Civilization VII is coming at a really interesting time for the historical 4X genre, with a bunch of rivals having sprung up in the last few years, and everyone trying to explore similar concepts to better translate the passage of time and evolution of nations into video game form.
We got to go hands on with the opening few turns at Gamescom 2024, and alongside a breakdown by Firaxis for the overarching concepts and changes, it feels like an exciting new chapter for the storied franchise. But there’s always more to ask and to find out, and we had the opportunity to sit down with Creative Director Ed Beach to dive into what’s new, different and what’s staying the same in Civ 7.
TSA: So, change is very difficult for people to accept…
Ed Beach: We’ve noticed! Our forums are abuzz with that!
TSA: [laughs] I mean, we’ll obviously talk about what’s different with Civ 7, but what kind of security blankets are there for people? What’s staying consistent and staying true to Civilization?
Ed: The number one change that seems to have thrown our community, and that we were expecting to throw our community, is that your civilization changes are you get to each age. I think the security blanket that they’re going to realise is there, is that they’re thinking “I’m starting as Egypt, and the game is asking me to switch to India.”
They saw that in some of our competing products, and it was very jarring, but we have a historical pathway system that’s really going to make a lot of those choices much more logical within history. So certain areas of the world, like India and China, that have their own ecosystem of dynasties that evolved over time, a lot of people are thinking there’s one India in the game, but that’s not necessarily true anymore. We are not revealing our whole lineup of civilizations, because that’s part of our marketing campaign to roll that information out, but in an area where it makes sense for us to have a representation of, say, India in all three ages, that’s very much what we might want to do.
So that’s not that much different to playing India before, but now its much richer, because you might have not just abilities through one slice of the game. Like all of our empires before, you’d get to play America or England and have to wait for your abilities to come online, and you’re hoping in a multiplayer game that you don’t get crushed and wiped off the map before you’re relevant – now you have this much richer portrayal of a particular historical pathway, because you’re playing through three layers and they all have bonuses.
I think players will realise that’s actually very cool and very much improved over what was there before. Obviously there’s going to be cases where players can unlock a strange pathway, and some players will love doing that, while players who love the historical immersion may shy away from that. And that’s fine. Everyone should play the game the way that they want. But it should cater to both those historical enthusiasts who want it to be more traditional…
TSA: Like those who want Egypt to always be exactly how it was…
Ed: But even then, Egypt ended up getting entirely conquered by the Ottoman Empire later in history, and how should that be represented?
TSA: I think another part that might not be grasped on a surface level is that it’s called Egypt in the game, but obviously Egypt now is very different from Ancient Egypt.
Ed: And if you look at something like Rome, Rome had influence everywhere and there’s a lot of modern empires that can say they did start with a big Roman influence, and that makes sense for me.
We’re launching the game with more civs than we’ve ever had before, because the more civs we have, the more of these pathways we can have, but it’s going to benefit even more as the mod community and our DLC packs start pumping even more into the game. It’s going to be really interesting all the ways you can navigate your way through history.
TSA: You alluded to your competitors, the rivals to your crown let’s say, and it’s a really interesting time for the historical 4X genre. Is it encouraging that so many minds are exploring a similar direction to yourselves? Especially as everyone has their own particular way of representing ages and evolving cultures.
Ed: I feel like there was a catalyst to this, and maybe it’s slightly egotistical on our part to think that Civ 6 was a driver, but it was very successful, and obviously we sold lots of units, we have a big install base, and that’s the kind of situation where anyone with business sense is thinking “We can grab a piece of that pie and it’ll be very profitable for us too!”
There’s tons of activity in this space, which is good for everybody.
As we developed this product, we didn’t know we were going to have four competitors when we started. We had actually gotten very used to, the first ten years I was at Firaxis, we didn’t have competitors and they stayed away from the historical space. Like “We don’t want to take Civ on, so we’ll go and do Sci Fi or Fantasy”, and they did some very good jobs at those other genres, but the competition directly in the historical space was limited.
What we saw was one by one those competitors were popping up, and we were like, how much attention do we have to pay to them? We knew we wanted to break the game up into chapters to make it more manageable for players to get through to the end, because we had data on how many people bail out, and we wanted to address that problem directly.
We ended up being distracted a couple times by some of these competitors, but we ended up in the final analysis was that we stick to our plan. […]
You can tell that we’re all poking at the same problems, because the name Ages is in our game as it is in Millennia, Influence is in our game and i think in Humankind. So we’re coming up with the same solutions, we’re trying to name things the same, even if they’re slightly different things, so we’re all poking at this idea of what makes a great historical strategy game and how to structure it. We had the advantage that Civ 6 was out there and still performing well, so we didn’t have to rush, so we could iterate on things quite a bit, and I think that’s been helpful.
TSA: The Civ 6 expansion Rise and Fall tried to deal with this kind of, well it’s in the name really, rise and fall of empires. What can you say about how those ideas morphed into the Ages here.
