“It’s a combination of determining what the leader’s character is in an AI sense, what they’re actively going to do with their own Civ, and what their entry points are for you to make deals with them from your own side.”Įach character will have a unique trait, but over the course of the game will acquire traits that affect the way they run their faction and interact with others. Frederiksen gives me a quick example. “ CK2 is one influence but we didn’t take perhaps the direction they did,” Frederiksen continues. I remark that it sounds like Crusader Kings II, which also revolves around leader traits. Every leader is going to have a small set of traits and these traits can both evolve or be changed throughout the course of an individual game,” says Frederiksen. “This a new diplomacy system, not just a couple of new options. Which brings us to Rising Tide‘s overhauled diplomacy. “As a result, they don’t identify, they don’t invest emotionally in their own civilization the way they did in, say, Alpha Centauri where those leaders were painted in much brighter colors.” “We have a rich sci-fi setting, we have a rich fiction that we authored, but there’s very little avenue for players to absorb and appreciate it,” said McDonough when I asked about it. Along with these new capabilities comes new naval military units, amphibious units, and aquatic alien life. It sounds like you could even have an entire faction with only naval cities. Oceans are now fully open to colonization, with cities and territories able to extend into the seas. “We’re really trying to redefine what Beyond Earth is and ground it in what it ought to be, which isn’t just ‘ Civ in space’ but ‘ Civilization of the future.'”Ĭentral to that is naval gameplay. “Sort of across the board with the expansion we’re specifically making plays from the position ‘Never been done in Civ before,'” said McDonough when I spoke to him last week. With Rising Tide, McDonough thinks they’re rectifying some of those issues. It wasn’t quite the bold Alpha Centauri successor everyone expected. Discussing the game in March, Beyond Earth‘s co-lead designer David McDonough admitted “a little bit of lack of ambition” with Beyond Earth‘s base game. The complaint was so pervasive, it even came up during a GDC postmortem on the game.

But one of the first things I asked was “What makes Rising Tide different from ‘More Civilization‘?” It was one of the most pervasive complaints about Beyond Earth, and rightfully so-in many ways, it felt like a reskinned version of Civilization V. To be clear, I haven’t seen Rising Tide in action yet.

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