Civilization: Beyond Earth Devs Explain the Game’s Origins

Will Miller and David McDonough, the lead designers of Firaxis Games’ upcoming turn-based strategy game Civilization: Beyond Earth, have penned an op-ed on popular astronomy website space.com to share their insights on the game’s development with regards to science and space exploration. 

“For us, Civilization: Beyond Earth has been an opportunity to explore ideas about the future — technology, progress and culture — and think about how settling on a new planet could be the next stage for humanity's progress,” they wrote.

Within the article, they explain how Beyond Earth starts with the premise that humanity has emerged from a period of great difficulty with renewed interest and drive in exploring space. 

In our game fiction, this is galvanized by a few key events, such as the first image of a habitable world, another pale blue dot around a distant star. But it is also driven by need. Settling an extrasolar planet would be a massively resource-intensive process, and as resources become scarce, eventually, there won't be enough to support mass colonization, which is an idea we're referring to as the Inflection Point. 

Instead of taking control of Stone Age settlers as they would in Civ, players in Beyond Earth will be leading one of the expeditions that leave Earth during the Seeding, before the hard reality of the Inflection Point makes it hard to do so. The next chapter of humanity will be defined in terms of what humans do when they leave this planet and start to spread out through the universe.

Read the rest of it here. 

The game is out on October 24th, 2014. It is exclusive to the PC.