Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth
Before they really got started on the game, lead game designers Will Miller and David McDonough spent many, many hours reading hard sci-fi and thinking about where mankind would go—literally, in some cases: All of the planets in an announced expansion are actual ones discovered with the help of NASA’s Kepler telescope.
“It’s a work of fiction, but you have to make the player believe how they got there. You start in a conventional place, with a habitat NASA could make say, 25-30 years from now. With rovers and things that are grounded in technology today,” Miller told me. “But we incrementally go out from there into hard sci-fi territory—the realistic and plausible side of it.”
That means you’ll see things like cybernetics and body augmentation, soldier suits, genetic manipulation and complete reengineering of the human genome to be more like any given planet’s inhabitants. It means you’ll see technology that relies on artificial brains and neural uploading, brain hacking, sentient and self-replicating computers, advanced robotics, memory manipulation
FYI – if I appear to have vanished completely from the net sometime in October it’s fair odds I’m deep in this Dark Extropian Training Sim.
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 