Humanity takes to the stars in Civilization: Beyond Earth (interview)

Posted byby Dean Takahashi
May 11, 2014
Updated June 18, 2025
10 min

Most Civilization games have ended with mankind moving to the stars. But that’s just the start of Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth, the next installment in the 23-year-old strategy game franchise. Take-Two Interactive Software’s 2K Games recently announced that Firaxis Games is working on the new title.

We caught up with the lead game designers for the project, Will Miller and David McDonough, to talk about how Beyond Earth will differ from predecessor Civilization V as well as the last big space-based Civ game, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.