Is Beyond Earth 2 coming before Civ 7

Beyond Earth 2 or Civ 7 first?

  • Beyond Earth 2

    Votes: 18 32.7%
  • Civ 7

    Votes: 37 67.3%

  • Total voters
    55
But again, it's extremely unlikely. Unlikely to the extent that it's not really worth bringing up every time a discussion about BE is going. We're never going to get another space-based Civ spin-off if each one gets overshadowed by a single game from the 90s.
But I'm afraid that BE is just much more uninspired and bland than SMAC. At least in my opinion. I feel bringing it up is a service to a potential concept, not an artificial impediment.
 
But I'm afraid that BE is just much more uninspired and bland than SMAC. At least in my opinion. I feel bringing it up is a service to a potential concept, not an artificial impediment.
You are right.
On both counts.

Yes, SMAC/X had soul.
Something BE was sorely lacking.

When designing and developing BE2 Firaxis really needs to take inspiration from SMAC/X.
After all it is going to be the yardstick on which it will be judged.
 
But I'm afraid that BE is just much more uninspired and bland than SMAC. At least in my opinion. I feel bringing it up is a service to a potential concept, not an artificial impediment.
To be blunt, it serves nothing. Was BE flawed? Yes. It doesn't take a comparison to SMAC to know that. But constantly saying there should be a SMAC 2 will not make a potential BE 2 better. Very few seedlings thrive in the shadow of a mighty tree. Allow BE to have its own space.
 
To be blunt, it serves nothing. Was BE flawed? Yes. It doesn't take a comparison to SMAC to know that. But constantly saying there should be a SMAC 2 will not make a potential BE 2 better. Very few seedlings thrive in the shadow of a mighty tree. Allow BE to have its own space.
I'm afraid I don't agree, and I won't fall silent. BE does not warrant, "a space," at the expense of potentially something much better. It's a lackluster product, at best. You may cease, now, with your attempts to browbeat me into not speaking my mind on the issue. I am unmoved.
 
I'm afraid I don't agree, and I won't fall silent. BE does not warrant, "a space," at the expense of potentially something much better. It's a lackluster product, at best. You may cease, now, with your attempts to browbeat me into not speaking my mind on the issue. I am unmoved.
By all means, speak highly of SMAC when SMAC is the topic of discussion. However, it's an unwelcome intrusion to speak of a desire for SMAC 2 when BE is being discussed. It's like talking about the color red whenever someone mentions blue. Eventually, it feels like we can't even talk about blue because someone tries to steer the conversation to red every time.
 
You realize that this counterpoint is entirely based on semantic pedantry, right? It would not be relevant if a serious, dedicated project to revive the idea were made.

OT but having said Jaws is out of time in the '20s, it is being re-released on IMAX

IDK who will watch it cos these days when videos of swimming with great white sharks are viral who will be scared watching Jaws?

I think nobody will be happier than I if Firaxis ship a follow up to SMAC/X but EA have the rights as @Eagle Pursuit pointed out.
Too many things make it impractical.
 
beyond earth simply lacked the deep story and interesting and detailed characters that SMAC had. The mechanics and graphics are not what players were looking for.
 
Disclaimer: I have not played SMAC/X. Here's another way to look at this. The original BE was released in Oct 2014. The development -- and writing / character creation -- included many of the folks who worked on Civ4 and Civ5.

How many "interesting and detailed characters" did Civ4 and Civ5 have for leaders? Were FDR and George Washington so amazing *in the game*, were they given interesting dialog, or did they just exist in their historical context? Montezuma was considered "crazy" and unpredictable in both, got a nickname, and Napoleon got a nickname too. I would argue that NONE of the leaders in Civ4 or Civ5 were written to be as "interesting", "detailed", or as engaging as the leaders in SMAC. Does anyone remember what Russian Katherine says in her diplomatic engagements? Or the great comments from Gajah Mada, Casimir, Maria I, Enrico Dandolo, Pedro II, or Maria Theresa? Given that players are glad to see one of their own leaders in the game, I can see that many people were happy to have these leaders in the game. But the notion that all of the leaders have interesting and detailed backstories just doesn't hold up.

My points:
  1. SMAC was a wonderful anomaly, an outburst of creativity. It set the bar for space-based games incredibly, unreachably high.
  2. Civ5 had its share of less-than-interesting, underwhelming writing for characters, but no one cared. Civ5 had numerically MORE characters with ordinary writing than BE did, but no one cared. Including all the expansions, Civ5 has 43 leaders compared with 12 leaders in BE(RT); I would submit to you that at least 12 of the Civ5 leaders are written equal to the writing of the leaders in BERT.
 
Disclaimer: I have not played SMAC/X. Here's another way to look at this. The original BE was released in Oct 2014. The development -- and writing / character creation -- included many of the folks who worked on Civ4 and Civ5.

