But the very first turn of the game is planetfall on the new planet. Who you are is up to you when you leave Earth. “It’s a whole new idea for Civilization the future of mankind on an alien world.”“The result is a fully customized replacement for the idea of Civ. Starting with your faction and then selecting the colonists that go along, the spacecraft you travel in, the cargo you bring with you. “You get to choose a bunch of customization options for who you are and what your colony expedition is made up of. 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. “Such threats can arise from the reckless generation and usage of energy leading to environmental, biological and/or sociopolitical collapse and must be guarded against ever more robustly as humanity’s technical prowess continues to outrun our capability to manage our increasingly complex society.“It’s something a lot of our fans are going to think and, I have to say, they should. The other option is “the grim prospect of backsliding into a primal state,” according to the paper. “If this outcome holds, humanity may well avoid a future beset with the more severe environmental problems posed by excessive CO2 emissions.” “Humanity should strive to achieve a dramatic energy transition during 2020 to 2050 … to solve at least the most pressing of environmental problems which stand in the path of development to a higher order civilization,” reads the paper. It’s all hinges on what happens next with our energy consumption, say the authors, as our civilization massively reduces its consumption of fossil fuels and transits to renewable and nuclear energy. Here’s the kicker-we might not reach Type 1 status because we may die-off long before, having ruined the planet we depend upon. “Technological progress has placed in humanity’s hands the future of our world and every living creature upon it.” “Technological development over the past 5,000 years of human civilization has led our species to dominance of life on Earth and placed us on a pathway to achieving a Type I civilization – and perhaps beyond,” reads the paper. Another paper published in 2021 predicts that we’ll reach Type 1 status in 2347, though the authors of this new paper disregard that as slightly optimistic.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |