Announce trailer for video game Civilization: Beyond Earth. It’s a futuristic spin-off of the Civilization series. The publisher also branded it as a spiritual successor to the 1999 video game Alpha Centauri.
Civilization is a series of turn-based strategy video games, first released in 1991. The gameplay centred on building a civilisation on a macro-scale from prehistory up to the near future. There are five main games to date, with a number of expansion packs, spin-offs and board games too.
Alpha Centauri was released in 1999, considered a spiritual sequel to the Civ series back then. The game is a science fiction depiction of the 22nd century as human race resettle on a new planet. It used the same game engine (of Civ II) but introduced many new features which made it a standout game.
Alpha was arguably the game of the year. Many fans considered it as better than the Civ game too. It’s been a while so I can’t remember why, but I seemed to prefer the original version. One of the reasons is perhaps I was more interested with the historical aspect than pure fiction instead.
Regardless, the Civ series continued to grow after that but there’s no follow-up to Alpha besides an expansion pack in 2000. Wiki article suggests that the project ended because the key staff had left the company. They integrated some ideas from Alpha into future Civ games though.
There’s not much info available on Beyond Earth at this stage. The trailer looks cool but teaser videos are so good these days that it can be misleading at times. It probably will not match the legacy of Alpha but the Civ series has been consistently good over the years, so I guess it will be a decent game.