meaning when your enemy has transformed itself into a robot. What does that mean for your civilization? How could you ever get along? That sort of thing: putting interesting decisions like that in front of of the player, all the way through the game."

Humanity's evolution is reflected in the gameplay. According to lead producer for the Civilization series Dennis Shirk, players will take their first 50-60 turns in the game alone. As each civilization grows, however, the game behind to change.

"When you cast off the historical context that we're bound to in a game like Civilization, you can go to some strange places, if you just let yourself go wild," Shirk said. "[The developers] showed a remarkable bit of both restraint and imagination in creating some very believable yet completely out of the ordinary places for the player to go through.

"When you're going through this game, you might start out talking to other leaders or factions or other leaders who've landed on the planet, and you still feel, "OK, these still feel like people from earth that I'm relating to.' But as the game goes on and these factions and these people start to change — they're adapting to the planet — the game becomes new all over again as this whole experience changes."

FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON

After it upended the idea of where a Civilization game could be played, Firaxis then upended the idea of how a Civilization game could be played. That begins with Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth's new loadouts.

As the game begins and players are leaving Earth, they choose a national identity, which sponsors the spacefaring expedition. Players have more choices to make, though. They need to choose their their spaceship, its cargo and the colonists that will join them. Each of these decisions impacts gameplay.

"Each of those creates this interesting, not-quite civilization, but really this a la mode faction that you get to start out the game with, and I think it'll make for some really interesting stories," Strenger said.

Creating the tech web

Lead designer David McDonough is working on the tech web, a non-linear, futuristic version of the classic Civilization tech tree.

"I find that that's where the game really comes to life for me," he said. "Tech is really the engine of a Civ experience, the thing that drives you through the history. In this one, it's the first and best way you tell the story of what happens to us next. Starting from things you might recognize, like physics, biology and space flight, and going forward into things that are crossing the line into science fiction, that are wild and imaginary, strange and mysterious.

"Getting to sculpt that entire story — that entire experience — and lay the foundation that the player is going to walk through the whole game has something that I've been very excited working on and very committed to getting right, getting to feel right."

Previous Civilization games gave players a linear tech tree to seed, based on the course of actual human events. But in Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth, players will be making history, not creating an alternate version of it. Exit the linear tech tree and enter the non-linear tech web.

"We were thinking, 'How does this progress from here out?,'" Brenk said. "The design team came up with this really neat solution where we have a tech web instead of a tech tree. It's not linear anymore because we don't exactly know where humanity will be going from here." Because it's no longer saddled to history, there are multiple different theories about how humanity might develop, and the tech web contains three broad affinities that help players assimilate to their new surroundings. The harmony affinity is for players who believe that they should become part of the new alien world. The supremacy affinity is harmony's opposite and favors technological advances like robotics and environmental domination over assimilation. The purity affinity uses "science and research," according to Brenk, to look back at humanity's past and culture and want to preserve humanity as it was and treat their new planet as a new Earth.

Affinities aren't all or nothing choices. Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth will, at least at the beginning, compel players to make choices that lead them down certain paths, but those choices will remain throughout the campaign.

"It's just like in the Civ games," Brenk said, "your surrounding when you start colonizing, in your first colony is settled on the planet, you'll look at your surroundings, and your surroundings will probably dictate or give you hints as to in which direction you should research. They'll probably nudge you in a certain direction, so often your tech choices are somewhat reactive. But basically, you're accumulating points towards each of these affinities, and your tech choices will make it so that you don't choose one of the three affinities at the start, but instead, you accumulate the points over the course of the whole game and advance in that direction, depending on where you're going."

According to Strenger, Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth will have three distinct victory types — one for each affinity, which reflects what each civilization understands success to be.

"The arcs for the affinities and the units both reflect the affinity that each player has chosen," he said. "So if my neighbor has gone down the harmony path, his cities and his units will start looking a certain way. Each of the affinities has a very defined aesthetic that we spent a lot of time connecting and developing on the art side of things."

OUR SHARED FUTURE

With Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth, Firaxis is hoping to move beyond building a civilization out of nuts and bolts. It wants players to build humanity with their own mixture of the past and the future, a combination of ideology and religion — to build an ethos to sustain homo sapiens among the stars. Whatever we become will be up to players to decide. But whatever that winds up being — passive or aggressive, human or cybernetic— humanity is primed to change. After all, they're building a different kind of civilization for a different kind of Civilization game.

"There's a lot of things, from the wonders to the most advanced military units, that are very much beyond what we today could conceivably build," McDonough said. "That's by design. We want the future to be futuristic."

[Waraji]

Get Hyped.

[Mazmaz]

Some supposed screenshots
http://imgur.com/a/649z9/

[Deftscythe]

My body is fucking ready.

[Skai]

Oh my god all my want. I am ready!

[Necronus]

Also known as "Sid Meier's: We Can't Legally Call This Alpha Centauri 2 But We Know That's What Your Thinking"

[BaneTheBrawler]

I AM EXTREMELY AROUSED

[6souls]

http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/...yond-earth.jpg

Spoiler: show

http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/...nd-earth-1.jpg
http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/...nd-earth-2.jpg
http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/...nd-earth-3.jpg

Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth will propel the development of human civilization beyond the traditional timeline of a Civilization game, by exploring humanity’s future on an alien world. For the first time, players will lead factions divided by contrasting cultures and evolve their new civilizations to reflect their chosen destiny. Players will experience an array of new gameplay possibilities, including nonlinear technological progression, deeper customization of chosen factions, and an entire alien world that will change the very identity of each faction based on their choices.

“Having celebrated its 23rd anniversary last year, Civilization has cemented its reputation as one of the greatest and longest running franchises in video game history,” said Christoph Hartmann, president of 2K. “Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth builds upon that success by pushing the series in new directions with players exploring an unknown future on an alien planet.”

