The widely admired studio behind XCOM and Civilization, Firaxis Games, have undergone a round of layoffs affecting around 30 employees, according to a report from Axios. Publisher 2K Games later confirmed the news and said the job cuts were due to a “sharpening of focus, enhancements of efficiencies, and an alignment of our talent against our highest priorities."
]]>Director Jake Solomon is leaving Firaxis after two decades of work on Marvel’s Midnight Suns, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and XCOM 2. This comes amid a studio shakeup with multiple senior roles sliding around the corporate conveyor belt. Firaxis also revealed that they’re in early development on the next Civilization game.
]]>Sid Meier, that legendary game dev whose name sits before the names of Civilization games, had a lovely chat with our very own Nate Crowley this weekend, as part of PAX Online X EGX Digital. The pair talked all about some of the most notable parts of Meier's career - including, Railroad Tycoon, Pirates!, and Civilization - as well as chat about his upcoming book, Sid Meier's Memoir!: A Life In Computer Games. And thanks to computers, you can watch their whole chat in full below.
]]>Gandhi is one of the most unique figure in history. His adherence to non-violence, his establishment of a full-fledged philosophy behind it and, above all, his success, are practically without precedent. Kings, empires and leaders can often blur into each other. The locations change, the dates are different and the numbers differ, but the essence remains the same. Gandhi was something completely different, and yet games try to represent him with the same pieces they use for everyone else - and so they always make him something far less than he was.
]]>Winter brings out a part of me that immediately seeks a mountain of blankets in which to burrow. Even in my seasonally confused state of Texas, the weather has tended towards the chilly and left me with little excuse not to have a kettle boiling interminably as I layer on socks and pull the biggest comforter from the top of the closet. But this presents a problem likely familiar to other cozy connoisseurs: how does one game while properly bundled?
I will admit it does limit possibilities considerably. That's why I've curated a small selection of games perfectly playable while your other hand keeps coffee or tea always within sipping range.
]]>The usually remote and mysterious Nate visited the RPS treehouse on Monday, and almost immediately work ground to a halt. Why? Because Nate challenged us with a question: what bits of modern technology could a person from the past figure out the workings of, just by observing and having a good think for a while? This immediately led to the counter-question "when and where in the past?", which gobbled up another fifteen minutes. And then he asked how far back in history we, as modern people, would have to be sent before we could be confident of reaching the same understanding of all the technology that was around at the time. He asks a lot of questions, does Nate.
In terms of my own limits, I reckon most things invented after the late 1700s, when electricity and complex engines began creeping into play, would be beyond my capacity to intuit. Nate suggested his cut-off was around the mid-16th century, when most technology still worked via chunky mechanisms that human pattern recognition can decipher. Astrid initially suggested anything post-nuclear, but then climbed back as far as Nate, citing the barometer as a particular baffler. Matt thought a stone age knife would be beyond his ability to reproduce, slightly misunderstanding the exercise and dropping him to the bottom of the RPS post-apocalypse pecking order in the process (a knife, Matt? A bit of knapped stone? Bloody hell. Don't give Matt the rifle). All this of course led me to the inevitable PC games angle: which games have technology systems complex enough to confound new players who, let's face it, might as well be time travellers?
]]>Civilization VI: Rise and Fall wants to solve a problem. That problem is perpetual growth, and it plagues many 4X games. Whether your aim is world conquest or cultural hegemony, victory in Civilization and many of its cohorts depends on domination. However peacefully you try to play, you're often straight-jacketed into a utilitarian-psychotic view where all resources and people are just raw material to be assimilated, Borg-like, until the whole map is monochrome.
But as the early excitement of exploration and expansion ebbs to late game stagnation, the fun runs out. Historically, stagnating empires tend to fragment and collapse. But in Civilization VI, like many games, you're the star of the show – and there's nowhere to go but up.
]]>Three of the best entries in Sid Meier's classic Civilization series are available now on GOG. Right now you can get Civilization III: Complete, Civilization IV: The Complete Edition, and CivCity: Rome DRM-free from the GOG website or GOG Galaxy client. And with the weekend upon us, what's better than curling up with games that grip you tightly and just won't let you go?
]]>I have played Civilization [official site] games as long as there have been Civilization games. I have always enjoyed them. I have always hated winning them.
]]>Every Monday we haul Brendan to the court of the biggest dynasty in the land and demand that he explains an early access game. This week, he stutters about Oriental Empires [official site].
As the kingdom of Zhou burned to ashes around me on the map, I took a moment to reflect on what had been a bad year. A peasants revolt, a devastating war, cities lost to disease and fire, and an incurable case of bandits. Oriental Empires seems to have everything I want in a game – disaster, bad decisions and angry serfs. So why did I only get as far as the second X in this 4X strategy before I turned away, frustrated and fed up? Perhaps it's because - as terrible as my year has been - I’ve lived it all before.
]]>As if 2016 didn't already contain a rich enough seam of strategy games, Firaxis announce today that Civilization VI will be released on October 21st. Development duties are in the hands of the team behind Civ V's expansions, Gods & Kings and Brave New World, and when we spoke to designer Ed Beach and associate producer Sarah Darney last week to learn all the details, they told us that almost every system from the complete Civ V will be included in the sequel: trade routes, religious systems, archaeology...there'll be no need to wait for expansions, it's all in the base game.
