We call it the Seeding,” McDonough says of the opening section of any Beyond Earth game. “It’s sort of like a prequel, a prologue to the game. There’s even a rethinking of how the building blocks of a typical civ’s life are first laid out. There’s the planet itself, an environment filled with competing colonists and any number of unknowns. There’s an orbital layer to build into, for military, scientific, and economic purposes. There’s a whole quest system, designed to introduce players to the alien landscape around them and the possible courses of development.
This rebuilding process cleared the way for entirely new, fresh elements, things that either hadn’t been attempted or hadn’t even been possible in the past games. But when we built this game, we stripped Civ down to that aforementioned skeleton and rebuilt the whole experience on top of that.” The maps, the units on the tiles, the city improvements and buildings, Wonders, leaders and diplomacy. A lot of things that every Civ fan will recognize are the bones of this experience too. “There are the bones of the experience that every Civ game has in its core DNA. McDonough agrees that there’s a challenge, but it’s not as insurmountable as it might seem. Starting out in the Stone Age and building toward a nuclear-powered future is just as intrinsic to the experience as the turn-by-turn tactical play that sees players expanding their borders and influence – militarily, culturally, economically, scientifically – with each passing year. It’s a whole new idea for Civilization the future of mankind on an alien world.”įor a fan who’s poured tens of hours (if not hundreds) into the Firaxis franchise, it’s hard to imagine how a Civilization game could even work outside the boundaries of known history. “B ut it’s important to remember that this is not actually the same game again. Alpha Centauri was a big inspiration for this game,” Beyond Earth Lead Designer David McDonough tells Digital Trends. “It’s something a lot of our fans are going to think and, I have to say, they should.
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