“The Civ team was excited about the opportunity to continue the story of Civilization into the future, because it allows the team to break free of historical context,” said Sid Meier, director of creative development at Firaxis Games. “We’ve always let our fans create the history of mankind, and Civilization: Beyond Earth will now let them create the future.”

In addition to its use of DirectX 11, Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth will be among the first wave of products optimized for the latest in AMD graphics technologies, including: the new Mantle graphics API, for enhanced graphics performance; AMD CrossFire™, for UltraHD resolutions and extreme image quality; and AMD Eyefinity, which allows for a panoramic gameplay experience on up to six different HD displays off of a single graphics card.

Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth will be available for Windows PC, Mac and Linux in North America this fall for $49.99.

Information

Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth is a new science-fiction-themed entry into the award-winning Civilization series. Set in the future, global events have destabilized the world leading to a collapse of modern society, a new world order and an uncertain future for humanity. As the human race struggles to recover, the re-developed nations focus their resources on deep space travel to chart a new beginning for mankind.

As part of an expedition sent to find a home beyond Earth, you will write the next chapter for humanity as you lead your people into a new frontier and create a new civilization in space. Explore and colonize an alien planet, research new technologies, amass mighty armies, build incredible Wonders and shape the face of your new world. As you embark on your journey you must make critical decisions. From your choice of sponsor and the make-up of your colony, to the ultimate path you choose for your civilization, every decision opens up new possibilities.

Features

• Seed the Adventure: Establish your cultural identity by choosing one of eight different expedition sponsors, each with its own leader and unique gameplay benefits. Assemble your spacecraft, cargo & colonists through a series of choices that directly seed the starting conditions when arriving at the new planet.

• Colonize an Alien World: Explore the dangers and benefits of a new planet filled with dangerous terrain, mystical resources, and hostile life forms unlike those of Earth. Build outposts, unearth ancient alien relics, tame new forms of life, develop flourishing cities and establish trade routes to create prosperity for your people.

• Technology Web: To reflect progress forward into an uncertain future, technology advancement occurs through a series of nonlinear choices that affect the development of mankind. The technology web is organized around three broad themes, each with a distinct victory condition.

• Quest System: Quests are injected with fiction about the planet, and help to guide you through a series of side-missions that will aid in resource collection, unit upgrades, and advancement through the game.

• Orbital Layer: Build and deploy advanced military, economic and scientific units that provide strategic offensive, defensive and support capabilities from orbit.

• Unit Customization: Unlock different upgrades through the tech web and customize your units to reflect your play style.

• Multiplayer: Up to 8 players can compete for dominance of a new alien world.

• Mod support: Robust mod support allows you to customize and extend your game experience.

[Hank]

Some guy on Reddit made this:



He didn't change anything with the video or the song. Just replaced the audio track. It goes so well, I wish it had been the actual trailer.

[Amiricle]

Also known as "Sid Meier's: We Can't Legally Call This Alpha Centauri 2 But We Know That's What Your Thinking"

lol just what I was thinking. I've been wanting a new Alpha Centauri game for so long. This will do.

[Buffy]

I loved CIV I-IV and Alpha Centauri, but loathe V. I hope this is more enjoyable than V was.

[BaneTheBrawler]

yeah i loved V but it had a lot of flaws. given that this game starts out with obvious high sea levels, and colonizing a new planet filled with alien life, i think terraforming/mutable terrain has a good chance of making it back in this time. And climate change.

i also really hope there's an orbital phase before you ever found your first city, and that you can do stuff in orbit throughout the game. hell, maybe have one factiony talent thing where you want to preserve the native eco system so bad you ONLY live in space! colonize some asteroids and moons and shit instead. i'd love to have a whole solar system to play with, instead of just one planet. especially since we're obviously already advanced enough to be in space!

[Uzor]

yeah i loved V but it had a lot of flaws. given that this game starts out with obvious high sea levels, and colonizing a new planet filled with alien life, i think terraforming/mutable terrain has a good chance of making it back in this time. And climate change.

i also really hope there's an orbital phase before you ever found your first city, and that you can do stuff in orbit throughout the game. hell, maybe have one factiony talent thing where you want to preserve the native eco system so bad you ONLY live in space! colonize some asteroids and moons and shit instead. i'd love to have a whole solar system to play with, instead of just one planet. especially since we're obviously already advanced enough to be in space!

Maybe there's a cataclysmic space-event where you all crash land on the planet and have to rebuild!

Iunno, would be fun if you could play around in space But somehow I doubt it.

[BaneTheBrawler]

then it would be Foreigner! but yeah youre prolly right. and eh, i guess i can live with that.

[Lucavi]

But if we're out in space, there won't be King Rham or Mr. Greece to randomly pick fights with us for no reason!

[Uzor]

But if we're out in space, there won't be King Rham or Mr. Greece to randomly pick fights with us for no reason!

"I see you're 100 lightyears away from me. I feel threatened that you're too close to my infinite space with your infnite space. This means WAR!"
Or
"I feel your planet has grown too big. Please refrain from building on your planet in the future" > "I was just pretending to be your ally, I'm going to go ahead and backstab you now and invade all of your planets".

[BaneTheBrawler]

Our words are backed with ANTIMATTER WEAPONS!

[Prothescar]

had gandhi tell me that his words were backed with nuclear weapons the other day, was a trip

[Uzor]

Ghandi: I wouldn't hurt a fly! Humans, on the other hand...

[BaneTheBrawler]

well i think that's probably the backstory. ghandi nuked everything and so now we need to leave so we can sate ghandi's nuke lust with more planets