Bình minh của một thời đại mới - Civilization VII Phỏng vấn Gamescom

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"Hello everyone, I'm Alex here with Gamereactor. I'm here with Dennis.
You might remember our faces because we've been in a very recent interview.
We are here at Gamescom though this time."

"We've just seen the Civ 7 full reveal after opening night live.
What a blast. I managed to play it a bit beforehand.
But, either way, people have now seen it.
What's the feeling now that you can sort of... the cat's out of the box."

"The cat's out of the bag basically.
It's all scary and exciting at the same time because this is the first time that the fans are really getting to see what we've been up to for the last batch of years."

"When you do something this big with something like Civilization, you're always holding your breath waiting to see what happens.
When the fan reaction started coming out, all the articles started landing, all of the streamers started posting, and watching the debates all start to fire up online about how they might play something like this, it's always just really cool to watch it all unfold and see what people think they're going to do with something like this."

"It's very cool.
It is because you guys have gone for something really radical in terms of Civ.
I think, as you said in the presentation, it's sort of by thirds you build new things and go back to what the franchise is best and then tweak what has been done in the past."

"So how do you feel about the reception that has been to this sort of 33% of newness?
Yeah, it's funny. We joke with that often because Civ has the rule of 33% same, 33% approved, 33% new, and we're like, Ed, you might be a little leaning into 40 because this is a big game."

"There's a lot of change in this game.
And the ages system alone accounts for a lot of that new feeling.
And what is actually the most interesting to me is 4, 5, and 6, fans could expect to play them all a certain way."

"They got so good at predicting what we're going to do that they always knew what was going to come in the expansion, the timing of releases, all of that stuff.
And this is what's most interesting to Ed and I because we're watching all of these debates unfold, we're watching people think about how they would play, how this new mechanic of the simulation of Rome and all the seeds of Rome throughout all of the world, all of Europe, how they're woven into other cultures."

"This gameplay system he's built is going to cause Civ players to have to play something new.
We've got a foundation of Civ, that core game loop remains, but it's a whole big system on top that they're not just going to be able to come in and play it like they played it in the past."

"There's going to be new strategies, new thought processes, new discussions that have to happen.
That's what I'm really excited to see unfold.
And as you mentioned there, there's the Ages."

"We've talked about that prior.
Something that I didn't really get to touch on was the transition between Ages, and that is going to feel like starting a new chapter, almost an entirely new section of the game as you will re-pick your civilization, you'll keep the same leader."

"How does that transitional aspect of the game play out, and does it sort of stop snowballing in a way from, say, games where we've all had them where somebody just starts out turn one, has the best start in the world, and then never slows down?
Well, that's interesting."

"Some of the work that I've put into this is because of the problem that Civilization VI had, which was a giant V in decisions and game play.
And the further into modern you went, the more clicking you were doing."

"You had to still make all those old decisions and all the new decisions, and all those decisions are interesting.
So in terms of the snowball effect, when we age transition and we're integrating another Civ's culture into our current culture, we're bringing Egypt forward, and now we're integrating, like, Songhai, that kind of thing."

"You've got a new civilization.
All the civilizations that enter that new age are all at the height of their power.
You're bringing things with you, but we're also taking away some old systems and adding in some new systems."

"Our goal is to keep your game play space about the same from age to age.
New discoveries to be made, for example, when you leave the antiquity, you're just exploring the landscape."

"Except when you get into exploration, you're looking for new decisions.
You're looking for a new place to live.
In modern, it's going to be something else."

"So he wants to keep the decision space similar in each, and he wants the decision space to stay interesting.
None of the benign decisions that you had to make in 6 where you're just constantly having to keep up."

"So that was his biggest goal with this system, is you're always playing something at the height of its power when it's interesting, and you're always making interesting decisions."

"A good parallel to that is when we had the straight line of traditional Civ, you play America.
You're playing America, but not cool until you get to their uniques, which happens very late."

