14 DAY TRIAL // Publisher 2K announced yesterday that the upcoming turn-based strategy game, Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth, would come out on October 24.
Today, the company has released yet another developer video, providing an inside look at the upcoming game, featuring interviews with the title's two designers, Will Miller and David McDonough.
Firaxis' upcoming installment in the long-standing Civilization series is meant to be a spiritual successor to Alpha Centauri, offering players the chance to follow mankind's footsteps through the stars once again.
"We're huge fans of both science and science fiction, so we wanted to make sure the game starts in a believable place, but it starts moving out very quickly and taking these little steps into the more fantastic," McDonough explains, citing various pieces of literature as inspiration for the upcoming strategy game.
"One of the things that we had a great time doing was figuring out who the cast of characters was going to be. And the way we did that is we started with the geopolitical landscape of Earth as it is right now, and introduced this thing that we call The Great Mistake."
"The result of that was this reshuffling and mass migration of people, so the nations sort of reassembled themselves and clawed their way out of this dark age up to the point where they're finally back on their feet again and the game begins, when they're sending space ships to new worlds," Miller chimes in.
Just like in Alpha Centauri, the various factions in the game have different leaders that embody what they stand for, also reflecting each faction's cultural background.
"Their leaders represent this multicultural mixing that happens, a lot of them speak a mixture of languages, for example the American Reclamation Corporation, the sponsor that you can pick for that, Suzanne Fielding, speaks a combination of Spanish and English, sort of interchangeably, a lot like how everybody swears in Chinese in Firefly, you know, it tells a lot about what happened without saying much," Miller points out.
The fact that players delve into the uncertain future of mankind allows the developers to experiment with the way that the tech tree works, and instead of following what gamers already know from history, this time around they will be able to play in a more exploratory manner, discovering along the way what technologies are going to prove useful or the most interesting to them.
Pre-orders for Civilization: Beyond Earth are open on the 2K Games online store and allow access to the Exoplanets Map Pack. The game is coming out on October 24, 2014, for Windows PC, Mac and Linux.
