Okay, be honest; you’ve probably not finished too many full campaigns in the Civilization series. It’s okay, neither have I—there’s always some reason to tap out and start fresh. We’re not alone, and Firaxis has the numbers to prove it. Answering an assortment of interview questions from our sagely Council for The PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted—where Civilization 7 was just voted the #1 anticipated game for 2025—creative director Ed Beach got on camera to let us know what’s going to be different this time, and how Firaxis is going to be re-defining the genre after 34 years of iteration.
"We had a lot of data that people would play Civilization games and they would never get all the way to the end. They just wouldn’t finish them. And so we wanted to do whatever we could—whether it was reducing micromanagement, restructuring the game—to really address that problem directly," said Beach while standing stoically against the backdrop of a US Civil War-era fort.
The solution is to let players make a clean break if they’re starting to feel their attention flagging. It’s a bold design decision, but in Civilization 7, "you don’t stick with a civilization throughout the entire course of the game,", he said. A full campaign is broken up into ages, which are both notable shifts in technology and aesthetics, but also break a single playthrough up into three more easily digestible chapters.
As one age ends and another begins, players will have the option to switch who they’re playing as and continue on as a civilization at the peak of its power and influence. It’s a big option to present to players, but should provide an interesting option to shift gears if you’ve been operating as a quiet background player up until that point, with little opportunity to break into the limelight.
Beach said that this also helps sell the fantasy of experiencing the history of our strange, flawed species: "We’re challenging players to not look at the history of an empire as something that started in 4000 BC, made it to the present and is going on without end. It’s not very reflective of the way things work in real history."
It does sound like players won’t necessarily be leaving everything behind if they choose to switch roles midway through a playthrough. This is still Civilization, and you are playing as immortal figureheads that have been around since 4000 BC.
“You can choose science civs from different places in the world and link them together for your playthrough, and we have to figure out how those attach to leaders, which aren’t necessarily hard-wired into civs anymore, but that all becomes part of the long journey that you have building up your empire, and it does feel like one continuous journey."
It’s a major shift in design, and one that highlights Civilization’s primary role as a singleplayer, solipsistic experience. It also reminds me of more freeform, sandboxy grand strategy games like Crusader Kings, where a single playthrough almost always had the player’s perspective hopping between various characters on their family tree, or even hopping to another tree entirely to experience how you’ve impacted the world from a fresh perspective.
Obviously only having two opportunities to switch per campaign is a bit more restrictive, but it does change what it means to ‘win’ a game of Civilization.
As someone who absolutely has struggled to finish a Civ campaign, I’m excited to see whether they can pull it off. I never would have expected Firaxis to pull off rebooting XCOM into a less granular digital board game-esque experience, or making social hangouts and deckbuilding the core of a superhero throwdown, but I’ve enjoyed both—as a studio, they seem to excel when they’re taking risks.
Civilization 7 is set to launch on February 11th next year, and you can wishlist it now on Steam. We’ll have an extended cut of the interview (presumably answering only the most prying and personal of questions) available on PC Gamer's official YouTube channel soon.
