How Sid Meier’s Starships and Civilization: Beyond Earth will talk to each other

Civilization development team Firaxis is preparing a new update for its most recent game, and this will enable the sci-fi strategy release to communicate and interact with the studio’s next big project.

Firaxis announced a number of things it has planned for the winter update to Civilization: Beyond Earth, and the biggest change is the addition of the base features required to get the two sci-fi games talking to one another. This is the first time that the developer is enabling players to feel the repercussions of their actions in one game in another release. And this ambitious plan comes as Firaxis games — and Civilization in particular — continue to grow in popularity. Civilization V is almost always one of the 10 most played PC games on Valve’s Steam digital-distribution platform, according to its stats page. By combining Beyond Earth and Starships into a single universe, Firaxis and publisher 2K Games could boost the popularity of each.