The devs from Aspyr Media have released some details

Oct 22, 2014 08:56 GMT  ·  By

The launch date for Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth has been narrowed down to this holiday season by Aspyr Media, the studio that is also porting the game for the open source platform. They have also published a lot of details about the upcoming title, including the hardware requirements.

The developers from Firaxis and the 2K Games publishers have only said that the Linux version will land after the Windows one, but they don’t offer any kind of specific date. Now we know that Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth will land this holiday and that probably means sometime in December, maybe even a little bit earlier if we're lucky.

The devs from Aspyr Media, those porting the game for Linux and Mac OS X, have provided much more details about the upcoming release and they now have a FAQ in place that answers all the important questions.

Will you be able to play Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth?

The system requirements for a game are actually quite important because they prepare players before buying it. It's an important information to have and Aspyr Media has made it public, so here it is. You will need SteamOS or Ubuntu 14.04 (it's very likely that other distros will be able to run it as well), an Intel Core i3 or AMD A10 processor at 2.4GHz, 4GB of system RAM, 10 GB hard disk space, and a Radeon HD 6450, Geforce 640M, or Iris Pro video card with at least 1 GB or VRAM.

As you can see from this short list, the system requirements for Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth are not all that demanding and it should work very well on PCs with middle-end hardware. It's also worth pointing out that these requirements are not final and they might change soon.

Moving saves from one platform to another

"Saved games will NOT sync between Windows PC, Mac, and Linux via Steam Cloud. Since the Mac and Linux versions of Civilization: Beyond Earth may frequently be in and out of sync with the Windows PC version, syncing game saves across platforms via Steam Cloud has been disabled. This will ensure saved game data will not be lost or corrupt due to incompatible in-game content or other unforeseen reasons. Users do have the option of transferring game saves via physical media (like a thumb drive) if they wish," note the developers.

This is basically the biggest problem noted by the devs and it's not all that important. There are a couple of other smaller issues, but Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth will be on par with the Windows version.