All of the previous games in the Civilization series have maintained a strong sense of historical consistency and accuracy, especially when it comes to all the different civilizations and their respective leaders. For example, Queen Elizabeth I always leads the English, Gandhi leads the Indians just to name a few. However, the latest entry in the series, Civilization 7, lets players move around historical leaders and their civilizations in completely liberal ways, resulting in a mix of history and places that don’t really align with real life or real history. While some players have found this startling new feature to be a bit amusing, many others consider it fairly bizarre and even somewhat outrageous.
And in a recent interview with IGN, Civilization 7 lead designer Ed Beach explained developer Firaxis’ unique approach with the game that has led to this particular choice.
“So if you look at previous Civ games, you would have historical anomalies such as America existing in 4,000 BC or Sweden and Canada in 4,000 BC. And none of those things actually made any sense. They were just accepted parts of the Civ canon.
“But now if you’re going to get to America, you’re going to start somewhere else. You’re going to start with Rome and go to the Normans and then go to America. I just did a Harriet Tubman playthrough where I was trying to honor her African heritage, and so I played as Aksum and then as the Songhai and then came over to America. So these are all valid pathways through history. You can set them up so that the leaders make good sense with this one, and arguably the history is more solid this way than it was before.”
Beach also acknowledged that this particular direction in Civilization 7 lets players re-arrange history in ways that may seem like it’s breaking real world history. But he states that this unique approach in gameplay also makes things a bit more interesting for the players.
“There are ways you can take the game that we’re putting together with Civ 7 and mix up the history in an even more scrambled fashion than you ever had before,” Beach said. “So you can take Confucius and you can have him lead Spain, or you can take Xerxes from Persia and have him lead the Mayan civilization.
“So absolutely, there are crazy combinations that seem like we’re breaking history even more than before, but there are some problems that we fixed. So I’d like to look at as we’ve moved it around. It’s a new way for players to experience and think about history, and I think that kind of fresh take is a healthy one.”
Civilization 7 was released on February 11 for the Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One and Series X and S, Nintendo Switch, and the PC platform (which includes both macOS and Linux). A VR port of the game will be available in spring 2025 for the Quest 3 and 3S platform, but no price or specific release date has been announced as of yet.
