Civilization VII’s Creative Director Ed Beach Brushes Worries Away

Since the release of Sid Meier’s Civilization VI in 2016, a few contenders have attempted to challenge the 4X game throne, such as Millennia and Humankind . While none have truly revolutionized the genre, some have introduced interesting new elements. It seems that Firaxis, the studio behind the Civilization and XCOM franchises, has taken notice of these developments as they work on Sid Meier’s Civilization VII , the latest entry in the storied strategy series.

After the gameplay reveal of Civilization VII during Opening Night Live 2024, many fans have focused on and expressed concern over a significant change seemingly inspired by Humankind : civilization-switching. As explained to me during a media presentation at gamescom 2024, civilization-switching is just one of several features designed to intentionally differentiate Civilization VII from the familiar gameplay loops of Civilization IV, V, and VI . This release is intended to mark a paradigm shift for the franchise.

Having played about 30 minutes of Civilization VII behind closed doors, I’m pleased to report that, even as a veteran fan who loves the previous games, I’m more on board than not with the big changes introduced in this new title. For my full impressions of Civilization VII , click here.

Following my hands-on demo, I caught up with Ed Beach, the creative director on Civilization VII , to ask him about the groundbreaking changes coming to the game including mixing and matching civilizations and leaders, civilization-switching, commander units and more:

Hello and thank you for having me today! Can you briefly introduce yourself and your work on the Civilization franchise?

Ed Beach : Hi, I’m Ed Beach, I’m the creative director on Civilization VII and I have been working on the Civ franchise for 15 years now.

You and the team have mentioned that Civilization VII is somewhat of a paradigm shift for the franchise. Did you always intend to change things up with VII?

Ed Beach : It absolutely was. Civilization VI has a big and active community and so the fans wouldn’t be interested in just a new coat of paint for Civilization VII. We wanted to actually shake things up so that there was a dramatic change that the players would be very interested and engaged with and would want to try right away. So, we knew going into it that we wanted to make some structural changes to the game.

One of these changes is the ability to mix and match civilizations and leaders. What do you hope that this change will bring?

Ed Beach : We previously tried this mix and match of leaders in Civilization VII. We had Eleanor of Aquitaine, for example, who could lead England or France and we had Kublai Khan who could lead either China or Mongolia. This feature was really popular which actually led to people saying “I want free mixing and matching of my leaders and civilizations”! But, we couldn’t really do that in Civilization VII , because that wasn’t how we had balanced the game. We had some leader-civilization pairs where the leader was really strong and the civilization was the weaker part and vice versa.

And so, if we let people grab strong leaders and match them with strong civilizations, that would have messed with the balance quite a lot. So, when starting a new version of the game, let’s focus on getting that right this time. And this time, if we balance all the leaders against each other and all the civilizations from one of the ages in our game against each other, then all of a sudden this mixing and matching system will work for players.

Some players will use it a lot because they’re kind of min-maxing and want to finish the game in the fewest number of turns. Other players, who like to have a very historically immersive experience, might always start their game with Augustus paired with Rome and not use Augustus with someone else just because they want to role play. This new way supports both approaches.

Are you at all worried about people flocking towards optimal builds? Is there going to be a leader and a civilization pairing that is going to be the ideal choice when, say, going for a cultural victory?

Ed Beach : It’s certainly possible. We’re going to, I think, have a big interest in multiplayer play because the game is shorter now – it’s broken up into chapters. You don’t have to play through all three ages in multiplayer anymore. You can just play one of the chapters and, all of a sudden, the multiplayer game is two or three hours long instead of six or eight hours.

So, there could be optimal builds that develop…the multiplayer community has been very, very good about putting out mods to balance the game themselves. I’m sure they’re not going to feel like Firaxis is ever 100% right with regards to balancing, but at least the modding in VII will work very similarly to how it did in VI .

We haven’t announced a lot of details about modding yet, but the modding community is going to feel very comfortable. The designers didn’t want to change that internally – we wanted to very much build the game in the same way. So, a lot of the way the game is set up is very consistent to what we’ve done in VI . Optimal builds are probably okay in single player because, if you need to, you can just up the difficulty level or maybe you’re trying to speed-run anyways. So, multiplayer is the big concern but the multiplayer community should take care of that.

Diplomacy is also something that is changing in Civilization VII . So, when you’re mixing and matching leaders and civilizations, to what extent will leaders have inherent traits? For example, will Benjamin Franklin be more aggressive than, say, Ashoka?

