At Gamescom this week, PC Games Insider attended the Civilization VII presentation and then spoke with Edward Beach, the creative director and lead designer at Firaxis Games.

As usual with a new version of a long-running franchise, the challenge is balancing features beloved by generations of players with innovations to keep the game fresh. Firaxis and 2K announced Civilization VII in June and then revealed its gameplay during the showcase in Cologne.

Most of our one-on-one chat with Beach focused on how his team has reorganised the game into three distinct chapters (the Age of Antiquity, the Age of Exploration, and the Modern Age). This streamlines the late-game content, which has been a pain point for players.

The paths of history

The transitions between Ages enable players to choose different strategic paths and cultural identities to carry forward. Additionally, the game features more flexible leader-civilization pairings, enhanced military gameplay with commander units, and a focus on exploration and settlement, which many players consider the most fun part of the experience. Can these changes make the Civilization experience engaging and approachable for both virgin and veteran players?

Sid Meier launched the very first Civilization game in 1991, and it remains the poster child of the 4X genre. Take-Two bought the rights to the Civilization franchise from Infogrames in 2004 and then bought Firaxis outright in 2005. The last full Civilization game for PC was Civilization VI in 2016. So, what are the design principles behind Civilization VII, which is due on hard drives in February 2025?

“We fundamentally restructured the game!” says Edward Beach. “All [4X] games start out very small, with a settler or a warrior, and you explore the map and get one city going, and it expands exponentially. You start putting more and more cities down the map. Your army gets larger by the end of the game, so just playing through a turn becomes a 10-minute activity.”

Beach reveals that his team “consistently noticed” that it was usual for players to enjoy exploring the map and setting up an empire at the beginning, but would commonly fail to take their game through to the end, preferring instead to restart and get that early rush of exploration. “There’s a point where lots of our players drop out and say, ‘I’d have more fun starting a new session than trying to finish it!’” admits Beach. “It’s terrific that they play it over and over again like that. But there’s a lot of content and cool history showcased at the end of our game that players are not engaging with.”

The solution is to think about how the game is structured and whether there can be points throughout that enable the game to be re-energised and simplified. “We really think about the game structure and how many clicks it takes to do anything, and also how many units you are managing,” says creative director Beach. Working with historians (“I challenged them to look at history and figure out when there was a natural break; where all the big classical empires like Rome and Greece started to crumble and fall apart…”), they’ve split the game up in Ages which are a chance to ‘tidy up’ the gameplay.

“You play through the Age of Antiquity, then the Age of Exploration, then the Modern Age, and at each of those breakpoints, we can simplify the game a little bit for you,” says Beach. “We can drop the things that you won’t bother to keep managing because now you’re in a more modern time period.”

This is one of the most significant changes to the game structure since the series began, and perhaps understandably, the devs are getting some “consternation from the die-hards.” Will the transition from age to age be jarring for the player?

“We’ve had a lot of chances to iterate on it, run focus tests, get reaction,” explains Beach. “We want to recognize the empire you’ve been identifying with and building up, and we want vestiges of that to stick around with you. So if you start the game as Egypt, you might build pyramids, mortuary temples and funerary complexes. Anything you do that’s super Egyptian, that carries forward with you.”

A new way to play

He continues: “We have this notion of historical pathways. So you might go from Egypt and become a new Middle Eastern power, or an African power. You may end up exploring some other cultural legacies as you’re going along. But the Egyptian identity you established early in the game, we keep with you. Each of our cultures has unique policies they can build into their government, and we call those ‘traditions’. Those Egyptian traditions that you have when you start as Egypt, you can actually keep slotting them into how your government is set up way on into through the Modern Age – perhaps as Egypt, anything you’re doing along a navigable river [will be] much stronger.”

But it’s also possible to be flexible and follow an unexpected path with your civilization that changes its trajectory. While we’re viewing Civilization VII at Gamescom, we see a suggestion that you could begin as Egypt but focus on military horse technology and end up with a society more like Mongolia.

“We don’t want you to think ‘I’m playing as Egypt. All I’m going to be able to do is be really good around rivers!’” says Beach. “Maybe the strategic imperative is to go toe-to-toe with my neighbour on the continent and become the dominant military power on the continent. I can move like Mongolia and be effective in that new direction. Let me unlock that civilization and go with that. It’s a new strategic moment for the player. It makes that Age transition a more empowering single decision than I think a Civ game has ever had before. You’ll have three or four big decisions as to where you want to move. It’s cool to let players pick what their next strategic pivot is going to be.”

Another part of the game that’s evolving is how the leaders work. It’s a more obvious iteration of what the team tried in Civ VI. Leaders and civilizations are no longer intrinsically linked.

“We had a couple of instances of it [before],” explains Beach, reminding us that Eleanor of Aquitaine could lead France or Britain while Kubla Khan could lead China or Mongolia in the last game. “They were very popular, and we had players asking for a system where leaders could be mixed and matched. And if you think about the way our Age system works now, you could be progressing from Egypt to another African or Asian culture, or even Mongolia. And as our roster of civilizations has increased, our leaders need to be more flexible. The Age system strongly suggested to us that continuing to loosen the ties between leaders and civilizations was the right way to put this game back together.”

