Pull up a chair and enjoy as we sit down with the team behind Civ 7 and learn about what we can expect to find in their upcoming game.
Civilization. In the gaming space, the name alone brings forth memories and scenes of gaming sessions lasting hours, even days and the image of one certain real world pacifist ready to hit the big red button. With Civilization VII on the horizon, I had the opportunity to sit down with some of the team behind the next installment of this monolith of a game series. Join me as we dive into the details behind Civilization and what we can expect.
Civilization VII Team Interview – Lead Producer Andrew Frederiksen
Andrew Frederiksen is the lead producer over at Firaxis Games and has been with the company since 2015. I was lucky enough to sit down with him and pick his brain about some of the new and returning features we can expect to see in Civilization VII.
Q. This is the most ambitious Civilization game yet, can you please tell us some of the new and exciting features we can expect?
Andrew: We work with the rule of thirds, a third of the game should be proven, a third of the game should be improved and a third of the game should be new. You’ll find that a lot of things have changed in a lot of different ways. I think obviously the biggest thing is the Ages system and that really changes the content space, it really changed how victories work and changed a lot of other stuff across the course of the game. I definitely think that’s the biggest but then you’ll also see changes in the trade system, resources, a lot of new stuff with how units work as well as the commanders which is a big new feature as well.
Q. What are some of the main returning features and some of the features that aren’t returning?
Andrew: One of my favourite features that is actually gone, I struggled with this at first but now I’m so passionate about it, there’s no more builders or workers. Now, you still get to make decisions on where to grow and what to make, but now you don’t have to use turns to make a unit and then turns to move the unit, it’s just like “get to the interesting decision right away”. So it’s something that’s removed but ultimately makes the game better.
Q.Are there some new leaders we can expect to see, anyone really interesting we can expect?
Andrew: One of the coolest things working on Civ 7 is the time we spend learning, even if I’m not the one involved in them I’m like “oh we’re going to do that leader? That civ? That’s cool!” There’s leaders we’ve talked about for years that we finally get to bring in, there’s leaders that no-one had thought about until this new approach opened up possibilities. However, I’m going to be very careful and not say anything and give too much away. There is of course Hatshepsut that we’ve revealed, there’s Augustus and there’s also Tecumseh who comes with the pre-order and they’re incredible in so many other ways but I think they’re all really fun.
Q. Just to continue with that train of thought, I’m sure there are many fans wanting to know, will we see the return of Nuclear Gandhi?
Andrew: *laughs* We are always looking at what we’ve had in the past and the fan favourites, whenever we’re choosing a leader, a civ, any piece of content we’re always looking at fan favourites. We’re also always looking at what are they not expecting. You know there are ones where people are guessing online, we love seeing the guesses and going “ohh they got that one! But we haven’t revealed it yet” or “Oh they really think that? We never thought about that one.” so there’s always a lot of really interesting conversations. Will any particular come back? You’re not going to get me, as much as I want to answer them. I think the better thing to say is we have a lot more exciting announcements to come where I think fans will be excited and surprised.
Q. Will we see any changes to the multiplayer system? Because Ages changes everything, how will we see that impacting multiplayer?
Andrew: You’re right on the money, because Ages has so many impacts, some of them really help multiplayer in particular. Because you’re not playing a game like you would play any other previous Civ game. In the previous games you would play from beginning to end and it was very common for people to be like “well we got this far, there’s nothing I can do to stop you or there’s nothing you can do to stop me” and in those sorts of situations people would stop because the end was a foregone conclusion. Now with the Ages it’s like “we’re playing this Age and” I hate using this word, but it’s kind of like a checkpoint “we’re in a new Age so we’re focused on a shorter period of time with its own rule set, its own challenges. I might not have done well in this Age but I may do better in a later Age.” That’s obviously a huge thing. Coming out on all platforms at once with crossplay is also huge so it’ll be easier to play with your friends even if you’re not on the same system.
Q. Was there any difficulty with building the game for release on all platforms?
Andrew: There are definitely some challenges, up till now Civ has always come out on PC and then if it came out on console, it was ported over later. And that’s obviously a challenge in some ways because you’re taking something that was designed one way technologically and moving it over here. But now we’re doing that at the same time, which in some ways is easier because now we know the issues upfront and we can work towards that. But in other ways it’s a problem because you have to solve all the issues at the same time. We had a lot of conversations which meant some decisions were made differently or made at different points, but those were mostly on a technical side. From a gameplay standpoint, it was about making it as accessible as possible for everyone who wanted to play it, and that was something we felt was very important to get it out there and have everyone get on it right away.
Q.Do you have any final words to get our readers excited for the game?
Andrew: I think I would just say that if you’re new to Civ, this is a great one to come in on. A lot of the stuff we have is streamlined, we’ve taken out some of the complexity while keeping the interesting decision in a few areas, don’t worry it’s still plenty complex. If you’ve been playing Civ for a long time, this will be new and fresh and exciting in different ways.
Andrew (left), The handsome man writing this (right)
Civilization VII Team Interview – Lead Unit Artist John Fitzgerald & Senior Lead Environmental Artist Matthew Quickel
John Fitzgerald is the lead unit artist for Civ VII and has been working with Firaxis for almost 12 years now. While Matthew Quickel has been with the company for a little over 10 years and is the environment lead for Civ VII. Much like with Andrew I was able to pick their brains with some questions, looking more into the art side of Civilisation.