Ed: It’s a really good observation, because the thing we wanted to do with Rise and Fall was to not represent human progress as this ever-ascending ramp where players or empires are never being challenged and they can just keep on getting bigger and stronger. That’s traditionally what a Civ game has been, but it’s not really the way history works.
It’s much more, you grow so big that you don’t know how to control your empire anymore, outside invaders see that you have weaknesses and poke it, and so there’s some kind of crisis. You typically end up having to retrench, regroup and push forward again, but you’ve taken a step back.
Rise and Fall we experimented with that. We had the loyalty system where if you went into a dark age, you would lose cities at the edge of your empire. We’re taking inspiration from that idea, we have a Crisis system so there is a challenge at the end of each Age, and a natural reason why your empire starts to fall apart.
We have historians on the team and they’ve looked at when those time periods across the world, where there was a Dark Age everywhere, not just in the Roman Empire, but in the East where none of the big empires were surviving. So we’ve tried to slot the times that the crisis happens in, so there’s a historical story to tell there.
But there were a few things about Rise and Fall that we didn’t like, and you’ll notice in this game that a couple things have disappeared from Civ 6. The points system to get just enough Era score to evaluate if you go into a dark age or a golden age, and the tech and civic boosts – those systems did some good things, but they made players chase mini objectives almost to a level that was distracting from their strategic vision as an empire, so we’ve backed off that.
There’s still quests in the game – advisors give you quests, you can get quests from the narrative system – and there’s always the need to explore the map more to find discoveries, so we think we have enough short term objectives in the game without making the players keep track of all these little scores.
TSA: I was also going to ask diplomacy and how some games will present all the numbers and how stats add up, other games will try to obscure it a little bit, and these mini objectives
Ed: You can just get an overload of too many little numbers and trackers and progress bars to fill up, and I don’t think that’s a fun game.
TSA: I’ve mentioned it now, so let’s talk about diplomacy and if there any key ways that you’re shifting this side of the game?
Ed: I didn’t feel quite as passionately about it as some members of my design team, but i agreed with them: the one thing they felt was unrealistic about Civ games all the way back to Civ 4… 3 actually, was the deal table. If you’re a great leader, you’re Augustus Caesar, you shouldn’t be haggling over the price of figs when you’re trying to trade them to your neighbour! That just didn’t feel right.
The diplomacy systems in Civ games had this weird incentive where the more time you spent going around to different leaders and trying to negotiate those deals with them? That was the best way to play, because you could go, “Oh this guy’s a little friendlier to me, he’ll give me a better deal. I just got this new commodity, let me get as much gold as possible.” There was this weird min-maxing game that A) took a lot of time, and B) didn’t feel like something a world leader should be doing.
TSA: It’s more like a space trading game where you go from one port to another.
Ed: Exactly, and then the third thing about it was you were trading your luxury goods to other leaders through that interface, but we also had a trade route system and you establish routes to other players, but there was no connection between them. We always wanted them to be unified.
We have unified those, and when you set up a trade route to another player, that’s how you get their resources. There’s no deal table where you’re haggling over prices, now your merchants go out and bring commodities back. Everything you buy from another player, they’re going to earn gold from, and you get one free trade route with everybody, but if you want more trade routes with somebody, you need to be friendly enough that they’ll allow it. So diplomacy and trade are very tightly tied together, but it’s a brand new system that unifies a lot of what we felt needed to be unified.
TSA: Finally, you’re keeping the unpacked city style from Civ 6, which was so visually arresting, but with the new transitions between civs, how are you evolving it for Civ 7?
Ed: There’s three big changes. The first one is that each urban tile is not assigned a specialty – it’s not a science district or a culture district – you get two building slots there and you can put whatever building you want there.
There second thing is cities have to grow out from the centre. It used to be that you had the centre of your city here, and your first district could be way out on the edge of the [city’s area], and players were like, “That doesn’t feel like the same city, that feels like little suburbs.” So now your city has to grow out from the centre.
The third thing is that as you go from one age to the next, the city buildings from the previous age lose their power. The new buildings from the new age are much, much better, and you want them to be in the choice spots where you put the earlier buildings for adjacency bonuses and things like that, so we have this system where you over-build. In the presentation we talked about how London was built in layers, and that’s very interesting because now the same part of the map you’ll get to figure out how you want to lay out your cities on it multiple times through a game, and that gives you all sorts of opportunities for this building gameplay to evolve and improve as you’re working on it.
TSA: Extending from that, is there anything where you visually merge the civilisations together?
Ed: If you play as Egypt and you get the special necropolis mortuary complex built on a tile, that’s permanent, and so even if you move on from Egypt to another empire, that Egyptian quarter remains. Think about cities that have, you know, Latin quarters, Jewish quarters and that was an inspiration to have these old quarters that are vestiges of the empire that used to live there, and as you go through the ages, your whole lineage starts to reveal itself to you on the map.
Thanks to Ed for speaking to us at Gamescom. Civilization VII is heading to release on 11th February 2025, and for the first time, it will be launching across both PC and consoles at the same time, available across PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PS4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch.
