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dwcole78

How to Fix Beyond Earth

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How to Save BE/Why AC works and BE does not

 

BE could have been wonderful.  Sid Meir triumphantly throwing off the shackles of history and returning to space and philosophy.  Instead it showed how they learned all the wrong lessons from the success and overall adoration of Alpha Centauri, how they do not understand science fiction, and how much of the greatness of Alpha Centauri came not from Sid Meir but from Brian Reynolds. 

In an interview talking about starships Sid Meir said something along the lines of – its science fiction the story doesn’t matter.  Like many people I only stopped slamming my head against the wall recently.  Even the most tolerant interpretation of this comment is ridiculous.  The friendliest interpretation to Sid is that he was trying to say “its science fiction there are no limits to the story you can write”.  This conflates science fiction and fantasy.  Even the softest science fiction (see star wars) tries to have some logical scientific explanation for its oddities.  Yes, writing science fiction is freeing because you can ask “what if” but the best science fiction stories are defined by the limitations they impose on themselves. 

The other interpretation “its science fiction the story doesn’t matter just write anything” (which given BE and starships I think may be what he believes) is so ridiculous that it doesn’t even need rebutting.

I have 313 hours in BE – and I cannot name any of the BE leaders and none of them are distinct characters.  AC is completely different.

Let’s look at two of the AC factions as examples.  Miriam is a complete stereotypical religious fundamentalist.  She has all and the only answers and everyone else needs to serve her.  That bible thumping grandpa you likely have if you live in the US – turn him up to 11.  Instantly interesting and instantly memorable.  Especially when BE was published as the US was arguably in the thrall of the Christian Right at the time.  Still leaves empty spaces for the player to fill (does she really believe what she spouts or is she just using it for power, what level of Christian charity does she practice) but you have tools to work with. 

Similarly Morgan is an extreme American Libertarian Capitalist.  Instantly you have a character sketch but details are left for you to fill in.  Does he believe in giving to charity on a personal just not governmental level, or is he the worst kind of Gilded Age Robber Baron who would buy the children of poor people as sex slaves?  You could find both and every version in between in the stories written on the internet using AC games or characters.  I have yet to see a good BE story.

All of the above focuses on story and character, but this is because to me this is where BE fails to capture the spirit of AC the most.  It is also what made AC such a revelation and still the best Civ version.  A strategy game with RPG level story and characters that actually promoted thought.  But BE could also learn from AC’s mechanics.  The best part of BE’s gameplay mechanics though, started with story.

As in all Civilization games, government is a major issue.  You can be communist, democratic, capitalist, or green.  Harkening back to Civ 2 (and somewhat like civ VI) though, rather than just consisting of various bonuses each form comes with its own negatives.  Want to be green?  Sure the planet will like you more and aliens will attack less, but your growth and industry will be limited.  Oh wait you are playing as Morgan – will then you can’t choose green.

Think about that – the faction you choose limits the gameplay choices you can make in game.  Playing Didere , who can never be capitalist, vs playing Morgan is almost like playing a completely different game.  In the same token, playing Miriam who for the first 100 turns or so generates no science (that’s right zero science) vs. playing Zarakov whose almost entire mission is to amass science is like playing two different games.

Choosing one affinity in BE vs another not only changes nothing narratively it also changes nothing mechanically.  They tried with the various bonuses each faction gets but it just didn’t work.  Even on the highest difficulty as a harmony player, not only did I not have to make fungus near where I want to invade and then invade with my fungus loving troops it wasn’t really possible to do so.  The techs that gave the ability to use satellites gave no affinity or at least not harmony affinity.  As well, especially on the higher levels, pursuing techs that do not give affinity is a way to die since ALL of your unit advances are tied to affinity.  The wonderful tech web quickly becomes linear again as most paths quickly become nonviable.

Let’s talk more about the affinities.  Really, they each only feel like coats of paint.  My leader avatar changing as my affinity increases sounded cool but it wasn’t taken nearly far enough.  If I go technocracy I am supposedly becoming a computer but never does my leader avatar become really more computer like – just a human in a yellow robe.  As I move up, I should be replacing my limbs with computer parts and eventually become a cyborg and then completely bodiless.  Represent me as ones and zeros or the 2001 obelisk.  I should certainly no longer be human.  The same is true for harmony.  I should gradually become more alien eventually becoming a bug with a human face and then a full on alien bug.  Think the human sandworm in the later Dune novels.  ONLY the purity affinity should have stayed recognizably human.

