Sid Meier’s Civilization series is a staple of the turn-based strategy game genre, with over half a dozen titles spread out over a span of 23 years. The series is still going strong today, but the designers of the most recent game, Civilization: Beyond Earth, say they wished they had taken more risks when creating it.

“We should have been more audacious,” co-lead designer Will Miller said this week during Game Developers Conference 2015 in San Francisco. Previous Civilization games had more or less focused on real world history, but Beyond Earth took a futuristic sci-fi approach.

But despite the different setting, many fans complained that the game was not different enough. “In moving Civilization from a historical setting to a science fiction setting we had a real opportunity to do things differently,” said other co-lead designer David McDonough. “But we were too conservative.

McDonough added, “We wanted to find a compromise between the game being like Civilization V and something entirely new. But in the end we were caught between the two poles. This left players feeling a little short-changed and flat, especially with aspects of the sci-fi that we kept close to our chest.”

“We were too afraid”

Many of the fans who felt “short-changed” derided Civilization: Beyond Earth as an overpriced add-on, which was neither as extensive or innovative as a full game nor as cheap as DLC. A civilization’s technological progress, one of the staples of the series, felt meaningless to many players. Rather than the clear progression from bronze age tools to modern technology, Beyond Earth’s progression took players from hightech space gizmos to slightly better hightech space gizmos.

One of the biggest criticisms of the game was its lack of any meaningful improvements over previous Civilization titles, and Miller agrees that they could have done better at differentiating the title from its predecessors.

“We’d had a perfect opportunity to bring out the sci-fi and flavor of the game that people could integrate into their own story,” Miller said. “But we completely missed it. Here was an opportunity to allow players to do things that you could never do in a traditional Civ; but we just held ourselves back because we were too afraid.”

Image credit: Firaxis Games (c)