Gameitall 
At Pax East today, developer Firaxis (the team behind Civilization, XCOM: Enemy Unknown and Enemy Within) announced that they will be returning to Space in a new Civilization game called Civilization: Beyond Earth.
The game is a spiritual successor to Alpha Centauri, a game that fans have been asking Firaxis for 10 years for a proper sequel/remake. While Alpha Centauri rights are own by EA currently; Firaxis’ Will Miller, who is co-lead designer on the Beyond Earth project, said, “The heart and soul of Alpha Centauri lives at Firaxis. For all the fans of Alpha Centauri, this is the game we’ve made for you.”
“The biggest systematic change for Civ 5 is that tech is a web, not a tree,” said David McDonough, the other co-lead on the project. “By the end of the game you’ve got 70 percent of the web.” It was noted that this can lead to two cultures having radically different techs, where genetically modified aliens can fight sentient robots.
Other notes about the game includes a Quest System (a first for the franchise) that will encourage you to explore the new world, along with interactions with aliens, and the ability to follow one of three paths – called affinities – Purity, Harmony or Supremacy. The affinities were explained as the “hypothesis of what humanity could be like in 1,000 years.” Supremacy is a technologically oriented path, focusing on robotics and humans that find “safety in their own technology.” Harmony is geared toward understanding your new planet, guiding human evolution so that it is well-suited to its new environment. Purity is pseudo-religious, he says, a path that attempts to “keep humanity pure” by transforming every planet into a new Earth. “Whatever else you do, whatever wars you fight, or technology you research, it’s all kind of in pursuit of this affinity goal,” says McDonough.
Judging how much time we’ve spent into Civ 5, we can expect to be logging a lot of hours into Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth when it launches this Fall.