The affinities also should have had drawbacks as well as bonuses.  ESPECIALLY when the hybrid affinities become mixed in.  Some hybrid affinities make sense.   Purity technocracy can be interpreted as incorporating computer parts into human bodies.  But even here you go too far down technocracy purity no longer works.  Human bodies are limiting, true freedom is in being pure conscious ghost in the shell code.  This is how a high technocracy society would function.  To continue using the hybrid units your affinities would need somewhat to stay in balance.  Get two out of balance and your society is making the choice not to use the other affinities. 

The last thing I will discuss is the lack of wonder movies.  One of the best story hooks in AC was the quotes for the technologies, given they either came from philosophy greats of humanities’ past or faction leaders.  Each quote from a faction leader fitting with the faction leader’s basic character and using that faction leaders voice actor.  Even better than this though were the wonder movies.  Each movie told a tiny story that fit not only with the faction leader but also helped flesh out the world.  Watch the self aware colony video or the mind twister video and tell me these don’t add immeasurably to the sense of the games world. 

If I wanted a completely abstracted mathematical strategy game I would play chess, go, or Sudoku.  What firaxis increasingly seems to think of as window dressing is really an important part of the game experience.

Lal, Yang, Miriam, Morgan, Santiago, Zakharov, Dierdre; the core faction leaders in Alpha Centauri and names I can rattle off with very little prompting even though it has been years since I have played the game.  If you have every played Alpha Centauri, or even heard of it, you can probably do the same and ,more importantly, have some idea of who each of these people are.

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You could argue Star Wars tries, but repeatedly and consistently fails. You have to accept certain tenets, for example, the Force is basically space magick. This magick has no rules and is frequently a plot device stand-in. A lot of the weapons because "because they do".

 

This is an argument I encounter a lot, and to my mind unfortunately it's leveraged at science fiction people personally don't like. Inconsistently, even. Star Wars is okay because X, or Star Trek is okay but Y.

 

In this case, Alpha Centauri is okay because X, but Beyond Earth isn't because Y.

 

You not being able to name leaders in Beyond Earth doesn't mean they're poor personalities. I can't always recall all the SMAC leaders, and SMAC is something I put a lot of time into. And don't get me started on the aliens in Crossfire, with Generic Good Guys and Generic Bad Guys rounding out the factions there. If, like me, you got very bored with the specific agendas of SMAC's leaders, maybe you enabled Random Personalities. Maybe you enabled Random Agendas. You play enough games with all of these, and all of a sudden you have a fervent Chairman Yang that also favours (Sparta-like) military dominance.

 

You prefer the default, strong personalities (to the point of being caricatures) of SMAC. And that's fine! But because BE opted for a different way of portraying its leaders, doesn't make it inferior. I mean this is not me saying BE is perfect (though I enjoy it greatly, and have played it more than CiV), but certainly, you're focusing on an angle that no developer can satisfy. Only you can satisfy your requirements for what you want to happen to this game, and I hope you can agree that's something that won't necessarily please others.

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My main issues with BE were:
1) It felt more like a mod or expansion for Civ5 than a full game. Including having all the issues Civ5 had.
2) Everything felt very samey, no matter which of the three options you chose your units all looked pretty bland.

3) Similarly the technology was pretty boring, it felt more like near future sci-fi rather than super technologically advanced stuff.

4) Winning almost always turned into a slog.


 

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My honest belief with how Beyond Earth went wrong is that it was systems-first rather than fiction-first design. They looked at Civilization V and asked themselves, "What would it take to translate this game into a sci-fi setting?" rather than looking at their fictional influences and asking themselves, "How would these work in a 4X game?" Accordingly, much of Beyond Earth feels like the bare minimum done to port Civ 5's systems to a new setting: personality-free factions, uninspired and interchangeable tech, bland and obscure wonders, meaningless endgame... I wholeheartedly agree with the part of dwcole78's post, at least, where he says that sci-fi and fantasy aren't genres that excuse you from building good and interesting fiction into your design. Way too many games in the past decade or so have had this impressionistic pastiche of pop-culture sci-fi, usually blockbuster movies but occasionally making nods to the "golden age" of sci-fi literature. I was honestly surprised that Paradox's Stellaris referenced Iain M. Banks in a recent patch, but then their fans have been making that connection for more than a year. Their next patch is named after Douglas Adams, which feels more like they've run out of serious sci-fi authors with name recognition than anything else. I would die of shock to have a game reference Vernor Vinge... except for Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, which did just that.

