Speaking to Polygon at GDC, Sid Meier talked about the upcoming Starships and how science-fiction can free up developers to create games for players.
“The danger with a space game is that you kind of have to learn a whole new set of rules that don’t make any sense to you until the designer tries to explain them. ‘Well, in my game there’s eight dimensions, light travels in a curved path,’ and oh jeez, it’s painful,” Meier explained, speaking generally of space based games.
Explaining how Starships differs, Meier explained “In our game … you can play without having to absorb a bunch of non-intuitive rules. I think the game we tried to make was about fairly intuitive gameplay, and then you can project your own strategy and tactics onto those rules. But the rules aren’t ones that are hard to understand. They’re fairly intuitive.”
Meier explained that as there are no maps in space, the team at Firaxis had to imitate that feeling somehow. Their solution was to use asteroids and asteroid fields to create a sense of path finding and hiding places. “Maybe the asteroids can move sometimes, or maybe there are passages that are sometimes open and sometimes closed, and maybe there are these jump gates where if you go in one you’re going to randomly pop out at a different one!” Meier said.
“What we were looking for was all the cool stuff that maps bring to tactics, while combining that with some things you can only do in a space-themed game. But the asteroids are an invention of ours. That’s the great thing about science fiction. You can kind of invent whatever you want.”
Starships is set in the same universe as Civilization: Beyond Earth and launches for PC 12 March.
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