With Civ 7, Firaxis Might Have Finally Removed Endgame Boredom

In the event you’re anything like me, you’ve played 1000’s of hours of Civilization games over the past twenty years. There’s one thing about Civ’s gameplay loop that has never modified, not once: I like the start of the sport, and dread the ending. This problem is especially bad in Civ 6 because playing wide—having multiple cities covering the map—is the very best and most effective technique to win on higher difficulties. But which means by the tip of a playthrough, you are faced with the final word tedium of moving troops, selecting production lines, popping builders, and changing districts, all with none of the sense of direction and discovery you get from the primary 100 turns of the sport. Even in games I’ve been winning, sometimes I just make the choice to start out all once again to save lots of myself from the drudgery.

This brings us to Civilization 7 and its understandably controversial ‘Age’ system. The sport will probably be split into three separate ages: The Antiquity Age, the Exploration Age, and the Modern Age. Depending on the settings, these can each take as much as two to 3 hours, splitting an eight-hour run into three shorter, more manageable chunks. Each Age has its own legacy paths, cards, unlocks, upgrades, and events, all increase to a crisis event mechanic that has only barely been touched on in these early looks at Civ 7.

One among the major ideas behind this mechanic, as executive producer Dennis Shirk told me in an interview at Gamescom 2024, was to assist bring some balance to the way in which the sport plays out. “It’s even in our telemetry, after we take a look at how much players are literally playing, we see big drop offs towards the endgame. This Age system is considered one of the most recent additions to Civ 7—added just earlier this yr—and we’re still working on it, but we hope that it may provide players with more meaningful decisions, probabilities to rebuild/restart, even later in the sport, without having to start out a brand new game.”

Lots of this may occur within the Exploration Age. Shirk told me “there’s no way we could do Pangea maps as default because we wanted players to find the Recent World as a core mechanic. There will probably be a rush for players and AI to find numerous latest land within the mid-game, with latest cultures, resources, and so forth.” We didn’t get to see the Exploration Age, and it looks like the Age system remains to be being tweaked, but I’m intrigued by the thought of getting more of that wonder and sense of discovery that you just get as you first send your scout into the wilds.

Each Age can even end with a crisis, where worldwide stability is tested, and also you’ll must make some difficult decisions using Crisis Cards. These are principally policy cards from Civ 6 but they’ll offer your empire a variety of negatives that you just’ll must work around. Eventually, the world is thrown into crisis, and you should rebuild and restart together with your latest culture and civilization as we speak about one other latest feature: the flexibility to vary civilizations throughout the game.

That is one other controversial feature, but I believe it could work. Humankind tried it, and it was a neat idea, but with poor execution because of bad player signaling that a culture had ever modified, one minute you were fighting the Romans and the following it was the Mongols with really no thread of continuity in any respect. Civ 7 will a minimum of retain leaders and a few buildings and units will remain the identical, hopefully spreading an in depth and unique aesthetic across your empire every time you play.

Recent civilization swapping also introduces a variety of latest ways to play. Shirk told me that “it’s been really fun testing out latest combos of civs, and while we will’t speak about all of them, it’s been about finding a balance between those players who need to roleplay with historically-suggested civ changes and people who need to get really technical with it, and really push their civilizations to be the very best version of itself.”

Civilization 7 appears like considered one of the largest departures from typical Civ gameplay that we’ve ever had, but that’s not necessarily a foul thing. Civilization 6 stays the most effective games within the series with its absolutely heaving load of DLCs and leader packs, and you possibly can play that game eternally. I can’t begrudge developers trying something latest, otherwise we’d never get anything different. If these changes to Civ 7 mean I stay engaged through your complete playthrough, then they’ve nailed it for me.