The game is running on a brand new suite of software, built to be far more mod-friendly than its predecessor, and as well as brand new AI systems, there are a host of new mechanics that will explore and emphasise your relationship with Civ's greatest character: the map.
]]>No matter how many variants of “cool human does awesome thing in Minecraft” [official site] stories I hear about, I’m always blown away by the ingenuity some people have. This time, a team of modders have managed to bring much of Civilization [official site] into Mojang’s burgeoning sandbox. The mod is called Civilizationcraft [official site], and a new update has just added religion to the game.
]]>Here's the latest Civilization: Beyond Earth - Rising Tide [official site ] trailer talking about hybrid affinities, overthrowing dictatorships, and combining harmony and purity in a part faux-propaganda, part technical rundown of what the upcoming expansion has to offer.
]]>While visiting Firaxis to play Civilization: Beyond Earth, I spent a couple of hours talking to members of the team and learning how the company works. As the current creators and curators of two of my favourite series of games, Firaxis rank among the most interesting studios in existence, and their history is also a large part of the history of PC strategy gaming. With one eye on the future and the other on the past, here are extended thougts on the utilitarian nature of Civilization, the role of Sid Meier and much much more.
]]>Last week, I visited Firaxis to talk about the studio's history and the ongoing evolution of Civilization. We mainly focused on the series of games rather than humanity's works as a whole, so as to stay on topic, and I spent part of the day playing Beyond Earth. Is it a sci-fi spin-off or a fully fledged sequel? How precisely is it related to the series and to the much-loved Alpha Centauri? Later this week, I'll share conversations with the development team and more thoughts on the history of the series, but first of all, here are some impressions of the game itself.
]]>I spent a lot of time playing Civ IV mods, particularly the splendid Fall From Heaven, but I've only tried a couple of alterations to Firaxis' most recent entry in the series, and don't think I've downloaded a single one since installing the two excellent expansions to the base game. That all changed this weekend, when a post on PC Gamer drew my attention to the work of modder framedarchitecture, who has created several historical scenarios and a huge Forgotten Realms total conversion. The Faerun mod requires the Gods and Kings DLC and will disable Brave New World when used, and it adds just about everything you could want from a Dungeons and Dragons themed Civ game.
]]>Yes, the free-to-play Facebook Connect version of Sid Meier's Civilization, Civ World, (which was mentioned in this interview) will enter a closed Alpha next week. No details on the game just yet, but interested parties can apply for a slot in the Alpha here. If memory serves the lot of you love Facebook games, you just can't get enough of them, so I am sure that this will be good news and won't at all result in grumbling. Right?
]]>Quite a few people have pointed us at this, and I suspect most of 'em got it from Kotaku, so let's give 'em a link. Brentalfloss adds his own lyrics to the always atmospheric Baba Yetu theme tune from Civ 4. Watch below!
]]>[Boom]. RPS inbox explodes. And so it should - Civ news is always enormous news. Hooray, hooray! Despite much wailing and gnashing of teeth by Civ fans in concern that last year's super-streamlined Civilization Revolution on console meant the end of Civ tradition, the freshly-revealed Civilization V (CiV?) looks about as PC as PC gets. By which I mean, "hexes."
]]>A rifle amongst the oily rags, Toblerone wrappers and bat skulls that litter the floor of the RPS engine room reveals we've never posted about open source Civilization clone FreeCiv before. By turn, that means we've never written about its newish browser-based offshot FreeCiv.net either. This is exactly the kind of site that should be telling you it's possible to play one of the most important names in PC gaming history in your browser, for free. Unfortunately, we've been washing our hair since December 13th, so we didn't. Now we all look like Jennifer Aniston circa 1995 (Jim looks especially glamorous), we have time to tell you.
]]>I had a play with an early version of Civilization Revolution on Xbox 360 the other day, my optimistic thoughts on which can be found here. (Don't worry, this post is PC-relevant). Inevitably, a few readers quickly expressed dismay that the tech tree had lost several branches, some micromanagement (e.g. city health) had evaporated, and all-told it has a greater sense of rapidity and accessibility than the PC Civ games. I'm sure some of our readers feel the same way. A shame, as the game's bold intention is to non-patronisingly bring the core 4X values - the values that made us love it in the first place - of Civ to an audience that otherwise would run screaming. So, dismissing what CivRev is trying to achieve outright because you're saddened it only has one type of religion seems a little short-sighted. This is a companion piece to the PC Civs and not the death of them, but presumably that's scant consolation if your desire is simply for Civ 4 on a gamepad and HDTV.
Anyway, MTV Multiplayer's Patrick Klepek thought to ask the question I didn't - partly because of my 6am-train-dulled wits, but mostly because the answer was abundantly obvious within seconds of playing the game. Will this cartoony, minimal-buttony new take on Sid Meier's most-milked cashcow come to PC?
]]>From our 'Putting Words In Sid Meier's Mouth' desk.
]]>While Meer's been battering his way through it, I haven't had a chance to actually play the new Beyond the Sword pack yet (Though the hype around it has caused me to have a vanilla-Civ4 relapse). However, it looks like I'm never actually going to get a chance to play it as the developers intended, as - by all accounts - I should immediately patch it with the latest Unofficial patch from Solver over at Apolyton.
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