Firaxis’ Ed Beach and Dennis Shirk talk major overhauls in “Test of Time” update.
It has been difficult at times for new mainline releases in the Civilization series of games to win over new players right out of the gate. For Civilization VII—which launched just shy of one year ago—the struggles seemed to go deeper, with some players saying it didn’t feel like a Civilization game.
Civ VII’s developers, Firaxis Games, announced today it is planning an update this spring called “Test of Time” that rethinks a few unpopular changes, in some cases replacing key mechanics from the original release.
I spoke with Ed Beach, the Civilization franchise’s creative director, as well as Dennis Shirk, its executive producer, about what’s changing, the team’s interpretation of the player backlash to the choices in the initial release, and Firaxis and 2K’s plans for the future of the Civilization model.
The heart of the controversy
There were of course bugs, balance issues, and missing documentation and UI features, and there have been updates to address some of those issues, with more to come.
For example, I asked about two oft-requested features: a city connections view, and the classic hot seat local multiplayer mode.
Beach said a connections view is in the works, though it will come after the big spring update. As for hot seat, he said that “there are some key members of our development team who feel passionately about getting that out.”
Shirk promised that’s coming too, but declined to say when.
But the real heart of the controversy is that Civ VII broke with what a lot of players considered core DNA for the series.
“We introduced all these great new mechanics because we wanted to give our players something new to chew on because they had something very similar from IV or V to VI,” said Shirk. “It was like if we were making Madden and we decided they’re going to play with a soccer ball instead of a football.”
For example, Civ VII lets players play any historical leader with any civilization and requires them to leave behind their initial civilization pick in favor of a new one mid-game—not just once, but twice, at the beginning of the second and third ages, phases of play with distinct tech trees and mechanics.
“I am a huge fan of British history, and so going from the Romans to the Normans to a Great Britain, that feels very natural to me. But it’s not natural to everybody,” Beach said. “As soon as you introduce those type of civ changes and the mixing and mashing with any leader, all of a sudden I think there’s an immersion element.
“We got feedback in some of our focus testing before the game shipped that there was going to be some level of controversy here, but we didn’t realize quite how strongly players identified with the idea of, ‘I need to take some people and grow them and have that specific civilization cultural set be what’s growing to face the challenges of world history,’” he added.
I mentioned prior big changes, like the switch in Civ V from the series’ classic “stacks of doom” military gameplay to a more granular, one-unit-one-tile approach to combat, and asked why the changes in Civ VII were so much more divisive than something like that.
“The difference… was the immersive storytelling versus the mechanics,” Shirk explained. Features like one-unit-one-tile “were mechanical changes that did not impact the immersion, the emotional storytelling that you’re telling yourself in your head.”
“It’s not all about the mechanics,” he said. “It’s about the game that players want to build for themselves.”
One civilization to stand the test of time
Starting with the Test of Time update, players will have the option to play one civilization through all three of the game’s ages. Each civ will have an apex age when it will have access to its full kit. In other ages, it will keep some of its kit, but it will also gain an age-appropriate culture tree, and the player will be able to use a new system to give their civ access to unique units or infrastructure from another civilization that would call the current age its apex.
At the start of an age, AI leaders will follow the player’s lead—if the player decides to stick with their existing civ, the others will stay, too. If they decide to switch to a new one, the AI will be able to do the same.
The idea is that this allows for players to not only pick which approach suits their preferences, but to change their mind mid-game, without a lock-in from the game settings at initialization.
Victories and triumphs
The update will also rethink both how victory works in the game, and the controversial legacy paths system, which saw players trying to achieve linear, prescribed goals within each age to gain bonuses for the following one (or in the case of the modern age, to win in the end).
Whereas the base game delayed any direct work on victories until the third and final age (modern), Test of Time will let players begin making progress toward a victory from the very first age (antiquity), and if they manage to take a very strong lead, it will actually be possible to win the game outright in the second age (exploration).
As before, there will be four victory conditions, but a few will be rethought for this new context. The cultural victory will be achieved through a custom combination of wonders, great works, celebrations, and more. Military will remain focused on conquering cities and towns. Economic will, like culture, add up a bunch of things, including resources, gold buildings, factories, and treasure convoys. And the scientific victory will remain a space race.
Additionally, Firaxis is removing the concept of legacy paths from the game completely. It will be replaced with a new system called “triumphs.”
Firaxis’ goal here is to make the gameplay more of a sandbox like prior titles, with less rigidity in how players work their way toward success.