"There's a reason nobody plays America in multiplayer, because everybody's dead by the time you get to what you can actually use.
So this, for him, simulating the way Rome has emerged as different cultures throughout time, was the best way that he could come up with to really make everything feel important in every age."

"So we hope that we've defeated that point where we just have widening and widening uninteresting decisions, and it's coming out of something that's really engaging and interesting and discoverable in each age."

"Does that lead in some way to the district changes as well, rather than give players a multitude of different decisions that they need to take?
It's now rural or city-based, and you build your districts around that?
One of the complaints that we had from our fans is that cities felt disjointed in 6, because you could build things anywhere. So you would min-max exactly where you were going to put that campus, sometimes in the middle of a ring of mountains, which was always hilarious to me. And you could only put buildings specifically in that campus building. It was rigid."

"The rules were rigid with that, and then you had a disjointed improvement. The new system allowed more flexibility with that. So you can group different buildings with different districts, but urban centers always have to be attached to each other. So you have a city center, when you decide to expand with more hero buildings out from that, it's got to be attaching to an existing one."

"So you can build along a riverfront, you can build backwards. When you do improvements, when your city grows and you get more population, they're going to build an improvement instantly, but it's got to be connected to the city. So the city feels more contiguous, and you have a more city-centric view of the game. It's more flexible in how you build your buildings."

"So we thought it was a much more interesting approach. It made a really cool-looking landscape. It just feels really good and takes away some of the micromanagement of workers and the min-maxing of where you place districts."

"I will miss my worker sound effects, but apart from that, I probably won't miss moving them around every turn or forgetting that they're there.
We put in new sound effects for other things."

"Brilliant. I mean, speaking of the sound, we've got a new narrator, Gwendolyn Christie.
How did that come about?
I remember you mentioning last time we spoke that you didn't mean to go for the Game of Thrones streak, but it just happened. Where do you go from Sean Bean? He was one of our favorite narrators. I mean, we've had a lot of narrators in the past, with Leonard Nimoy and so on and so forth, but Sean Bean was great, and when we were brainstorming who we wanted to voice the next, there were a lot of suggestions made."

"When Gwendolyn Christie's name came up, we're all a bunch of nerds at Firaxis, obviously, and it came up naturally because when your brain space is existing on Sean Bean, hers is not far off to the side because it's just connected and it just made a connection."

"And the funny thing is, is when we heard her do her lines, every little thing that you hear, it doesn't matter how insignificant the quote is, you hear heart, and you hear feeling, and you hear passion, and she put everything of herself into every line that she had."

"So much so that in the original design, we had different narrators per age because we wanted the ages to feel different.
And her reading in Antiquity was just like, oh, this is amazing."

"This just feels really good. And we ended up recording her straight through for the rest as well because she was the voice of Civ VII, and it continues to surprise us."

"She's engaged, she's super friendly, and she was really passionate about what she was doing.
She was excited about it.
It ended up being just a huge win."

"I don't remember the exact thread that led to that decision, honestly.
It just kind of bubbled up that way, and we went 2K, do you think we can get Gwendolyn Christie for this? And they're like, we'll find out."

"And they went and searched, and they're like, she's available.
And we're like, let's do that. So, yeah, it was great.
As you say, in my three-hour play session, I was trying to get to the end of the age as quickly as possible."

"So I'd usually skip the announcements, but every time, I listened. I had to listen. I couldn't tune. Her character, everything she reads, it doesn't matter how insignificant."

"That's what blew us away about it. Everything felt interesting when she was talking about it.
It was the most important thing in the world.
It was great. I mean, there are plenty of important things in the world as well, and stepping back a bit towards the comparisons with Civ VI and Civ VII, there are things that are kept. There are things that are going to be not even, well, everything is tweaked up a bit, but some things make a return, like natural disasters, I noticed. There's also this element that seems to be built on things going wrong as well in the crises."

