One of the most common criticisms levelled at Firaxis’ Civilization: Beyond Earth is that it fails to live up to the narrative grandeur of its spiritual-predecessor, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri; but why? Simple nostalgia?

Certainly the grass is greener in the 1990s for many gamers, but I would argue there’s more to this discontent, something which goes to the heart of good game design.

Narrative feels even more pretextual for your average 4X strategy title than it does for most games, where it’s a threadbare excuse upon which to hang the actual gameplay. But the best strategy games go farther, using what critic Rowan Kaiser calls "transparent mechanics" — mechanics that work to express a game’s core ideas, imbuing gameplay with meaning.

Alpha Centauri’s strength can be found in its use of aptly placed flavor text, fully voice acted in many cases, to give events in the game — such as researching a technology or building a city improvement — added significance. The masterful voice-overs practically sing reams worth of philosophy and worldbuilding lore over the course of play, burning its speculative fiction into your consciousness.

Beyond Earth lacks a similarly memorable impact. But more than that, its problem lies in its inability to connect its innovative mechanics to a bigger, more meaningful story. Its mechanics lack a crucial transparency, and what they seem to express is not given a coherent voice by the writing.

Flashes of Narrative Light

You can find the soul of Alpha Centauri in the voiced faction leaders, the vast array of quotes both from Earth’s past and from Alpha Centauri’s invented future, the short fiction that punctuated the action at key events and its surprisingly well done secret project videos.

These details lent coherence and meaning to the strategic action at its ludic heart. There was a narrative unity that gave life to the world by punctuating the development of your colony with all of this lore, delivered in a way that it could all be easily digested.

The fungus-bred native mindworms and the neural network of planetary consciousness they expressed thus became a character in their own right, a narrative through-line that bore only a shield color in common with Civilization’s nameless, irksome barbarians.

Beyond Earth, by contrast, gives us aliens that feel as inscrutably Other as Starship Troopers’ "bugs." This is in profound tension with a vital mechanical change that represents one of the game’s most incredible innovations: unlike barbarians or mindworms, they do not attack on sight. You can live with them, more or less harmoniously, if you don’t attack them. Yet, unlike mindworms and Planet itself, the aliens remain a blank canvas.

This seems a fair way to think of most of Beyond Earth’s narrative failings: bright flashes of writing and expressive mechanics that need a corral of meaning. The connection of mechanics and writing are what we remember from Alpha Centauri, and that connection is missed in Beyond Earth.

The pieces are all there in Beyond Earth, they simply aren’t as musically arranged

There is some absolutely stellar writing that periodically glitters into view, and the narrator —the presumptive voice of humanity—is the young woman who stars in the opening cinematic. She becomes an almost playful guide through the web of knowledge and advancement that characterises your colony’s long march into the future. Some of the writing sparkles, like this flavor text for discovering the Synthetic Thought tech: "Turingschande: Noun. Shame felt upon discovering one has mistaken an artificial-intelligence for a close relation."

But unlike in Alpha Centauri, where it all congealed into a coherent story, Beyond Earth’s better writing feels like points of light in the dark. Nothing connects them together into a better whole.

A prime example of this can be found in the flavour text sourced from the Kavithan Protectorate and its mysterious leader, Kavitha Thakur. Unless you read the out-of-the-way blogposts on the Civilization website you’re not really given much background on who she is or what her faction is about; you can only guess that it’s the future government of what is currently the Indian Subcontinent.

This new trend of hiding interesting lore outside of the game-- Destiny falls into this trap, and Halo 4 all but requires you to have read the novels and lore-- is becoming an annoying distraction. Finding meaning in a game shouldn’t require homework, nor a reading list of content that appears outside the game.

The game further obscures its own lore by dividing the factions blandly by geography and nationality, while Alpha Centauri neatly dodged this issue by premising its factions on ideology instead. The Kavithan Protectorate is not truly distinguished by its origins in South Asia, but because it is a syncretic theocracy led by a mysteriously ageless woman who takes harmony deadly seriously.

Consider another one of the better flavour quotes from Beyond Earth:

"Seraphim, Cherubim, Devas, Fravashi, and Yakshas, extend thy arms to cover us, hear us and convey our prayer to the Lord Creator." -Kavitha Thakur, Daily Devotionals for Comm Operators

It says a lot with a little, but this theological morsel is not really expanded on much in the game. The Civilopedia provides some more background, but that again lacks the seamlessness with which Alpha Centauri made its factions live and breathe. Theology is interesting on its own, but it becomes even more interesting when it informs the actions of the characters and factions.

Alpha Centauri elegantly presented its meaningful lore, but Beyond Earth scatters or buries it.

The witty writing is left adrift. Somehow the still portraits of faction leaders in AC feel more alive than the fully rendered and animated models in BE’s diplomacy screens—which, incidentally, mostly use text entirely lifted from Civ V.

Eternity Lies Ahead of Us

What Beyond Earth lacks in story it makes up for in the potential of its expressive mechanics. Much has been made of the Affinity system, where your colony chooses one of three broad ideological tenets to follow that establishes its relationship to the new world. Purity, a bioconservative ethos; Harmony, which advocates symbiosis; and Supremacy, a transhumanist ideology.

At each step up the ladder in each of these ideologies, you’re treated to flavour text that beautifully dramatizes the ideology in question.

But the ladder itself is the important thing. It’s what I would call an "expressive mechanic," a mechanic that, when set in motion, conveys a narrative idea. Or, in developer Brenda Romero’s phrase, the mechanic is the message.

Simply put, Affinity in Beyond Earth is not a binary choice one makes at a pre-defined point, unlike ideology in post-Brave New World Civ V. Rather, it is a cumulative expression of the choices you make throughout the game in the quests, which technologies you research and in a few other places.

Beyond Earth’s better writing feels like points of light in the dark

The arc of your play shapes this mechanically-consequential aspect of your colony’s ideology; what’s more, the game accommodates hybrid ideologies. Unique units are available to those who’ve invested enough points in two Affinities, and even the architecture of your cities becomes hybridised. What you believe informs what you do, down to the aesthetics.

The ideological choice of how your faction relates to the new world is driven by, dare I say, a narrative of your choices throughout the game, opening and closing different endgames.

Simply put, it expresses the idea that a culture’s ideological beliefs are the product of what went into its development.

But what Beyond Earth lacks compared to its predecessor is that the flavor text does not follow this mechanical rhythm: you learn little to nothing about the aliens, your own faction, or the impact of your ideology on either over the course of the game.

The flavor text is not tied to that arc of Affinity development, while Alpha Centauri's text unfolded like a novel in a roughly chronological form around technological progress. The pieces are all there in Beyond Earth, they simply aren’t as musically arranged.

From the survivalist hunkering down of the first 50 turns to the dark scrambles of many of the endings, the game’s mechanics have a story to tell that is desperately trying to come out. For now, however, Beyond Earth remains a well-oiled machine in want of a ghost.