For Beyond Earth the role of lead designer is filled by two people – Will Miller and Dave McDonough – and they’ve created a game that feels a lot like its predecessors and completely different at the same time. Instead, he acts as a guiding force behind each major release coming out of Firaxis – a mentor to bounce ideas off of or offer solutions to problems. Meier doesn’t actually design most of the games that bear his name. “He’s very generous in giving the reins of projects to young people, to old veterans, and he loves to play and see and talk about the games with anybody that’s interested.” “Sid embodies the attitude,” said Anton Strenger, gameplay designer on the two Civ V expansions and not working on Beyond Earth. There are genuinely kind and passionate game designers in every office chair, and studio head Steve Martin and designer-in-residence Sid Meier foment an atmosphere of iterative design while simultaneously respecting and encouraging a strong work-life balance you don’t hear about at other studios. The people at Firaxis are nothing like that.
They’ll laugh at your jokes, maybe crack a smile, but they are just there to pimp their games. I’ve been on millions of these trips and met countless game developers and they are usually a stuffy bunch.
I went to the Firaxis office outside Baltimore, Maryland, last week with the ostensible purpose of playing more Beyond Earth in order to write a preview of it. Beyond Earth is a game about discovery, of finding out about the place you have landed upon and the circumstances the human race finds itself. In Civilization: Beyond Earth, you travel to new worlds and explore your surroundings with very little context of human history necessary. Sid Meier created the framework through which we can explore turn-based strategies for our imaginations, not just re-chronicle the past. What happened, or could have happened, on this island Earth? It was a game that allowed you to express your will over every era of recorded time, and only hinted at the existence of other worlds, of the possibilities of the mind. The scope of Civilization has always been that of human history. The new game from Firaxis Studios will cease depending on history – Civilization: Beyond Earth will go into space.