'Civilization: Beyond Earth' announced!

Big Crystals, worm-like giant alien menace, craters, purplish landscape.
They really go all not-earth vibe here....

 

Just about every producer is going with online authentication these days, whether they go through Steam or not. You run the risk of the company's servers going down at any point, and the game (while it may still function that day) may not be able to be activated again. Luckily, the internet is full of people who love to make things that don't work, magically work. Either way, I don't feel Steam is at any risk of shutting down. Even if Valve were to go bankrupt, their greatest asset is Steam, and its business relationships, and would likely be sold off to another company that would keep it running. If going with Steam greatly drops their development efforts and allows them to focus more on gameplay issues than multiplayer-lobbies/distribution/patching/etc, I'm all for them going the Steam route.

 

Welcome to 2010?

 

It's possible they've extended the engine to allow for this since that time, though. IIRC they extended the engine for Civ4: Colonization to allow it to do some things it couldn't in Civ4.

I do like the graphical style. Why not have some color on an alien world that no one has ever seen?

 

http://www.gamespot.com/the-next-big-game-beyond-earth/

 

WHOA! Really?! This is very unexpected.

I quite like the idea, I'll be following this one.

 

Sorry firaxi but civ5 is still a mess and three high quality screenshots sounds like a joke, I cant any way believe this game could be any better. Finish your old game before putting out alpha centauri clone.

 

So after Sid Meier's Railroads!, Civilization IV: Colonization, Civilization V, XCOM: Enemy Unknown we will get dumbed down edition of SMAC.

I don't want to break anyone feelings or hopes, but quality of last games from firaxis is very similar. I don't expect this to be worthy successor or good game, regardless of nice images and my wishes.

 

How can it be a clone if they're the original devs of SMAC?

 

Oh yeah ! That's a good new ! I hope there will still the unit prototyping feature like in the old one !

 

To be fair, this time round, we don't have Brian Reynolds. So it's not exactly the same team, even if there are veterans.

Honestly, all of this makes me think that this game is more of... a "love letter" to SMAC. And I'm OK with it.

 

I feel that the biggest problem people are going to have going into this game is expecting SMAC 2 with the serial numbers filed off for IP purposes.

 

Really? I kind of consider III to be the weakest of the series, probably because I started playing it straight out of AC.

I totally agree with you about the atmosphere, the sense of impending doom felt throughout the game. Though as people said here, it won't be ACII. Oh well.

I'd also disagree with the sentiment elsewhere on this thread that the "Tech Web" will reduce strategy. One thing I liked about AC was the semi-random tech progression. Does it take more chops to go through a checklist of what techs to hit first, or to be flexible enough to take what you're given? Both, I suppose.

 

All I see is a reason to install again Alpha Centauri and get some practice before this game comes to the stores.

It's too early to really comment on this game, but from what I have read it looks like it has many things Alpha Centauri had.

 

If Valve didn't use money for their own experiments, and just focused on Steam, they'd have enough money right now to support Steam for at least 10 years ignoring the cut they make from sales during those 10 years.

Best part about Steam is the patching, though. Easily.

 

Also, at the moment, Steam is the least of all evils, I feel. You can run in offline mode for quite some time (i.e. it's not an always-online verification), you can lend your account (family sharing), has unlimited activations and it is fairly mod-friendly (built-in mod support and does not flag/lock down your game for modding).

Sure, DRM is annoying and bad, but nowadays, every publisher insists on it. Out of all of them, Steam is the least bad. And comes with some neat side benefits (no need for DVDs, streaming over your home network, decent patch/mod management).

If you categorically decline DRM, indie games and retro games are the only games available in the future, I'm afraid.

 

Steam actually works now. Lets hope they dont turn into another google or facebook.

But really firaxi, shame on you. Hire few programmer more to hunt bugs down so we atlest know your games wont end as half baked.

 

Its been years since I've used this account, surprised if I even remembered the password. Anyway I'm cautiously curious but I love science fiction and strategy games. Though I have to say from being an old school Civilization player no squares? Gosh what ever happened to longitude and latitude? I'm hoping firaxis is trying to be creative with hexagons, maybe even full scale spherical map.

 

Is it 64 bit? Will it be as moddable as civ4? If not pass.

 

The thing is, with online distribution, and near-instant automatic patching, why NOT release the game as soon as it is 'half-baked'? Full paid open beta, as it were.

In many cases of game development, the time of most money lost is the pre-release internal testing/bug fixing. Might as well let the community to a bulk of the testing, and pay you for the privilege. It worked well with Civ 5, and I see no reason it won't work well with CivBE.