Continuing to go through my back-log of shorter games that I've bought in bulk on sales, I spent a couple nights going through an indie game called Exo One. Exo One is a sci-fi ... um ... adventure game? Puzzle game? Platformer? Infinite runner? I'm really not sure how to classify this game ludically. Exo One feels like somebody thought "let's adapt the last 10 minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey into a game" So it's part 2001, with a little bit of Contact thrown in for good measure, and plays similarly to Journey (but without any of the multiplayer aspects that made Journey such a beloved insta-classic). Basically, it's a game about going somewhere, but without really knowing where that "somewhere" is supposed to be. As such, it's the journey that matters; not the destination.

The basic plot, as I understood it (because it's a bit trippy and difficult to follow), is that an alien civilization transmitted data to Earth containing plans on how to build an exotic interstellar space craft (hence, the Contact reference). When a crew of astronauts travel to Jupiter to test the spacecraft, there is some kind of accident or unexplained phenomena that causes one of the astronauts to become lost in space. We play as that astronaut trying to return home -- well, actually, it's a little bit more complicated than that, but what's actually happening falls into spoiler territory, so I'll just leave it at that for now.

The spacecraft itself is a metallic, shapeshifting ball that can transform into a discus-shaped glider. It is equipped with a "gravity drive" that allows it to temporarily multiply the the force of gravity that is applied to it. As such, the core gameplay loop consists of rolling this ball across alien landscapes, using the gravity drive to pick up speed whenever you are falling or rolling downhill, and then jumping and transforming into the discus glider in order to reach higher elevation or travel long distances.

What if the climax of 2001: A Space Odyssey were a game?

Yeah, it's a weird one...

I started writing this post months ago (back in 2015, I think) - long before I had any inkling of the impending release of Civilization VI. This post may be entirely moot now that Civ VI has been announced, and it seems unlikely to me that Beyond Earth will see further expansions. However, I still want to present these ideas, so I've re-written this post to be less speculative and more retrospective. Even if these ideas aren't fated to be implemented for Beyond Earth, it's still an opportunity to look at a way in which the game could have differentiated itself from Civ V, and they could serve as a template for future Civ titles (maybe even Beyond Earth 2) or for modders. Maybe I'll even mod it in myself if I get time and motivation.

Civilization: Beyond Earth really struggled to separate itself from Civ V. The expansion, Rising Tide takes steps to address this with some of its new gameplay mechanics and revised diplomatic engine. Sadly, these efforts don't really address one of the underlying, fundamental, disconnects that the game has with me:

"One of the things that bothered me about Beyond Earth was the way that the victory conditions create an unnecessary competition between the different civs. Aren't we all just colonists from the same earth who are supposed to be trying not to repeat the mistakes of the past? Aren't we trying to preserve the human race? Without the various civs starting the game with any sort of pre-established ideology or agendas, there's no reason for them to be competing with one another. Without a genuine shared victory, there's also no systems in place to share your colonial success with your fellow colonies. The net effect is that once you've defeated the challenge of taming the planet and [one way or another] eliminating the aliens as a threat to your expansion, then the rest of the game is a competition between civs to be the first to reach any of the [mechanically satisfying and varied, yet intellectually vapid] victory conditions."
   - from my Rising Tide review

Heck, why are we competing to begin with?

Despite being mechanically different from Civ V's victory conditions, Beyond Earth still fell into the trap of being fundamentally, unnecessarily tribalistic and competitive. I don't know if this is supposed to be some kind of sad, fatalist message that Firaxis is writing into Beyond Earth: that we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. This isn't Fallout. I hope that Firaxis' designers aren't that cynical, and that it was an unintentional emergent consequence of design.

This may seem like a small, trivial, superficial issue, but it's not. Regular Civilization is easy to buy into because it's based [loosely] on established history and uses real-world characters and states that most people are already familiar with. Buying into the theme of Beyond Earth is just so much harder because there's so much of the game that just doesn't make sense, or which doesn't really follow from the opening cinematic or the game's flavor text. This is why Alpha Centauri went to such great pains to personlize the leaders, and to turn them into charicatures of established real-world ideologies and standard sci-fi tropes. These are factions with established goals and agendas that we can understand, and we can buy into their conflicts. Beyond Earth doesn't have that, and so not only do its leaders fall flat as characters unto their own, but the entire basis upon which the game's core conflicts and victory conditions are based start to fall apart as well.

In any case, I think that one of the best ways that Beyond Earth could have truly separated itself from Civ V (mechanically and thematically) would have been to change the competitive nature of the victories and introduce truly cooperative victories, or maybe even a "players versus map" victory type. And I want to emphasize from the start that I haven't put nearly as much time into Beyond Earth as I have into Civ V. I'm by no means an "expert" in the game. So feel free to take the following suggestions with a grain of salt. I admit that these ideas simply might not work, but I still think that it's worthwhile to explore the possibility space that this game could have offered...