Alpha Centauri is hands down my favourite 4X game of all time, and it's almost entirely down to its characters and story.
I never thought I'd miss Sister Miriam, but it only took until my second rival made planetfall in Beyond Earth to start remembering her fondly. If you never played Alpha Centauri... well, firstly, please rectify this situation at once... she's the faction leader everyone loved to hate, without the inherent awkwardness of classic Civilisation jokes about Gandhi getting the Bomb and so on.
In a way, I feel bad about making the comparison, because Beyond Earth's team has always been clear that they were making Civ In Space rather than Alpha Centauri 2. It was also going to be nigh-impossible to recapture that lightning in a bottle without simply rehashing what came before. As is often the case, a modern game picking up where an older one left off doesn't simply have to compete with the original, but potentially decades of carefully pruned and polished memories.
In Alpha Centauri's case for instance, it's easy to forget that the dialogue was largely done in Mad Lib style - endless conversations along the lines of"Greetings from the [WHO HECK US], honored [PERSON], I hope you are [APPROPRIATE THING TO SAY]!" Any memories of real diplomatic cut-and-thrust are entirely invented or very rose-tinted.Alpha Centauri is hands down my favourite 4X game of all time, and it's almost entirely down to its characters and story.
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.
This is all very Civilisation in style, of course. But in Civilisation, you don't go in cold. There are expectations of the characters and nations, fair or otherwise, there's... well... there's history. In Beyond Earth, the artifice is gone. These people are simply statistics with a face, every stone left unturned to make them more.
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