Ed Beach : That’s actually a really good question and something that I haven’t talked about with anyone yet. So, each of the leaders earn attributes and their attribute trees are like skill trees that level up your leader as you progress through the game. Out of the six skill trees that we have in the game, each leader will be sort of naturally inclined towards two of them.

For example, Benjamin Franklin is inclined towards science and diplomacy since he was the American diplomat who went to France – despite all of the scientific inventions he somehow had the time to be a diplomat, too! However, he can earn any of the attributes, but he will be able to earn scientific attribute points and diplomatic attribute points faster than any of the other four. A lot of this is delivered through our narrative system, where we take moments from, in this case, Benjamin Franklin’s life and share those with the players. And that might unlock some of these attribute points.

The attribute trees that you have also determine some of the diplomatic actions you can take with other players. In the build that we have here, you can see that you can have cultural interchanges or trading activities with other players by which you can both start to earn more culture or culture, respectively. Which of these options you have are based on which leader you’re playing as.

Speaking for myself as a Civilization fan here, part of what made some game sessions so fun was bringing, let’s say, Egypt from antiquity into modernity. So, how will the foundations and identity of the initial civilization be felt by the end of the game?

Ed Beach : We have tried to really emphasize that, no matter where you start, you’ll notice, at the end of the game, the pathway you took. So, every civilization has unique improvements that they and only can build. For instance, Egypt gets this cool funerary complex called a mastaba and a mortuary temple to go with it. And so, that’s what we call the necropolis district. Anytime you build one of those unique districts somewhere: that’s permanent, they stay with you throughout the whole game. Every civilization in our game also has an associated wonder.

Wonders will still be things that people can compete over, but, if I’m Egypt, and I want to build the Pyramids, I’m going to get a huge bonus relating to how fast I can build them. As long as I’m paying attention and not just totally sleeping on the Pyramids, I’ll probably have them with me. Every civilization also gets a unique branch of the civics tree – we’re keeping the civics tree we had in VII , but now we have short branches that are just, in this case, Egyptian culture nodes.

On that, we call the social policies that are specific to a civilization “traditions”. These “traditions” carry over in all the other ages. So, I might be still using the Egyptian “tradition” that makes my cities near navigable rivers really, really powerful even at the end of the game.

How flexible will players be when choosing the civilization to take over as the game transitions from age to age? How many civilization choices will players have?

Ed Beach : In the build that we’re showing right now, we actually only have four playable civilizations so the choices seem more limited than they’re going to be when the full game releases. So, in Civilization VII , we have to put more civilizations in because, when you play through one session, you’re playing as one leader but three civilizations. As such, there are dramatically more civilizations that ship with the game than we’ve had before.

During each era transition, the presentation makes it look like there’s maybe only one historical choice but there will usually be more than that. Plus, you get to unlock more civilizations through gameplay bonuses. So, the players who like to stick with history may not have as much choice as the players who want to unlock all their bonus civilizations through gameplay and don’t care whether, for example, they go from Egypt to the Mongol Empire since they’re dominating the map with their cavalry armies. It depends how you like to play the game, but we certainly have plenty of choices for players.

You’ve expanded the role of the advisor, which now assigns players quests depending on the victory conditions that they’ve chosen to pursue. To what extent is completing these quests going to guarantee victory, especially when playing on higher difficulties?

Ed Beach : In past games, if you wanted to win a science victory against a high difficulty setting, you sort of had to decide to do that right out of the gates. And that may be true a little bit on the highest difficulties in VII , but what happens is that the science advisor is making sure that you’re pushing science as fast as possible. If you do a really good job with that in the first stage of the game, you’ll get all the way to the end to what we call a science Golden Age opportunity.

And so, not only will you hit a couple milestones before that, which will give you powerful boosts into the next age, but that Golden Age opportunity will make you as strong as you can possibly be in science. Now, we keep track of all the milestones that you achieve throughout the game and, when you get to the final age, going through that legacy path in science in that last age is going to give you an opportunity to win the game with a science victory. Victories in the final age are always dramatic moments that cause the game to end immediately.

Each of the science milestones that you’ve accumulated across ages is going to speed up the duration of turns it takes you to win. So, you can rush right down that path if you want to. What we like about age transitions and the fact that you choose a new civilization going into each one is that, if say science isn’t working out, you are free to go for another victory. What’s nice is that you’ve got those two points in the game where you can pivot your strategy and…take a different path. So, those are cool moments where you can switch up your strategy.