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The issue with worldbuilding in Civilisation is always placing that information in the UI in a way that makes sense to the user. In that this doesn't usually happen too much. The Civilop(a)edia has a huge amount of information here, but it's squirreled away, hidden almost. Beyond Earth is no different in this regard. There is an absolute wealth of information on the history, emerging factions, and so forth. Quotes too, from the leaders, fleshing out their inspirations, aims and general personalities.

 

Which, if you don't go digging (and this isn't a slight, digging isn't exactly a preferable choice in a game you play for the gameplay interactions), you won't find. Which is why quotes were criticised as dry, as "not being grounded in reality" (the Wonder quotes for example were mostly from Beyond Earth characters, but unlike SMAC without the straightforward, even trope-ish characterisations found there, these simply aren't as recogniseable).

 

So I get that.

 

But I also love systems-first design. I played endless hours of SMAC, but these days the cracks in its design are really, really obvious. And no amount of dated Wonder clips (as great as they were at the time, when I was young) is going to change that for me. The best thing about that game, that still sticks with me, are the dreaming sequences and the breaks in the gameplay flow they create. But it's very hard to create something like that from scratch in a semi-spiritual successor in a way that doesn't ape it (and actually does it well). Which could be why they didn't. Or maybe they just didn't care for it, I don't actually know, heh.

 

I certainly prefer BE these days, on the whole, as a game. I still have SMAC (and Crossfire) installed, and I revisit it really not that occasionally. But I do, and mainly just to see how it holds up.

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1 hour ago, Gorbles said:

But I also love systems-first design. I played endless hours of SMAC, but these days the cracks in its design are really, really obvious. And no amount of dated Wonder clips (as great as they were at the time, when I was young) is going to change that for me. The best thing about that game, that still sticks with me, are the dreaming sequences and the breaks in the gameplay flow they create. But it's very hard to create something like that from scratch in a semi-spiritual successor in a way that doesn't ape it (and actually does it well). Which could be why they didn't. Or maybe they just didn't care for it, I don't actually know, heh.

 

I certainly prefer BE these days, on the whole, as a game. I still have SMAC (and Crossfire) installed, and I revisit it really not that occasionally. But I do, and mainly just to see how it holds up.

 

Yeah, I just can't get into Beyond Earth like I can get into SMAC. It feels like a total-conversion mod for Civilization V and that keeps me from digging into the systems the same way as with SMAC. Different strokes, I suppose!

 

I also admit, I see the two leads for Beyond Earth as real lightweights in the fiction department, probably unfairly. I just remember that they gave interviews with RPS and PC Gamer that trumpeted their fictional influences and they were... underwhelming. Clarke, Asimov, Dune, Sagan, and... "the classics." It was purely marketing, I think, but if they'd really tucked into Kim Stanley Robinson or something, I think it would have given them a better basis for adapting Civ 5 to a different fiction.

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I've heard that the BE expansions make it a pretty good game; is that not the case?

 

Also, I don't know how old you are, but I was a teenager when SMAC came out so it had an unfair advantage making itself memorable for me. I do agree that there is something intangibly well done about the original 7 faction leaders, though I think their stereotypes are a bit over-the-top. Maybe it's the novella written for the game that endeared me to them; I haven't seen one for BE. 

 

 

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Yeah, I was playing SMAC from about 10 - 12ish (I honestly forget), I have fond memories of all the early games I had for the family computer. Tomb Raider III, better than any other in the (old) series for me, because it's the one I had (t'was also pretty decent). Never knew there was a novella for SMAC though!

 

For Beyond Earth, it received only one expansion, but in my opinion it really does help the game. Whether or not it addresses the issues you have with the game (I've found) is very much personal, though! It improves the early game massively, it makes a number of UX improvements, it makes diplomacy more engaging (in my opinion) and gives you a new diplomatic resource to trade with. The problems set in the in mid-to-end game common in Civilisation games in that you're just clicking through turns waiting for things to happen. I haven't found a strategy / 4X game that doesn't suffer from this to some extent, though.


I really liked it. It was worth the money for me. If you don't own BE though, you might be worth waiting on a sale to pick up BE + the Rising Tide expansion at the same time.

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