Interview: Civilization 7 Will 'Break People Out of Their Comfort Zone'

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The release date of Civilization 7 draws near and will see the game launch on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch at the same time — a first in series history. That’s generally a good descriptor for the upcoming turn-based strategy game from Firaxis. It breaks franchise conventions with more than its launch platforms, and this has caused some worries among fans. Will it still feel like Civilization?

I have been given the opportunity to speak with lead designer Ed Beach and executive producer Dennis Shirk about these concerns, the mechanical changes causing them, and so much more in the run-up to Civilization 7’s launch.

Both Firaxis members are veterans of the series, this being far from their first rodeo, but I still want to know if such an important release is making them a little nervous. “It always is at this point of the game. You’re a little anxious,” Shirk says. “This was a bigger jump than we typically do for a Civ release. There’s a lot of holding of breath while we’re waiting for the stuff to start flowing out and seeing what the fan reactions are. It’s exciting, but it’s also nerve-wracking.”

“Dennis is right that this is probably one of the biggest changes this series has ever had,” Ed Beach adds. “We knew it was a big enough change that it was going to break some people out of their comfort zone. There are going to be some traditional players, who don’t want to have to choose a pathway through history for their leader in Civilization. We knew it wasn’t going to be unanimous acceptance, but what we’re really seeing is that there’s a lot of people embracing the new system. The previews seem very engaged with it and we’re seeing our community come up with all sorts of theorycrafting.”

It seems like the lead designer is spending a good deal of time in online forums, taking in what people have to say. “I have looked at the threads where they’ve been discussing these things and everyone is proposing something different than everyone else,” he continues. “That just shows how many different combinations there are and how many different ways people are going to be looking at that.”

The first topic I want to dive into more deeply are Age Transitions, because they’ve become the mechanic creating the most friction in online discussions so far. In case you’re out of the loop, Civilization 7 makes you switch cultures two times per game: Once when you go from Antiquity into the Exploration Age and a second time when you advance from Exploration into the Modern Age. These Age Transitions are something of a soft reset and that’s something not everyone is liking.

“We had a design pillar that was one of our key guideposts to make sure that we were following the whole time through the project, which was that history comes in layers,” Beach explains. In following this design pillar, the team wanted to make sure that things that remind players of their choices during the ongoing game are transferred to the next Age.

“Unique Traditions carry forward because of that, as well as unique improvements like Terrace Farms or unique Quarters,” Beach says. Commanders stick around between Ages as well, since players spend a lot of time and energy leveling them up, while Attribute Points for leaders are permanent throughout a playthrough, too.

“Then there are some things that carry forward just because of how important or how iconic they are for the Civilization franchise,” Beach continues. “The World Wonders, we decided, were worth carrying over. We had some debate on that one. Historically, many of the wonders of the world are no longer there. They’ve fallen apart. No one even knows where the Hanging Gardens of Babylon are.”

Before your internal monologue goes ‘Probably in Babylon, duh,’ I’d like to back Beach up saying that there’s been no archaeological evidence for them so far at this most ancient city — some scholars have even suggested that the Hanging Gardens may have been a poetic creation and not an actual place.

Back to the lead designer, who explains: “So there was some historical precedent for them maybe not sticking around, but we decided they were too important to the franchise and especially now with the way Wonders give adjacency bonuses to any buildings that you put next to them. They really become part of how you lay out your Cities, so we felt like those had to stay.”

Beach and the team are very aware of the fact that the Age Transitions are divisive — it took a lot of effort to get them right, he says: “You are absolutely right that this is the biggest friction point, just because it was the thing that we had to iterate on the most to get Civ 7 together. We had Age Transitions in some of our very first builds of the game and we focus-tested this game more than we ever had to focus-test any previous game. We had over ten test rounds and every time we’d be adjusting Age Transitions a little bit more. That’s how we finally got it to where it is.”