Instead of following a preset sequence of goals, the player will pick and choose from a large menu of possible accomplishments, each of which is associated with the six leader attributes: cultural, military, economic, scientific, diplomatic, and expansionist. Completing a triumph will either give players an immediate reward or a card they can use to set themselves up at the start of the next age.
Examples include milestones like reaching 200 population, being the first to build a university, claiming most of the world’s natural wonders, or being at war with every other civilization.
Beach explained his thinking on triumphs. “We purposely set it up so, rather than like pathways through an age, we’re looking at it sort of like as a constellation of objectives, and you choose four or five of those guide stars to move towards,” he said. “But they’re varied enough and they’re difficult enough that there’s no way you can complete all of them.”
There will be default rewards that players can claim at Age transition even if they don’t achieve any triumphs at all, an affordance Beach says is for beginner players.
During development, triumphs were considered alongside a very different alternative: simply doubling the number of legacy paths—two culture, two economic, two military, and two science. “But we look at that versus this sort of more open-ended triumph system, and we liked the open-endedness of it,” Beach said.
Triumphs are also designed in such a way that modders will be able to “easily” add them to the game. Firaxis is also workshopping something called “triumph sets,” which would allow players to configure their game at the start with specific limited packages of possible triumphs tailored to certain playstyles or challenges.
“We have [players] that are saying, I’d love it if you actually randomized the triumphs so I don’t even know going into the game which ones I’m going to be presented with,” Beach said. “We’re holding off on that for right now. That’s sort of a future idea.”
33-33-33
These are big changes that aim to walk the line of retaining what makes VII unique, while satisfying players of V and VI who felt it went way too far.
Civilization creator Sid Meier famously had a rule for sequels: 33 percent of a new game should retain systems that were established in the prior entry, 33 percent should substantially improve prior systems, and 33 percent should be brand-new systems and mechanics.
“I actually was challenged by my design team, and they wanted to change even more, way blowing past that 33-33-33 rule,” said Beach. “I would actually numerically try to add up how much change we were talking about and demonstrate to them that we had blown way past those guidelines and start to try to rein them in and say, well, out of these systems that we want to make updates to, let’s pull back a couple of these and keep a couple of them the same because we’re just overdoing it in terms of how innovative we want to be here.”
He said that in the end, “we still probably violated the 33-33-33 rule by going a little bit heavier into a new approach to everything, but there were some things we really wanted to tackle.”
Why VII changed so much
Beach and Shirk explained a little bit about how the game ended up where it did.
“I think part of that comes out of Civ VI being the longest development cycle we’ve ever had before,” Beach said. The team worked on that entry in some way or another for roughly 11 years.
Going into VII, “we spent longer on our postmortem than we ever had before,” Beach recalled. “We had whiteboards filled with thoughts on every single system and what was good about it and what wasn’t good about it.”
“We wanted to tackle that late game problem of the combinatorial explosion,” he explained—referring to how some players of prior Civ games felt that the amount of things to control becomes unwieldy toward the end of a long playthrough, thanks to “so many cities to manage, so many units to manage, too much micromanagement.”
“We just saw a lot of data about people never finishing games and just deciding at some point, I’ve gotten what I can out of this game, this game is now a chore,” he said.
The team also wanted to make the game more modular and extensible, so it would be easier to design and add new systems post-launch. He cited frustrations working on Civ VI, where the combinatorial explosion problem was already so significant that it became a deterrent to adding new things to the game.
Testing a new approach
Based on Firaxis’ experience with Civ VII‘s reception, the studio is trying some new things to incorporate player feedback earlier in the development process for new mechanics or systems.
“It’s the worst-kept secret in the world that we’ve had this external test team for quite a few years called our Frankenstein Group,” noted Beach. It’s a small group of people—fewer than 50—who help test out new ideas and give feedback.
Now, that’s being expanded with a workshop program facilitated by publisher 2K that loops in many more members of the game’s community for play sessions and feedback rounds.
Shirk said this is a big departure from how things were done in the Civ V and Civ VI eras. With V, the team would release an update, then browse Reddit and sites like CivFanatics to see the reception. “In VI, we actually got to introduce more data and telemetry just to see how players were playing, but still a lot of us just looking at the forums,” he added.
I asked if Firaxis and 2K would consider the early access model, which is more typical for non-AAA games, for future Civ titles. “It’s one of those things that you can never say never,” Shirk responded. “As developers, we’re always looking at that jealously because we see that it’s a great opportunity.”
Both Beach and Shirk claimed that the audience of Civilization has expanded significantly over the past few games. You can’t please everyone, but more than most other games in the 4X or grand strategy genre that can be satisfied with serving a niche, Civilization—a franchise that has intermittently been the gold standard of genre across its 35-year history—has to try.
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