The team will also change the way settlers work later in the game. Exploring each new randomly generated map is fun, but you’ve often seen everything in the first 60 turns. So the team have created a way to create new opportunities for exploration in later Ages.

“If it’s a new chapter of the game, it should be full of opportunity, and opportunity in our game is typically tied to exploration,” says Beach. “So what we’re doing now is this: in the Antiquity age, you can’t get to the other side of the world. We always make it so we’re blocking off half the map from you with those deep ocean tiles. At the beginning of the next phase, the key activity is to find what the other side of the world looks like. What are the resources over there that my people have never seen before?”

During the Age of Exploration, naval scouts give you access to a new land of opportunity where you can establish new coastal settlements. “It’s another area where we’ve tried to refine,” says Beach. “It’s very interesting to [base it] on your choices at that transition point. There are some dark paths you can take where you change up your settling strategy and maybe give up the ability to settle on your home continent, but you get an enhanced ability to settle overseas. Mongolia is interesting because they have different objectives regarding what they want to do militarily in that part of the game.”

Beach and his team are being cagey about the details at this point, but the concept is to open up a new part of the map at the Age break to see how different civilizations will race to it.

Learning the world

It’s that question of balance again. Will these additions to Civilization VII attract new players, bring back lapsed players, and appeal to long-time Civ fans, all at once?

“We can’t forget about our core audience,” muses Beach. “Our core audience has grown quite a bit through Civilization V and VI. Civ VI was the first to really get out to consoles. We have over a million players on the Switch, for instance. We have to respect the big community that has developed recently. But we feel like there are lots of improvements and it should be more welcoming to new players. We’ve spent a lot of time on our tutorials – way more time than we ever have before.”

In addition, this time, there will be four different advisors, and you can let them know the sort of player you want to be. “You can say, ‘I don’t want to conquer everyone. I just want to be a culture player.’ There’s an advisor you can choose. It’s a little ambitious to say we can cater to everybody… but there are steps we’ve taken in all those directions.”

We ask Beach if the expectations of gamers have changed over the years. What do they want from their 4X games today? Are strategy gamers different now from 30 years ago?

“Yes, that’s absolutely true,” he confirms. “We’re looking at both board games and computer games, and people had different tolerances. The rule books were horrible 20 years ago, 30 years ago! When I first started with board games, the session length for a board game would have been way longer. You see that with computer games our tutorials have to be much better than they used to be. We can’t assume that somebody will pull out a 70-page manual that was included in the box version of the game and read through that to try to learn how to play any more.”

It comes down to three things: tutorials, streamlining, and session length. “We have to think that asking somebody to play 15 to 20 hours before they get to the endgame for the first time is not the way games are set up now,” says Beach. “Our new Ages system is a direct pivot to address some of those changes.”

If you want to play a conflict-style game, Civilization VII will also make bringing your units to the frontline easier and faster. “I would say our military gameplay has changed the least,” says Beach. “But the one thing that was always annoying about our military gameplay was when you have your armies spread out on the map. When you have eight or 10 unit pieces on the map trying to engage the enemy, you have to get them from your empire over to the battlefield. And that was always way more tedious than it should have been; just getting them through the choke points and across that terrain was always unwieldy.”

The latest release introduces a new Commander unit and an automatic reinforcement command to solve that delay. “The Commander is able to pack four or more units into his unit,” explains Beach. “Once they’re packed up like that, they move as a single entity across the map to their target. You unpack the army there in order to engage with the enemy. Then you get that great tactical gameplay, but you’ve skipped that intermediate step of getting each unit across the land to your foe. We also have [a new feature] where if they need to be reinforced, you don’t have to move the reinforcement all the way across the map to get there. There’s an automatic reinforcement command: you set up the reinforcement queue, and they’ll arrive at the battlefield three or four turns later."

He continues: “It’s also interesting because the AI uses Commanders too, so you have to scout around the battlefield more carefully because if all of a sudden just one AI unit appears, but it’s Commander, and he deploys his army next to your city, that’s a very scary moment. Some of our top players recently visited us for a hands-on session, and some of them lost cities to the AI. That hasn’t happened to me in a Civ game in years. The Commanders are a big innovation.”

Civilization VII represents a decisive evolution for the venerable 4X franchise. With its fresh Age system, flexible leader-civilization pairings, and accelerated late-game military gameplay, Firaxis aims to reinvigorate the series for both long-time fans and newcomers. As creative director Edward Beach emphasizes, these changes address long-standing challenges in the genre while respecting Civilization’s core appeal. The industry will watch closely to see how these ambitious changes resonate with players and potentially influence the broader strategy game landscape.

This conversation took place in person at Gamescom last week. Gamescom is the world’s largest trade fair for the video games sector, held annually in Cologne since it launched in 2009. It kicked off this year on August 20, 2024, and over 1,400 exhibitors from 64 countries (a whopping jump up from last year’s 1,220 exhibitors) took part. Press could see Civilization VII on the 2K/Take-Two Interactive pavilion, and the game was also a high-profile part of The Future Games Show on Wednesday, August 21, where it was revealed that actor Gwendoline Christie will narrate the game. 2K and Firaxis Games will publish Sid Meier’s Civilization VII on February 11, 2025.