How many "interesting and detailed characters" did Civ4 and Civ5 have for leaders? Were FDR and George Washington so amazing *in the game*, were they given interesting dialog, or did they just exist in their historical context? Montezuma was considered "crazy" and unpredictable in both, got a nickname, and Napoleon got a nickname too. I would argue that NONE of the leaders in Civ4 or Civ5 were written to be as "interesting", "detailed", or as engaging as the leaders in SMAC. Does anyone remember what Russian Katherine says in her diplomatic engagements? Or the great comments from Gajah Mada, Casimir, Maria I, Enrico Dandolo, Pedro II, or Maria Theresa? Given that players are glad to see one of their own leaders in the game, I can see that many people were happy to have these leaders in the game. But the notion that all of the leaders have interesting and detailed backstories just doesn't hold up.

My points:
  1. SMAC was a wonderful anomaly, an outburst of creativity. It set the bar for space-based games incredibly, unreachably high.
  2. Civ5 had its share of less-than-interesting, underwhelming writing for characters, but no one cared. Civ5 had numerically MORE characters with ordinary writing than BE did, but no one cared. Including all the expansions, Civ5 has 43 leaders compared with 12 leaders in BE(RT); I would submit to you that at least 12 of the Civ5 leaders are written equal to the writing of the leaders in BERT.
Addressing your point, specifically, and in any other usage of such comparisons in gaming (or fictional media), fictitious characters of significance are, in general, held to a higher bar than dramatized historical figures for expectations of creativity. "Plot device cut-out characters," are not generally given praise or preference by critics and fans of such media.
 
OT but having said Jaws is out of time in the '20s, it is being re-released on IMAX

IDK who will watch it cos these days when videos of swimming with great white sharks are viral who will be scared watching Jaws?

I think nobody will be happier than I if Firaxis ship a follow up to SMAC/X but EA have the rights as @Eagle Pursuit pointed out.
Too many things make it impractical.
The scary part about that movie is not the shark, it's the "there is a terrifying threat out there and people are too concerned with short-term benefit that they ignore it."
There's a parallel to something happening now - a few things, I think - that make it amazingly relevant.
 
The scary part about that movie is not the shark, it's the "there is a terrifying threat out there and people are too concerned with short-term benefit that they ignore it."
There's a parallel to something happening now - a few things, I think - that make it amazingly relevant.
Spielberg's genius is that it transcends "a shark movie".

But there are so many inaccuracies.

For example Jaws apparently kills an orca which washes up on shore. (Or was that in the sequel?)

But recently it's been discovered that it's orcas who predate on shark:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/melissacristinamarquez/2022/08/22/serial-killer-whales-strike-again/

For me (and kids grown up on Shark Week) Jaws is just so wrong on so many levels.

I suppose in the same way that colonising Alpha Centauri instead of an exoplanet would be just wrong.
 
The scary part about that movie is not the shark, it's the "there is a terrifying threat out there and people are too concerned with short-term benefit that they ignore it."
There's a parallel to something happening now - a few things, I think - that make it amazingly relevant.
That's how I felt about Season 4 of Stranger Thing (I'll put in in spoilers in case anyone still hasn't watched it):
Spoiler :
They had Vecna, vicious flying bat creatures, tons of creepy spiders, and far too much body horror for my liking. But the scariest part for me was the overly righteous, vigilante basketball team that was utterly convinced Eddie was a murderer because he played D&D.
 
OT but having said Jaws is out of time in the '20s, it is being re-released on IMAX

IDK who will watch it cos these days when videos of swimming with great white sharks are viral who will be scared watching Jaws?

I think nobody will be happier than I if Firaxis ship a follow up to SMAC/X but EA have the rights as @Eagle Pursuit pointed out.
Too many things make it impractical.

The scary part about that movie is not the shark, it's the "there is a terrifying threat out there and people are too concerned with short-term benefit that they ignore it."
There's a parallel to something happening now - a few things, I think - that make it amazingly relevant.

Spielberg's genius is that it transcends "a shark movie".

But there are so many inaccuracies.

For example Jaws apparently kills an orca which washes up on shore. (Or was that in the sequel?)

But recently it's been discovered that it's orcas who predate on shark:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/melissacristinamarquez/2022/08/22/serial-killer-whales-strike-again/

For me (and kids grown up on Shark Week) Jaws is just so wrong on so many levels.

I suppose in the same way that colonising Alpha Centauri instead of an exoplanet would be just wrong.

That's how I felt about Season 4 of Stranger Thing (I'll put in in spoilers in case anyone still hasn't watched it):
Spoiler :
They had Vecna, vicious flying bat creatures, tons of creepy spiders, and far too much body horror for my liking. But the scariest part for me was the overly righteous, vigilante basketball team that was utterly convinced Eddie was a murderer because he played D&D.

Or, you know, we talk about BE instead of Sharks and Stranger Things? I don't think I've ever seen threads more quickly derail than on Civfanatics :S (maybe I just frequent mod-happy forums).

