Civilization 7 Interview: Firaxis Answers All Our Questions About the Anticipated Sequel

We finally got our first glimpse at Civilization VII gameplay during gamescom 2024, and it already looks dramatically different from anything we’ve seen from the storied series before. That includes a huge shake-up to the way Civilization VII progresses thanks to the new “ages” system, which is designed to break progression up into something akin to chapters.

We got a first look at Civilization VII in its first preview , which gave us a pretty positive outlook for the anticipated sequel. Still, we had plenty of questions for creative director Ed Beach, who sat down with us for an interview at gamescom. Read on for his thoughts on Civilization VII’s new structure, whether it will take elements from the previous game’s Gathering Storm expansion, and much more. And for everything else announced at gamescom 2024, head here.

Civilization VII is coming to PC, PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and Switch on February 11, 2025.

I already told you that I just learned Civ VI and now I have to relearn Civ VII, but I’m fine with that.

Ed Beach, Creative Director, Firaxis: We’re trying to make the barrier to entry a little bit lower than it used to be. Civ VI could be a little bit too dense in places. If you’re jumping in at the end with all the expansions and all the content, that’s not really the easiest place to start. So I think Civ VII might be the move you want to make.

Yeah, I’m really excited. So that brings me to my next question. So you’ve been updating Civ VI consistently and there’s a lot of mod support. So why is this the best time for Civ VII?

Beach: Well, we’ve been thinking about Civ VII for a while. We started working on the game before the pandemic, so it’s been in development for a while. The design team had ideas that worked really well in Civ VI, but they had some side effects in the sense that the game takes a really long time to play. By the time you get deep into the game, there’s a lot of cities and units and stuff to manage, and we wanted to think about that and come up with a different approach so that we could make the game more manageable and accessible and just get players all the way to the finish line more often than they had in previous Civ games.

Yeah, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve stayed up until 3am just to play one more round. It’s got me. So Gathering Storm and the global warming and the mechanics offer such a dynamic change to the core gameplay. Is that something that’s being implemented in Civ VII?

Beach: So we haven’t talked a lot about what comes after the Exploration Age after the Renaissance. We’re really diving into the first age now, and we have demos and things like that. We’re not going to forget about climate change, although it was personally very impactful when we started working on that with Gathering Storm. I was the lead designer on that expansion.

I looked up a lot of things about climate change… I mean, we’re not a simulator-style game, but we tried to get some things right in terms of how sea level rise works and storms move across the world and so on. So we took a lot of that and what you can see in the game now that we’re demonstrating with the Antiquity Age is that there’s still flooding, there’s still volcanic eruptions. We still have the storms that are moving across the map.

So a lot of those Gathering Storm mechanics, ideas, whatever, we still have.

Is that part of the crises that are being implemented in this new system?

Beach: So those are kind of adjacent but similar. We have different crises. The one we’re demonstrating right now is an invasion crisis, imagine you’re the Roman Empire and you’ve gotten too big and everybody wants a little bit of your action. And so these barbarians are at your door knocking on your door. So that’s the one we’re demonstrating in the build that we have here right now. But we’re working on other types of crises, things like civil unrest or plagues and some of those systems for crises use the same random event system that we use for natural disasters.

Why did you switch to the age system?

Beach: So it’s part of trying to make people play a game that’s more manageable. 4X games generally have this problem where you start with just your first unit, you get one city down, you think, wow, this game is great. It’s very manageable when I get dozens and dozens of cities and this many units to manage. Everything gets bogged down. And we wanted to break our game up into chapters, just like a long book series or TV show that you might enjoy breaks itself up into seasons or books.

So we can have big traumatic moments like these crises that you’re talking about, but then also give players a chance to take a breath and reset and simplify things. And that allows you to take the player through a long experience in a more satisfying way than just saying, “Oh no, it’s just going to get bigger and bigger and bigger and you just have to keep up.”

So it’s a nice new way to approach that problem and we’re very curious about the outcome.

As a new type of player I’m very happy to hear that. But for returning players, do you think it’s still challenging enough that they’ll find this new system interesting?

Beach: Well, yeah. The experience is still the same length overall. So we’re actually diving deeper and more immersively into the history of each historical era than we’ve ever done before. And some of the gameplay mechanics we can change more deeply, so that they might play out differently in our era of antiquity than they do in our era of exploration, just like our trading systems are different in all three eras.

So I think there’s enough for people to dive deep into. We recently demoed the game to a lot of veterans from our community. They’re really excited about the possibilities and theorizing and everything. So there’s going to be enough for everyone.

What was the best feedback you received from the community?

Beach: I think we have to be very careful now that we have divided the game into eras. We really make you think about who you are, what leaders of civilizations represent you in the game, and you get the chance to walk a unique historical path.

Maybe you start out as Rome, and where did Rome evolve? Maybe it evolved into another European Civ and that takes you to Germany or Britain or France at the end of your game. And players love that historical storytelling and immersion. And we’ve allowed for some crazier combinations, and some of our fans love that because they love theorizing, I want to mix this with that and I’m going to be super overpowered in science.

But we also had to think about what those players wanted who wanted the more historical path through our game. And so we set up the game so that that’s the default way that both the human and the AI ​​go through the game and then you have to, it’s up to the player to choose that crazier playstyle.

Civilization 7 – First screenshots