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Civilization: Beyond Earth – Rising Tide is a wet expansion with a dry trailer

Civilization: Beyond Earth – Rising Tide trailer

At E3, Firaxis showed off a wee bit of Beyond Earth’s first expansion, Rising Tide, behind closed doors. Now there’s a video, though, and you can get a glimpse of the watery expansion’s new features, like expanded ocean gameplay and a new faction.

Beyond Earth was an extremely conservative game that came out during a time when 4X games were actually trying new things, thus it ended up feeling a little dull, a little too safe. Maybe Rising Tide will change that?

It’s hard to tell from the video, because it’s under 7 minutes long and even a quick game of Beyond Earth will swallow up hours and hours. Making biomes more distinct and giving a greater purpose to the ocean is certainly a step in the right direction, and diplomacy has also seen some tweaks, which is very welcome given how dry it was in the vanilla game.

There’s a new faction, too, and it’s actually interesting. I honestly can’t remember a single faction from Beyond Earth, because they were entirely absent personality, but this new lot, the Al Falah are quite different from their frenemies. They don’t do the whole cryosleep thing, so as they travelled to this new world, they developed a unique culture distinct from Earth’s old, dismal ones. Intriguing!