For those who think that the current iteration is already too radical, the earlier implementation that Beach tells me about would probably have caused a storm of outrage. “There were some very punishing versions of Age Transitions,” he says. “Right now, all of your Cities become Towns, but we had versions where you could only keep like five settlements and things like that. We experimented with it a lot, which I think gave us comfort that we could find the sweet spot in the middle. We’re happy with the way it came out for sure.”

Another area in the spotlight has been the perception that the player is railroaded into playing a certain way, especially during the Exploration Age. This is something that can’t be waved away, because the game is heavily steering you into engaging with the Distant Lands. I ask if the devs are concerned about this and if they have any plans to address this criticism, for example, via specific civilization mechanics like Mongolia has in the base game (they have a bit more flexibility for earning Military Legacy Points in the Exploration Age).

“Absolutely,” Beach responds. “We’ve gotten that feedback in some of these focus-tests, even before the community was aware of what’s going on. We have plenty of plans to address that.”

Firaxis sees the crises that appear towards the end of each Age as one way to provide variety, as the players never know which one might show up. “Another idea is exactly like you said with the Mongols, to have a different way of approaching the victory conditions,” Beach says. “I think playing with the victory conditions and allowing some flexibility there is going to open things up wide. Nothing to announce there for right now, but that’s certainly what we’re looking at.”

I bring up some of my concern about the AI as well, as I’d seen some funny behavior during my time playing the game. In the Modern Age, the AI produced a ridiculous amount of Explorers, for example, clearly overfocusing on the Culture Victory.

Beach tells me that Firaxis has “several different strike teams within our design group.

“One of them is looking at pacing and progression through the Ages and it’s been looking heavily at Age Transitions. Another one is specifically looking at AI behaviors. Overaggressiveness of the AI on the Explorer game was identified pretty quickly as a problem in the preview build. We’ve already made some adjustments. I can’t remember exactly what the timetable is as to whether those are gonna be ready for when the game launches, but they’re already well into testing for sure.”

This should be quite reassuring for players: Even if there are issues with the AI or other aspects, Firaxis seems to be well prepared to react quickly and efficiently to fix them.

Some areas of Civilization 7 seem a little devoid of detail when compared to its predecessors. For example, Great Works are no longer based on real historical objects. Even Artifacts, a key piece of winning a Culture Victory, no longer come with the same details as in Civilization 6. I bring this up, because to me digging up an Artifact that tells me from which culture and era it stems from would be a very literal and engaging manifestation of the ‘history comes in layers’ design pillar. I ask if that’s an area in which we can expect a bit more depth in the future.

“That’s certainly possible,” Beach answers. “All that information is stored in the game and there are a lot of places where we’re storing information so that we can build on it later and do something more interesting or more involved with it. I don’t know exactly what our plans entail with that, but we’ve made sure that all that information is stored away, so that if we wanted to go back to things like theming Museums [like in Civilization 6], it wouldn’t be a huge change to do it.”

Beach explains that “we’re already throwing a lot at players for the very basic version of Civ 7. We’ve got twelve different Legacy Paths that they have to learn, so we want to keep them not too complicated. We have three different types of Great Works — the Codices, the Relics, and the Artifacts — and right now they’re all pretty simple, but I would absolutely look for us to be doing a lot more with those down the road, yeah.”

I’m much more happy with how Great People have been implemented in Civilization 7, so I ask the lead designer about the story behind the changes. Turns out, everyone who helped to make Gran Colombia such a popular DLC civilization in the previous game contributed to its use as a blueprint for how Great People would work in Civ 7.

“That was the first one that had a unique historically crafted set of Great People and they were a very popular civ,” Beach explains. “Simón Bolívar had so many different generals that worked with him and helped him, it was the perfect collection of people that you could get a set of eight to ten Great People out of. So we looked for similar sets of people that would make sense.”

Groups like Greek philosophers and Spanish conquistadors were easy pickings for this, but a couple of trickier examples do exist. “I think probably the most creative one that we came up with was for the French, because we have the Jacobins and they are, you know, not necessarily all shining lights and beacons or niceness, so I think that one’s very interesting,” Beach says.

