Civilization: Beyond Earth Launches October 24th

2K Games and Firaxis have released an 8 minute gameplay walkthrough for the upcoming game Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth. They also revealed the release date for the game, which is October 24th, 2014. This puts it in what I will now refer to as “the month of death”, which will see the launch of a ton of huge games like Battlefield: Hardline, Aline: Isolation, Super Smash Bros., Evolve, and Dragon Age: Inquisition. 

Civilization: Beyond Earth is a sci-fi sequel to the society simulation series of turn-based strategy games. In it you lead a human colony as it attempts to survive, and hopefully thrive on an alien world. The traditional Civilization gameplay is all there, except this time you will be fighting and trading with aliens and other futuristic humans rather than historical civilizations.

Instead of choosing which historical leader will represent your society, you choose between companies to back your missions and decide what supplies your team has taken with them to the new world. Another change for the series is that the tech tree is no longer linear, creating a tech web instead. This web makes it so that no single playthrough is able to unlock every piece of technology forcing the player to adopt differing strategies based on their circumstances.

Sid Meier’s Civlization: Beyond Earth will be available on PC, Mac, and Linux on October 24th, 2014. Pre-ordering the game will earn you the “Exoplanets Map Pack” which contains six additional maps based on real exoplanets. The maps included in the package are:

• Kepler 186f: This lush forest planet is one of the oldest known Earth-like planets.
• Rigil Khantoris Bb: Orbiting the closest star to the solar system, the historical records of this arid continental planet’s settlement are well-preserved.
• Tau Ceti d: This planet of seas and archipelagos features a booming biodiversity and a wealth of resources.
• Mu Arae f: Tidally locked in orbit around a weak star, the southern hemisphere of this planet is a blistering desert where the sun never sets, while the northern hemisphere is perpetually in frozen darkness.
• 82 Eridani e: An alien world of scarce water and wracked by tectonic forces.
• Eta Vulpeculae b: A mysterious new discovery with unknown terrain.