Civilization: Beyond Earth - Page 3

On April 13 2014 12:32 Eliezar wrote:
This isn't a Civ 5 mod, that's silly. This is more like when someone builds a new game in another game's engine. Its clear it is using the backbone of Civ 5.

Lots of games use other games engines to build their game on. Games like XCom, Borderlands, and Gears of War, and Mass Effect all used the Unreal engine and are not "Unreal" mods.

Is it going to look similar and have a playstyle similar to the Civ series? Yes. Is it a completely designed game with different concepts? Yes.

On April 13 2014 01:28 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
[list]
[*]Do quests and side missions while exploring the planet.

On April 13 2014 21:42 Nazza wrote:
Read an article that stated that the beyond earth team started by looking at all the fiction and literature that the team behind Alpha Centauri looked at when they started making it to get inspiration and ideas. So there's definitely some influences from there.

On April 13 2014 23:06 Gonff wrote:
This guy stripped the audio from the original announcement trailer and played "Final Countdown" over the top. It lines up perfectly. Fate?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_WSgMhfuic

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.”

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.

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.