Interview: Firaxis’ Dennis Shirk and Edward Zhang on the new gameplay systems of Civilization VII

Aside from trying out the game, we also got to interview key members of the Civilization VII development team during a recent media preview.

To be exact, we got to have a conversation with Lead Game Designer Edward Zhang and Executive Producer Dennis Shirk. In the interview, Zhang and Shirk dived into how they came up with some of the key new systems and mechanics of Civilization VII, including the three-Age structure and Influence. They also talked about their approach in selecting the Leaders for this next game.

Civ 7’s new three-age structure is a huge change. When it was being talked about, was there any pushback from members of the development of such a major departure?

DS: There were big debates about it, and we had a lot of discussions. And honestly, it was a system I’d believed in so much, though we had to do a lot of iteration steps. It didn’t work right away. There were a lot of things that didn’t feel quite right.

We’re a team that got very, very good at making a standard civilization game, and this one is something that is riskier, and it’s something that reaches further. So yeah, there was always a lot of tension, healthy tension on the team in terms of what we felt was working and what we felt wasn’t working.

It was probably about one year ago when everything just started to click. We had the right pieces in place. The crisis system was in place. That was a great new addition to the game. The Legacy Path system was also added. Previously, we had victories at each age that everybody competed for, and it made everything very stressful right away. So, we changed them to Legacy Paths, where everybody could do it as a goalpost for victory at the end of the game. All of these things contributing to that Age system just made everything feel really good.

EZ: The design team has debated over and over, even since I joined. I didn’t join at the start, I joined about halfway through the project. I would say even at that point, we were still fine-tuning each system quite a bit, all the way till very recently.

Dennis has a very good point that we keep iterating over, where we never stop, making QA crazy and making everybody crazy. I think that’s our core principle, that we never stop iterating. We want to make the game feel good to the end user.

DS: While we’re here talking to you, they’re literally making changes back at the studio even this close to release, because we always never stop working. That’s why, when the game comes out, we’ll continue working on the game. There’s going to be player feedback, and we’re going to continue to evolve the game. That’s one of the best things about working at Firaxis. It’s a constant round of feedback, adjustment, and iteration.

It was mentioned before that Civ 7’s new three-age system was done in part due to statistics that show many players not finishing a complete game given how it’s clear at some point that the victory condition has been achieved, though it’ll take 100 turns more for victory. What other interesting findings from stats did you take into account while developing Civ 7?

EZ: Well you mentioned one important thing, that games tend to snowball out of control. At a certain point, you already won the game, and you don’t want to keep playing, and we solved that with the Ages system.

Another big reason that people want to stop playing Civ is the late game. Micromanagement just becomes so intensive as you have so many units, and you have so many cities to go through. You have each individual builder waiting for your order to build something, right? We changed all of them. We removed builders. We introduced a commander system that can pack a lot of units into them so we can move as one. And we introduced the Town system, where you can autopilot Towns to support Cities. So combined with your snowball point as well as the micromanagement point for other players, those are the two major changes we made in response to assistance feedback.

Firaxis has expanded the criteria of what a “leader” is for Civ 7. Given this, what was the process like in narrowing down which notable figures would become leaders in the game?

DS: That’s always the most exciting part of the game. We do that throughout the first year of development, is the Leaders and the Civ choices, and everybody has their favorite. We have community feedback from the past game for people that we know that they’d like to see return. We’ve got criteria to make sure that we have representation around the globe for finding new leaders, digging deep into history, and saying, look at this person, this is awesome, we want to represent them.

We also have the gameplay systems. We also want to try to choose personalities that we think will really fit with the new system, like Machiavelli and our new Diplomacy system is a perfect match.

That process is really involved. We have all of the 2K local teams on speed dial to make sure that we can constantly be talking to them about what would be really good representatives for certain parts of the world. Our in-house historians are making recommendations for not just Civilizations and Leaders that we think are going to be really popular, but also for ones that are underrepresented that we want to represent. So, it’s just a big bucket of discovery. It’s just a lot of discussion, a lot of back and forth, but it’s a really exciting process.

The new Influence system with the new currency is a big change yet feels quite natural while playing. How did you come up with the new system for Civilization VII?

DS: It started out very different from where it ended up. One of the overarching goals that the team universally said was they want to kill the deal table. The deal UI, the subject of so many memes, and the AI with the deal table have always been an extreme challenge because there are so many different values among everything you can trade. We wanted to give a lot more options for how you interact with other leaders.

It started from a token-based system with tokens that refreshed. There are a lot of different things that we tried, but when we finally came around and landed on the current Influence system, that was when everything started to click.

EZ: Influence didn’t exist in the game until later in the project. It’s a new addition, and it really clicked with everybody.

Back then, it was a deal table and everything, you have to do a lot of guesswork, or maybe you look at the guys, you can get by in a lot of higher difficulties by, you know, fooling the AI. A lot of designers really hated the deal table, so we took that away. We wanted to replace it with something that’s sure, something you earn, like some sort of hardened cash, if that makes sense.

Influence is exactly that. It’s measurable. It’s something you can earn point by point. You see where they come from, and you can spend them just like Gold, in a sense, to purchase a Diplomatic favor. So, I would say that’s a very successful rework. We didn’t have it until very late into the project, but when it came online, everybody was very happy. All the user tests were very positive.

DS: That was an example of one of those systems where a lot of debate because it was a big change, but then when it finally clicked, it was a wonderful feeling.

Yeah, I can agree that is probably one of the best new features for me, from the early game standpoint, it’s a really smooth addition, even though it’s quite different from the previous systems.

DS: Wait till you get later in the game, you can start using it for espionage, creating favor, and adding war support to things because you can spend influence to give yourself more war support when you’re at war. This makes their happiness war weariness really, really crater. There are a lot of clever things you can do with it.

Civilization VII will be released on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC, and macOS on February 11, 2025.