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Pete Murray offers an update on the upcoming Beyond Earth patch and, along with Gameplay Engineer Shaun Seckman, shows how easy it is to use Beyond Earth's m. Civ IV: Beyond the Sword will also include ten new civilizations, sixteen new leaders, five new wonders, and a variety of new units that will offer even more fun and exciting ways for players to expand their civilization's power as they strive for world domination.
Earth And Beyond is unlike most other online role-playing games. It is set in a distant future rather than a fantasy past. It doesn’t kick off by overwhelming you with endless stats and boring you with weeks of mundane, soul-destroying tasks. It gets you out where the action is right away. It’s aimed at a broad audience, unlike the recent Anarchy Online or the potentially decent Neocron. But then maybe none of this is so surprising when you consider Command & Conquer creator Westwood is behind it.
Now, before we go any further it is worth mentioning that although Earth And Beyond looks like a space combat game, it doesn't play like traditional space combat games such as X- Wing or Wing Commander. The game is almost entirely mouse driven and success in combat depends exclusively on the skills your character has built up rather than on your own dexterity with the controls. Fans of games such as Freespace or Elite may well be a little disappointed at this, but in its defence the game has much more to it than combat.
Keeping Up Appearances
Customising your character and your ship is one of Earth And Beyond's strengths. Despite its aim of trying to get people playing quickly, you can spend a good couple of hours picking out foreheads and tattoos for your character or choosing a nice green hull for your ship. None of this has any effect on the gameplay of course, but not having to wade through stats and skill tables and having only to concentrate on your appearance makes the game feel that much more inviting.
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To keep things simple there are only three races in the game, each offering a choice of only three professions; trader, warrior or explorer. Picking a side will depend primarily on what you want to be. Although it may just have as much to do with aesthetics as anything else since your choice of race and profession will dictate what ship you will have. And as much as I wanted to be a Progen Warrior, there was no way I was going to fly something that looked like it had been fashioned out of Duplo bricks by a two-year-old. I have standards, you know.
Battle Hardened
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A couple of ridiculous looking spaceships aside, Earth And Beyond is a very good looking game. Each system is populated with jump gates, asteroids, planets, space stations, some bizarre alien jellyfish and the occasional spatial anomaly. As space games go, the world of Earth And Beyond is incredibly varied and packed with detail. More importantly, even at this pre-release stage it is incredibly stable, although at the moment the game isn’t particularly heavily populated. After about eight hours playing time I’ve only come across a handful of human players.
Having not had much chance to engage in combat it is difficult to gauge how battles will be conducted, but having played a couple of training missions combat seems to be wildly oversimplified. It’s a case of clicking on a potential target and if it’s at your level, you just keep pressing the key that corresponds to the weapon you want to fire until you win. The fact that death doesn’t have much consequence in the game adds even less urgency to the battles, but again I must admit to having very little experience so far. At the moment it looks like the battles later on are much more tactical than they first appear, as specialist skills and equipment have a much greater bearing on the outcome.
Brave New Worlds
As is typical with most Westwood games Earth And Beyond is deceptively simple, yet one would imagine hard to master and finely balanced all round. Less typical of the famous Las Vegas codeshop is that E&B boasts plenty of original features, not least of which is the fact that as well as space combat and exploration, you can dock at any of the game’s stations and walk around the interior on foot, meet up with other players, hit the bar, pick up a mission or just head for the trading floor. It all adds another level of interaction to the game, which together with the easy-to-use communications, should prove popular.
As Earth And Beyond isn’t even considered to be at the beta stage, it’s impressive that it’s already as stable as some established online games. Not all the ships are in yet, and the full depth of the game’s story won’t be explored until it is released later this year, but there’s already much here that sets it apart. For Westwood, Earth & Beyond represents a brave step into the unknown, and for thousands of potential online gamers who until now have been sidelined due to a lack of titles, there is much to look forward to. Hopefully Westwood will charge a realistic rate for the game because with Star Wars Galaxies on the way (as well as a space expansion pack), Earth And Beyond could be left behind very quickly.