Naturally, the team couldn’t find enough source material to form similar sets for all civilizations. Beach brings up the Mississippian culture as an example, which makes its debut in Civ 7.

“There’s not much in terms of a written record that has been left by them,” he explains. “We were never able to put them in Civilization before, because the requirement was always that every culture had to have a prominent leader that we had enough information about, even if it was mostly mythical information like for Gilgamesh, so that we could portray them. So we discarded the Mississippians for Civ 5 and Civ 6, as they didn’t have a suitable candidate for a leader. It’s great to be able to bring them into Civ 7, because they can be paired with other leaders. But to come up with a list of Great People for them, that just wouldn’t have been possible.”

Another one of my personal highlights is how the conditional civilization unlocks available during a playthrough can come together to create these narratives for your run, so I wanted to learn the origin of this mechanic as well. For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s an example: Say you start out as Rome with Augustus as your leader, but you really want to play as the Ming in the following Age. Well, there is a way to do that — you can find three Jade resources on the map and exploit them. Likewise, unlocking Mongolia would happen by gathering three Horse resources.

“We started our game without those and there’s a really interesting story about how the thought process between our game and some of our competitors interwove,” Beach begins. “We didn’t have those and it didn’t feel quite right to us, so we started looking for solutions. Humankind came out with basically the same idea that you might want to switch civilizations in the middle of your game. They had a very freeform system where you switch five times during the game and there’s no real narrative explanation for it.”

Beach brings in an example, saying how someone spending time in France would easily notice all the history there: Roman aqueducts, French castles, Norman Bayeux Tapestry, and so on. “You feel the layers of history around you and that idea that you could have a progression where all three of those heritages are representing your game was very powerful to us,” he says. “So we started locking in on these historical pathways as a foundational element for the game.

“We started realizing the richness of these historical pathways and that’s why we started adding narrative elements to it,” he continues. “We actually have gone through a couple of iterations on what the unlocked conditions should be. Some of the simplest ones are the ones where you just collect a certain number of resources, but we feel like the more interesting ones are the ones where it’s sort of a gameplay choice you make. You settle on islands and then you unlock Hawai’i, so then that feels even more rewarding. They became a really important part of the Civ 7 story and the Civ 7 design.”

With the finish line for our time drawing near, I ask the duo what they would like players to think after their first game of Civilization 7.

“I want them to feel like they just didn’t play another game of Civilization 6,” Shirk says. “I don’t want to say that I hope it ended in failure, but that they had to pull something new out of their own toolbox to really engage with the game, because their old strategies didn’t work. And when we’re talking about data on the back end, we want to see people finishing games, just going straight through and really just reinforcing that engagement, especially in the Modern Age.

“A big weak spot for the games before was that the Modern Age was a bit of a click fest,” he elaborates. “Not everybody finished games. They especially didn’t like the latter part of the game because there’s just a lot of mundane decisions. We do want to see people approaching it with new eyes and we’ve been really loving what people put together in the later ages.”

“What I would love to see people get out of their first game is an appreciation of the kind of storytelling that’s possible in Civilization 7,” Beach answers. “We talked about these historical pathways through the game. Part of that is the story that the player is building, but we also have a new narrative system that is sitting there, listening to what’s going on in the game.”

“We have 1,500 or more narrative events that can pop up, but they’re all contextual. When your river has flooded and the same City has been hit twice by a flood within a certain number of turns, that triggers a specific story,” he explains. “Some of these stories have multiple dependencies, so there’s like a chain reaction that has to occur for you to get very deep into the story. This is going to be a really potent thing for us and for modders to add additional content on. We’ve gone through a lot of work to set this up, so this game will have maybe the most immersive, richest stories you have ever seen from a Civilization world. So I’m hoping that players see that as they play through.”

Civilization 7 is clearly not going to be able to please everyone. It is a bold venture, but one with a very firm vision behind it — and the developers seem well prepared to adapt and adjust things as feedback comes in, having their fingers at the pulse of the community.

Civilization 7 is coming to PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch on February 11, 2025, though players with an edition featuring advanced access can start playing on February 6, 2025.