Going hands-on with an early build of Sid Meier’s Civilization 7 at Gamescom 2024, I’m impressed by much of what this upcoming installment in the hugely popular strategy series will bring to the table. The reworked core mechanics that finally allow you to create your own leader and civilization pairings look like a brilliant evolution of the franchise and, while I didn’t get to spend too long playing the upcoming game, I came away looking forward to the full release.
One of the things I enjoyed most, however, was the unique art direction that the development team has chosen this time around. A departure from the relatively cartoony look of Civilization 6, the world and leaders of Civilization 7 feel much more authentic and realistic but are still pleasingly colorful and expressive.
It all looks fantastic in action and speaking to Civilization 7 executive producer Dennis Shirk after my play session, I’m keen to gain some insight into the process behind the creation of this new aesthetic.
A fresh pair of eyes
“With each iteration of Civilization, we usually have a new art director step up and have their vision put into the game,” explains Shirk. “This time it was Jason Johnson, our art director, he was one of the artists on Civilization 6 as well, but he wanted to take what was best about 6 with its vibrant color palette, its optimistic outlook, and take what was best with 5 more of the realism, but not so much of the gritty muddiness, and make something new.”
This will undoubtedly be a relief for the many fans crying out for the series to return to a more grounded art direction, but the decision was also made with considerations for the player experience in mind. “He did an approach that he called readable realism. He got a lot of inspiration from museum dioramas that he'd go and look at, he loves that kind of modeling,” Shirk says. He also suggests that plenty of inspiration came from “some of the best game boards ever made and painted.”
“We have environment artists at the studio that play a lot of Warhammer and Warhammer 40k,” he continues, “the stuff they put together and created looks amazing and [Johnson] loves that he's basically creating the best looking tabletop game on the planet [with Civilization 7].”
On top of a new art direction, Civilization 7 will also be shaped by a new approach to storytelling. Shirk reveals that developer Firaxis Games has brought in a sizable narrative team for this installment: “So in the past, we've mainly had just historians, for the Civilopedia, things like that, because we've leaned on the player to tell their story entirely. This time around, we wanted to bring more life into the world. [...] With the narrative team being brought in, they put narrative out in the world [to discover].”
As for what this means in practical terms, Shirk says that you can expect an even greater focus on “those discoveries you can make, those little 'storylets' that give you a little bit of story about what's happening in the world and why you're making a decision. [The team] attached little narrative quests to each civilization later in the game too, there's different chains that you go down based on what you've done in the game. You might have an event come up and say, 'Hey, there's a thing that's happened based on what you did. What choice do you want to make here?' and you start going down a path of making those decisions.”
Even so, he is careful to clarify that the focus is still very much on player freedom and emergent storytelling. “It's not an on-rails thing like storytelling in other games, this is just contributions to the story that you have in your own head, that story that you're telling yourself,” he says. “We wanted to take that storytelling to another level and give you some additional ammunition to pack into your head as you're playing through the game."
New beginnings
Civilization 7 is also in a unique position as the first mainline entry in the series to launch simultaneously on console and PC. This means that it will be the first exposure that many new players will have to the sometimes quite daunting, complex franchise. Luckily, Shirk is eager to explain some of the ways in which player activity in Civilization 6 has shaped the tutorial system in its successor.
“We've had a whole team concentrating on just the onboarding and tutorial. In Civ 6, we had a separate tutorial and then we had advisors in the game, but our advisor system couldn't ‘talk’ to the UI, for example,” Shirk says, referring to the slightly awkward implementation of the advisors in Civilization 6. Advisors (on-screen characters that provided useful tips and tricks) would point you towards specific actions to try and guide you towards success. While they might tell you to find a specific on-screen button in order to execute a command, there was no way for this to be automatically selected or highlighted on the player’s interface - making it easy to get lost menus.
“Telemetry also told us nobody played the tutorial, because frankly, when people get a new game, they don't want to play the tutorial. They just want to play the game. So we actually rewrote the whole system,” he explains. “We have the tutorial dynamically embedded in the game now so it's going to teach as you play. We have the tutorial system able to ‘talk’ to the UI system, so that if they want you to press something specific, it actually does that, and you can be walked through that process.
Players that are new to the system can just come in and have a good time
“We’re constantly refining that to make it even better. The main driver of that is because we're releasing on all platforms on day zero, we know that a lot of console players are probably going to be new to Civilization. We want to make sure that we're really taking that into account and that a new player can come in and understand the basics of how to play,” he says. “Even if they don't engage with half of the stuff that we put in the game, they're going to be able to have a really good time invading their neighbor and having that initial Civilization experience that most people have.”
According to “telemetry and data” in addition to forum feedback, the developers believe that “newer players are going to play a domination game” where they attempt to win by conquering the cities of every other civilization. “That's the default. It's the easiest thing to grasp. You build an army, you attack something. So we're removing as many roadblocks as we can,” he continues. “Players that are new to the system can just come in and have a good time.”
Whether these efforts to create a more approachable experience will be a success is yet to be seen, but I’m certainly eager to find out when Civilization 7 launches for PC, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch on February 6, 2025.
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