Civilization VII: The Beginning of a New Age

By Garrett Martin | January 31, 2025 | 11:00am

Video Games Features civilization vii

Civilization VII: The Beginning of a New Age

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When Civilization VII arrives on February 11, players will be introduced to perhaps the biggest change the series has seen in its 34-year history. The new Ages system revamps how civilizations move from one historical era into the next. In the past periods like the Classical Era and Industrial Era were little more than on-screen flavor text that roughly corresponded to the approximate timeline of the real world. Civilization VII treats them as definitive breaks within a civilization’s history, with three distinct ages serving as three chapters of a playthrough. You’ll even get one of those report card-style rankings you’d see at the end of a game of Civ at the end of each age. You’ll know when you’re moving from the Antiquity Age into the Exploration Age into the Modern Age, as a precipitating in-game crisis triggers each transition. And although it’s not exactly like starting over, it does serve as a kind of mid-game inflection point that hasn’t traditionally existed in Civ games. The goal is to make Civ feel dynamic and fluid throughout a whole game, and lessen that typical Civ situation where bad decisions early on can hamper your civilization thousands of years later.

The Ages system might be Civ VII’s most dramatic new addition, but it’s only one of many tweaks and updates the developers at Firaxis Games are making to the venerable series. Paste recently talked to Ed Beach, Civ VII’s Creative Director, and Dennis Shirk, Executive Producer, about the Ages system, the expanded role historians played in developing Civ VII, and more. Here’s what you can expect from Civ VII.

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The following conversation has been edited for clarity and concision.

Paste: In the past you’ve talked about the rule of thirds when it comes to sequels—how ideally they’d be one third new features, one third improved, and one third staying the same. How do you know when something should be improved or replaced with a new feature?

Ed Beach, Creative Director: This time we struggled with this a little bit, even though we’re supposedly masters at using this principle. We had done a really in-depth look at Civilization VI, and what was working and what wasn’t working. And I had asked the designers of each of the systems within Civ VI what they wanted to change and what they felt like was still working. And they came back with a very aggressive list of things to change. We had to tell them, no, we can’t change all those things. That’s changing way more than a third of the game in a drastic new direction, and we have to kind of let our players still feel grounded. Let this still feel like this is a Civilization experience for them. So we did a lot of prioritization. I think we took some systems like our combat system that was working pretty darn well in V and VI in terms of how two units engaged in combat. And even though we had ideas on how we might want to change those, I said, hey, if that’s really not something that needs to change, that’s not a top priority to change, because it’s working pretty well. Let’s not mess with it. So we absolutely did apply those principles. We talked about it and it led to some scaling back in some areas. But I do think overall, we’re probably breaking that one third, one third, one third principle. I think we got a little bit aggressive in terms of how much we want to change. But you know, it’s been nine years since the last version. So it was time for some new ideas.

Dennis Shirk, Executive Producer: When we talk about Civ IV, Civ V, Civ VI, and all the other studios that are making Civ-like games right now, it was just time to take it a little bit further, and allow our fans to have to approach something with like new eyes to be able to figure it out and unpack it. New strategies. We thought it was a good moment for that.

Paste: So about the number of Civ influenced 4X games that have been coming out the last couple decades: Do you find yourselves influenced by those games? Do you look to them to see what Civ could become, or do you try to avoid looking at the competition like that?

EB: I think it’s mostly avoiding it. You can’t totally avoid it. Obviously, you know, they’ve had some bold ideas, and we’re all sort of… I feel like Civ VI put a big stake in the ground, and then everyone was poking at it and trying to figure out where its weak spots were, and trying to come up with new ways to improve it, including ourselves. And you’re gonna come to some of the same conclusions. You’re gonna see some things in some of those competing products that are the same ideas that we have in terms of what we want to try. So there’s definitely some overlap in thinking, and there were cases where competitors tried things, and we could see how well they resonated with a 4X strategy fan base or not. But by the time we actually realized there was going to be three or four competing products coming out over the time period between Civ VI and Civ VII, there was no way we could try to cover what other ones are doing, or try to respond directly. We had to chart our own course.

