Civilization VII Preview - Gamescom 2024

There are a few game franchises that are synonymous with an entire genre. Counter-Strike and Call of Duty are the shooters, anything Mario related rules the word of mouth for 2D platformers, and Fortnite with PUBG have created and redefined battle royale. When it comes to the 4X turn-based strategy genre, the game that likely comes to everyone's mind is Sid Meier's Civilization. After debuting in the early 90s, the series has become ubiquitous with its genre. Managing empires, from the day-to-day city production, to commanding grand armies and focusing on scientific research, the series has managed to deliver continuously successful and well-received entries over the past three decades. There have been challengers for its crown, but none have managed to capture the same level of success as this original franchise. Eight years after the last entry, we've had a chance to have the first look at Civilization VII during Gamescom 2024.

The demo session was hosted by a few members of the development team at Firaxis, who told us that they are both excited and nervous to be launching the game in early 2025 for not only PC, its home base, but also for consoles at the same time. It's the first simultaneous cross-platform launch for the franchise. As before, the main pillars of the game will remain focused on strategic depth, historical immersion, and narrative potential - letting players live out historical sagas as they see fit, both real and fictional. The devs say their goal when creating new entries in a storied franchise such as this is to honor the legacy and the existing foundation, while creating something new - though such ambitions are not exactly unique to Civ.

With the seventh entry, the team took a philosophical approach to progression with regards to how world history is built in layers. Civilizations rise, reach their pinnacle, and fall, and let something new begin, repeating the cycle. In gameplay terms, for Civ VII this means that there won't be Eras anymore, and just three Ages: Antiquity, Exploration, and Modern. There will be unique content in each Age, and goals to complete. Goals will fall across four Legacy Paths: Science, Economy, Military, and Culture. By working through these paths, players unlock bonuses that will be carried over during the Age transition. But a new element that will happen during transitions are new Crisis cards. Players will be forced to choose from a variety of negative effects for their empire, as it begins to face a crisis. While this concept seems interesting from gameplay perspective and will prevent empires from snowballing too much success from the start, it also does seem a bit artificial.

The negative cards will fall into the same categories as the Legacy Paths, which means you can initially defer being heavily impacted. If you have plenty of gold income but a weak army, you'll probably choose a negative Economic card first, though more cards from other categories will need to be picked. The developers say this should encourage players to be well-balanced in all aspects of their empire, to be able to absorb these negative effects and make it into the next Age. As before, certain civilizations will be unique to certain Ages. But a new element is that the historical leaders you can play as will no longer be tied to their historical civilization.

Civ VII also promises a slew of Quality of Life improvements to core concepts, such as easier setup of trading routes, and new army management with the introduction of commanders. These units allow you to group up to 6 military units into one tile, and move them all as a group, which means no more manually moving many units across the map, or repetitively squeezing your army one by one through some narrow mountain passage. To get into action though, you do need to re-deploy the individual units into their own hexagon map spaces. Further, the commanders can also call for reinforcements to your units, again reducing micromanagement. You can also apply veterancy upgrades through the commander as experience goes to him.

The developers have also made the decision to remove barbarians from the game. This will likely have a notable impact on the early hours, as you no longer have to contend with a rogue military element. Instead, there will now be independent powers, akin to city states from the past games. These factions will try to behave a bit more like real empires, and players will be able to build slightly more advanced relationships with them than before.

Following this overview, we got a chance to play about 20 minutes of an early build of the game. For anyone familiar with Civilization, and similar 4X turn based games, the basics remain familiar. You begin with a settler unit, moving it across the map to find a suitable location for your first city. Once founded, you can begin to produce more units such as warriors, scouts, or more settlers. You can also build improvements on nearby tiles around the city - the concept that will return from Civ VI. Science research trees will let you start working on developing animal husbandry and the wheel, while cultural decisions may popup, asking you to make light narrative choices for bonuses such as increased production or resources. You'll shortly encounter other empires, and can begin building relationships with their leaders.

We chose Augustus as the leader and Roman Empire as the civilization, as while they are no longer tied, the bonuses of the leaders will still synergize best with their actual historical nations. We got to play to turn 50 in our allotted 10 minute time limit, and it was much the same Civ experience as usual. Some of the tweaks are interesting - such as no Barbarians, and new ability of the scout units to setup an outlook post and see further around them, revealing farther points of interest and giving you a sense of direction to move to. We met some AI civilizations, and a few independent states. Given the limited demo time, once we got a narrative choice to steal some cows from a nearby independent state, it was a no brainer. This meant we now had a hostile enemy, and even though a few military units were lost, we managed to repel their forces when they came within range of our city.

Civilization has been the predominant choice in the genre for so long, it's not clear if anyone will be able to unseat it. However, thanks to other developers and publishers trying (even now, with the upcoming release of Ara: History Untold from Xbox), it has kept Firaxis honest, so to speak, and not sitting on their laurels too much - unlike, say, certain sports franchises that face no competition. Civilization VII looks like it will continue on a path that the developers were clear about - keep building on a foundation that has literally stood the test of time, and make additions / quality of life improvements that will make players engaged and wanting to play one more turn. Civilization VII is planned for launch February 11, 2025 on PC and consoles.