I would love it if a new BE had more depth when it comes to lore and characters like described above, but an extensive series of event descriptions like in Stellaris and Old World would also go a long way in my opinion.

And I would still love to see a link to Civ, where some markers in your Civ game would serve as bonuses and maluses during your BE game.
 
yes, there was in tweets and insta content some references to bioshock too a steampunkyother world version could be in the making, but it is all speculation, but i so hope you are right
 
Part of the challenge in creating lore for BE(RT) factions is the connection to Old Earth.
  • Does this faction continue / extend its heritage from Old Earth? (using the Civ4 attributes: Creative, Financial, Expansionist, etc)
  • Or does this faction consciously/deliberately move in a different direction? For example, militarism focus when its OE background was more trade-focused.

The challenge with the first option is the setting: whatever Old Earth (OE) country or group of countries that could afford to equip and launch a seed ship to send it off-world would tilt our choices to those 20th or 21st century nations-states, often in the G20, rather than historical predecessors. We would get Italy, not Rome; Iraq, not Babylon; Mexico, not Aztecs; Syria or Lebanon, not Hittites. It's harder to make a connection to cultures that disappeared / merged hundreds of years before the spaceships launch.

The second option could open the door for interesting story-telling. A group of Swedes or Norwegians trying to emulate the conquest of the Vikings; a group from Turkey or Greece trying to emulate the trade focus of the Phoenicians or the expansion of the Byzantines; the factions from the USA could go in multiple directions.

As a fan of BERT, I like Kavitha's spirituality and characterization. I like Samatar's attitudes and speeches; they strike me as similar to other present-day Africans I have met. As I wrote in an earlier posting in another thread, each of these leaders had to pursue this position, interviewed for it, and competed against other people who wanted the job. That should mean that a leader in BERT has an interesting story that led to their financial backers to choose them.
 
Part of the challenge in creating lore for BE(RT) factions is the connection to Old Earth.
  • Does this faction continue / extend its heritage from Old Earth? (using the Civ4 attributes: Creative, Financial, Expansionist, etc)
  • Or does this faction consciously/deliberately move in a different direction? For example, militarism focus when its OE background was more trade-focused.

The challenge with the first option is the setting: whatever Old Earth (OE) country or group of countries that could afford to equip and launch a seed ship to send it off-world would tilt our choices to those 20th or 21st century nations-states, often in the G20, rather than historical predecessors. We would get Italy, not Rome; Iraq, not Babylon; Mexico, not Aztecs; Syria or Lebanon, not Hittites. It's harder to make a connection to cultures that disappeared / merged hundreds of years before the spaceships launch.

The second option could open the door for interesting story-telling. A group of Swedes or Norwegians trying to emulate the conquest of the Vikings; a group from Turkey or Greece trying to emulate the trade focus of the Phoenicians or the expansion of the Byzantines; the factions from the USA could go in multiple directions.

As a fan of BERT, I like Kavitha's spirituality and characterization. I like Samatar's attitudes and speeches; they strike me as similar to other present-day Africans I have met. As I wrote in an earlier posting in another thread, each of these leaders had to pursue this position, interviewed for it, and competed against other people who wanted the job. That should mean that a leader in BERT has an interesting story that led to their financial backers to choose them.
To be honest, even if the source of SMAX is unavailable due to copyright issues, I like the idea, absent in BE, of a number of alien/extraterrestrial factions colonizing from a completely different world, and having radically different viewpoints, ideologies, views on technology and the planet, and perhaps even reasons for ultimately being there, and conflicts and other interactions they, too, have brought from home. Even an early chain of advances would be needed for humans and aliens to communicate and interact. And it wasn't just SMAX - the SciFi alternate game that came with Civ2 ToT had up to three factions with a similar premise.
 
To be fair, it's maybe difficult to tell how much of SMAC is nostalgia and how much was genius... But I think tying the factions to ideologies rather than geography was the most solid choice in SMAC - after all it isn't as if geography meant that much any more. BE factions felt lifeless at best, excessively stereotypical at worst. Though taking off the rose tinted glasses SMAC was hardly immune to stereotyping.
 
To be fair, it's maybe difficult to tell how much of SMAC is nostalgia and how much was genius... But I think tying the factions to ideologies rather than geography was the most solid choice in SMAC - after all it isn't as if geography meant that much any more. BE factions felt lifeless at best, excessively stereotypical at worst. Though taking off the rose tinted glasses SMAC was hardly immune to stereotyping.
What? Are you DARING to say that Sheng Jiyang came across as little more than a power-mad, order obsessive, hyper-bureaucratic, CCP aparatchik suddenly devoid of party hierarchy superiors who dressed up his excesses in pseudo-Neo-Confucian, "wisdom," and wanted to force EVERYONE on Planet into his People's (Hive) Republic? Those are dueling words! :p
 
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