Out of the Seven Wonders of the World, we can add one more to the list in recent years, a triumph of human engineering achievement almost as jaw-dropping as the Great Pyramids of Giza or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon: Sid Meier's classic 4X Civilization series now operates fine and dandy on Nintendo Switch, with nary a keyboard or mouse to be found.
At Gamescom, we chatted with Civilization VII’s Creative Director Ed Beach about how they’ll get players hitting 'one more turn' through the course of human history until the early hours yet again.
Read on to find out how Firaxis’ new Ages system adds a compelling new three-act structure, the Gathering Storm expansion’s lasting influence on the main game, and the day-one release and cross-platform multiplayer support Switch players can look forward to next February.
Nintendo Life: Civilization is 33 years old this year, and the latest version looks set to be among the biggest shakeups the series has had in that time. What’s new with Civilization VII?
Ed Beach (Creative Director): The key concept we've introduced is one we call “Ages”, which breaks the game up into three chapters. Before, we had a very long game that took a long time to play. By the time the game finished, there were all sorts of cities and units to manage. It was very complicated and we wanted to boil it down to smaller chunks. You still have the full experience — it'll take you the same amount of time to play through our three ages — but we take advantage of those chapters so each of them has a dramatic conclusion, not just the end of the campaign. We can simplify how much you manage when you start a new Age, like reading a book series: when you get into the second book, you know things have calmed down from the craziness at the end of the first book, there's less going on, and things are going to build back up to another crazy frenzy at the end of that second book. It changes the pacing and flow in a very satisfying way.
This time round, you’re focusing on the concept that history is built in layers. Here in Cologne, the Gothic cathedral is built on top of the remnants of Roman villas that once stood in the heart of the city. Can you tell us a bit about how Civilization VII builds on that idea that the past is always with us?
Cities have been built in layers over time, as different empires come through and rule that part of the world, and our new city layout gameplay and how you build your cities in the new game reflects that. You build things on top of previous versions of the cities with new Modern builds available.
the floods are back. The volcanic eruptions are back. The storms like hurricanes and sandstorms and everything like that that sweep across the map, those are back
In the first chapter of our game, the Antiquity age, you pick one of the powers that was predominant in history during that time period. Let’s say Rome, because we're in Cologne. And the Roman Empire was spread all throughout Western Europe. And when you do that, you'll feel like Augustus Caesar wherever you're playing, and I'm ruling the Roman Empire. But you'll also be challenged at the end of that age with a crisis from our new Crisis system: that could be outside invaders coming in and wanting to sack your cities, [or] it could be a civil war or plague. Once that's happened, your empire will have to reset, and you'll have to move into the next chapter in history.
Just like the Roman Empire was replaced in this part of the world by the Frankish or the Holy Roman Empire, you'll make a choice like that in the game. And the city that you had before will have old buildings that need to be replaced, like blacksmith shops and libraries that could be replaced with universities and guilds from the Middle Ages. Making those changes, you'll want to take advantage of the local terrain and choose places that are good for your industry - that might be the same in each age, but you'll build different buildings in those areas. It's a very fresh take on how our empires evolved; we like it both because it's new gameplay for players to explore and how it also reflects the way things actually work historically.
You were the lead designer on the Gathering Storm expansion for Civilization VI, which introduced a variety of dramatic crises to disrupt players' campaigns. How are you bringing ideas from that expansion into the new mainline title?
Gathering Storm introduced natural disasters like floods and volcanoes. It introduced powering up your cities with coal or oil factories, power plants and factories, and it did have an element of climate change as well. We're not talking about our later two ages in any detail right now, but in the first Age of Antiquity, you'll see right away the floods are back. The volcanic eruptions are back. The storms like hurricanes and sandstorms and everything like that that sweep across the map, those are back as well. And so yes, that whole rich, dynamic, random event system with natural disasters is very much a part of what we're doing right now.
In recent years, there’s been real strides made with Civilization on consoles. Civilization on the Switch was every bit as playable as the PC version, when it used to seem unthinkable that Civ could ever work without a mouse and keyboard. How’s it felt to see the console community get on board with Civilization, and can you say what’s in store for the Switch version?
We've been really, really happy with the Switch audience and how that community has grown. I've talked to players just this week and the Switch is an important part of their Civ experience, being able to move around and play the same campaign, then when they're at home with their PC they can use the Cloud Save feature to play it on different platforms. That's very exciting. I love that portability!
The console community is very important to us. It's part of us. We don't want them to feel left behind at all.
