Image: Firaxis Games
If humans are to survive many millennia down the line, we need to get off the only rock we've ever known. But, once we get to a new world, what will our new civilization look like? And how will humans adapt to survive on a place we weren't designed to live?That's the question that Civilization: Beyond Earth is going to try to answer. It is, of course, a science fiction game, but it's also one that its designers, Firaxis Games, have spent a lot of time researching and pondering.In their minds, we can go one of three ways: Humans can live in "harmony" with the planet, genetically splicing our DNA with theoretical alien DNA, hacking ourselves to live on a completely foreign place; we can consider ourselves as superior to whatever is on the planet, using robotics and other advanced technology to survive and dominate the planet; or we can consider the human race as "pure," trying to terraform whatever planet we land on and make it as similar to Earth as we possibly can, so that humans, in their current form, can live on it much like we do today.Those three "affinities," purity, supremacy, and harmony, are the most important game mechanic in the newest iteration of the legendary turn-based strategy series. They didn't come from nowhere: Before they really got started on the game, lead game designers Will Miller and David McDonough spent many, many hours reading hard sci-fi and thinking about where mankind would go—literally, in some cases: All of the planets in an announced expansion are actual ones discovered with the help of NASA's Kepler telescope."It's a work of fiction, but you have to make the player believe how they got there. You start in a conventional place, with a habitat NASA could make say, 25-30 years from now. With rovers and things that are grounded in technology today," Miller told me. "But we incrementally go out from there into hard sci-fi territory—the realistic and plausible side of it."That means you'll see things like cybernetics and body augmentation, soldier suits, genetic manipulation and complete reengineering of the human genome to be more like any given planet's inhabitants. It means you'll see technology that relies on artificial brains and neural uploading, brain hacking, sentient and self-replicating computers, advanced robotics, memory manipulation, and all sorts of other things we ponder here at Motherboard every day.It's not a completely unprecedented move for the game series: Beyond Earth is the successor to Alpha Centauri, one of the most critically acclaimed 4X games of all time, and one that explored some of these technologies back in 1999. But the 15 years between then and now have given this all a bit more urgency, a bit more realism as we start to see some of these technologies become real, here on Earth.That's not to say the game, which is slated to launch October 24th, sticks strictly to the science: Miller and McDonough didn't spend hours talking with futurists and working with theoretical physicists and artificial intelligence experts as they went through the game's programming phase."Sid Meier, our creative director, has a game design guideline: Do your research after the game is done. That might sound strange, but if you overload a game with things people don't understand or if your spaceship game becomes too scientific or esoteric, people don't want to play it," Miller said. "Authenticity is an important part of this, but you don't want to make it feel too dull or make people feel dumb."That being said, the technology and choices that make it into the game are certainly important from a, well, civilization standpoint. Assuming we make it to another world, what sorts of conquerers will be?And what will be the most prudent path forward? In the first few years, scientists believe, space colonizers probably won't be living large, but when we really get a handle on things, can mankind stay at all similar to how it is today?Well, this is still, at its core, a Civilization game, and you've still got to dominate everyone else on the planet in order to win. You're not going to be creating a technoutopia where everyone gets along.As you'd expect, it's turn-based, all the action still takes place on one planet (though it'll be alien planets in this one, obviously), and you'll still start out with relatively rudimentary technology and advance to the game-ending, civilization-destroying stuff.But tech advancements here aren't as rigid as they were in previous games. Instead of a regimented "tree," there'll be a tech "web" that lets you cast your resources pretty wide."It's nonlinear and it's flexible. You can research something like genetics or chemistry, and choose several different options, and then you can specialize," Miller said. "You kind of pick a direction, and shoot for it while you're making a bid for the win."And mankind can't really survive in its current state, not when progress and utter domination is the goal."No matter what you do, you don't get out of this clean—there's an intense transformative experience for humanity, even if your goal is purity," McDonough told me. "No matter what you choose, you have to grow technologically to a future that is pretty strange, that's post human."And, at that point, is it still "civilization?" I suppose that's for our descendants to decide, really.
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