Q. Civilisation VII is the most ambitious game in the series yet. With the new Ages system, as we move through Ages and the civ is changed, will we see a change from the previous civ reflected in the units or architecture?
Matthew: There is a plan for that. When you move into a new Age, you’ll have some infrastructure left behind and you’ll replace that infrastructure as you move into a new Age. The environment team has tried to do a good job of thinking of how all those combinations can come together. And we had to do that through a variety of things like materials and colours and all those things so it cohesively feels like it’s different, like it’s separate, but you’re moving into something new.
John: And from a unit perspective we do have a wide range of cultures in the game that we’re trying to place onto the units of course. But it is the kind of the conclusion of one age and the beginning of something new and to kind of reflect that, you are given a new roster of units to start off with.
Q. How much research goes into designing the units, the architecture and the environment?
John: I’d love to be able to travel the world to see these things first hand. But as a member of the team at Firaxis we love history, we’re all a bit of history buffs. But we’ve hired on historians, PHD historians to help kind of guide the different cultures and what they mean for those different time periods. For myself, I’ve been working in historical based games for 20 years so it’s very much in my wheelhouse, I very much so enjoy it and with Civilization we want to give you the definitive walk through history you know? And kind of make it your own. So making sure we have historical detail in there, kind of what you expect to see for the different time periods and different cultures, we want to try and represent them as much as possible.
Matthew: We have a variety of different people on our team with a lot of different interests. A lot of it will start with a basic conversation of “well what civ are we working on? Is there someone in-house who has that information?” As John mentioned we do have historians which has been a great resource for us, but also our principal artist he actually specifically travels to locations on his personal vacations to go see some of the wonders because he’s just that interested in them and he gathers the information on them, and brings it back as he works on them so he’s been a great resource. Maybe there’s just someone on the team that has a specific interest in a certain civ and they may have a personal connection to it, they may have just grown up as like an Egypt buff and they already have a ton of information on that. And so we just try to utilise that combination of personal interest, research that we do, artists that are going to those locations, historians, it’s really just a combination of all of those that helps us define what Civ is going to be like.
Q.With designing the environments, specifically the cities, the intricate details to some of the buildings, how hard was that to add?
Matthew: Trying to get detail in a game where you can be zoomed so far out and then even zoomed in quite a bit, like the Wonders, they can get really close. Trying to get that level of detail across those layers is quite challenging. We try to design a visual language “readable realism” is a term that we use that refers to a certain level of tangibility that we want every building to feel like it has. So we already kind of had that experience in Civ 6 but we pushed it even further with Civ 7. So we had to do things like reduce the rows of bricks so it’s readable from different cameras.
John: And for units, readable realism is very important for us too. We wanted to give a nod to tabletop gaming like little miniatures which can look great as a member of an army but you also just want to pick them up and want to look at them and look at all the details up close and really provide enough texture in the world like you could drag your finger along it and feel the tooth of the world. I think it’s just a dynamite look, it has a lot of potential for growth and consistency over different ages but you just want to see more, you want to build more, collect more of these little units
Q. What was your favourite thing to design in the game?
John: One of the things I’m very proud of is getting the breadth of unit content in the game, both in terms of the overall scope with all of the different ages and then the width with all the different cultures. So each Age has an opportunity for us to have a strong start, middle and end. You’re given some units to work with as you research military techs and you’re able to unlock them and as you gain military mastery you’re able to unlock the final level and see your empire all the way through. That has been a tremendous amount of work and is something we’re really quite proud of, just the sheer amount of diversity that we have been able to get into these units.
Matthew: Yeah I just want to echo that statement, in Civ 6 we were sort of limited in our resources and what we could provide on that level of diversity in the game. One of the things we did do in Civ 6 however was that for each civ that you have, you had a unique palace. We weren’t actually able to ship with a unique palace for every civ but we went back and added it and one of the things that is really cool is when you have fans who see that and it was really a desire of ours. So when we went into Civ 7 we’re like “we want to make expansive cities with a lot of diversity and every building you place down feels like it belongs in that culture. And I’m just really proud with what we were able to accomplish there and that the team was able to come up with processes and systems to allow us to create content that we previously weren’t able to create. I think it’s just going to be a really cool experience for the fans that are really invested in the nuance of what each civilization should look like.
Q. We’ve seen in the trailers volcanoes and hurricanes, will we see any sort of destruction elements?
Matthew: Yes, natural disasters do play a role on the environment. It’s always kind of tricky in Civ with the game scale, how much of that we can easily see, how much of that we can afford to do. But you’ll absolutely see the pillaged states that will happen if, say, a volcano damages it. We have floods that impact the terrain around it. We’ll definitely have some impact from the natural disasters in the game, plus all the damage from when units come in and destroy everything.
John (left), Matthew (centre), Your favourite tabletop reviewer (right)
Civilization VII Team Interview – Conclusion
There you have it folks, I hope my info prodding was enough to keep everyone tied over until Civ 7 releases next year. I want to thank Andrew, John and Matthew for meeting with me to answer some questions. If you want to pick up this latest game in a long running series, you’ll have to wait only a few more months. Civ 7 is set to release on February 11th and will be releasing day one on PC, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch.
All I’m saying is I never realised how much I wanted a game narrated by Brienne of Tarth until we finally got one.
Thank you very much to the team behind Civ 7! You can find out more about the game via the official Civilisation VII website. Want to chat all things gaming? Join us over on the Qualbert Discord for a passionate community across Australia and the world!
