If you click on a link and make a purchase we may receive a small commission. Read our editorial policy.
What the Civilization developers felt was wrong in Civ VI, and how they're fixing it for 2025's Civ VII
History comes in layers, and Civilization VII lets you build empires inside them that even crises can't tear down
Popverse's top stories of the day
- The curious festive magic of the holiday movie, and why we shouldn't think too much about it
- WATCH: The cast and creator of Star Trek: Lower Decks talk journeying to the undiscovered country with the show's final season
- Long before The Boys and The Franchise, Marvel explored the dangers of Hollywood and superheroes with X-Statix
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.
Want to know what's coming up next in pop culture? Check out Popverse's guides to:
And if you're looking for specific franchises or genres, we've also got lists for the:
Finally, if you're a fan of superheroes and not specific to just Marvel or DC, we have overall guides to:
About PAX West
A Celebration Of Video Games, Tabletop, & Game Culture!
Dates
-
Location
Seattle Convention Center
United States
Follow Popverse for upcoming event coverage and news
Find out how we conduct our review by reading our review policy
Let Popverse be your tour guide through the wilderness of pop culture
Sign in and let us help you find your new favorite thing.
Comments
Want to join the discussion? Please activate your account first.
Visit Reedpop ID if you need to resend the confirmation email.