"Could you talk a bit more about how they can affect your empire without maybe necessarily being something that you can build around?
We were talking about the crisis system a little bit today, and this is part of Ed's modeling of that. He uses Rome as that core example. Rome rose to glory, crisis hit them, internal corruption, external barbarians, and eventually other cultures emerged, whether it's through Spain, Germany, etc., all across Europe, and Rome, those seeds are all over the world and merged into that."

"The crisis system part of that is what intrigued him the most. It wasn't until recently, literally, I think the system was fully unplayable at the beginning of this year, and the first time I played it, I was like, this feels really cool, because it made you feel like everybody in the game is achieving something. They're doing exactly what their goals that they set out to do."

"You're getting all your legacy points, you're making progress on all the branches, the AIR2, but you reach, as you make those accomplishments, the ticker goes a little bit further towards that end of age, and it advances every time something big happens."

"So everybody in the world's feeling pretty good.
So when the crisis emerges, you've got crisis policy cards. So you have policies in your government, but when crises start, the game says, well, you have to slot your first one."

"There's different crisis cards for every different discipline in the game, so whether you're playing military, economic, cultural, all of these things hit different aspects of those. So you slot your first one, you're like, okay, I'm still feeling pretty good, I'm not playing an economic game, I don't care if I'm losing gold per city-state that I have. But then it asks you to do a second one a few turns later, and then it asks you to do a third one, and you're starting to sweat. But you're managing, you knew this was coming."

"But there's also a worldwide event that happens.
In this case, like with Rome, you have independent powers that are hostile to everybody start spawning on the map, and they'll lash out to whoever's closest."

"So if you are unprepared for that, if you only built just enough military for your opponent, and not for where these other empty spaces of land were that you have these independent powers erupting, you might have a chance of getting severely damaged, getting to the other side of this crisis. But if you do make it, you go forward to age transition."

"But it's just a really great bit of character that really brings the age to a really cool climax at the end.
Something that I like that you've been speaking about throughout this interview is the idea of Rome and sort of that historical perception of it, and that sometimes is a bit muddied."

"And that's something that I think was really interesting when looking at Civ, because you guys take history very seriously.
Very, very seriously. And yet there's always got to be a point where fun comes into it as well."

"Like this time, for example, it's not just political leaders.
We have cultural and scientific and other leaders as well.
Can you talk about where sort of the boundary may lie between where you guys decide, OK, we'll do something that's more for the rule of fun than it is maybe to keep it strict within historical lines? Yeah."

"Keeping it strictly within historical lines is still very important, no matter what it is.
Whether it's political lines, that's where we're flexible."

"We wanted to have a more diverse cast of characters to play this time.
Not just, you know, Antiquity, Old King, and doing his thing."

"There's so many huge, important personalities in all of history that never had an interest in politics. Benjamin Franklin, little interest in politics, mainly a scientist, big science leader."

"Confucius, one of the greatest thinkers of his time, a philosopher. And what would it be like to play something like that? So, by including these, we not only include the width of our diversity in terms of the types of people and personalities and cultures we can represent, but also we let the players have a little bit more fun with what-ifs. You know, what if he actually did a thing and became a leader of this?
And you can actually play around with that."

"It gives us a lot more flexibility, too, in terms of what we add to the game in the future.
Because we're not just restricting ourselves to the same political leaders that we've been doing in the past six versions of the game."

"And something as well that you guys have done is, as we said before with the leaders, there's now sort of the ability to change that civilization to be something at the height of its power."

"At what point did that sort of come into the game?
Because it is quite the radical change, I would say, although the ages stand out as the clear main shift to what we know as Civ, this might be the dark horse in terms of what could change the game the most, I think."

"This was Ed's original thesis. The presentations that I've been giving today have a section of his original presentation that he gave to the team. I believe you got to see it at the last press preview. He's actually showing a map of Roman London, and he takes a section of that at the Ludgate, and he shows how that changed through time."

