THE GREAT MISTAKE

From its very first incarnations, the Civilization series has always been grounded in human history. Since 1991, it's tasked players with building empires that would survive and thrive the test of time. Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth focuses not on the past, but on the future. And it needed a reason to be different, a narrative justification to take the franchise where no Civilization game has gone before.

Firaxis calls it The Great Mistake.

"The state of Earth a couple hundred years from now becomes rather dire," lead designer Anton Strenger told Polygon. "There's a series of events which we call The Great Mistake."

In the science fiction that forms the foundation of Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth, our home planet is no longer what it used to be. Humanity's future among the stars flows from those events, but Firaxis is making a choice. It knows what happens — everybody there knows what happens, so they can work from a common foundation — but Firaxis isn't going to tell players everything.

"Internally, we've written out exactly what those events are, but for the player, we're leaving it vague and allowing their imagination to fill the gaps," he said.

According to Strenger, the deliberately ambiguous narrative is way to both engage and empower players who will determine humanity's fate.

"We don't take such a strong stance on narrative for the game because we want this to be a really repayable experience, a really customizable experience," he said. "A lot of the gameplay systems we're putting in really address that.

"Players create their own story. If we, as designers, go in and say, 'This is the backstory of why you're here,' I think that's a missed opportunity for the players. I think our philosophy as a studio is to show restraint when it comes to narrative. You'll see the same thing in XCOM. Until the very end in XCOM, you don't really find out about why they're there — and even then, it's kind of left up a lot to the player's imagination."

There's another narrative reason that Firaxis is taking a vague approach to the narrative underpinnings: In the context of Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth, players will literally determine what we become after Earth, and the future of humanity is grounded in a fierce geopolitical struggle that begins back home. Players will need to choose sides.

Civ Beyond Earth[www.civilization.com]