Paste: The biggest new feature in Civ VII is the new ages system. Is that something you wanted to work towards for a while now?

EB: Some of our systems, like the mixing and matching of leaders and civilizations, which is also in Civ VII, were ideas that had been around for quite a while. We just couldn’t quite fit it into Civ VI. The ages system did not become something that we were targeting until we got past Civ VI, and we were really focused on Civ VII.

What we did when we started Civ VII is, we came up with five different design pillars and several of those design pillars were very focused on the fact that our game just took a long time to get through, and not only was it a long experience, but sort of more of the excitement was packed in the beginning, when the turns were snappier. And that as you got deeper into the game, that it takes you a longer time to get through a turn, because there was just so much to manage, and that that was the weak spot for our game. And we really had to address that in some way, and so breaking the game up into chapters where each chapter has a sort of calm, peaceful, sort of “explore the map” type of beginning, but each chapter also has a really dramatic conclusion at the end, where the battles are crazy, and the action is fierce, and maybe some worldwide crises are breaking out, that seemed like a really good way to structure the game to get people to want to engage with all three pieces of it. And so we’ve been running a lot of tests and looking at a lot of data, and we’re getting people deeper into our games and playing through all three ages better than we ever have before. So we’re very encouraged by what we’re seeing with the features and the ages feature in particular.

Paste: In a dev diary on the Firaxis website you noted that the ages system will lessen the need for expansions. Do you think we’ll see expansions for Civ VII still?

EB: So we are always looking at ways to support, enhance, enlarge and deepen our products after they go out there. Civ VI has, like we said, been out there for nine years, and we still had a brand new monthly challenge happen just earlier a couple of weeks ago. So we know we’re going to be supporting Civ VII for a long time. I do think the whole nature of how we’re delivering content has shifted. We packed a lot more into these ages than we ever had before. They’re deeper. The fidelity with which we’re representing different civilizations and cultures is way more involved than before. So in Civ V and Civ VI, we really needed expansions to finish fleshing out that historical chunk of the game. I don’t think that need is there in quite the same way for Civ VII. So absolutely, we’re going to be looking for things like expansions. But I think fans can anticipate that the nature of them, and exactly how we use them to deepen the experience, is going to be different this time.

Paste: This is the seventh main installment of Civilization in 34 years. When you’re thinking about the future of the series, how many steps ahead are you thinking on the Civilization tech tree? Like, are there places you already hope to take the series that you know you won’t be able to get to until, say, Civ VIII or IX?

DS: That’s a tricky one. Each version of the game, we pretty much put everything into it that we think we can do with the time that we have. In Vi we went, like, slightly into the information age. Generally VI, you know, was one solid piece of game play start to finish. The player had to kind of know what they were doing coming into it before they even got to the late game to know what victory they’re going for. So Ed and his team really approached this when they approached making the age system to break it into three specific pieces. It was with fresh eyes that they had to come into it because they wanted to really make something new. So three distinct pieces of gameplay and packing each age with as much unique content systems, etc., as we could. So we’ve been working on this one for quite a bit in terms of how we know what we’re putting on the table versus what we’re going to save for later. I don’t think we ever do that. We always put everything into it that we can. Like Ed had just alluded to the fact that there’s places that we can take VII that we’ve never been able to do with VI’s structure, just by the nature of the way that we’re doing the ages system. So there’s a lot more that we see coming up in the future that we’re going to be able to do. But we put everything that we have in every release. There’s definitely not a strategic plan to save something for the future.

We do occasionally take time to prototype future concepts when we’re later in a process. You saw that in VI when we started looking at New Frontier Pass ideas with the barbarian gameplay that we put in, some of the leaders that we tried disentangling different personas. Things like that. So we’ll always try things out as ideas come up.

EB: Yeah, I think one thing that we do do is late in the cycle, for one major release, we start getting experimental and prototyping.

DS: Yeah, as new ideas come up.

