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In order to come up with what next year’s Sid Meier’s Civilization VII was going to be, it fell to the team at Firaxis Games to take a long hard look at what had gone before… and realize that it didn’t really work the way they wanted it to.

“We did a really long set of post-mortems where we were very, very critical of Civ VI,” creative director Ed Beach explained during the Civ VII panel at PAX West 2024. “My design team can be brutal to themselves, to me, you know; they don’t pull punches. And what we came up with [was], we need to restructure the game.”

The problem, Beach argued, was that while previous versions of the game started small, “by the end, there’s so much that you’re managing, it’s unwieldy, it’s tough to do. So what we wanted to do is, we wanted to break the game up into smaller segments that could be more manageable, that we could contain that explosion, so we knew we wanted to break it up into chapters. We didn’t know what they were going to be called yet, we didn’t know how they were going to work, but I was starting to [think], ‘Okay, that’s a cool idea, let me start building on that.”

That building came in the form of studying how real cities and civilizations have changed through history, with Beach specifically looking at how London has been remade over and over again through time since its initial formation as Londinium somewhere in 110 AD — and that the city has been layered over itself again and again and again, as civilization evolves.

“That’s the big idea for Civ VII,” Beach explained. “History comes in layers, and you can build your civilization in these layers. Every part of the game, you are very, very powerful, you’re an empire at the height of their glory… and you get to build your empire the way that’s appropriate for that time period.”

But where does that fit into the idea of chapters? Well, the layers are breakpoints, as it turns out.

“You play as a different empire, and there’s going to have to be a moment where that age of history starts to wind down,” Beach said. “We basically decided, we’re going to end a chapter of history, we’re going to think about why the empires are struggling during those periods, and we’re going to have new game systems called ‘crises’ that players are going to have to sort of power through to get their empire to the end. What’s cool is that your empire doesn’t go anywhere. Your empire is still there; it’s been challenged, it’s a little frayed at the seams, but so much of what you built in that age is going to move forward with you.”

The new game, split into three chapters called ‘Antiquity Age,’ ‘Exploration Age,’ and ‘Modern Age,’ is “not like previous Civilization games where it’s just up and up and up and up, and you never had a challenge, you never had a setback. Now, I feel, it’s more like a long book series you read. It’s like an epic fantasy novel, or something like that, and there’s a climactic battle, and then you have a little bit of a pause and a reset when you start the next book. That’s sort of now the structure of our game, and I think it draws people through the whole game experience in a much better way.”

Sid Meier’s Civilization VII is scheduled for release February 11, 2025, and is available for pre-purchase now.

Watch the complete Civilization VII panel below.

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