But all of that is just trimming on a game that sells the effect with just what we see and what's implied.Īw, the University wants to wage war. Dipping into the lore, it's even worse than it may seem - at one point Lady Deidre of the Gaians manages to impress another faction by greeting them without her protective mask on, the mindworms cripple their victims with fear and give them one of the most horrible deaths this side of the Sarlaac pit, and the entire plot is rooted in extinction. By the time you realise just how bad things really are, it's too late. Chances are that at least initially you'll take a faction that you feel comfortable with, that chimes at least somewhat with your moral compass or beliefs and set out to make Planet a better place (This is admittedly much less the case in the gimmicker add-on Alien Crossfire). Alpha Centauri's Planet is a terrible, terrible place where the best of intentions go to die.īut here's the thing. What starts as a mission of hope breaks up before it's even really begun, and it's not long after that that you're nerve-stapling citizens and fighting wars where the losing immortal is thrown screaming into a pain booth. There's the obvious stuff with the faction leaders and big text infodumps at regular intervals, but there's also a lot of other important stuff going on that's less front-of-house - not least the constant reinforcement of just how awful everything on the planet actually is. All too often, lore is an excuse, seen in many a bullshit argument like "But elves are nymphomaniac nudists in the lore!" Story is a core part of the experience, and in Alpha Centauri more than any other 4X game ever made. The two are often confused, but serve very different purposes. By that, I'm not calling laziness, but rather pointing to the fact that the sweep of the game is about everyone losing interest in all that stuff anyway in favour of the Harmony, Purity and Supremacy affinities that they all inevitably end up subscribing to.Ī simpler way to put it is that Alpha Centauri has story, Beyond Earth has lore. the Pan-Asian Co-operative or whatever, nor that the developers even care that much beyond what was needed for balancing. Even after several games, I don't feel any innate sense of how the Slavic Federation rolls vs. The difference is that these never really feel part of the game. And that's true, in much the same way that the plans for the bypass due to knock down Arthur Dent's house were technically on display for him to see. If you look in the Civpedia, you can find reams of background information on the difference between Franco-Iberia and Brazilia, information on the techs and wonders, where CEO Suzanne Fielding went to school, all of that. a compliment here! Yes!"īeyond Earth, its defenders say, goes to similar lengths. "Rude? No, no! Oh God, You're Here Too is. It was a personal experience, helped by a thousand tiny little touches like the insults the faction leaders would sling at each other ("Lady Deidre dancing naked through the trees" and so on) that made it feel like they were engaged in the struggle instead of simply controlling their part, and the beautifully written slivers of philosophy that sat effortlessly next to words taken from some of the greatest minds in history. Regardless of the numbers and what specific tactics the AI was using, fighting the Hive felt different to fighting the Gaians the accumulated weight of the Morganite philosophies and their financial empire making allying with them a very different matter to, say, Chairman Yang, who would turtle up in his bases. The idea to split humanity on ideological rather than national boundaries was a great one, but it's what happened next that marks AC's true genius - the human faces put onto them to make them more than simply a philosophy, mixed with a game that made you feel you were seeing the expression of it.
Alpha Centauri is hands down my favourite 4X game of all time, and it's almost entirely down to its characters and story.
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