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We built this game for our players, and we’re always watching how people are playing and trying to react to that, and drive the franchise in a new and differentiated direction from Civ. This expansion is a combination of David and my vision for the game, and the addition of what people wanted from the community. I think we released a very strong initial product, and we patched it based on user feedback. We’re in the process of doing that with Beyond Earth. We released it, it had some problems, then we patched it, we released two expansions that really brought that game up to what people know and love today. This kind of echoes what happened with Civ V. I think it is sort of a foregone conclusion for us. You’re seeing us committed to that franchise, committed to that idea with this expansion, And with the patches to the base game that we released afterwards. I can’t comment on exactly what that looks like, but when we set out to make Beyond Earth the idea was to make a franchise. Will: We have a long-term product plan at Firaxis. RPS: How much of a foregone conclusion was an expansion pack for Beyond Earth? A lot of reviews – including ours, I think – predicted that expansions would make it so much better, but how reasonable an assumption was that? And we’ve also introduced the concept of hybrid affinities. We’ve added four new factions, including the Al Falah, the Arabic leader. I think that’s the most fundamental difference under the hood. We’ve also completely replaced the diplomacy system from the original game with something new, which I think probably changes the game the most. First, as the name suggests, is the addition of water-based gameplay, the ability to land cities on the water, and the new units and the aliens and the resources that come along with that.
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There are several features that we are very excited about. If you’ve had Beyond Earth for a while and are interested in the expansion, this is going to be a brand new experience for you, from a gameplay perspective as well as a content perspective. Will: Rising Tide is what we like to call a Firaxis-style expansion, which means in addition to putting a lot of content into the game and balancing and polishing we also put new systems into the game which fundamentally change how it plays. RPS: What’s this doing in a nutshell, then? So really I'm just waiting for Sid Meier's Civilization 6 now. I should try Starships, but I hear it's a bad port of a very lightweight tablet game. Saying all that, I don't regret my purchase - what I did play of it was fun, it's just not quite up to the same standard as Brave New World. I'm sure if I forced myself to play it lots I would uncover hidden depth and quality - it is a Civilization game, after all! - but in Brave New World you see how great the game is straight away and you certainly don't have to give the game the benefit of the doubt or force anything on yourself. It's weird, because those are all things that Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri got really right, by all accounts. The leaders and civilizations are also bland, and even the story - which should be pretty interesting - is presented in a dull way. I feel like the game suffers from some serious UI issues, too, but that's secondary to some of the mechanics being a bit off.
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That makes the tech web feel very bland, which is a shame, because by rights it should be a more exciting system than the tech tree. You just stick to the ones that advance your affinity. Furthermore, because of this uniformity in outcome, it feels like it doesn't really matter what techs you go for - there's no impetus to go off the beaten track and grab a different, interesting-looking tech. The domination victory is still distinct from the other four, but the AI plays so defensively you are unlikely to encounter other states going for it, and you're likely to be most of the way to one of the other victories by the time it's viable for you to try out - at least in single-player. The only choice there is which affinity best matches your starting area. I feel the problem lies, fundamentally, in the victories - the progenitor, alien, cyborg, and human victories are all the same! You traverse certain marked blobs of the tech web, gain access to a magic resource, start building super powerful land units, then use them to defend a victory building until a countdown expires. Beyond Earth is an odd game - I thought it was very impressive and imaginative when I first played it, but it seems to seriously lack the replayability of Brave New World.