At PAX East today, Firaxis announced a new entry in the Civilization series, titled Beyond Earth. The game, to be published by 2K Games and released this fall.
Civilization: Beyond Earth is leaving our home planet to inhabit new worlds as the series moves in a new direction. Rather than basing their work on historical models and figures, the art design team at Firaxis is free to come up with whatever they want.
“We, as designers, were free to come up with really fun new gameplay systems that didn’t really make sense in a more historical game, or even like a fantasy game,” said Anton Strenger, designer and programmer at Firaxis. It “was amazing to see the artists. Usually we have historic reference that they’re working from, and right now they get to invent a world, basically, an alien planet in the future.”
Apparently, the game is not about getting off the planet at all, however. Rather, the game begins years into the future when the technology already exists to leave and we are on the cusp of developing new habitats in space.
We expect to see the game at E3 2014, especially given its launch window of this fall, and we’ll report back with all the details we can get our hands on from Los Angeles!
