David McDonough and Will Miller would like you to know that they ripped parts of Civilization: Beyond Earth from other games.
“We play a lot of games here. We didn’t invent a lot of the things in Beyond Earth,” Miller said. The pair are the lead designers on Firaxis’ latest game, which takes the acclaimed 4X strategy Civilization series (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) into space on PC Oct. 24. “We don’t ever design in a vacuum, and it’s cool we don’t have to.”
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Above: Will Miller and David McDonough demonstrate that Civilization: Beyond Earth is serious business.
I quizzed McDonough and Miller recently on exactly what those influences are, the rules they could break by taking Civ into space, and their personal favorites in the game (hint: They involve octopi and angels).
Civilization: Beyond Earth takes advantage of its new surroundings, asking players to set up colonies on planets that already have alien life, creating their cities among species whose motivations are a mystery, then layering on competition from other humans. (Read more about the game’s structure in this GamesBeat review.)
“We got the opportunity to try some pretty radical ideas in Beyond Earth,” McDonough said
Miller and McDonough say Beyond Earth’s structure and surroundings borrow heavily from other games: for starters, Stardock’s Galactic Civilizations series, which was itself a ripoff of Civilization. Stardock CEO Brad Wardell joked recently that even the GalCiv name indicates of what his company was trying to do in 2003: take Civilization into space. He laughs about it now, saying he probably wouldn’t even be able to get the trademark on the name today.
Miller and McDonough say they’ve turned the tables, borrowing elements of GalCiv in the creation of the new Civilization story and its alien-planet setting.
Above: The otherworldly setting allowed Civilization: Beyond earth designers to incorporate new ideas into the strategy series.
Space, the land of endless opportunity
“David and I have been very enthusiastic about space in general,” Miller said. “Our fans since Alpha Centauri have been wanting to see us go back there. It was right place, right time.”
The new setting led to more opportunities — alien life, a neutral faction, an orbital layer that enabled them to effectively influence a single hex of land with more than one unit — and the chance to stretch, McDonough said. “That’s the most exciting part for us as designers.”
But they borrowed liberally from others, including their own earlier work, along the way. Endless Space, an Amplitude game, inspired Civ: BE’s star-like, nonlinear tech web. Their work on the action RPG Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning before coming to Civilization affected the way units progress in this game and the decision-tree-style quests players face as they expand their civilizations.
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The skill tree, with its many branches, is more like Blizzard’s Diablo games than the earlier Civilizations, McDonough said. His work on 2K Games’ notoriously hard XCOM strategy reboot affected Civ: BE as well.
“Maybe its OK to have the first hour be brutal,” Miller explains with a laugh.
Above: This city shows buildings from the robotic Supremacy tree, available only if you choose that Virtue as the game progresses.
Designing to aid — and confound — how you play
Fans also had a huge impact on the design of this Civ — specifically, the way they played to win the older games. That’s right: If you don’t like the new tech web, you may only have yourself to blame. Players had figured out the critical paths to the tech they needed to win and endlessly discussed them in the forums, the pair said. McDonough and Miller found that a bummer.
“We think it takes away a little bit from the game if you know what you’re going to go before you start,” McDonough said. He figured the space setting set them free: Technology could go in any direction, unconstrained by Civilization’s traditional march of history.
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“We always want players to have to adapt,” Miller agreed. They wanted their tree to offer an inside-out approach, asymmetric, indeterminate, rewarding clever tactical combos more than fastest progression toward a particular tech goal. The “Virtue” trees, which are separate from the tech web and enable players who pursue a particular style to pick new enhancements for all their units, help to enforce this, they said.
Above: Aliens are almost always hostile if attacked, but my experience suggests those big worm guys like destroying cities just for fun.
Those darned moody, unpredictable aliens
Tech wasn’t the only thing they could blow up because of the sci-fi environment. Aliens gave Miller and McDonough the chance to introduce an unpredictable factor into the game, one that would react to the player’s movement and conquest but not always as a rival.
“The aliens in the game are the third players in this game,” Miller said. The intent: shake things up. In previous games you might run across always-hostile barbarians or other human factions you could fight or negotiate with (a mechanic that’s till present in the game.) But there is no negotiating with the aliens, and they won’t always attack.
“The aliens are prioritizing one agenda over another. As you act on the planet — expanding, grabbing territory — they will react very strongly to that,” McDonough said. “The aliens are very powerful, but they’re not there to win the game. It’ll be interesting to see how people react.”
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Aliens also react to the NPC human factions, helping them to form ideas about what people are like. So even if you’re nonviolent toward your alien friends, if other human factions aren’t, the aliens may still retaliate against you, the pair said. And smaller aliens are animalistic, taking shots when they can.
“They’ll come after you. You have to treat them with some caution,” Miller said. “We never wanted people to be complacent.”
“The aliens will take their turns and change their minds,” McDonough said. “We put the player in a bit more aggressive posture at the beginning of the game. You are strangers in a strange land. The first chapter in Beyond Earth is about survival.”
That may force some players who favor diplomacy to choose firefights instead.
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“The idea that you pivot and change your mind was one of our founding ideas and objectives with this game,” McDonough said.
Above: Fight the aliens or just the other human factions? The choice is yours.
Nuture or conquer? Quests help you choose
One way you’ll start to change your mind is through the quests, which pop up based on actions you take — exploration, conquest — and ask you to make choices about what you’ll do next. Some ask you to seek particular objectives or create specific units for rewards. Others ask you to decide what to do about a problem or discovery, awarding you a variety of rewards based on the choices you make.
What you decide to do in one quest helps direct what happens in the next — if you choose to drain a lake to get at an artifact, for example, you might then have to choose what to do with the artifact in the next quest.
“The decision tree is a pretty cool format,” Miller said. Quests and rewards randomly change, both in what you get and when they appear, from game to game. “It’s optional.”
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“There’s an expectation that a game like Beyond Earth delivers a sci-fi story,” he said. The quests are one way the designers chose to tell it. “You can make those decisions quickly, but they still matter. They teach you to play the game, in the beginning, and give you one more vector for customization. No decision is bad.”
Above: The ANGEL: McDonough’s favorite unit.
ANGELs vs. Rocktopi: the best units
One result of giving players so many ways to customize the game is the wide variety of units they can eventually choose to play. Each Virtue tree results in different units becoming available, based on whether you’re choosing to take advantage of the alien tech and abilities, to exterminate them in favor of your own, or to transcend current human tech in pursuit of robot-assisted nirvana.
Miller’s favorite unit is the Rocktopus, a unit that becomes available late in the Harmony tree (the one that uses alien technology). It’s formed around a float stone, effectively creating a giant jellyfish that players can deploy on the map or in the orbital layer, affecting a collection of hexes underneath it.
“I like aliens that bend the rules,” he said.
McDonough’s favorite was the ANGEL, which stands for Articulated Neurosymbiotic Gantry (Execution & Logistics). It’s a unit that becomes available late in the robot-based Supremacy tree, a mechanical walker with a spidery robot chassis powered by a human consciousness. It’s the Swiss Army knife of advanced units, he said.
Despite all of the fun new elements the pair included in Civ: BE as a result of the space/sci-fi environment, they’re quick to assure fans that Firaxis won’t make a Civ for every popular setting. They’ll use some ideas they got from Civ: BE in future games — on Earth.
“I don’t think we’re going to try to map Civ to a bunch of other genres,” Miller said. “We’ll always have a classic Civ offering. I doubt we’ll see Civ in Tights anytime soon.”