"What was built on top of that? What was built on top of the next player? And so on and so forth.
We use the...
I guess the best example I can give is the Tower of London."

"You go in the Tower of London, you're going through walls built by the Britons. You see the tower in the middle built by the Normans, and then the Roman wall that's still a piece of it right there by the bird cages, right off to the side. And it's really amazing."

"You've got a microcosm. We visited the Cathedral in Cologne while we were doing setup, I think it was on Monday, and we did the Spire Ascension, which almost killed half of our crew getting to the top."

"Really cool. But at the base of this, they had excavated the biggest Roman house in Cologne that you can see. You can't tour it or anything, you just have it there so you can see it, but they excavated this, and it was a fascinating example of history being built in layers."

"So this thesis is what carried him forward.
He wanted to model what happened to Rome.
So we have, again, as I said, we have that straight line of playing a sieve from here to here. But what if we modeled something different? That merging of cultures. The way you play, the decisions you make determine what comes next. So we're not just doing willy-nilly, choose random. When you merge Egypt up into something else, it's because you played something a certain way and now that culture emerges and merges with Egypt."

"So you're carrying that forward with you through time until you have your own people, something custom to you as you move forward in time. So that is where it all started. That exact thing is where it all started."

"It's scary and exciting because our fans see something very different than what they're used to.
And I think that's what's exciting to me because for the first time in a long time, fans are going to have to come into this with fresh eyes."

"You can't use a pre-existing strategy to win this game. It's going to have to be rethought out and debated and discussed and I'm really excited about that."

"So you know strategy works.
I would say that killing everyone on the map strategy was somewhat successful for me when I got to play, but I feel like that's just the case in strategy all around. Speaking of war, there's a bit of a big change coming there as well with the fact that you can now put all your units under a commander unit."

"The one that gets XP and is that another sort of effort into removing the unnecessary decisions sort of not clogging up the board as much as well?
We all know the wars where they're just won by somebody having as many tanky units as possible closing a choke point. Does that remove the unnecessary decision making as well?
It's not even so much the decision making. It's just the benign decision making and the extra clicks and everything. I love the fact that you can have your carpet of doom marching towards the enemy, and your enemy is not necessarily the opposing force, but it's the single tile mountain hex that you have to get your army through."

"So commanders allow you to group up to six units on top of a commander, move them, and then redeploy them where you're going to fight. The units don't get the experience anymore, the commander does."

"Everything within his sphere of influence benefits from his promotions, their army promotions. But there's a lot of cool things that go along with that. Everybody knows the pain of actively fighting a war. Back here in your cities, you've got your unit pump going on, and you're slowly dragging them all over to where they need to be."

"The nice thing is there's a reinforce action now.
You click the unit, you reinforce, and no matter where your commander and your army is going, that unit is going to find its way to the commander. So again, it's removing those extra clicks, removing the decisions that are not interesting, and just get you right to the gameplay that you want to play."

"So that part, surprisingly, that's what we found out of the event that you attended.
Out of all the things that we've done, commander emerged as a star, as this is the best thing ever, just because it's so easy when you're managing an army. You don't have to have a field camp full of ten units and stuff."

"You have commanders formed into an army, and you put them to sleep, and they're in a camp. They're waiting for you to do something with them. You don't have the entire field clogged up. You can't maneuver around them. It's just a..."

"It was a brilliant move by the combat team to come up with this. It was great.
I absolutely loved it, just bringing in my commander and yelling surprise as I spawned everything in."

"Yeah. Dennis, just one last question for you. When's Civ coming out? When can we see it? February 11th, 2025, on all the platforms you have, your PC and most of the consoles in your living room. So really excited to bring this all at the same time."

"A little scary. We've never done it before. Really exciting to do it, though.
So, February can't get here soon enough. It's going to be awesome."

"Dennis, thank you so much for your time.
Thank you."