EB: And there’s a long history of that, like the navigable rivers that we have in Civ VII. The very first time we tried them out was in a American Civil War scenario back in Civ V. And people really liked them then, but we just couldn’t figure out a way to get them in, and so they sort of languished until we got to Civ VII. And then it was like, “Hey, remember those, those were really cool. Let’s try them out.” And they’re great. So we have sort of a long enough corporate memory of some of these ideas that lots of things we try make it in eventually, and you’ll see things coming back in Civ VII that haven’t been around forever. We have the sort of celebrations that empires go through that are kind of like the “We Love the King Day,” and that skipped Civ VI. But we had that in Civ V and earlier versions.

Actually, probably the biggest, best example of that is the treasure fleet mechanic that we have in The Exploration Age right now for one of our economic victories. That started all the way back in Civ III. I worked on a scenario for Civ III as just a contractor for Firaxis. I wasn’t even an employee then. We put treasure fleets in and now they came back this time, four iterations of the game later. So, you know, it’s cool that we have a big bag of tricks like that, but trying to figure out when to use certain things and when they fit, and when they don’t, that’s an interesting part of the puzzle that we’re always wrestling with.

Paste: You work very closely with historians, and the games have been influenced by how that discipline has evolved over time. Why is it important for Civ to have that relationship with historians?

DS: Having historians on the team has become more and more important the further we go down the path of Civilizations. We originally just had writers on creative on IV and started leaning into it a little bit more on V. In VI we actually had a college professor who did a lot of our writing, and then coming into VII, we have a full on historian team now, and a lot of that is because just over time we learn more and more how our specific outlook as North Americans differs very much from the way that other civilizations and cultures across the planet view themselves. So our outlook manifesting itself in those leaders and cultures just was not working as well. We had different trips over time in V and VI from not completely understanding of people that we’re putting these art elements in front of and story elements in front of. So it’s really important to us to get everything right out of the gate. We know that we are not a historical simulator. We simply put historical pieces together, and players can then learn about it, have fun with it, and twist it into strange directions to tell their own story. But we want the pieces that they’re playing with to be dead on accurate wherever possible. We want it to be a really great representation, not only for the benefit and the richness of the game, but because of Sid’s concept of stealth learning. I mean, we want people to know about the new things that we’re introducing them to. Harriet Tubman—we’ve talked about a little bit off and on over the past few interviews, but Harriet Tubman is one of those that’s like a local legend, local hero. Everybody outside of the United States has no idea who Harriet Tubman is. And now everybody’s asking the question and talking about it and learning about it. And we think that’s actually a really cool side effect of making sure that we have historians creating our game, helping to craft those scenarios, pick those leaders, create their identities and their cultural identities. And yeah, I think that’s why it’s so important. Because if we don’t have a strong foundation, the game is just not going to be right. So it feels really good to have that.

Paste: Building off what you just said, Dennis, about our North American outlook: so Civ has clearly been working to get past that Eurocentric viewpoint that we grow up with here in America. Right now, here and around the world, we’re seeing something of a reaction against people trying to grow past the Eurocentric viewpoint. We’re seeing a rise in ignorance, a deemphasis on education and understanding. What do you think Civ’s role is in the current climate that we’re living in right now?

EB: It’s a really interesting question, and it’s one that has been touched on in different ways in some of the interviews that we’ve been doing recently. I do think that Civilization as a series has always been—it can’t be anything but a celebration of world cultures and the diversity that’s out there, and we have always tried to be respectful of cultures that maybe got the short end of the stick in terms of the way world history played out for them. And so, being able to represent North American cultures like the Shawnee, like, we were able with Civ VII to get members of the Shawnee tribe, and even their chief, as partners with us to work through that. That was an amazing experience for us, because we want to tell those stories. We want to be very serious about an accurate representation of what their legacy is and what achievements they had, and hopefully still have in the future. So it’s very important to us. It’s part of what the civilization journey is. I think it is very relevant to what’s going on in the world right now. So yeah, if we can play a little piece in that, that’s good with us.

Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, music, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.