The thing we have to shout from the mountaintops is: day one, it's releasing to all platforms. Civ VI came out on PC first, we had to wait for it to get to consoles. The console community is very important to us. It's part of us. We don't want them to feel left behind at all. If they had to wait two months, four months, six months, that would be devastating. We want everyone to have that experience right from the beginning. To do that, we needed to control how console development is done more in-house. Rather than sending something out to get ported, we're making builds on all platforms, every single day. We have lots of in-house engineering effort on all console platforms. So Switch has been very, very important to us.
You’ve had a longstanding career as a board game designer since the '90s. I’m curious if you can tell me how that bleeds into your work in video games?
It's very helpful. Board games are very structured in terms of how complex you can make a mechanic. Video game design is a little bit different, you can get away with making the computer do more work than a board game player would tolerate. But I think those board game sensibilities [are] a very good approach for people playing Civilization who want to understand why things are happening the way they are. If they're getting a certain amount of Science per turn, they want to be able to unravel that. It helps keep things structured and elegant - a lot of small atomic steps rather than this big, crazy black box calculation.
The board games I worked on [including Here I Stand about the Protestant Reformation, and Virgin Queen about Queen Elizabeth I] have interesting interplays between religion and politics; we've been able to reflect that in Civ V and Civ VI with the new religion systems. And religion will come back in Civ VII. It's mainly focused in the middle age of our game, during that age of Exploration when the wars of religion happen. I've always loved how you can have almost two different levels of conflict going on in a map where religions are fighting over each other, and armies are fighting each other, and sometimes those conflicts intersect. It's been cool to reflect that in board games and computer games.
What can you tell us about Civilization VII’s multiplayer? It’s a common experience for many, including myself, to optimistically start a multiplayer campaign before running out of steam - will the new Age structure help multiplayer campaigns the way they will for single-player?
There’s several cool things about multiplayer. One is we're supporting cross-play right out of the gate, which is part of getting all the platforms together. The other thing is, breaking the game up into Ages means that it's not, “Oh, let's start up a multiplayer game and we'll be here for the next eight hours before we get to a conclusion.” Now, the game is structured so that it's in more digestible chunks. We play multiplayer all the time with our development team: those are two- or three-hour sessions to get through a game, not six- or eight-hour sessions. That's so much more suited to multiplayer. You can still have a campaign where you'll play through all of history, that’ll take longer than two or three hours. But I expect a lot of the way that's going to go is people get together with their friends and they'll play one game one night, one weekend, then the next night or next weekend they'll move on and do the next stage.
How’s Civ changed in response to this larger console audience coming in? [It] sounds like it’s only set to expand.
It's a very fresh take on how our empires evolved; we like it both because it's new gameplay for players to explore and how it also reflects the way things actually work historically.
We think about both the existing base and the novice base. The multiplayer community has become part of the streaming community; our community is changing and evolving. We have to provide that deep, long experience that longtime Civ players are expecting, but the newer community wants a quicker, more streamlined experience; something simpler with more of those elegant board game mechanics and less involved, complicated things. We're addressing a lot of this. We have a new tutorialisation system for new players, we encourage experienced players to enable it the first couple times they play the game because we've changed enough about how cities work, for instance, that they're going to want that explained properly.
Can you say more about how cities have changed?
In Civ VI, we called it the District system, and we still have them but it works entirely differently. In Civ VI, you’d have a science district and a culture district and a commerce district. Now we just have urban and rural districts, and those urban districts can have any two buildings you want there. It's much more flexible. All the science buildings have the same type of adjacency bonuses [...] it's resources that science buildings like to be adjacent to. So you'll tend to clump your science buildings together in a similar fashion to Civ VI, but it's more free-form than it was before.
So I think that's going to make it so there’s lots of challenging puzzles for the experienced players, but a new player can come in, and even if they're not getting 100% of the science out of their city that an experienced player gets, it's not going to stop them enjoying the game and progressing.
One final question before we’re out of time: What part of the game are you most looking forward to seeing players get to grips with?
One thing people don't appreciate right out of the gate is once you have this game that's broken up in these different ages… I usually play France. Before, France always was one big civilisation [with] one leader attached to it. Now, you can play France, and France's origin is the Roman Empire. You’ll get to Rome then move through the Norman Empire and into France. You'll be able to see more fully what those nations' histories are, and there'll be options for who you're going to have leading it.
I think people are a little bit gun-shy about how breaking my game up into Ages is going to work for me, but once they see it, I think they're going to see that it's actually opening up even more options.
Our thanks to Ed Beach for taking the time to speak with us and share his thoughts. The age of Civilization VII dawns on Switch on 11th February 2025. What do you hope to see in Civ VII? Sound off in the comments below!