In the presentation that I attended, it was hinted that “darker paths can open if you don’t do very well”. What does this mean? And, to what extent would a “darker” playstyle be viable for players?

Ed Beach : Each of these legacy paths, like the science path, has milestones that you can achieve. For example, you might have done really well in culture and you can declare the next stage to be a cultural Golden Age, but you did so poorly in science that you also have the option to declare a scientific Dark Age. You can’t do both at the same time since they conflict with each other, but you have the option. The Dark Age cards are similar to what we had in VI where they gave you a sort of unique power that you don’t normally have in the game. However, these powers come with a down side.

To give you a good example of this based on the demo that we’re showing on the show floor, the military victory in the antiquity age requires you to get 12 settlements under your control. Say I do very poorly at that, and I don’t come anywhere near hitting that milestone, I’ll then have the opportunity to trigger a military Dark Age for the next part of the game.

This may totally change the way I settle compared to other people in the game. The next part of the game is the age of exploration, which is all about unlocking land on the other side of the globe, and…I’m not sure what our final design on this will look like, but I know that one of the things that we strongly considered is that, when you take that military Dark Age, you will have to give up having settlers to expand on the original continent.

So, if you didn’t do very well with expanding on your continent, you can take your settlers overseas and build a big empire there. The upside to this is that you might have new powers so, for example, some of your naval units might be able to sail along the coast and establish a town. And that’s something that other people won’t be able to do. So, the Dark Ages cards present great ways to pivot your strategy like that.

I love the introduction of commander units – it’s my favorite addition to Civilization VII so far. To what extent will these commander units replace great admirals and great generals?

Ed Beach : The commander units, when on land, help all the other units around them in a way similar to how a great general would, but they also serve as a funnel for all the experience earned. Plus, they have a cool promotion tree. But we can’t forget about naval units, so we need to have a naval commander as well. We’re not going into much detail about what’s happening in the exploration age and the modern age, but players will eventually get navies and an air force. There’s no reason that this commander unit has to be confined to land-based activities. The commanders we’re showing now are just the beginning.

Civilization VII is the first mainline title to release day and date on PC and console – including the Nintendo Switch. Why is having a simultaneous release important for you and the team at Firaxis?

Ed Beach : It’s important because VI reached all of these platforms, and some of them surprised us with how popular the game became. We can’t abandon those communities and the players who fell in love with the game. It would be very sad to tell them, ‘Sorry, you’ll have to wait six months to get the game.’ We wanted everyone to be able to jump in and play it at the same time, and that was important enough to us that we changed our entire approach to the console version of the game.

The console version is no longer just a port that happens later. Instead, we’re testing on those platforms constantly and have in-house builds for all of them. It’s important to keep those communities thriving, but it has also been a lot of work!

Since Civilization VII is likely going to be a platform for future updates and expansions, can console players expect said updates and expansions to also release day and date with PC?

Ed Beach : We’re not going into detail on the expansions or DLCs, but the content we create will be available across all platforms, so that should be fine. The content is going to be delivered a bit differently than in the past. We actually have different ways to approach content now—our age system is very modular, which opens up new opportunities for future expansions. We’re still exploring how we’ll act on these opportunities, but it’s exciting for us that an update to the game doesn’t have to involve making the existing systems more complex. We have plenty of new opportunities for expanding the game.

Will there be feature parity on all platforms?

Ed Beach : I can’t promise that there will be feature parity everywhere for all time, but, on base release, absolutely.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Ed Beach : The one thing I’d like to add is that I think people will appreciate how richly the civilizations are represented. In previous Civilization games, players often mentioned they enjoyed playing as France or Germany, but to me, that experience was somewhat lacking because you didn’t get any bonuses at the beginning of the game.

Since those bonuses came later, it wasn’t always a fun experience, especially in multiplayer, to wait for them to become available. Now, there are a lot of factors that contribute to how France became France or how Germany became Germany, and you can explore how these civilizations were built over time. As you progress through each age, you get to play as empires that are very powerful at that point in the game. You’re never just sitting around waiting for your bonuses to activate.

This has completely changed the way the game feels for me and our development team, and it’s incredibly exciting. I think those who are concerned about evolving the pathway through civilizations as a big change for the franchise might be underestimating how cool it really is.

Sid Meier’s Civilization VII will be released on February 11, 2025 on PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and X|S, Nintendo Switch, PC and Mac.